Strange Weather For The Time Of Year

In February, it was colder in Italy than in Iceland.

We have just experienced some unseasonably cold weather. In broad terms, we have just experienced a week in which the temperature was somewhere between 10ºC and 15ºC below the average we could expect for this time of year. This was accompanied by a high pressure cell originating in Siberia, along with a good deal of snow. There was considerable disruption to our daily lives, and invariably GDP will be weaker this quarter as people couldn't get to work, and tax revenues will be down because people weren't earning and spending. Needless to say, this was all greeted with the chorus of, "What's happening to our weather?"

The simple answer to that question is climate change. Perhaps we might expand that answer. The climate in the UK is much milder than the latitudinal mean. The UK is on the same latitude as the prairies of Canada and the wilds of Siberia. It is kept warm by the Gulf Stream. This is a warm current originating in the Caribbean and flowing up to north west Europe. The key to the Gulf Stream is it's high salinity. This winter, there has been unusually low ice formation in the Arctic. The fresh water that, in previous years would have formed this polar ice has remained in the North Atlantic, lowering it's salinity. It has caused the Polar Vortex usually present over the Arctic to slip onto Siberia. A few years back, the Polar Vortex slipped onto North America, with similar results.

What does this mean to us? In 2011, as part of the National Ecosystem Assessment to 2060, I produced a set of wild card scenarios to speculate about the impact of climate change. One of the wild card scenarios held that the UK would become a lot colder as a result of global warming. This is a counter-intuitive result. The changing climate is balancing a warmer planet (much hotter weather) against a reversion to the latitudinal mean temperature (much colder temperatures). Sometimes we have unduly warm winters, and sometimes we have unduly cold winters. Such is our lot. An unduly cold winter has the effect of delaying the growing season. Already, we are currently between one to two weeks behind in our planting season, which means lower crop yields this year. It will lead to higher food imports, food prices turning upwards, and a bit more pressure on UK living standards. It will take years, if not decades, for the climate scientists to model, measure, and quantify these changes. I prefer to rely upon the evidence of my own eyes.

What can I do about it? The usefulness of futuring is it's ability to warn us of an unpleasant future and to give us time to take action today to mitigate that future. A future with a changed climate has been flagged for some time. The weather experienced (stormier, more windy, colder in the winter and hotter in the summer) is consistent with the forecast trajectory. What action can we take now to prepare for this situation worsening?

In my own life, I am taking actions in three areas - transportation, energy, and food. In terms of transportation, I simply travel less. I got rid of my car some years ago, although my wife lets me borrow hers if I need to. I generally travel by public transport, which, for me, includes taxis. Inter-continental travel is now the exception rather than the rule.

We have diversified our energy supplies. We use gas for cooking, although, on occasions we revert to cooking on a wood grill. For heating, we have gas fired central heating, electric heaters for when we want to heat a single room rather than the whole house, and we have a log fire. One weakness we have is that we rely on the National Grid for electricity. We plan to address that in the near future by installing solar panels.

Although we are not self-sufficient, we do grow a good portion of our own food. This is limited by the size of our garden. We plan to downsize to a smaller house in the near future, and this will act as a trigger to get an allotment, increasing our cultivated area. Most importantly, we are re-learning how to grow our own food. This is a valuable skill set that tends to be lost in modern living.

We are at a point where a radically different future can be seen today. If the climate scientists are anywhere near correct, this will all worsen. Our weather will become more extreme and intemperate. We will have to redefine what we mean by normal weather patterns. We will also have to adapt our behaviour to adjust to this new reality. We have all been warned. I have started my journey into the future. Have you?

Stephen Aguilar-Millan

© The European Futures Observatory 2018