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Landeskunde GB Climate changes /

Caught by our
capricious climate

LOODS in Wales, gales in Kent and


warm spells in Scotland. Strange
5
weather, you might think. Certainly
these conditions alarmed OBSERVER readers
a century ago when they learned how the
country had been battered by intense storms
and abnormal warm fronts for several con10secutive winters.
Widespread damage, deaths and questions
in the House of Commons followed in the
wake of this late nineteenth-century havoc,
suggesting that our reactions to bad weather
15may never change. Britain is going to be eternally startled by its own climate, it seems.
All that has altered recently is the range of
our surprise, with every gale or hot spell now
being interpreted as a portent of greenhouse
20catastrophe. In fact, our own times are really
not that special. Our ignorance of history
makes us slander our own times, said Gustave
Flaubert. Things have always been like this.
And nothing illustrates this point more
25aptly than the study of meteorology for the
weather has always been unreliable as can be
seen with a quick look through the history
books.
Take the union of the English and Scottish
30Parliaments in 1707. Many Scots looked upon
the Act as a piece of treachery by the nations
leaders. In fact, say meteorologists, the Scots
were virtually starved into surrendering their
independence by a bitter and cold spell that
35destroyed several consecutive harvests.
Similarly, the Irish potato famine of the
1840s has been linked to a sharp rise in
atmospheric humidity at the time which in
turn led to a spread of potato blight, mass
40starvation, and an exodus of Irish immigrants
to Britain and the United States. Of course,
political factors were also involved in both
examples. Nevertheless, it is clear that weather

changes have had a continual, profound, and


45largely unappreciated impact on our society
and its structure today.
The question is: are these changes periodic
and predictable, or are they utterly random?
Most scientists think that this years intense
50storms were actually repetitions of severe
gales and flooding which afflicted the country
in 1590, 1690, 1790, and 1890. No one can
provide an explanation for these strange,
regular 100-year visitations.
55 A few important weather cycles have been
unravelled, however. It is known that the sun
goes through a period of intense sunspot
activity every 11 years (we are in the middle of
one at the present). Atomic particles pour
60from these sunspots and batter our upper
atmosphere, triggering all sorts of weather
changes such as the release of powerful electrical storms.
Other cycles have even longer periods,
65including a recently-discovered variation in
Earths orbit that takes several hundred thousand years to run its course. On top of these
competing, coalescing climate cycles occur
other events that are even less predictable
70such as the eruption of volcanoes which spew
massive amounts of fine ash into the upper
atmosphere and lead to global cooling.
Making sense of the climate has become an
extremely important business and is going to
75be of pressing concern to future generations.
They should not be hoodwinked into thinking
that a few storms foreshadow the end of civilisation, however. As we have seen, bad
weather has always been with us.
[Shortened and adapted from THE
OBSERVER, 4 March, 1990; 510 words]

hm-abo Mai 1990

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