Western Morning News (Saturday)
Charmian Evans Why I’m keeping my wellies close to hand...
IDUNNO about you, but I’m finding that weather forecasts seem to be getting more and more unreliable. Maybe I’m looking up the wrong place online – I do remember looking up Plymouth once and got very excited when it said the weather was going to be 30 degrees, only to discover it was Plymouth Massachusetts.
So I got that wrong. I’m not going down without a fight though. It seems to me forecasts are 50% right. Maybe we live in a region that defies predictions, but I doubt it. My most accurate means of knowing whether to wear a rain or a sun hat is a faithful old family barometer that at least tells me an immediate forecast if I’m too lazy to stick my head out of the door.
I find myself coveting climates of friends that live abroad, where summer means sunny climes, barbeques can be planned months in advance in the knowledge that the grill won’t get waterlogged and you’ll land up cooking 100 sausages in the kitchen.
This summer has been a real rollercoaster. Snatching time away in our motorhome means I’ve packed sunscreen and brollies. The British weather is nothing if not inconsistent. I’m so used to its mercurial aspects that I even packed wellies for our children when we drove to the south of France... and of course got teased as they spent their whole time running round in flip flops.
“Ah ha!” say some. “It’s all down to global warming”. We’ve been saying this for a while now, but not half as long as most of us realise. Earlier in the year scientists were at last able to transcribe a very delicate manuscript that talked about the weather in Bristol. The manuscript was acquired by the Bristol archives in 1932 but was so fragile that academics couldn’t investigate it. Turns out it was 400 years old, and it’s only now that digital photography has made it possible to painstakingly transcribe it.
It’s quite a comfort to realise that the climate was as mad then as it is now. The manuscript describes decades of extreme weather events that hit the people of Bristol all those centuries ago. Even the sun was blotted out by volcanic eruptions. There was more snow than anyone could recall. Floods stranded people up trees for days and frosts were so hard that the River Severn could be walked on for months.
Writer Will Humphries says “the chronicle entries describe a ‘strangely altered’ time of crop failures, famines, great freezes, floods, unseasonal blizzards, tempests and droughts”.
Apparently during the Little Ice Age between 1300 and 1800 England experienced some of its worst ever weather after huge volcanic eruptions in the Americas pushed dust and gases high into the atmosphere blocking out the sun.
Humphries wrote that “the cooling phase that followed was known as the Grindelwald Fluctuation and occurred between 1560 and 1630.” One of the co-authors of the academic article based on the transcribed chronicle, Professor Anson Mackay of the University College London, reckoned that the Grindelwald Fluctuation disturbed the global climate and led to catastrophic weather events.
So it seems there really is nothing new under the sun, and we really aren’t the first human beings to scratch their heads and wonder what’s happening in the world. The famines we read of today aren’t new – except that in Britain centuries ago it seems the weather was responsible for us suffering from famines as bad as any found in Africa today.
In 1596, the chronicle records “a great famine in diverse places and in the city of Bristol all kinds of grain were very dear so that the poor were in very great want”. As if that wasn’t enough, the “greatest snow that was ever known by the memory of man” fell on the city in October 1607. But worse was to come – the poor folk of Bristol lost over 2,000 people in The Great Flood of 1607 – maybe when the snow melted. A huge flood of water surged up the Bristol channel. The manuscript says that the flood “came so fast and high at Henbury (now a suburb of Bristol) that waters continued a long time a fathom deep that the people were obliged to abide on trees two or three days.”
London didn’t fare too well either. The Freeze of 1607-8 was when the Thames froze so hard that a large frost fare was held on it.
Basic weather instruments only came into use in the 1800s, preceded by thermometers in the 1700s.
Meanwhile, people probably looked to nature. A saying that is at least as old as the Bible is “red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky by morning, sailors take warning” and there’s some truth in it as weather systems in the northern hemisphere generally move from west to east, so if there’s a colourful sunrise – meaning clouds to the west – it means rough weather could approach. If the clouds catch the sunset as they go east, it means the weather could be calmer tomorrow.
So what does all this tell us? Well, the weather has a mind of its own. Planning any outside event or local holiday is, I reckon, just down to chance. I’m keeping those wellies close at hand.
This summer has been a rollercoaster. Time away in our motorhome means I’ve packed sunscreen and brollies