One of the first lies we tell our children in Britain is that the year can be divided into four distinct seasons. One of these, the picture books suggest, will feature blue skies with a bright yellow orb in them; another, at the far end of the year, a landscape blanketed in white, and a world that’s stopped so that everyone can build a snowman. The rather more prosaic reality – that for upwards of 200 days a year, the weather in these islands is uniformly grey, damp and mild – rarely makes it to the picture books.
But the news media’s passion for extreme weather cannot be sated. Late last week, the Met Office issued a yellow warning (which can mean, helpfully, either severe weather affecting a few people, or less severe weather affecting many). On Friday morning, in Wales, the Midlands and the north, that was upgraded to amber (which means significant chance of travel disruption, potential power cuts and risk to life and property).
Nowhere has yet been upgraded to the most extreme red condition (dangerous weather expected, take action now, abandon hope entirely). In London it’s hard to avoid noticing that, despite the chill, there is not a cloud in the sky. No matter: weather means clicks, and so the live blogs are out. The Mail has found a woman swimming outside in south-east London, and strongly implied this is madness because it has snowed near Aberdeen. Metro is conveying advice from Direct Energy that the public stock up on dried pasta and cereal bars, and has detailed (this at lunchtime, on the third day of the month) “the UK’s coldest temperatures in January so far”.
In light of warnings about dangers to life and property, the Great British Weather Obsession may seem understandable – we all need to know if we’re going to be able to get to work, or whether we should stock up on candles – but like all other obsessions, it can go too far. The Daily Express has long treated implausible weather warnings as one of the mainstays of its front pages. In doing so it has successfully predicted roughly 94 of the last five big freezes.
The striking thing about the front pages’ love of weather, though, is how little extreme weather we ever actually get. Last year, a report – produced, unexpectedly, in a “please improve our Google ranking” kind of our way, by Leonardo Hotels – ranked the UK’s snowiest cities. It found that lofty Sheffield topped the list, with 11 snow days a year, followed by Birmingham and Newcastle, with nine apiece. This is not, as anyone who lives in Moscow or Toronto could tell you, that much snow. Sure, there are more northern or more elevated parts of the UK, that see much more snow than that: the Shetlands (64 days), say, or Cairngorms (76). These, though, are home to relatively few people. For most people living in the UK, serious disruption by snow is something that only happens once every few years. This perhaps explains why we all get so excited when it does.
It also explains why the country tends to grind to a halt. It’s all very well complaining that other countries seem to cope fine, despite getting more frequent snow – but those two things are not independent variables, and the reason they cope is because it happens more often. It’s therefore worth the state and individuals alike investing in all the things (snow tyres, big shovels, extensive stockpiles of grit) necessary to deal with a problem that reliably hits you every winter. It’s no coincidence that Scotland, the coldest part of the country, has invested in a fleet of gritters, whose names (Sir Andy Flurry, You’re a Blizzard, Harry, et al) provide one of the highlights of the year.
The rest of the UK could do the same – but that’d mean spending limited money on things that’d only occasionally see full use. And the exact same newspapers that are live-blogging the weather now, and will be complaining about disruption next week, would no doubt be gleefully covering wasteful spending on unused grit stockpiles instead.
If the failure to invest in anti-cold weather infrastructure to date has been rational, though, it’s not clear it will remain so. Climate change has so far mainly brought warmer weather, but it could bring colder winters, too. Britain is much further north than we tend to think, and it’s only the Gulf Stream, the jet of warm air travelling up from the Caribbean, that means we don’t spend much of each winter blanketed in snow.
But there has been plenty of handwringing about the Gulf Stream’s future. Not every scientist agrees, which is lucky, because the earliest date it was predicted to be possible was 2025. It’s possible that the case for investing in infrastructure that can survive prolonged cold may soon enough start to appear rather stronger – and that future British cold snaps may not be quite so much fun.
[See also: Russia’s black armada]
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