We're watching the rising of the stars and the shifting of the tides.

And another version of this sort of thing is what is often called red tides or toxic blooms.

And when the tides of waste matter come in it sounds as if a whole storm is approaching you.

Because we'd been held up in Russia, of course, the full moon brings the highest and lowest tides when you're standing on the frozen surface of the sea, high and low tides generally mean that interesting things are going to happen the ice is going to start moving around a bit.

WINDII also discovered a gap in atomic oxygen at the equator, thought to be due to the action of atmospheric tides and associated winds.

We end up with things we've heard about before red tides, for example, which are blooms of toxic algae floating through the oceans causing neurological damage.

Literally scrambling through what's called pressure ice the ice had been smashed up under the pressure of the currents of the ocean, the wind and the tides.

But the tides are shifting. Sovereign wealth funds and institutional and private investors are increasingly recognizing that climate change will undermine their returns, and that governments eventually will begin to address the problem.

Both systems therefore concentrate on observing environmental changes that occur over short periods (e.g. oil pollution and red tides) and the simultaneous observation of phenomena occurring globally over the surface of Earth (e.g. wind speed and direction of sea surface).

No amount of engineering advances can fully defend and save our small island developing States and low lying coastal areas from the perils of the surging waters and rising tides of the sea, caused by the adverse impact of climate change.

Part of the problem, I think, is we stand at the beach, or we see images like this of the ocean, and you look out at this great big blue expanse, and it's shimmering and it's moving and there's waves and there's surf and there's tides, but you have no idea for what lies in there.

For any question, a 7 denotes the equivalent of a perfectly detailed mental blueprint, and a 1 implies almost no sense of a particular mechanism at all, just a vague image. People happily, and reliably, assign numbers to their understandings of everything from complex machines to biological systems to natural phenomena such as the tides but these ratings are usually far higher than their actual knowledge.

But, whatever Mao s terrible failings, during his years of absolute power there was a sense of common purpose and solidarity that went with shared hardship. Maoism was a curious and unique mixture of class warfare and socialist leveling, all enunciated by a man who believed that individuals or at least Mao himself could shape history rather than be formed by its tides and currents.