THE shivering man behind me at the bus stop complained that global warming wasn't happening and that it was all a hoax. He couldn't be more wrong, although I must admit it was a bit parky outside the Co-op.

Mind you he didn't look old enough to remember what a really cold winter felt like, and he certainly didn't have the same experience as us older ones who lived through the 1946/7 one, and later suffered again in 1962/63.

I was ten in the first freeze and still wearing short trousers because of the war time clothing restrictions. My knees have only recently recovered. The snow was level with the bedroom window, there was a shortage of coal as the railway lines were blocked, and some of our bread was dropped from the air. To be fair, it was in the Peak District.

Then in 1962 I made the mistake of coming home from the Niger delta on December 22nd, the day the temperature dipped below freezing, to stay there until March. Not surprisingly, with daughters blue with the cold, we cut short the break and returned to Nigeria where we could count on 28 degrees Celsius, every day.

The figures for the weather station in Lister Park show that Bradford suffered the same two winters, with 1947 having three consecutive months with the average minimum temperature as low as minus four, and even the average maximum in February was below freezing. 1962 wasn't much better with the minimum for another three months below freezing, and this contrasts markedly with the average lowest temperatures of the last three winters when January, February and March have all been between seven and twelve degrees.

While it's important not to pick figures just to support an argument, a closer look at the national figures, which have been collected since 1659, do show that the UK climate is now very different from the middle of the last century, with 2014 now the warmest year on record, just pipping 2011 and 2006.

Since 2000 there have been ten times as many hot records as cold ones – 204/20, with two thirds of all hot records occurring since 2000 with only three per cent of cold ones. The rainfall totals show the same trend and this is to be expected as warmer air holds more water vapour. In the same period there have been ten times the number of wet records as dry ones, 106/11, and while half the wet records have occurred since 2000 there have been only two percent of the dry ones.

There's snow outside as I write, but nowadays I don't expect it to stay too long.