Why are we taking about the weather?
What do people from Mexico City, Norway, Central Slovakia, Northern China, and South Australia all now have in common with the British? It is talking about the weather. One time the weather was a subject that I only really heard the British and Irish talk about. We would be famous for going on about it, sometimes in minute detail, perhaps that was how we partly overcame our reserve. Nowadays everyone is talking about the weather.
Polite conversation would regularly take place; “it is rather cold/warm/wet today”. Perhaps “We are having a fine/bad/typical summer”. Our official weather forecasters even describe weather sometimes as “changeable” a reading that is honoured on some barometers. The reason for this is that the British Islands are located on the edge of different climate zones which all compete for attention. But now people in paces of stable and predictable climate have found conversation about the weather as rivetiung as we British. It is not because the British have started a fashion which has caught on everywhere, lke the latest craze; it is because the weather is now an interesting topic of conversation for almost everyone.
If you are from Central Slovakia or Norway or Southern Germany you will almost be complaining about the mildness of winter and the lack of snow. For most of your life you will have had snow every single winter. Now some winters are almost snow free. February, the coldness month has suddenly become the warmest winter month. You have not got out your skiing gear, unless you travel miles up the mountains.
If you are from China you will be talking about too much snow. It fell just before the Chinese New Year, when you were about to travel home to see your family, stopping you from doing that. There had almost never been snow in such quantities this time of the year (or never at least for fifty years) but now it has not only spoiled your New Year celebrations but has damaged infrastructure, spoilt crops, and wrecked buildings. Fruit and vegeatbles will be expensive and scarce.
Parts of Australia have always been low rainfall areas; drought has been the order of the day more often that not. Now torrential rainfall in the middle of summer is spoiling cricket matches and summer holidays in Sydney. A monsoon seems to have struck northern Queensland
In Mexico City, surrounded by mountains at an altitude of 2,400 metres, the effect of thermal inversion has been to trap dust, particulates and pollution in the still air atmosphere permanently, in a kind of smog. But now you are talking about gale force winds of nearly 100 kilometres an hours that ripped off the roofs of some buildings when they blew the dust away last week.
In almost every part of the world people are talking about the weather. What used to be predictable – except in Britain, has now become a topic of more than polite conversation. I wonder why? I suppose it puts into context my observations about trees in bud in January in London.
What are your experiences?
Related posts:
- Canada Calling
- British are taking steps to combat climate change.
- Bike to Work Week May 24th to 31st
- Composting Year Planner
- Climate change; how humans are evolving into parasites
- Jounalists, polar bears, caribou and climate change
