What is normal - Gales in March?

This week the UK and northern France have been battered by gales with gusts of up to 82 miles per hour in the UK and up to 160 kph off the Breton coast.  There is already talk of the demise of global warming, as these gales are evidence that it isn't getting hotter - or are they?

First off I take exception to the phrase global warming, as there are all sorts of arguments about some places getting warmer and some getting colder (looking at its latitude, the UK is already unnaturally warm anyway).  I prefer to talk about climate change.

Secondly, I think it is fair to say that the weather is a chaotic system and does not conform to nice norms calculated over 50 or 100 or 150 years as being the average for the time of year.  In any case to get an average, some things have to be higher or more or stronger and other things less.

Chaotic systems are subject to variation and odd extremes.  You could say that our recent gales are part of that.  Or you could say it is part of the weather pattern of Northern Europe and is actually quite normal to have abnormal events.

When I was a child I was given a tiny book by Maurice Sendak called Chicken Soup with Rice, which had a poem a month about Chicken Soup - the entry for March went thus:

"In March the wind blows down the door and spills my soup upon the floor.  It laps it up and roars for more.  Blowing once, blowing twice, blowing chicken soup with rice."

I think something like that reminds us that gales in March, particularly in the run up to the equinox and tied in to high tides is actually normal, yucky weather for March, and that things are rather nice and normal!!

Comments

[john]

The troubles with all this talk about Global Warming/Climate Change are many-fold. The media are the main problem. The fact that there may be irreversible alterations to the climate in 50 - 100 years time is boring in the extreme. Polar bears alone on ice floes, violent storms battering the planet are better, but basically irrelevant. But they look good so they are reported as Climate Change, which they aren't.

Secondly, there are very few certainties in science and the whole CC 'thing' is about a considerable body of evidence that all seems to point in the same direction.

Imagine this. The weather forecast says it might rain today. The barometer is dropping. There are clouds brewing on the horizon and you say to yourself, 'it feels like rain'. There is no guarantee it is going to rain, but you would be daft not to take an umbrella. That's where we are with CC. It would be daft not to start taking precautions. There is no certainty that it will happen and by the time that certainty is in place, guess what? It's too late.
But people don't like to be told what to do by 'scientists' or Governments and the bad times won't really affect the first world too much and it won't happen in most of our lifetimes, so we will, I'm sure, carry on regardless and nuts to the future!