That’s it, I’m calling it: this is the worst summer ever. Despite the fact we are currently seeing a fleeting glimpse of sun, the weather has been notably dismal. The Met Office says it could be the coldest summer of the past 24 years.
That’s it, I’m calling it: this is the worst summer ever. Despite the fact we are currently seeing a fleeting glimpse of sun, the weather has been notably dismal. The Met Office says it could be the coldest summer of the past 24 years.
There you go. That’s the best I can do.
But she’ll still get paid.
P.s. WTF did I even bother skimming though it? More fool me.
Look, we all know that crap weather in the UK is just that, ‘weather’, whereas a spell of nice weather in the UK is a sure sign of man made global boiling and a carbon tax must be imposed forthwith (because that nice Mr Stern said so).
“ the coldest summer of the past 24 years”
Yes, but that won’t stop them also declaring it the hottest ever. Because what is it they need for that – one poorly-sited weather station showing a record temperature for, what is it, 6 minutes?
When you get pregnant, you can stop writing about the patriarchy making you suck blokes off when you don’t really enjoy it. And start writing about backache and morning sickness. And then when you give birth, you can stop writing about that as the focus switches to sore nipples and depression. Then, when you take the baby home, sore nipples and depression fade into the background and the articles are about sleeplessness and men misgendering babies. When the child starts toddling around and can amuse themselves for five minutes, you look out of the window and start cobbling something together about the weather.
But who looks at the weather when battling gender-stereotyping at your kid’s primary school? And who worries about that when your children are suffering from the stress of GCSEs….and then,…
Worst summer evah? What, worse than the one the floated Noah’s boat?
I can’t keep up. I thought we’d just had the hottest May ever. Perhaps it’s the dramatic fluctuations in weather, oops, sorry climate, that is the real evidence of Global Boiling, sorry, Climate Change? Or is it a sign of a new killer virus that originated in dead polar bears and mutated into a human flesh eating virus?
I think I need more vodka on the cornflakes…
Age 72 I can attest that a ‘typical’ British Summer is ‘typical’ because of its variability and is prone to wet weather. 1950s/60s my childhood day trips to the sea-side often involved woolly jumpers and/or raincoats. At other times Summers were hot, dry with droughts and water restrictions.
Memory loss used to be an affliction of the elderly, now it affects all ages.
@RichardT
I don’t think it took those three Typhoons six minutes to take-off past the met station at RAF Coningsby. 🙂
The newspaper Tim links to appears to be written for people who can’t look out of a window.
Can’t see it lasting long.
There is a good discussion in Samizdata today about Met Office temperature measuring stations being overwhelmingly positioned in locations guaranteed to produce abnormal and non-representative readings.
Grist,
Technically May is in spring, summer is June, July, Aug.
@John, They should be.
The interesting measurements come from places where you know the local weather tends to be more extreme for a given metric.
It gives you an idea of the upper/lower end of the scale of events you’re working with.
You need far fewer controls ( the areas where weather is usually tame and well-behaved ) to establish a baseline.
So yeah, there’ll be far more measuring stations in places that tend to have more extremes.
Almost all real science works like that… You figure out what’s “normal” then go hunt and measure the extremes to find the upper/lower range.
Of course, OldSkool actual scientists know his and account for this in their calculations.
I very much doubt that the modern crop of Academics™ can even comprehend this setup, if they’re taught “this is how you actually do this” at all.
( Or simply ignore it as “Inconvenient Lies by the System” like Monidiot….)
The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in Seaton Carew.
(apologies to Samuel Langhorne Clemens (allegedly))
As to what really causes the current shyte weather….
Remember the Snow In Texas last winter? Followed by really wonky weather in eastern Canada and the US east coast?
That polar stream that caused it moves over the years. It resonates with its counterpart and gets more or less prominent more or less cyclicly. But it moves from west to east.
It is currently particularly strong, as it does roughly every decade.
It is now blowing in a line between Iceland and somewhere off the western irish coast, supercharging the usual circulation there, as well as pushing extra warm, wet air up North from off the Moroccan coast well up to halfway the UK sometimes.
You can see the result in the satellite images of the past two/three months: lotsalotsa rain that gets transported our way, hitting that polar stream, making it spin.
The effect is particularly strong because there’s currently no land mass to brake the air, once it shifts further and hits Europe its effect will lessen, ultimately swinging to the other “extreme” in about 4-5 years.
If this had hit in winter, we’d be wondering if we’d be hitting a new Ice Age, as most of that rain would have come down as snow…
It’s not as if this has been figured out three centuries or so ago already, the only difference is that we can now follow it live with satellites, instead of the British Admiralty ( and equivalents elsewhere) pieceing bits together from slow reports to get an idea where the Sailing should be Good, and where it wasn’t…
Grikath: «The interesting measurements come from places where you know the local weather tends to be more extreme for a given metric.»
John was talking about ‘temperature’ not ‘weather’. It’s kind of you to give of your wisdom more widely but here it’s more an issue of met stations being next to airport runways and the like.
@ Chris Miller
Probably because there is a north-east wind from the North Sea (which is cold up there even in summer) most of the time in Seaton Carew. One of the places to which I have never voluntarily returned after being taken there as a child.
The reason for the wet weather over the last 2 years is simple – the Hunga Tonga volcano eruption in Jan 2022. Unusually for a volcanic eruption it placed huge amounts of water vapour into the atmosphere (instead of the usual ash and dust). Estimates are that it increased global atmospheric water content by 10%, which is a big change in a dynamic and chaotic system. And all that water vapour will have to come out of the atmosphere as everything trends back towards the mean. Hence more rain. It could take up to 8 years for everything to settle back to normal, so we’ve got a way to go yet.
I am sure that when the met office gets around to ‘revising’ temperature records they will discover that actually this summer is the latest in a long series of events proving the inexorable rise of ‘global’ temperature and the forthcoming climategeddon
Maybe that’s why they are currently siting new Class4/5 stations to exploit urban heat islands and local weather effects?