Fraser Medvedik-Horn writes the weather report.
It’s almost definitely a result of climate change that the weather is behaving very differently than it did when I was younger. Then again, is that just a cognitive bias, a type of thinking error? It may be the case. Thinking about the weather is riven with biases.
That’s why so many people make idiotic statements like the Asshole-in-Chief, who confused climate and weather. Easy enough mistake, to be fair, lots of people fall foul of this error.
What is the difference between climate and weather? According to the National Snow & Ice Data Center about 29 years and 11 months. Weather is the day-to-day flux of a short period of time; climate is the long-term observable pattern. 30 days versus 30 years. So it’s easy to get confused. One hears climate change and if one is prone to short-term thinking one imagines it happening very clearly and obviously at the moment. Preferably, advantageously. It’d be nice but that’s not how that works.
Many Scots are of the opinion we are living in a singularly wet country and it’s always wet all the time. They say this though there’s been contrary evidence all Summer, we’ve had a bit of a heatwave which caused me to write about weather earlier this year. This heat has been unbearable for someone like me who burns hot. I’ve taken to buying shorter and shorter shorts as the season has sloped onwards into heat. It’s been tough.
The hotter weather has had other effects, too. Building pressure into an intolerable tenseness which threatens to wreck the relative cohesion of the already tempestuous people here and provoke them to violence. This pressure has, mercifully, broken a couple of times in the shape of thunderstorms. The thunderstorms bring a smattering of showers and much of the Scots go back to complaining about how much it rains here.
“Guys,” I want to yell at them, “Don’t you understand that this is not normal in then slightest?”
Generally our Summer temperatures are not supposed to get much about 24 Celsius. It may occasionally rain, but it’s nothing like the branding or the story we tell foreigners. In fact, my fellow Scots, much of the world often has crapper weather than this. The English get floods. The poor Americans are practically broiled for three months. For many countries, this is their rainy season. Only in Scotland do we normally have perfect weather, gentle heat, low wind, clear skies.
The changing climate will only get worse for us as we’ll experience more storms, increased temperatures (which is a bad thing! Every degree about 20 Celsius is 10% too much.), we will see our animals getting messed up and plants drowned in the inches upon inches of rainfall.
You can plant as many seeds as you want but you know what they say about God and plans. Well, regardless of that, we need to stop killing the planet or future children will not get the Bonnie land of my childhood. Instead they’ll have a desiccated ruin and I think that’s a bad thing. As unpopular an opinion as that is to have in this current climate. Though, of course, I more accurately mean in this present weather.
The writer of this piece has gotten right into peaches but like his writing has discovered that sweet flesh can disguise a bitter core.
pasturesfresh 
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