Mr Fremlin, apparently, was a Kentish brewer in the 1920s. RAF pilots, seeking scapegoats for the otherwise inexplicable malfunctioning of their aeroplanes would attribute it to goblins that lurked in the beer and emerged invisibly from Fremlin's bottles. Hence, some say, the race of "gremlins" came to be, and over the years they have diversified considerably. They find the world of electronic telecommunications to be a happy sporting ground, and they applied their disruptive skills to Weather Eye last Monday.
You may have noticed according to your Irish Times that day - someone did, because they telephoned politely to draw attention to the fact - that "the average rate of decrease in temperature with height in the atmosphere is about 20 Celsius per 1,000 ft"; sic, as they say, and sic again. Of course it is no such thing. The drop in temperature with height is nearer to two degrees Celsius per thousand feet - and I write it out in full advisedly.
The gremlins know full well that the electronic wizardry which nowadays transports your daily "Weather Eye" instanter to The Irish Times likes plain digestible material; it abhors refinements like italics, bold or superscript, and becomes totally confused if confronted with umlaut, grave or tilde. So as "2C" two degree-sign Celsius zapped along the line, its superscript descended to a zero, chilling the top of Lugnaquilla, for example, to a frigid minus 40 degrees.
Until the present century, it was generally assumed that the decrease in temperature with altitude went on indefinitely. Now we know, however, that above a certain height the temperature stops falling - and may even begin to rise again. The lower atmosphere has two distinct layers, each with its individual thermal characteristics.
A shallow layer, some five to 10 miles deep, immediately adjacent to the Earth, contains the clouds, the storms and areas of rain that are the familiar ingredients of our changing weather. Within this layer, the "troposphere", the air becomes steadily colder with increasing height.
But this cooling stops abruptly. Above the troposphere is a region 30 miles or more in depth of thin, almost cloudless air - the "stratosphere" - throughout which the temperature is fairly constant. And above that, the atmosphere is so flimsy that temperature ceases to have much meaning as we understand the term. The relatively high temperature in the stratosphere is explained by the presence of ozone, which is a very effective absorber of the ultraviolet radiation emitted by the sun. The process of absorption not only increases temperature in the stratosphere, but also, as we know, prevents much of this potentially harmful radiation from reaching Earth below.