Wednesday, August 09, 2017

Britain's "New Normal"



Are you getting the feeling that maybe climate change is closing in on us? In Yorkshire and Lincolnshire today they're bracing for a month's worth of rain in the course of just 24 hours.

Flash flooding hit towns and villages in the East Riding of Yorkshire and north-east Lincolnshire. There was a metre (3ft) of standing water in parts of Withernsea and further flooding in the Grimsby and Immingham areas.

The Humberside fire and rescue service said it responded to calls on Tuesday evening from Bridlington to Hull, and from towns south of the river Humber. Meanwhile, Grimsby Town’s League Cup football match with Derby County had to be abandoned on Tuesday night because of the heavy rain.

Social media users posted pictures of stranded cars on the road into Flamborough, with Melanie Onn, Labour MP for Great Grimsby, tweeting pictures of the waterlogged roads, saying some were “like a river” and the water was “over my ankles”.

While continental Europe experienced a heatwave, Brits used the hashtag #Britishsummertime to post tongue-in-cheek memes and gifs of rain and flooding, featuring Noah’s Ark, Singing in the Rain and Game of Thrones’ Jon Snow facing the elements.


Meanwhile the continent still bakes under an intense heatwave. I spoke with a woman who last month spent a delightful albeit still bearably hot couple of weeks in Croatia and Montenegro. She has friends who just returned to Vancouver after having to abort their long-planned bicycling holiday through southern Europe because it was simply too damned hot.

This is the "new normal." British Columbia is blanketed in wildfire smoke, eastern Canada is cold and wet, Britain is flooding, Europe is roasting, and, oh yeah, up in the Arctic, Greenland is on fire. Yeah, Greenland.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile, Grimsby Town’s League Cup football match with Derby County had to be abandoned on Tuesday night because of the heavy rain.

So you're saying this climate change thing is really serious?

TB

The Mound of Sound said...

No, hardly. See the next post. It's all explained there.

TruckerTucker said...

Our sun is hot and white. I can barely stand it compared to the much more mellow sun when I was little. I could be roaming for hours in hot sunny California and didn't need sunscreen. We moved to Oregon in the late 90s and the changes started in 2003. The sun feels like a cooker now even in the winter when it's cold it is.

There is all sorts of topics about it especially on YouTube that is very interesting. Don't search on Google as you will just random garbage with the words (hot) and (sun) showing weird results.

TruckerTucker said...

Even in the winter when it's cold the sun still has a (warm) feeling that shouldn't be there. We have had a couple modified cold waves and during the clear weather despite the shivering north wind the sun still felt warm on my neck/back.