Flood, deluge and the gathering storm
I... propose to bring to your notice a series of... phenomena, which, so far as I can weigh existing evidence, are peculiar to our own times; yet which have not hitherto received any special notice or description from meteorologists.
This was how John Ruskin opened his first lecture in London in 1884 on "The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century", asserting a radical change in what he called "weather aspect", comparable to the one we've been experiencing in 2007-8.
It's not just my imagination, is it? The last twelve months really have been the wettest in recent memory. To my recollection, anyway, last July was a biblical month: there were floods all over England, or at least the south, Yorkshire already having suffered earlier. Water didn't just fall, but drove from the skies with hardly a let-up; it was by pure chance that I saw a brilliant innings by Kevin Pietersen at Lord's on what seemed the one dry day of the summer. Eventually the rains eased, but ever since, things have I'm sure been wetter than before. I've spent more time worrying about the suitability of shoes than ever in my life and as a serial loser of umbrellas, I can report that I've bought more of them between last July and this than I'd ever have forecast - which proves my point better than any meteorological statistic. The stats do back me up, though: last winter there was 19% more rain than the average from 1971 to 2000, and in the spring there was 10% more rain than average. This summer's not quite so bad as last, but there's not been much room to swing a barbecue. And when did you last hear talk of a hose-pipe ban? For all of the last year we've been living in a strangely shifted climate, one that's distinctly moist. So what happened last summer that might have caused this alteration?
I'm not the first to suggest that this is a case of après Blair, le déluge. But since Bryan Appleyard wrote that last year, it's become clearer that the Sturm und Drang of one man's brooding soul, wracked - Heathcliff-like - by tempests, can change the weather for us all. If we're going to get a proper summer again, something must be done. As Ruskin said:
Of states in such moral gloom every seer of old predicted the physical gloom, saying, "The light shall be darkened in the heavens thereof, and the stars shall withdraw their shining."
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