This document discusses the unpredictable nature of climate changes in the United Kingdom over history. It notes that strange weather conditions like floods in Wales and warm spells in Scotland alarmed people in the late 19th century, showing that reactions to bad weather have remained consistent. The document also discusses how weather changes have impacted major historical events and societal structures, like a cold spell leading Scotland to surrender independence in 1707 and potato blight causing the Irish potato famine in the 1840s. While some weather cycles like the 11-year sunspot cycle are understood, the climate has always been unpredictable, with events like volcanic eruptions also influencing conditions.
This document discusses the unpredictable nature of climate changes in the United Kingdom over history. It notes that strange weather conditions like floods in Wales and warm spells in Scotland alarmed people in the late 19th century, showing that reactions to bad weather have remained consistent. The document also discusses how weather changes have impacted major historical events and societal structures, like a cold spell leading Scotland to surrender independence in 1707 and potato blight causing the Irish potato famine in the 1840s. While some weather cycles like the 11-year sunspot cycle are understood, the climate has always been unpredictable, with events like volcanic eruptions also influencing conditions.
This document discusses the unpredictable nature of climate changes in the United Kingdom over history. It notes that strange weather conditions like floods in Wales and warm spells in Scotland alarmed people in the late 19th century, showing that reactions to bad weather have remained consistent. The document also discusses how weather changes have impacted major historical events and societal structures, like a cold spell leading Scotland to surrender independence in 1707 and potato blight causing the Irish potato famine in the 1840s. While some weather cycles like the 11-year sunspot cycle are understood, the climate has always been unpredictable, with events like volcanic eruptions also influencing conditions.
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]