So, according to the Met Office, Britain is reaching the end of what will ‘almost certainly’ be the warmest summer on record. The average temperature across Britain up until 25 August was 16.13 Celsius, compared with 15.76 Celsius for the previous record-holder, 2018.
There is still a week to go, of course, and it is a week which, on average, you would expect to be one of the coolest weeks of the summer, coming as it does right at the end. But let us assume that the Met Office is right and 2025 really does grab its place in the record books. So what? It has also been a largely benign summer in Britain, with little in the way of extreme heat – the maximum for the summer so far was 35.8 Celsius, 4.5 Celsius below the UK record. There have been relatively few cases of thundery downpours and flash flooding, and one storm which failed to match forecasts.
The news of – probably – the warmest summer on record has unleashed a storm of climate hysteria
Actually, this summer has turned out to be similar to one experienced in Britain exactly 50 years ago – the hot summer of 1975, memories of which tend to have been erased by the even hotter summer of the following year. Then, as now, the summer was dominated by high pressure over northern Europe, with long periods of warm, dry weather and a wetter period in the middle. The difference is that on that occasion London experienced the Hampstead Storm of 14 August 1975, when 6.72 inches of rain fell in a 24 hour period, causing extensive flooding in North London. You don’t have to try too hard to imagine how that event would be interpreted if it happened now.
The news of – probably – the warmest summer on record has nevertheless unleashed a storm of climate hysteria. According to one story doing the rounds in the past 24 hours, heatwaves are making us age faster – this is based on a study by the University of Hong Kong claiming to find a link between the ‘biological age’ of 25,000 people in Taiwan and their exposure to heatwaves.
Given that they all lived on the same smallish island and were exposed to pretty much the same weather it is hard to see what conclusion you can draw from this. The researchers claimed that manual workers experienced faster ageing because they were more exposed to hot weather than office workers in air-conditioned offices, but then is there any society on Earth – in a warm or a cold climate – where professional office-based classes do not outlive manual workers? The study seems merely to be identifying the almost universal disparity in health between different classes and finding a way to attribute it to the weather.
Elsewhere, a bizarre column in the Times which claims that the real reason migrants are fleeing from Afghanistan, Iran, Eritrea, Syria and Sudan isn’t so much the Taliban or other despotic regimes – even if that is why they tell you they are fleeing – it is the weather. ‘All have their political fears, all want to better their lives but most also form the advance guard of the great climate exodus.’
Yes, of course. Never mind that my family has just been slaughtered, or that I hear there are great opportunities to make money in London, legally or illegally; the real reason I am getting on this dinghy to sail to Britain is that it is a tad too hot in Kabul. It is just that the masses do not seem to be clamouring to escape from even hotter – but wealthier and better-managed – countries like Singapore and Dubai.
The climate in Britain has certainly grown a little warmer over the past half century, but so, too, have silly season stories grown even sillier.
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