al78

Which of course isn't true, unless you think the pictures in the media showing one extremely localised part of the country which got twice as much snow as anywhere else and was unusually badly affected is representitive of EVERYWHERE.

It might be more to do with eating too much poor quality food with low nutritional value rather than an insufficient amount of food. Scurvy and rickets are caused by certain nutritional deficiencies (vitamin C in the former). We may need to look at whether decent nutritious food is more expensive than junk food and if so, whether that is contributing siginficantly to poor diets and health consequences.

I've just come back from a week in Jotunheimen, Norway, and I get the impression the weather over there was better than the UK. I thought that being at least a degree north of the Shetland islands and 1000m asl I would have a break from the sweaty heat that periodically plagues SE England in summer but no, climbing to the Besseggan ridge was very hard work and sweaty. What surprised me was even during the cloudy and damp days the cloud base was up near 2000m so only the higher summits were shrouded. In the UK the cloud base plunges to around 200-300m when the rain comes in and you can barely see anything of the scenery. Another little oddity was the pessimistic weather forecasts from around mid-week onward. Three times it was forecast to be one of those days when the rain arrives and sets in for the day, only for the rain to be showery in nature and easy to deal with even on a 7-8 hour trek between huts.

Drop the denialist attitude. No-one has claimed that European windstorms are predicted to get worse with climate change.

Cycling home from the station around 6:15pm this evening it felt very cool for July even with a jacket on. The dullness and everyone driving with their lights on as well made it feel more like just before the clocks go forward.

This is summer in the UK. The June we have just experienced is not typical of the UK, it was closer to the Mediterranean with the frequent warm/hot weather and very low rainfall (for places like mine that largely missed the heavy showers anyway) hence it was the hottest on record.

Forums like this bring out the best and worst of human attitudes in my experience. It is possible to make some great connections with people across the world but on the other hand there are these brief periods of hideous individualism where empathy appears absent. Similar to the outside world really.

After sweating buckets on Sunday doing a 12 mile training walk on the South Downs I am grateful for what looks like (finally) a regression to the mean in terms of temperature at least. This year in the south has been ridiculous, cloudy and wet most of Spring then a flip into warm/hot and bone dry for over a month with no happy medium. Hopefully the rainy season will start soon and I can have a break from watering crops on the allotment, but it is looking like rainfall this week will be mostly in the northern half of the UK. Cooler nights will also help prevent a buildup of sleep debt.

The temperatures here in Horsham haven't been quite as high as recent heatwaves nor as humid so the interior of my house has not got above 26C yet. If I open windows on opposite sides of the house after sunset I can get that down to around 24C which so far is manageable for sleeping.

Thankfully temperatures recently have been tolerable for sleeping and not incredibly hot during the day. After a full month of zero rain I'm looking forward to the unsettled weather next week to bring some much needed rain to my allotment. If I am going to grow British vegetables without having to spend way more time and effort than I have available I need near normal British weather.

I was hoping one or two of the showers would give Horsham some rain but looks like we have missed them all. The temperate wet and dry climate with the wet and dry seasons randomised continues, who knows when the flip to wet will occur. At least I have managed to sleep at night despite the temperatures.

Mediocrity is being generous. I call it crapness. It is the same with the rail network, it takes only a modest deviation from normality to cause significant problems. The UK's infrastructure seems to have little resiliance.

I'd like to get hit with a few showers this weekend and next week. When I am trying to grow my own food having no rain for a month is detrimental.

I'm not exactly dreading the first hot spell but I don't like it very hot because it is uncomfortable, and when coupled with high overnight temperatures causes major sleep disruption. It surely isn't difficult to understand that someone might wish to avoid physically uncomfortable conditions involving trying to do normal day to day activities feeling like they are jet lagged due to significant sleep deprivation from which there is no escape. Please try to have an ounce of empathy. That does not mean someone who hates heat relishes 5-10C below average under North Sea clag. As I've said a hundred or so times before and I'll say it again, hating one extreme is NOT the same as enjoying the opposite extreme. Extremes in any direction are generally bad for one reason or another.

Conditions on Sunday were perfect for the 5k run in the local park in aid of charity, sunny and pleasant temperatures. I managed to jog around the course despite having never done any running before. Looks like no rain for another week which will mean virtually a full month with not a drop of rain in Horsham. Whilst I appreciate the comfortable temperatures and lack of rain for doing outdoor work, one wet day every 10 days or so as opposed to months of soaking wet followed by weeks of bone dry would help with the allotment. The three week period between the wet and the dry season when the clay soil is cultivatable has almost closed and the ground is almost like concrete in places.

My point was heatwaves kill and that is why the effect of high temperatures shouldn't be trivialised nor people patronised because they suffer from the effects. Whether cold temperatures kill more or not is irrelevant to that point. Yes cold temperatures kill more which is why I don't relish extremes at either end of the distribution, and if there are people that suffer in 10-14C they are going to be suffering in the UK climate for most of the year, they have to dress appropriately for the conditions and their own comfort level, I fail to see the relevance of this either to the point I was making. Not liking high temperatures or acknowledging high temperatures kill is NOT the same as advocating below normal temperatures or ignoring the side effects of cold weather, it is not a binary either-or.

The hurricane that wasn't a hurricane. Reminds me of a clip out of on of the Top Gear challenges, Crap 70's Supercars. Hammond: "... and my Ferrari..." Clarkson: "Isn't a Ferrari" Hammond: "It is!!" Clarkson: "It is not a Ferrari. Teeth, be quiet" Well we've hit the dry season now. I picked the wrong time (early April) to order slug nematodes. They need damp soil to be effective but since they arrived two weeks ago not a drop of rain has fallen, and no rain forecast next week.

I remember 1995 (lived in Salford at the time). I recall a cold spell in May when a few flakes of snow fell even in Swinton which is normally one of the last places in the country to get snow. The first half of June was poor thanks to an Atlantic anticyclone with a northerly airflow over the UK. From what I recall this anticyclone eventually moved over the UK and off we went with a hot summer.

I'd question whether the temps have been significantly below average in the SE this spring. It has been an odd spring where the normal fluctuations in daily temperature due to different air masses have been smoothed out, so we haven't had any warm air masses and summer-like days, but on the other hand we haven't had any freezing weather and hard overnight frosts that gardeners love to hate. These two factors have largely cancelled out. They don't equate but they should not be equated. One is a change in the climate, the other is weather. Even in a globally or regionally warming climate, it is possible to get below average temperatures if the synoptic setup is for cool air masses to be advected in, which is what has happened in the south this year, combined with a very wet March-April (2nd wettest on record for SE England) which suppress daytime temperatures by limiting sunshine. A three month outlook will be biased towards predicting above average temperatures because "average" refers to a prior 30-year climatology, and the climate has warmed over that 30-year period, so if you could build a distribution of temperature based on the climate now and randomly sample from it many times, then bin the samples into terciles based on the prior 30-year climatology, there would be more samples in the upper tercile than the lower tercile. A changing climate affects probabilities of certain weather types, so a warming climate increases the probability of upper tercile temperatures and lowers the probability of lower tercile temperatures. That does not mean lower tercile temperatures will never happen, the Arctic is still freezing cold in winter and Arctic air can still be advected over the UK bringing cold and snow with the right synoptics. What a warming climate means is that below average temperatures, on average, won't be quite as cool/cold as 50 years ago and high temperatures in summer will be slightly higher, on average, than 50 years ago. Alternatively, if you take a temperature threshold at the high end of the distribution and look at the probability of exceeding that temperature, there is a greater chance now than there was several decades ago, but that doesn't mean we will never get summers like 2012 again. I remember a wet day in February 2011 when it rained pretty much all day with the temperature between 1 and 2C. I couldn't help thinking at the time that if it had been the 1960's, we'd have had several inches of snow.

If it is exceptionally hot then it is dangerous for some people. Heatwaves kill: Excess mortality during heat-periods - Office for National Statistics WWW.ONS.GOV.UK Joint analytical article between the Office for National Statistics (ONS) and UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) on deaths during heat-periods in 2022. Just because you personally are immune to the effects of excessively high temperatures, it isn't all about you, those with health conditions, the very old and the very young do suffer.

The Met Office have released a new three month outlook and it is not optimistic if you live in the south: https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/business/public-sector/civil-contingency/3moutlook_jja_v1.pdf "Consistent with our warming climate, there is an increase in the likelihood of hotter than normal conditions. Whilst this doesn’t necessarily mean heatwaves will occur, it does increase the likelihood of these compared to normal. Given the expected surface pattern, there is an increased chance of drier-than-normal conditions in the north and wetter-than-normal in the south, averaging out for the UK as a whole. Given likely periods of continental flow, there is an increased chance of thunderstorms, these possible across the whole country, but perhaps more prevalent for southern areas." I am not sure how reliable these three month outlooks are in terms of the tercile probabilities but this looks like much of the same crappy nonsense we've endured in the south for almost the whole of Spring.

It magically changed from bone dry to soaking wet from February to March, no reason the same can't happen again in the near future.

Used to be changeable, now it seems to have morphed into a Frankenstein temperate mixed with a wet and dry climate of which this spring is a good example. We've been very lucky that the excessive rainfall this season has not translated into destructive flooding as in 1947 which had virtually the same amount of rainfall in March-April as 2023 in SE England, although the devastating flooding that year was due to the rain combined with a lot of thawing snow. The UK climate is mostly benign and that is what makes the infrastructure vulnerable to disruption. It takes little to throw the rail network into a day of delays and cancellations such as when a cm of snow falls largely thanks to saturated timetables with no slack to absorb even very modest deviations from normality. It is a good climate for agriculture and good for the lack of very destructive weather which some might claim is boring, but others might be grateful they are very unlikely or never going to see their house destroyed and their loved ones killed by something like a tropical cyclone. One thing that is worse than the climate is society in general. The UK over the years has become more toxic and divided with hate on an upward trend and empathy on a downward trend.

Plenty when a geographical error has nothing to do with the numbers, is consistent with other sources, and certainly more so than any claim that it rains on over 300 days a year in the UK which would equate to raining on at least five days out of every six on average. Here is another source: UK: annual rain days 2021 | Statista WWW.STATISTA.COM The annual number of rain days in the UK has fluctuated over the past three decades. And another: Climate of the United Kingdom - Wikipedia EN.WIKIPEDIA.ORG If you want an official source such as the UK Met Office, here you go: Winterbourne (Telford and Wrekin) UK climate averages WWW.METOFFICE.GOV.UK Winterbourne UK climate averages All consistent with well under 200 rain days per year, under 150 days per year if you only include England and Wales.

I don't think it rains 300+ days a year in any one location in the UK, except maybe the western Scottish highlands. After all, the advocates of cycle commuting claim you will only get wet around 12 days a year on average (which is nonsense from personal experience). Average Yearly Precipitation in the United Kingdom - Current Results WWW.CURRENTRESULTS.COM List of total annual rainfall plus snowfall at cities and towns in the United Kingdom, including average yearly precipitation and days of wet weather throughout the country.