Sunday August 16, 1998
The Gloucester del Sol was hot last week, nearly as hot as the Costa del Sol. Cheltenham sweltered, Gloucester glowed, Burford burnt. Local fruit farmers in the Vale of Evesham stood in the sunshine and complained that the severe frosts earlier this year had devastated the plum crop, but few listened sympathetically.
The English climate was uncannily similar to what it had been like in the thirteenth century when the local fruit farmers grew abundant crops of grapes in Gloucestershire. John Donne's "busie old foole, unrulie sunne" is at it again.
We have been here before - many times - long before "global warming" entered the dictionaries (and long before dictionaries).
"There have been many climate shifts in history," says Professor Christopher Smout, director of the Institute of Environmental History at the University of St Andrew's. "Stornoway, in the Western Isles, once had a climate like that of Bordeaux in southern France. And recent excavations at Loch Shin show that volcanic eruptions in Iceland forced farmers in Scotland to give up the struggle."
And whatever happens to the weather this winter, it is unlikely to be as dramatic and as fierce as the "Little Ice Age" that hit Britain in the seventeenth century, when you could drive a horse and cart across the Thames and roast an ox on the ice.
On New Year's Day 1684, John Evelyn recorded that the Thames was frozen over so thickly "as to beare not onely streetes of boothes in which they roasted meates and had divers shops of wares quite acrosse as in a towne but coaches, carts and horses passed over". Severe winters were so common, an annual Frost Fair was introduced and another contemporary historian noted that "many persons who had lived in Hudson Bay territory declarede they had never known it colder in that frozen region than it was in England during that winter". No mention of any hole in the ozone layer.
Now things are getting odd again and there's a hole in the ozone layer. Ian McCaskill has chosen a good time to retire as a BBC weather forecaster for it has never been so difficult to predict the vagaries of the world's weather.
People are dying from the heat in holiday resorts in Cyprus and Turkey. Spaniards are not eating dinner until midnight when temperatures have dropped to 25C. There's a fierce heat and a drought in the American Mid-West; in other parts of North America and Canada, strong hurricanes are predicted to continue and fires in the dry forests are being fanned by high winds.
The Yangtze has burst its banks in China and official figures put the death toll at 2,500 - unofficial ones put the toll much higher. Law and order is reported to be breaking down after a month of chaos and floods.
Inner Mongolia is the latest area to be hit by China's worst flooding for more than 60 years. Last Wednesday Japan was the victim of downpours that left around 130 holidaymakers stranded after landslides blocked a road.
Large parts of northern India, including New Delhi, have been virtually unvisited by the annual monsoon rains this year. The poor rain in parts of the country comes on top of an unprecedented heatwave that killed around 3,000 people across the country.
In France, Strasbourg in the East hit a record of 36.2C, five degrees hotter than the previous high, while two departments - Yonne and Nievre - reached 40C for the first time since records began. Little or no wind meant pollution levels were high, with a record 22 towns reaching level 2 (180 microgrammes of ozone per cubic metre of air) on a scale of 1 to 3. Bordeaux, Lyons and Paris posted the most worrying figures, all three approaching the 360mg per cubic metre that triggers a level 3 alert, when severe traffic restrictions automatically come into effect. At least 40 deaths, mostly of elderly or infirm people over the four-day period, were attributed to the heatwave.
The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has examined the mortality rates in Britain during the 15-day heatwave of 1976 and the five-day heatwave in July-August 1995 - it found average increases of around 9 per cent (with a much larger increase, over 15 per cent, in Greater London). The team found that the additional deaths increased with age, as you would expect, but there was also an unexpectedly high increase in young adults.
No one knowsprecisely why all this is happening; why the earth is warming, and by how much. In the new film of The Avengers, the villain, played by Sean Connery, is a madman who holds the world to ransom by controlling and altering the weather. Perhaps that is the reason. According to some experts, it could be more effects of both El Nino and La Nina, the upswellings of hot and cold water in the Pacific. Other experts dispute this, saying these phenomena have been blowing hot and cold for centuries without producing such dramatic effects.
"The rainfall is not necessarily La Nina, it happens most years - but this year it's a case of bad timing and little preparation," said London Meteorological Office spokesman Richard Bennett. "One or two areas have been a bit heavier than usual and, combined with local snowmelts, have worsened the situation."
Rains in South Korea have so far left 255 dead. Swedish scientists, however, claim this is due to a solar wind reducing the Earth's cosmic cloud cover. Greenpeace insists it is pollution, refrigerators, the motor car and man.
A computer model for climate change between 1860 and 1990 by the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research shows that in industrial regions the cooling effect of sulphate aerosols can mask the warming arising from carbon dioxide emissions. You reads your theory and you takes your choice.
Whatever the reason, there is no doubt the climate of the world will continue to change and continue to get warmer. We may never walk across the Thames again, but perhaps the climate of Stornoway will come to be like Bordeaux again. Not, however, like last week's climate in Bordeaux where no wind meant that pollution in the city was so high that a crisis alert was nearly introduced; where grapes on south-facing vines began to wither under the heat. (Even truffle hunters are asking for government help.)
If we get any hotter in Great Britain, Roy Brown, professor of countryside management at Manchester Metropolitan University, forecasts an increase in an unpleasant sounding illness called Lyme disease carried by ticks. Longer frost-free periods, more intense daylight at the key growth periods, damper and generally warmer conditions have already increased the breeding areas and it would get worse.
Researchers at Liverpool's School of Tropical Medicine point out that malaria was endemic in Europe until as recently as the 1960s and an increase in heat will change the breeding habits of mosquitoes.
If some tropical areas get hotter, they will become too hot for the creature's breeding habits but, conversely, any temperature increase in cooler areas could mean these becoming breeding places.
Add to that, research from Professor Brian Diffey of Newcastle General Hospital that a sustained 10 per cent depletion of the ozone layer could lead to increases of up to 35 per cent of various types of skin cancer, and Stornoway could well prove a very dangerous place to live in years to come.
Additional reporting by Jon Henley, Helena Smith and
Edward Helmore.
© Copyright Guardian Media Group plc.1998
-- Mark Jones http://www.geocities.com/~comparty