Essay by Eric Worrall
Apparently you soft Brits have become so used to mild global warming weather, an almost normal Summer felt freezing cold.
Average months now feel cold thanks to climate change
Published: July 3, 2024 9.20pm AEST
Matthew Patterson
Postdoctoral Researcher, Atmospheric Physics, University of ReadingPeople in the UK love discussing the weather. For the first two weeks of June 2024, the cold, dull conditions were all they could talk about. Major news outlets like the BBC, the Guardian, Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph all carried stories on this theme.
The colder start to June was driven by winds from the north, bringing cool polar air down towards the UK. However, in the second half of the month, a high-pressure system took over and temperatures picked up, reaching 30.3°C on Wednesday 26.
In reality, June 2024 temperatures were pretty typical, about 0.4°C below the long-term average. The month was drier than usual and sunshine hours were slightly above average for the UK as a whole, though significantly below average in parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland.
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The hottest five days in the UK since 1910, have all occurred in the past five years.
Such a rapid rate of warming means we have come to normalise extreme heat, while relatively cold or even average conditions feel unusual and thus newsworthy.
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Public normalisation of hotter temperatures may also affect our perception of climate change and thus our willingness to act on it. Ecologists describe a phenomenon called “shifting baseline syndrome”, which is the idea that as the environment degrades, each new generation accepts the degraded situation they experience as normal. This also applies to climate change, as people forget or have no experience of the climate in the not-too-distant past.
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Read more: https://theconversation.com/average-months-now-feel-cold-thanks-to-climate-change-233812
Obviously it would be a calamity for Britons to get used to Tomatoes reliably ripening in Summer, and swimming pools being warm enough to use, because they might demand more of the same. Imagine if you could visit a British beach and be confident of actually swimming in the water, I mean for longer than 5 minutes?
Clearly it is time to shut down the British economy and put an end to this subversive warmth, it is time to restore proper British Junuaries. Otherwise Britons might all end up like Australians, drinking beer in the sun and calling relatives who live in cold places to tell them how nice the weather is.
Think of the children!
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