I received the two photographs posted below on February 19th from Konstantina Chryssou Hatzidakis on Santorini: the island in snow. Konstantina tells me that the children are loving it. When I remember the intense physical weight of the heat when I was there last summer, the calorie-thickened air slowing every gesture, and bearing in mind the rarity with which small islands get snowed on, especially at almost 36° latitude in the Mediterranean, the scenes seemed astonishing.

So I mailed another Greek friend, Nico Manessis, and Nico told me that he has heard from a friend in eastern Crete whose bush vines are currrently under one metre of snow. “This cold snap is a Godsend,” says Nico, “as it will help replenish low water tables in central Greece and the islands.” The growers on Santorini can’t remember such a cold spell, according to Haridimos Hatzidakis — and many of them are old, and have long memories. He’s happy, though: “The cold wind and the snow reduce the temperature of the soil beneath the surface, and that will ensure that budbreak isn’t too early this year. It also helps the vine’s new wood lignify and harden, and stops it being attacked by micro-organisms and bacteria.” Gardeners love a ‘proper’ winter for the same reasons: natural pest control. When rain comes to Santorini, it tends to come in storms, and much of the water runs straight off the slopes. That’s another reason to welcome the snow, according to Haridimos. “The snow is a great way of watering the soil — since it melts slowly, all of it is absorbed.”

I’m happy that winter has been kind to Santorini. As I’ve listened to the BBC World Service over the past couple of months, winter 2007-8 seemed to bring a blizzard of suffering elsewhere.

It’s been a hard winter in Aleppo and Damascus, where Iraqi refugees, huddled on mattresses in overcrowded and unheated rooms, have had to endure temperatures of well below zero for night after night. A winter to remember for all the wrong reasons in China, too, as snow shut down the transport system just when millions were trying to travel home for a once-yearly trip to welcome in the Year of the Rat. When I remember the steamy tropical heat of Guangzhou last May, once again I find it hard to imagine the city locked into snowy immobility.

Worst of all, it would seem, has been the freeze in Tajikistan. Three months of bitter cold in a country dressed in rags, where babies are born by candlelight in unheated hospitals in the capital city Dushanbe (232 newborns died of cold in January) and where children freeze to death at night in their cots in unheated apartment blocks. The water pipes have frozen and burst; finding drinking water means trying to melt puddle ice. A major source of the country’s electricity comes from the Nurek hydro plant – and the Vakhsh river has frozen solid; you can’t make electricity from ice. The gas comes from Uzbekistan, which demands prepayment, and Tajikistan cannot pay. All of this in the cities – but no one really seems to know what is happening in the countryside in this, the poorest of the former Soviet states, where two-thirds of the six million population lives in poverty. The misery, this time, is hard to imagine. If you do any praying, pray for Tajikistan.

A return to ‘normal’ winter cold, or a further symptom of climate chaos? I don’t know … but the precautionary principle should apply, and we would be wise to assume the worst. In his victory speech after the Wisconsin Democratic Primary last week, Barack Obama declared that “We can’t wait to put an end to global warming”. That sounds like electioneering from a young man on a roll, but if he makes it to the White House, let’s hold him to it.