UK weather extremes to become new normal, says National Trust – Watts Up With That?
From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness/Robin Guenier
What an utterly absurd report! This year has been one of the least extreme on record in England.
Quite when the National Trust became climate experts, I have no idea!
The National Trust has warned that extreme weather seen in the UK in 2022 has set a benchmark for what a typical year could be like from now on.
The charity said high temperatures, drought and back-to-back storms have created major challenges for nature.
In its annual review, it described such conditions as the “new normal”.
It said this year was a “stark illustration” of the difficulties many UK species could face without more action to tackle climate change.
The hot summer and months of low rainfall dried up rivers, fragile chalk streams and ponds, damaged crops and natural habitats, and fuelled wildfires that destroyed landscapes, the charity said.
The National Trust’s climate change adviser, Keith Jones, said there was “no escaping” how challenging this year’s weather had been for nature.
“Drought, high temperatures, back-to-back storms, unseasonal heat, the recent cold snap and floods means nature, like us, is having to cope with a new litany of weather extremes,” he said.
He added weather experts were predicting the future would see more torrential downpours, along with very dry and hot summers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64107967
The Facts
- Three storms in a week – the first time since, wait for it, 2015. How pathetically ridiculous. Just because the Met Office has started giving silly names to storms does not mean that these things never happened before.
Winter storms are perfectly normal, and often two or three depressions follow in quick succession. During February as a whole, the rainfall totals in England were not unusually high, being only the 20th highest since 1836:
- Hot summer – according to CET, it was hotter in 1976, 1995 and 2018. It was even hotter in 1826!
- Dry summer – it was drier in 1869, 1887, 1976, 1983 and 1995: there is no trend to summers becoming drier:
- Autumn was mild, the total opposite of any honest person’s definition of extreme.
- Cold weather in December! They are really are scarping the bottom of the barrel now, trying to pretend that cold winters will now be the norm.
For the record, the December CET currently stands at 2.7C. Throughout the CET record, December mean temperatures have ranged from –0.8C to + 9.6C.
An average temperature of 2.7C is nothing out of the ordinary at all.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/meantemp_monthly_totals.txt
Finally let’s challenge this idea that warm weather is extreme but cold is not, and that there is something new about large swings in temperature from winter to summer. The chart below plots the temperature between winter and summer each year on CET:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/meantemp_seasonal_totals.txt
This year the difference was 11.4C. The average for the full record since 1660 is 11.6C.
Enough said I think!
