In Britain, we have three types of weather. For most of the year it’s “meh”. For a couple of weeks in the summer it becomes “ugh I’m literally sticky to the touch”, and for a few weeks in the winter we get “absolutely fuck this”. But on the vast majority of days we wake up to that comfortable perma-grey, settling into it like a favourite pair of socks.
British weather is the best weather – civilised, no drama, good for the garden – but can we rely on it forever, or will climate change wreck everything? The recent heatwave, like snow in winter, doesn’t really tell us anything about our climate on its own, but it’s a good time to ask an important question: is the weather going to be “ugh I’m so sticky” even more in the future?
Videos by VICE
Things have already changed, a bit. “When I was a lad” is probably the most irritating phrase in the English language, but the weather really was different back then. “Central England Temperature” – a set of temperature readings from the Midlands stretching back to 1659 – shows an average increase of 1C since the 1970s. Sea levels around the coast have been creeping up too, about a centimetre a decade. Part of that is the result of climate change, and part of it is the result of northern Britain slowly rebounding after the last ice age.
WATCH: Eternal K-Hole of the Spotless Mind
Subtle changes over a long time have a big impact, and the effects are starting to be felt. The hottest days are a bit hotter than they used to be, the winters a bit wetter. Hotter air holds more water and energy, and the vast currents that carry weather systems around the planet start to behave a little differently. That’s almost never a good thing.
Storm Desmond hit the UK the winter before last, causing almost half a billion pounds of damage, and disrupting the lives of tens of thousands of people. What made it so destructive wasn’t the wind so much as the water. Desmond acted like a giant atmospheric Dyson, sucking up water from the Caribbean, dragging it along a colossal atmospheric “river” of moist air and dumping it on our heads.
Major storms aren’t anything new, of course, but research suggest storms like Desmond are maybe 40 percent more likely than in the past. These disproportionately affect the middle of the country, which means that if you live in the Midlands your insurance premiums could really start to suck soon. How much worse is it going to get, though?
Climate chance is really about energy. CO2 traps more energy in the atmosphere, which makes it hotter but also more violent and chaotic. This is something people don’t always get about climate changes. It’s not like turning up the thermostat by one degree; it’s more like microwaving a pasty. A load of energy gets dumped into it, and while the temperature might go up 50 degrees on average, in reality you end up with hot spots and cold spots and random bits of meat leaking out.
Every several years, the UK Met Office runs an assessment based on the latest science of what delightful weather Brits can expect in the next few decades. They did it in 2002 for the first time, then again in 2009, and the next edition comes out in 2018, next year. The most recent version, from 2009, paints a picture of Britain’s future that looks a lot like that poor, microwaved pasty.
But is an eight-year-old report still relevant? Well, the mean temperature in Britain from 1981 to 2010, just after the report was published, was 8.8C. Since then, the years 2011 to 2016 have averaged over 9.2C, with 2014 the hottest year on record, at 1.1C above the 1981 to 2010 baseline. So far, 2017 is even hotter still – the months January to May have averaged 1.16C over the baseline. That’s not including this month and its heatwave, which saw the hottest June day for 40 years. Is the report still relevant, you ask? Yes. Yes, it is.
So let’s go back to this badly cooked pasty. There are two big things to understand about the British climate. Firstly, as a small island perched on the edge of the Atlantic, most of our wet weather comes in from the west. A lot of our heat, meanwhile, comes up from the south-west, following the Gulf stream up from the Caribbean.
That makes the results of climate change very uneven. If you live in Scotland, the Met Office expects the mean daily maximum temperature to go up by about 2.8C by the 2080s. If you live near the south coast of England, the rise could be double that, or even triple. The effects are likely to be stronger in the summer than in the winter. Temperatures over 40C have never been recorded in the UK before, but could quickly become common.
Then there’s the wet stuff. The Met Office expect the west coast to see 33 percent more rain during winter, perhaps more, while in summer the south coast starts to look like a veritable desert with up to 40 percent less rain. Combined with the heat, water shortages and hosepipe bans could be a regular feature of life. Yet, ironically, other parts of the UK may simply be deluged. Without considerable funding or political will, Desmond’s grandson could see places like the Somerset Levels abandoned to the sea.
So enjoy the grey skies and the occasional mediocre heatwaves while you still can. This is probably as good as the British weather is ever going to be in your lifetime.
