Climates of the British Isles

Present, Past and Future

Elaine Barrow, Mike Hulme

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317973751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Biowissenschaften
• Subtopic: Umweltwissenschaft

Our understanding of climate and its role in human affairs has changed markedly over recent years, as have climate observation systems and modelling capabilities. Reliance on recent weather statistics to provide a guide for future climate is no longer viable. Evidence of human-induced climate change has placed climate high on political and the media agendas.
Climates of the British Isles provides a comprehensive account of what we know about climate and changing climates at the end of the twentieth century. Integrating the historical and geographical dimensions of climate, the crucial link between past and future climatic conditions is examined through the geographical lens of the British Isles. Climates of past ages are reconstructed and full descriptions of present climate are illustrated by a wealth of graphs, maps and images. Important climate data sets are provided.
Marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the internationally acclaimed Climatic Research Unit, this book distils much of the leading research of present and recent members of the unit and presents an authoritative, accessible view of climatic change and prospects for the next millenium and beyond.

1
INTRODUCING CLIMATE CHANGE

Mike Hulme and Elaine Barrow

The more things change, the more they are the same.

Alphonse Karr

CHANGING VIEWS OF CLIMATE

With hindsight, the twentieth-century view of climate was dominated by the perspective that climate is constant. Climate was effectively stationary for the purposes of human decision-making and only varied in any significant way over geological time. This view of climate was partly conditioned by the dominance of the developments in weather forecasting which took place during the first half of the century. The excitement of scientific discoveries which led to improvements in the understanding and prediction of the weather of the next day marginalised work which was more concerned with variations in climate over decades and centuries. The adoption of ‘normal’ periods by the fledgling International Meteorological Organisation reinforced this rather static view of climate. Weather statistics collected over thirty or thirty-five years were thought of as adequate to define the climate of a region, statistics which could then be safely used in future design and planning applications. Climate change was largely irrelevant.

This was in contrast to much thinking in the nineteenth century. The evidence of glaciation discovered during the early decades of that century and the emergence of evolutionary ideas were more consistent with a dynamic view of nature and of climate than one in which all things remained constant. Concern amongst colonialist conservationists about deforestation in the tropics causing climate change — in this case loss of rainfall¹ — was also consistent with this view. Thus a major English national newspaper could observe in 1818 that,

a prospect far more gloomy than the mere loss of wine had begun to present itself by the increased chilliness of our summer months. It is too well known that there was not sufficient warmth in the summer of 1816 to ripen the grain; and it is generally thought that if the ten or twelve days of hot weather at the end of June last had not occurred, most of the corn must have perished. The warm and settled appearance of the weather at this early period of the season, leads us to hope that an agreeable change is about to take place in our planet; and that we shall not, as for many past years, have to deplore the deficiency of solar heat which is so necessary to ripen the productions of the earth.²

Only during the last quarter of the twentieth century — from the 1970s onwards — has this more dynamic view of climate been rediscovered. The twentieth-century view that climate is constant was first seriously challenged by a few pioneering scholars, of whom Hubert Lamb must tank in this country as perhaps the most important. They were followed by the growing body of climate scientists and, by the time of our present decade, by an increasing constituency of decision-makers. A strong sense of history was characteristic of those originally challenging the twentieth-century orthodoxy. Indeed, Hubert Lamb and others were almost as much historians as they were climatologists. More recently, events in the climate system itself reinforced the challenge and have now led to a re-writing of the orthodoxy.

The prospect of significant global climate change induced by human pollution of the atmosphere has acted as a powerful agent in consolidating the revisionist view of climate as non-stationary. This process of re-thinking has been underpinned by the twin developments of more abundant global climate observations and rapid increases in computer modelling capability. It is now possible to describe truly global changes in climate using observational data and to explore future changes in climate using credible climate models. The changed attitude towards climate has also been institutionalised in recent years. In 1988, for example, the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme established an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to assess the evidence for the enhanced greenhouse effect, or so-called ‘global warming’. This Panel continues to produce reports for the world community on the prospect of climate change³ and they have also considered the consequences of global climate change for individuals, ecosystems and nation-states.⁴ The concern about changing global climate was sufficient to yield a United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This Convention was signed by 155 nations at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992 and subsequently came into force in March 1994. The British and Irish governments ratified the Convention in December 1993 and April 1994, respectively, and both diplomatic delegations have played their part in the ongoing negotiations to establish a legally binding climate protocol.

These developments have taken place against a background of a warming climate. Since the 1970s, both the British Isles and the world have warmed by about 0.3°C. The reality of this warming, and the prospect of accelerated warming over the next few decades, has focused more attention on the interactions and interdependencies of climate and society than was hitherto the case. Thus the United Kingdom government, through its Department of the Environment, commissioned national reviews in 1991 and again in 1996 of the potential impacts of climate change for the country.⁵ This type of national review of the importance of climate change is required of many countries under the Framework Convention and is a mode of reporting that has been adopted around the world.

There is a danger that this recent political concern about climate change and its impacts bestows on climate an unwarranted importance as an agent that shapes our lives. Such thinking has led, perhaps rather curiously, to a return in some quarters to a variant of the climatic determinism prevalent at the start of the century. Determinism is a reductionist philosophy that sees events and behaviour as controlled by a very limited set of physical factors. Ellsworth Huntington, the Yale geographer, is the most well-known proponent of such a role for climate. He argued in 1915 that, ‘The climate of many countries seems to be one of the great reasons why idleness, dishonesty, immorality, stupidity, and weakness of will prevail.’⁶ Although not always as strident or doctrinaire as Huntington, the importance of the climatic influence on our lives has been stressed by numerous thinkers, starting with the Ancient Greeks and their supposedly uninhabitable, torrid and frigid ‘climata’. The influence of climate has also been interpreted psychologically. In the middle of this century, for example, Gordon Manley stated that, ‘Appreciation of the British climate depends largely on temperament. That it has not been conducive to idleness has been reflected in the characteristics of the people’⁷, and, more recently, Richard Beck argues that, ‘the historical record is highly suggestive … that a mild climate in mid-latitudes helps to foster a tolerant society or that an extreme climate may predispose people towards intolerance.’⁸ These psychological interpretations of climatic determinism may seem hard to defend. Nevertheless, the prospect of global warming, and the study of the impacts of such climate change, introduces a new variant to the climatic determinists' repertoire of arguments.

Many studies of the possible impact of future climate change seem, implicitly, to elevate climate to being the major factor that will influence future human activity and welfare. Thus the conventional climate change impact study would attempt to simulate the effect of climate change by, say, 2050 on a particular aspect of the environment, say cropping patterns or forest distribution. Little attention is usually paid to whether or not climate is the main driving factor behind observed changes in such distributions. Even if it is recognised explicitly that other factors are involved (e.g., changes in technology, consumer behaviour, work and leisure patterns), these are so unpredictable that climate often retains the appearance of being the main controlling factor. Climate change determinism thus re-appears. Some studies have shown, however, that factors such as the future of the Common Agricultural Policy of the European Union will have a much larger impact on the future British landscape than climate change.⁹ And it only takes a simple thought experiment to realise that other considerations, too, will swamp the effects of climate change on future human and animal welfare. For example, civil conflict, technological and demographic change and global epidemics, are all likely to influence welfare to a greater extent than will climate change. This is not to say that climate change is unimportant or does not matter. We merely stress that to assess the true significance of climate change it must be evaluated against changes that will occur due to other environmental constraints and social constructs.

Climatologists talking about climate change always run the risk, therefore, of being seen to be slanted in their views. They may be interpreted as being unnecessarily alarmist by those who reckon that human ingenuity and technical change will minimise the effects of climate change,¹⁰ or overly complacent by those who see climate as a dominant control on human choices and action. Seeing climate, and therefore climate change, as a resource to manage and to benefit from, and as essentially neutral, is surely a more constructive view to take. The notion of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ climates is a hard one to defend in any absolute sense. Temporal changes in climate, seen in this way, present societies with challenges to cope with and opportunities to exploit. These chal- lenges and opportunities presented by climate change are very much those that every colonising community through history has realised are posed by geographical differences in climate. This view of climate, whether implicit or explicit, has been true of, for example, Mongols in Europe, Vikings in Greenland or Europeans in Africa. For example, one may view the nineteenth-century history of the interaction between climate and society as one about the ability of the European colonising powers to exploit geographical differences in climate in the Tropics — rubber in Malaysia, cocoa in West Africa or bananas in the Caribbean — and to manage the regional climate impacts that such exploitation might bring with it.¹¹ A twenty-first-century history of such interaction may well be about the ability of different communities or regions to exploit and manage the forthcoming temporal changes in climate brought about by human pollution of the atmosphere.

Taking this view, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is concerned primarily with the regulation of this exploitation and management process as implied in Article 2,

The ultimate objective of this Convention … is to achieve … stabilisation of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. Such a level should be achieved within a time frame sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change, to ensure that food production is not threatened and to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner.¹²

It is unlikely, however, that such regulation can ensure that communities and nation-states benefit or suffer equally from climate change. The partitioning of these benefits or costs between nations will depend on two things: serendipity and access to human and technological capital. The impact of climate change on the world is likely to be dictated largely by the existing inequalities in human vulnerability, with some luck and institutional regulation thrown in.

The view of climate prevailing at the end of the twentieth century is, therefore, as follows. Climate is no longer regarded as a constant, but is continually subject to change. These changes are increasingly being caused, inadvertently, by human behaviour. The changes in climate remain largely unpredictable, but will have important consequences for human welfare, decision-making and planning. In addition to the prospect of climate change, new developments in daily, monthly and seasonal weather forecasting provide an even greater impetus to take climate variability seriously. Organisations, charged with investment decisions, environmental management and future planning strategies, need to include climate in their decision-making structures as a key variable rather than as an assumed constant. If this book contributes to such an awareness with respect to the British Isles, then it will have achieved one of its purposes. It will, in the process, have also contributed to one of the four original aims of the Climatic Research Unit cited when it was established in 1972, namely, ‘To investigate the possibilities of making advisory statements about future trends of weather and climate from a season to many years ahead, based on acceptable scientific methods and in a form likely to be useful for long-term planning purposes.’¹³

OUTLINE OF THE BOOK

This book unashamedly exploits the title and structure of one of Professor Lamb's most important works — Climate: present, past and future — published in two volumes in 1972 and 1977. This title so well captures the essential temporal dimension of the study of climate and also embraces so fully the scope of research for which the Unit is renowned, that we cannot formulate a better description of the subject matter with which we are concerned. We have therefore followed his template in this anniversary volume.

Part 1 of the book is concerned with an overview of the causes and character of the climate of the British Isles as we know it at the end of the twentieth century. Trevor Davies, Tim Osborn and Mick Kelly in Chapter 2 put the climate of the region into a gl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Plates
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1: Introducing Climate Change
• Part 1: The British Isles Climate
• Part 2: Reconstructing the Past
• Part 3: Monitoring the Present
• Part 4: Forecasting the Future
• Appendices
• Glossary
• Name index
• Index of place names
• General index