PRESIDENT Bush should have been in Yorkshire this weekend. He was not, of course. Indeed, like most Americans, he is not supposed to like travel outside the USA very much.

When he was first elected the joke went round that he had only been outside the United States twice in his life, and one of those was to Disney-land. I am sure that cannot be true. He does, however, have a distinctly homespun turn of phrase, as if he has just popped in from the set of Bonanza.

One of his first acts when he became president was to withdraw from his predecessor's commitment to the Kyoto agreement, by which the developed world undertook to reduce the amounts of 'greenhouse gases' each country was putting into the atmosphere.

Bush's close association with the oil industry and big business was widely assumed to be the reason for this decision. The fact that Congress was reluctant to endorse the policy is the excuse used, but that does seem very convenient.

Environmentalists have been telling the rest of us about the dangers of global warming for some years. They have been advising us as to how we should behave to avoid the situation getting worse.

Their case was weakened by the fact that many, probably most people did not believe there was a global warming problem. Anyway many of them thought that a warmer winter might not be such a bad thing. The environmentalists had been telling us that it would also be wetter.

If President Bush had been here we would be able to demonstrate the effects of the wetness on the land, and, the way we are going, also on some houses.

The evidence is not especially scientific, but it seems to me that there has been a change in the weather. It is not for the better.

Americans, for all their recycling zeal, produce twice as much carbon per head as their European equivalents. It might help if they did not go to the tip in vehicles with huge engines on cheap fuel.

Until we can convince people who matter in the States there is a problem and that they must act, we shall not get anything worthwhile done about it. Parts of our farm, and many different parts of the world, are now testament to the fact that there is a problem.

It is time we all started doing something about it.

When I was at primary school I used to walk to school past the village war memorial. I was born a few years after the Second World War ended. Father was a soldier in that war. It seemed a recent event. The fascinating thing about the war memorial was that the roll of honour of those who fell in the first war was so much longer than that for the second one.

The carnage between 1914 and 1918 was devastating. The village had far fewer residents than it does now. It made me realise that war was not to be entered into lightly, and, indeed, was to be avoided at all costs if at all possible. America has not had a modern war on her soil.

To the families of those mentioned on our war memorial it was not an abstract idea which did not really affect decision makers much.

A straw poll in the pub the other night agreed that Bush was right about attacking Iraq, which probably makes me wrong. He should have been made to stand in the rain and read the sad list to himself.

At least he would have stopped to think for a little while.

Updated: 11:54 Tuesday, November 12, 2002