Records tumbling day by day

One night last week in central Scotland the night-time temperature never dropped below 14 degrees, making it the warmest February night since accurate records began in 1659. Yesterday in Wales the temperature nudged above 19 degrees - the warmest February day in Britain’s recorded history. Last Friday the temperature in Cardiff was no less than 8 degrees higher than in Athens: I know this because my wife was attending a conference in Athens at the time. With conditions in February continuing to resemble more an Indian summer than late winter, we may expect more records to fall in the next few days.

In central Cardiff this morning, where I live, the city awoke to a harsh frost. By ten o’clock it had vanished without trace and the air was mild. By lunchtime it was positively warm, with not a cloud in the sky and not even a zephyr of breeze. It could have been July. As I read my book sitting in the garden at one o’clock, the temperature was 20 degree in the shade, so yesterday’s record has already gone west.

Before long the famous January record for highest temperature may go. An incredible 18.6 degrees was recorded, again in Scotland, back in the 1970s. And it can’t be long before the all time high temperature will reach 40 degrees - it’s already close, at 39.2 (100 degrees Fahrenheit) which was recorded in Gravesend in 2003.

Yet despite all this, confounding the views of ill informed climate change deniers such as Donald Trump, temperatures can also dip alarmingly. America has just endured an almost unprecedented cold snap which saw frost and snow in the deep south, and metres of snowfall further north. In parts of North America near the heart of the continent, conditions were as close to the Antarctic as anywhere else. In Europe, of course, we had our “beast from the East” almost exactly a year ago, with Central Europe getting it even worse than we did - and watch out, because there’s still time for it to happen again this year.

This doesn’t contradict the theory of climate change; on the contrary it reinforces it. Climate change models predict increasing highs and lows, as well as more extreme weather events generally; tornados, hurricanes, flooding events that were formally 1 in 500 year events becoming almost the norm - and all this is happening, right now, all over the world.

Just because you get a cold snap, Donald, doesn’t mean climate change isn’t real. Try to get that into your thick skull.