70....80....90...PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER! What should we conclude from the recent hot weather?

Actually I have no serious doubt that the climate is getting warmer. In general, the summers are hotter, and the winters less sharp, than they were in my childhood and teens. I can say this because I dislike the change. I dislike hot, stifling summer days and I enjoy the exhilarating crispness of proper, frosty cold.

 

As someone who has always walked or bicycled to work, I also notice that the long, slow period between the end of winter and he start of spring, which was often quite bitterly chilly well into early April, is now consistently milder.

 

But I think we should be careful about drawing conclusions from particular events, storms, floods, hurricanes etc, unless a pattern is discernible over a pretty long time. .

 

Let us take the high temperatures recorded at Heathrow on Sunday. I���m inclined to be a but suspicious of any temperature recorded in this great concrete city, full of traffic, the blast of jet engines and the air-conditioning output of several enormous terminals. But perhaps that makes no difference.  Certainly some of the high temperatures (101.66 degrees) recorded earlier this summer were from the Cambridge Botanical Gardens, a delightful sylvan corner of that city, with a cooling small lake in its centre.

 

But what about yesterday���s record of 88.9 degrees for the hottest late August bank holiday? This has caused some people to recall the great 1906 British heatwave.

 

Wikipedia (which I think can be ruled impatial on this occasion) records: ���The heat wave had a comparable intensity to the 1990 heat wave.[2] From 31 August to 3 September, the temperature in the UK exceeded 32 ��C (90 ��F) consecutively over most of the UK on these four days. In September, CET Central England and Birmingham recorded a highest temperature of 31.5 ��C (88.7 ��F),[3][4] and Oxford recorded a highest temperature of 33.1 ��C (91.6 ��F), the Oxford high surpassed in 1911 with a temperature of 33.4 ��C (92.1 ��F).[3]

The 2nd of September was the hottest day of the month, as temperatures reached 35.6 ��C (96.1 ��F) in Bawtry, and remains the hottest September temperature of any day in the UK and the eighth-hottest day overall in the 20th century.[5]

Scotland had temperatures reaching 32.2 ��C (90.0 ��F) at Gordon Castle, Moray.���

 

Wikipedia also reports a July-September heatwave and drought in 1911, thus ���The United Kingdom heatwave of 1911 was a particularly severe heat wave and associated drought. Records were set around the country for temperature in England, including the highest accepted temperature, at the time, of 36.7 ��C (98.1 ��F),[2] only broken 79 years later in the 1990 heatwave, which reached 37.1 ��C (98.8 ��F).[3] However, the temperature did reach 100 ��F (38 ��C) in Greenwich, London on 9 August.[4] .   

 

The entry contimnues : ���Heatwave impacts

The impacts of the heatwave extended over all parts and sectors of the country. The impacts began to be felt around mid July, around three weeks after the heat wave began. Because of the extreme heat, working patterns changed in Lancashire, with work beginning at dawn, around 4:30am and finishing around midday, to avoid the hottest part of the day in the quarrying industry there. Fatalities became common and newspapers such as The Times ran Deaths by heat columns as temperatures continued to rise. The heat also caused indirect deaths, by melting the asphalt on roads, causing numerous accidents.[5]

 

By the beginning of August, even the health of country people was being adversely effected with stifling, humid nights, meaning food spoiled very quickly and sewage spilled out. Also in August, striking became common, most notably in the Victoria and Albert Docks, where the entire workforce of 5000 people walked out, because of the intolerable heat, meaning the whole area came to a standstill.[5]

 

Drought impacts

 

The extensive drought affected all parts of the country. Again, the effects were felt around mid July, when early harvests were taken in and fires began to break out, along railway tracks in Ascot and gorse around Newbury. By the end of July, the heat and lack of rain had begun to affect agriculture. There was a shortage of grass for cattle as pastures turned brown from drought. This forced farmers to raise the price of milk, to compensate for the lack of production. On 28 July trees and some rare plants had begun to wither and die with the lack of water in the soil, even in shaded areas all around the country. By August, wells, water pumps and water supplies had begun to run completely dry. This led to the stopping of activity in farming and pasture in Essex and the closing of wool mills in Bradford, each an important industry in its area.[5]

 

An unusual impact of the hot and dry 1911 summer was seen in the County Championship of 1911, where Warwickshire���s narrow win was the only time between 1890 and 1935 where the Championship was not won by one of the "Big Six" of Yorkshire, Surrey, Kent, Lancashire, Nottinghamshire and Middlesex. The unusually hot and dry weather created extremely fast pitches that suited Warwickshire���s pace bowlers Foster and Field and camouflaged their deficiencies in batting and spin bowling on wet pitches [6]

 

Sunshine

 

Sunshine in July 1911 broke all-time records for the UK and across the south coast of England, with Eastbourne, Sussex topping 383.9 hours [7] and many other south coast spots not far behind. Much of the south coast outshone many Mediterranean locations, and Eastbourne was very close to the levels of sunshine expected in Las Vegas and in the Nevada desert in the USA for July (my emphasis, PH). Since the average July sunshine in Eastbourne is about 255 hours, the town received about 50% more sunshine than usual.���

 

The summer of 1912, by the way, was the wettest in over 200 years and included the coolest and wettest August on record.

 

These very hot days always remind me of the old silly season headlines (usually accompanied by disgusting failed attempts to fry eggs on the pavement) , now mocked out of existence by ���Private Eye��� (they only worked with the Fahrenheit scale, for obvious reasons) ; ���London evening papers would lead their front pages by shouting:

���70���..80���.90!...PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER!���,

 

which does go to show that high summer temperatures in England are not in themselves especially new. The story of L.P. Hartley���s novel ���The Go-Between���, set in the summer of 1900 in Norfolk, is suffused by ever-rising temperatures, until the weather eventually breaks in a colossal thunderstorm as the story reaches its disastrous climax. But I can find no actual records that 1900 was particularly hot.

 

The long-forgotten 1961 film ���The Day the Earth Caught Fire���, starring a pre-Rumpole Leo McKern and the actual Daily Express offices in Fleet Street, also deals with ferocious,   relentless summer heat, which eventually dries up the Thames itself.  This movie is poignant for me, as it was actually filmed in the big, noisy and chaotic rooms where I worked in the final years before new technology took over. By the time I was there, from 1977, the melodramatic inter-war black-glass building (now owned by Goldman Sachs) was shabby and past its best. Even so it still breathed the last enchantments of the great days of the Street of Adventure.  It���s quite fun to watch, if you can track it down, and actually features the real Arthur Christiansen, who edited the Daily Express in the days of Lord Beaverbrook, playing himself and rather woodenly intoning the command I don���t think I have ever heard in real life, ���Hold the Front Page!���

 

Enjoyable to recall that in those days we blamed everything inexplicable or strange (which we now blame on global warming) on nuclear tests.