Peter Rhodes on climate warnings, an odd cheese and deciphering a phone tome

And off into the very heart of the Heart of England, for lunch in one of those evocative black and white Shakespeare-land pubs in a farming village on a perfect English summer’s day. How strange that while the pub menu offers piri-piri chicken, Halloumi, Greek salad and mozzarella bruschetta, there’s no ploughman’s lunch.

Funny stuff, Halloumi. How do they get the squeaks in it?

Continuing my personal odyssey from analogue to digital, I have invested in a cordless home-phone system. The online manual runs to an impenetrable 63 pages.

I bet we were all rattled a few days ago by reports that the Met Office reckons the scorching summer of 2022 will be regarded as a “cool” year by the end of this century.

Thing is, how do we square that apocalyptic warning by one group of scientists with the warning a few days earlier by another group of scientists?

Researchers in Copenhagen tell us that the Gulf Stream, whose tepid waters keep Britain relatively warm, could collapse as early as 2025, lowering temperatures across Europe.

“I think we should be very worried,” says the team leader, describing the effects of the shutting-down of vital ocean currents, called the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (Amoc).

And then, just to complicate things even further, the former BBC climate reporter Roger Harrabin tells Guardian readers in a feature that long-range forecasts, including those produced by super-computers, are not perfectly accurate and failed to predict rises in ocean temperatures and the phenomenon known as “heat domes”.

As he puts it: “What frightens me about the climate crisis is we don’t know how bad things really are.”

So to sum up the past week’s climate-change warnings, it’s hot, cold and don’t know. I now expect the usual rush of texts accusing me of being a climate-change denier. I will file them with the TV licence stuff.