I’m only in my early thirties but already within my lifetime I’ve seen marked changes in the climate. I grew up in a little village called Wormit (and then latterly in a slightly bigger village next door called Newport) on the river Tay. At this point the river is just under 2 miles wide. It’s a proper, fast flowing river and many people have been swept to their deaths in it over the years.

And yet, when I was a lad I used to get woken up in the Winter by the noise of huge blocks of ice bashing into each other as they creaked their way down the river. My dad took a photo one Winter morning of the ice flows which you can see below (note the chunks of ice in the middle distance and that Dundee is lost in cloud):

Today a mere 20 years later people would think me crazy if I suggested the river froze in Winter. You’d be lucky to see a flake of snow anywhere near the place. I remember the local schools having to close as a result of heavy snowfall and we’d sit watching the cars spinning off the road at that corner by our house (see above). Nowadays? The Winters are so mild that neither is an option.

Scotland used to have several thriving ski resorts and yet now the season is shorter, some of the resorts don’t open at all and the amount of snow is a fraction of what it was. The Winters just aren’t cold or sustained any longer and it’s happened in only a few years.

When I visited New Zealand in 2003 it was amazing to see pictures of the Franz Josef glacier as it had been just a century earlier and know that the car park a couple of miles from the glacier was covered by the glacier only a few decades earlier. Glaciers the world over are melting and ski resorts across Europe (for example) are seeing shorter seasons year on year. While periods of warm and cold are cyclical over time the years since the 1980s have seen rapid glacial melt well beyond anything predicted by scientists based on historical records.

Whether you believe that global warming is real and exacerbated by humans or whether it’s a government conspiracy used as a stick to beat tax payers with (or are somewhere in between), the fact remains that we’re coming out of an ice age earlier than expected and it’s looking increasingly likely that within my lifetime the polar ice cap may disappear completely in the summer months - consigning polar bears among other animals to history.

We have short lives and therefore a very short-term view of the world in which we live. But in that short time the world’s climate is changing, extinctions are at a level higher than at any time in the past and in geological timescales these changes are happening in an instant instead of a long time.

I often wonder what archaeologists a million years in the future looking at the fossil records would think. I suspect they’d wonder if some global catastrophe occurred in the same way we’ve wondered why the dinosaurs died out. My concern is that they’d be right. And that the catastrophe was us.

Whenever I see people on the train typing away on a BlackBerry I feel a deep sense of pity for them. I’m sad that they feel their company owns them to such an extent that they have to spend the time before (or after) work on the train replying to “important” emails. It’s not as if they work for MI6 and have to reply to an email about intelligence concerning a terrorist attack where every second counts!

If I see people on a weekend typing away on their BlackBerry (and I’ve seen a few) I want to shake them and tell them to enjoy their spare time while it lasts.

So when I was presented with a work BlackBerry at the start of the year I made sure the email notification was turned off and used it strictly as a phone to make and receive calls from my colleagues. At all other times it was sat on my desk being ignored.

Last week my BlackBerry was replaced with a brand new BlackBerry Bold and while I initially expected to treat it the same way as the old one, I’ve actually been blown away with what a cool piece of kit it is. As before I’m not going to use it particularly to send emails - the keyboard’s too small and if I’m working then I’m in front of a computer so can send and receive them there. And if I’m not working then the last thing I want to do is send and receive work emails! However it does a great job of letting me do the following:

• Listen to MP3s - it comes as standard with 2GB of storage and a pretty good pair of earphones with in-ear rubber inserts (ideal for cutting out background noise).
• Surf the internet - not only is it 3G but it can connect to the interweb via WiFi with a pretty good browser.
• Take pictures - my previous BlackBerry couldn’t and while the camera’s not amazing, it’s good enough to take pictures of chickens wandering the streets (which is the sort of thing I’d take a picture of).
• Use for Sat Nav - it has GPS and European maps built in along with directions so I can use it to get from here to there (although to be fair I mostly one go from my house to the cafe).
• Stalk my brother - he’s got a BlackBerry Pearl and the BlackBerry Instant Messenger is always turned on, mwa ha ha, there is no escape!
• Get my sudoku fix - oh yes, there’s even a sudoku game!
• Send SMS messages without using that useless T9 predictive texting - since it has a full QWERTY keyboard it makes life somewhat easier to text.
• Get 2-for-1 cinema tickets - since it’s on Orange (the old one was on Vodafone) I can take advantage of Orange Wednesdays.

In summary, I’m really impressed with it. So much so that I’ve diverted all calls from my own mobile and am going to use the BlackBerry as a my primary phone. In one fell swoop it’s managed to retire not only my own mobile but my iPod Touch (well, for short train journeys at least) and my Sat Nav. It’s going to encourage me to go to the cinema more often and save my thumbs from premature arthritis brought on by sending SMS texts using T9 predictive texting.

But if you see me sending work emails on the train you have my permission to shake your head and call me a hypocrite!