Cold Weather in London

Well actually I wanted to blog about this yesterday when I saw the headlines of the Daily Mail while shopping at Waitrose, but I was too busy trying to craft out the other blog post -.- so this only gets posted now.

This is the news article that I was referring to:
Britain Prepares for Siberian Freeze

As a tropical kind of girl (not that I like hot weather, its just that I've spent 18 years of my life in the tropics), that's just TERRIBLE!! Mostly because I can't cope with that type of weather as well as the well seasoned European. But anyway, it seems like every year that I've been here (that's only 3 years, but nvm), I've been hearing about extreme low winter temperatures. That got me curious about what was the usual/normal winter temperatures. So I went to the Met Office website, and got this really cool graph that plots average winter temperatures from 1910 - 2010.

While the average winter temperatures for the past few years from 2006 - 2010 have certainly been below the 1971 - 2010 average, the cyclical pattern of warm and cold winters have not been significantly changed. In fact, the lowest mean daily minimum temperature for winter in 1964 was -3 degrees Celsius, which is much warmer than the freak -15 degrees Celsius weather forecast for 2011. In the paper produced by the National Climate Information Centre "A spatial analysis of trends in the UK climate since 1914 using gridded datasets", there has been a significant increase in annual mean temperature over the whole of the UK since 1914, with the greatest increases seen in the Midlands, South East England and East Anglia (0.9dC).

So when you look at the longer temperature trend, winters are actually getting warmer, quite unlike my first reaction of shock when I first read the newspaper article on the Daily Mail. We cannot accuse the newspapers of misrepresenting temperature trends here in London, because truly, in the past 5 years, temperatures have been following a downward trend from a maximum of 8 degrees Celsius to 4.5 degrees Celsius. However, we can argue that the temperature trends reported are only a snapshot of the larger trend. If the newspapers had decided to take the 100 year trend as the basis for reporting, they would have no reason to raise alarm about the predicted low winter temperatures because after all, there have been much colder winter episodes in the past.

This brings us to the point of media portrayals of environmental issues, including issues close to our hearts, that of winter temperatures and all the possible problems it can bring us. After the chaos created by heavy snowfall at Heathrow Airport, transport disruptions, and 25 000 extra deaths caused by winter in the UK, the government of UK has decided to take the problem of an equally harsh winter this year seriously. The pertinent, hot (ignore the irony) issue here is that of cold winter temperatures, not of a warming trend in a 100 year span, and that is the story that all the news agencies are going to run with. In the BBC NEWS, it was announced that winter weather alerts will be introduced to help the elderly. In the Telegraph, it is reported that the army will now be on standby as part of an emergency procedure if a big freeze occurs. By reading all these news reports alone, I'd start arming myself with tons of warm clothes, leg warmers, gloves, ear muffs and scarves early on to join in the fight against the winter cold.

And of course if we look at the even longer temperature trend e.g. the Vostok Ice Core Stable Isotope Data, there is a cyclical pattern of ups and downs in global temperatures (based on reconstructions), so in this case, we shouldn't be too hung up on our cold, but not TOO cold winter temperatures right?
Note: this is in thousands of years

Newspapers do try their best to report facts for public information so that they can make informed decisions about the present and future. I may have sounded like I was discrediting all those news reports that we have been bombarded in in the press recently, but really that is not my point. My point is to show how the data we get in the newspapers are only a snapshot of the bigger, longer time scale. The newspaper has a duty not just to report fact (or their version of fact), but make revenue and translate government policies into bite size information for the reader. I think they have been successful in that aspect. Let us not forget that newspapers have been an incredibly useful historical source of climate information for researchers. But relying alone on newspaper accounts to understand how our climate (in this case weather patterns only) is changing is inadequate and sometimes misleading.

Ending off my blog post, I would like to say that everyone should indeed keep warm this winter and pray that the snow will not disrupt our winter travel plans like it did last year. And yay to the government for taking the snow problem seriously this year they should have last year anyway).

Side note: If you're bored and want to have a good laugh, you should read forum replies to newspaper articles posted online. Some people have proclaimed that global warming is a myth because we are getting colder winters, so we couldn't possibly be experiencing warming of any sort.

On another random note, next time we should all just blog using livejournal. The interface there is really much better.

Sources:
Met Office Statistics
Perry, M. (2006) "A spatial analysis of trends in the UK climate since 1914 using gridded datasets", Climate Memorandum No 21, Devon: National Climate Information Centre
Daily Mail Reporter (2011) "After a glorious autumn... Britain prepares for Siberian freeze in just weeks", Daily Mail Online, News, 2 Nov 2011.