By Steff Gaulter

 

After a bitterly long, cold winter, you would be forgiven for thinking that people in Europe would be enjoying the current heat wave. However, it seems that my mother was right, when she misquoted Abraham Lincoln and said “you can’t please all of the people all of the time, and sometimes you can’t please any of the people any of the time.”

In the UK, the spring of 2013 was officially the coldest spring for 50 years. The average temperature was just 6oC (43oF), well below the average of 7.7oC (46oF). In the last week of May the maximum temperature in London is normally around 18oC (64oF), but this year snow was still falling.

Wind forward just over one month and it’s a completely different story. The sun has come out and it’s taking no prisoners. The sunshine is beating down relentlessly and people in the UK aren’t used to it.

I was in England for the start of the heat wave. The weather really was glorious, but already there were whispers of ‘it’s too hot’! The first person I heard complaining was my sister. At the time it was 28oC (82oF).

For us, living in Doha, 28C is only a dream at the moment, but the UK is about as prepared for hot weather as Qatar is for cold weather. Here, our homes are generally spacious and airy, purposefully designed to release heat.

In the UK, the houses are small and compact, designed to retain heat. People in the UK spend more time outdoors and often rely heavily on public transport. Buses may have air conditioning, but waiting for them in the baking sunshine, isn’t fun, and the underground network is even worse.

The London tube tunnels below the surface are deep and poorly ventilated. Most of them are also very old, having been built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The temperature within the tunnels is often hotter than the air temperature outside. There were reports that in 2006, the temperatures in the tunnels reached as high as 47oC (116oF). That’s a whole 12oC (21oF) higher than the actual temperature recorded above ground.

People in the UK see sunshine so rarely that they’re unaccustomed to it. My mother gets annoyed that the weather presenters advise their viewers to use sun cream, but frankly, looking at the lobsters that emerged after the first few days of sunshine, it seems that someone has to do it!

The instant tomato look isn’t only an acquired taste, it’s also like carrying around an internal heater; if you were having difficulty cooling down before the sunburn, you will find it even worse afterwards.

The weather in the UK this year has been strange, but it’s actually been peculiar for a lot longer than that. This winter was not the first cold one; the last four winters have brought widespread and heavy snow throughout the UK.

When I was a child, I can only remember two or three occasions when snow fell. It was an exciting time, as it usually meant that schools were closed. In the last few years, snow has been far more frequent, much to many children’s delight.

The summers have also changed. Five of the last six UK summers have been very wet. 2010 was the exception, and even that wasn’t dry; the rainfall was simply ‘average’. People were struggling to remember the last genuinely hot summer.

The changing trend of winter and summer weather prompted a meeting of climate and weather experts. The big questions that needed answering were what is causing the change, and is it permanent? It’s already known that a shift in the jet stream, the fast-flowing ribbon of air that flows high up in the atmosphere, is responsible for the change in the weather. However, it’s unclear what causes the jet stream to alter its track in the first place.

There are several theories of what may be behind the change in the jet stream’s path. These range from variations in the sun’s energy, to the melting of the Arctic ice. At the meeting, it was largely agreed that the change in the jet streams in summer and in the winter was most likely to have been caused by different factors.

In the winter, the melting of sea ice in the Arctic and the overall warming of the region, is thought to be the reason for the change. This heating has meant the difference in temperature between the Arctic and the Tropics has reduced dramatically, thereby altering of the path of the jet stream. If this is the case, then the colder winters may well be a feature of the weather for the foreseeable future.

In the summer, the shift may be more transient. New research has revealed a link between warm surface temperatures in the North Atlantic Ocean and wet summers in Northern Europe. Like the more famous temperature changes in the Pacific, called El Nino and La Nina, the Atlantic also has periodic changes in the sea surface temperatures.

However, the temperature changes in the Atlantic can persist for decades at a time. Warm patterns, like the current one seen in the Atlantic, persisted between the 1930s and the 1950s, whereas cooler conditions prevailed between the 1960s and the 1980s.

If this theory holds, there could well be more wet summers in northwest Europe over the next few years. As you might expect, the newspapers had a field day when reporting the outcome of the conference, with the headlines screaming, “Stand by for a decade of wet summers.”

Scientists are keen to stress that this is the general climate, and not the weather which will be seen every day, so not every summer will be a complete washout. However, I bet there is now a wry smile on the face of many scientists.

Just two weeks after the headlines of endless rain, the heat wave started, ensuring that this summer will actually be remembered for its blistering heat.