Sunshades on a hot day

We had a very hot day today and there are heatwave warnings that the next few days will be even hotter still.

A hot day in St Neots

The photo shows people at the Bridge Inn. They are sitting on the river terrace relaxing. This was earlier in the day but by mid afternoon most people were looking for shade or (even better) air conditioning.

The temperatures in the shade topped 28 C today, not high by some standards, but pretty good for northerly lands like the UK.

I did some work in the garden and made quite a bit of progress, but it felt better to work in the shade and not to be too active!

Days like this are really very welcome in Britain because we don't get that many of them. On the other hand we we start to grumble about a drought if weather like this went on for several more weeks.

You just can't please the Brits when it comes to weather!

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)

Warming up June

It's June and the central heating has been firing up!

Our boiler's control panel

Most years, the gas boiler stays off after early to mid May and remains off until late September. I don't turn it off, it just stays off because the room thermostat doesn't need to demand heat.

But this year it seems that the temperatures are much lower than normal. Outside in June I would normally be in shorts and a T-shirt with a pair of sandals on my feet. But this year I'm wearing jeans, shirt and a fleece, with socks and trainers. We've had some warm days, but not very many.

What is going on? What is the explanation?

Well, for one thing there is always a lot of variation from year to year. That, at least, is normal. So having one odd summer is not in itself very peculiar. But we have been having a lot of extremes. Over the last ten or twenty years we keep seeing records broken - the driest, the hottest, the windiest, the wettest, the coldest and so on.

Nor is it just England, the rest of the UK has seen extremes as well, so has the rest of Europe and indeed the rest of the globe. Fires in California and Australia, floods in central Europe as I write, the US east coast storms last year, the huge tornado in Oklahoma.

There is a pattern of extremes over many years and in many places. This is global warming in action doing exactly what the climate scientists predicted. Our weather patterns are more unpredictable and more extreme - and this is just the beginning.

(If you liked this you might also like Journeys of heart and mind and Quote me on this.)