Warning: More Weather Warnings on the Way

ROGER WATSON

Hull and East Riding is in the grip of election fever for the mayor of the new unitary authority. Things are hotting up and expectations are high that some people who give the proverbial will turn up at the polling stations which are already being set up. Others may just want directions to Tesco.

Tensions are high among the candidates and local boxer, turned Reform candidate, Luke Campbell, is complaining that he is being accused of being a racist. As this is the accusation from which there is no return, his post-fighting career as a boxing commentator is over. Clearly nobody warned him.

Anyway, with all these nightmayorish shenanigans going on, the Lib-Dem incumbents at Hull City Hall – themselves hoping to take the mayor’s chain – have obviously taken their eye off the ball. I mean, specifically, the big hot yellow ball in the sky which has been evident in abundance this past week. While local officials sweat over the outcome of the election, the rest of us are sweating in the heat.

Yes, it is hot in Hull. Nobody warned us and I stepped out of the house early one morning this week to find that I was surrounded by an unfamiliar feeling: warmth. There had been no leaflets through the letterbox telling me how to cope with this extreme and unexpected bout of global warming and, I don’t mind saying, a feeling of panic engulfed me.

So, perhaps unwisely but because life must go on, I improvised, I ‘winged it’ and, I must say, that I was quite proud of myself. Cautiously, taking care not to make any sudden and potentially life-threatening movements which could have exhausted me and left me stranded on the patio, I turned round, and re-entered the house. The cool air brought considerable relief.

Next, I went back upstairs to the bedroom – slowly, of course, I’m not insane – and removed my trousers and shirt, fished out a pair of shorts and a T-shirt from the wardrobe and put them on. I went back outside and, while it was a struggle, I made it through the rest of the day. In fact, here we are in the middle of the week and nobody in the house has died. The neighbours all seem to be bearing up well, and I am beginning to wonder if all these climate warnings and local climate emergency groups are even necessary.

But on a short drive this morning I tuned the radio to that bastion of political balance and free speech, the BBC News, to hear that the government was not taking climate change seriously. You could have fooled me! We hear of little else from our parliamentarians. Professional Wallace and Gromit impersonator, Ed Miliband, pushes his net zero agenda with gusto.

“Blowing in the wind” he sang; well not today, Ed; I just checked the UK Energy Dashboard and wind power was providing precisely 2.7% of our energy needs. Admittedly, given it’s a sunny day, the biggest slice of the energy-rich pie (34.3%) is from solar power. But I am not sure how we’ll square that with the intention to block it out. As a brilliant editorial in Country Squire Magazine (‘Solar schizophrenia’) said, we seem to want to harvest every ray of sunshine in the name of net zero while blocking them out in the name of global warming.

The BBC News report ran a clip from Baroness Brown, chair of the Carbon Trust (so no conflict of interest there), who sounded like she was preaching a sermon, where she was bemoaning the government’s lack of preparation for extreme weather events. We need to prepare for fire, flood and freezes according to the noble Baroness, which is strange when all we seem to experience in the UK is a surfeit of extremely mild weather.

Of course, we do get floods in the UK; Hull was struck very badly twice in rapid succession early this century, with one death after prolonged periods of torrential rain. But, already an open secret in the city at the time, the local council had been neglecting to clear the drains and the drainage system became overwhelmed.

Drain cleaning has been much in evidence since and, aided by the barrier at the end of the River Hull, we have had no more flooding. There are floods elsewhere in the UK and they are terrible things, but any notion that the situation is getting worse is demonstrably a myth. The same applies to fires of which there are now fewer than there were in the 1930s.

As for freezing weather, Baroness Brown and her ilk ought to have lived in the northeast of Scotland through the winters of the 1950s and 1960s. We may not be seeing much global warming, but we are also not seeing such extreme winters. We are, surely, entering a period of extreme mildness.

Other contenders for the title of this article, courtesy of ChatGPT were:

• Nation Braces for Slightly Damp Tuesday
• Red Alert: It Might Drizzle
• Blustergeddon: The Wind Is Slightly Above Average
• Britain on the Brink: Puddles Spotted in Surrey
• Code Beige: A Bit Nippy Out There
• Stormageddon: Gusts Could Slightly Disturb Garden Furniture
• Apocalypse Later: Light Snow Expected South of Watford
• Umbrella Panic: Met Office Warns of 60% Chance of Mild Inconvenience

So, brace yourselves Britain. Stock up on sun cream, de-icer, flood sacks and emotional resilience. Alert the council, the BBC, and possibly the Archbishop of Canterbury – when we have one – or the Pope (ditto): it might be warm again tomorrow. The weather may not be extreme, but the warnings certainly are.

Roger Watson is a retired academic, editor and writer. He is a columnist with Unity News Network and writes regularly for a range of conservative journals including The Salisbury Review and The European Conservative. He has travelled and worked extensively in the Far East and the Middle East. He lives in Kingston upon Hull, UK.

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This article (Warning: More Weather Warnings on the Way) was created and published by The New Conservative and is republished here under “Fair Use” with attribution to the author Roger Watson

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