There is much controversy as to whether global warming exists or not.

Here in New Zealand they have had the worst summer in living memory, with rain, hailstones and barnstorming winds wreaking their familiar havoc.

Giant waves in the Cook Strait mean't mountainous seas, ferry cancellations and capsized boats.

In Britain there is now a regular cycles of inclemently hot summers and torrential autumns.

In France last summer, some 10,000 people died of heat related causes and forest fires raged.

In Australia, it has rained in the outback and the waterholes are unseasonally high.

Flash floods have hit Melbourne and Adelaide and in Sydney, between torrential downpours, the temperature has soared to the low forties.

It has been snowing in Jerusalem and unseasonal floods in Brazil has killed 160 people and left 230,00 people homeless.

Snow storms have lashed Greece and Turkey, high winds have whipped up sandstorms in Egypt so severe that the Suez canal had to be closed.

Wherever I have travelled this year, the talk is much the same.

The weather has gone quite mad.

Now this is fine for a Welshman abroad, because after rugby, the weather is probably our next favourite talking matter.

But now I wonder about the weather.

As I travelled by train from Auckland to Wellington, through hobbit-hill country and achingly beautiful rolling meadows, I saw at first hand the extent of the destruction.

Hills had been ripped to shreds by earth slides, trees stood looking almost embarrased in the middle of a lake where yesterday there were trees.

Cars turned upwards in the mud, dead cows littering the banks of the receeding waters, homes smashed to splinters by the raging, swollen rivers.

Many of the homes were uninsured, they had been in the family for generations, no one had expected this.

Now their homes, their livestock, their livelihoods and their lives were in ruins before their feet.

Others were drowned in the wake of this cataclysm.

The result of thirty hours of torrential rain.

I was forced to abandon the train at the National Park, for we were told that the lines had been washed away, and the overhead electricty supply had been cut.

Determined to push on to my destination and to witness this tempest, I declined the offer of a cot in a nearby school for the night, until alternative arrangements could be made, and managed to get a couple of lifts from kind passer-bys.

It was eery, the rain had stopped, and around North Palmerston we often travelled across road sunk under a couple of feet of water. In the distance, a helicopter was hoisting bewildered cows to safer pasture

Carefully watching out for floating logs, or carcasses of cows, the roads were just about passable, but often it felt like driving across a dark and murky sea.

From time to time, there would be police dredging the waters, probably searching for bodies.

A biblical landscape of the watery variety.

I finally managed to catch a bus to Wellington, and made it to my hotel.

The next morning the papers were adding up the cost in lives and in dollars.

$100 million at least would be needed, the first estimate.

The cost of repair would be ruinous.

Today, a small island called Tuvulu is expected to drown for the first time in history.

It is home to some 11,000 people, and they have been watching with alarm as year after year the water has risen, as the poles, the glaciers and the ice-sheets melt.

Tell them that global warming isn't a reality as they seek to escape the expanding waters.

I am baffled at the singular shrieking denials from some quarters, mostly those with vested interests, it should be noticed, in those countries that contribute most to the problem.

Such as the USA.

Later that night, we were warned of 120mph winds, and more lashing winds.

I had hoped to press on further to the South Island over the weekend, but decided to batten down the hatches and wait out the gathering storm.

In my room, I shivered as the panes rattled.

I turned on the heater.

It is mid-summer.

yechydda,