Gardens and parks have been suffering and our poor farmers have struggled with animals and crops. Their fields have become cracked and desert-like with the greenness sucked away. When we flew back to Birmingham from Majorca on July 25th, we looked down upon a very un-English straw-coloured landscape.
Even our trees have been suffering - shedding leaves or simply drooping. Trees are only big plants. They need water like other plants. Up our garden the branches hang heavy with small apples. Their swelling growth has been slowed to a halt and many have fallen as the trees switch to survival mode.
You do what you can. I have constantly put food and water out for our avian friends and areas of the garden - including our vegetable plot - have been watered regularly. Surprisingly, we do not have a hosepipe ban here in Yorkshire even though most of our reservoirs are only 50% full.
Doom-mongers will say that this has been a frightening summer that continues to demonstrate the future impact of climate change and global over-heating. They may be right but for me this has been the best summer of my life.
I think of many summers past when the grass stayed defiantly green and hot spells were limited to a day or two if we were lucky. I call them green summers and it is, I think, very likely that we will experience plenty more of them in the next two decades.
Don't get me wrong, I am not denying the seriousness of climate change. It is very real but I will not be weighed down by that burden in the years I have left. I would rather just say quite simply that the summer of 2026 has been the best one I have ever known.
But we may be reaching the end of it. This evening was a little cooler with an ethereal bright pink western sky perhaps indicating changing conditions. After weeks without precipitation, it seems that rain is predicted in the next few days. It will be very welcome that's for sure.
No, don't be weighed down by a burden in the years that are left.
ReplyDeleteI know you're a man of feeling and conscience and reason. Balanced.
People are in a kind of Cimmerian darkness, caused by the sun's fire.
Wildfires all across Europe ; North America choking ; homes destroyed.
Homeric ; but at least we have real science to make sense of it, not the mythic.
Yes. Homeric indeed.
DeleteWeather, not climate. Some of use can remember trying to keep a new garden alive through the summer of 1976, and get to school through the winter of 1962/3.
ReplyDeleteWhy do you say that? Or feel the need to? At some point patterns in weather are climate. Frequency of hot weather, average global temperatures, etc are up. Hard to see how that isn't climate.
DeleteWhich of course doesn't stop a hot and dry summer from being a glorious thing as it has been for YP.
Polar ice caps are melting. Sea levels are rising. Après nous le déluge.
Us not use Will and weather is inextricably linked with climate.
DeleteAccording to this year's Greenland data, arctic ice cover is increasing....
DeleteAnd the Great Barrier Reef is doing just fine....
I hope you do very soon get some cooler days and nights and rain too, steady, soft, earth-soaking rain.
ReplyDeleteIt has felt like Australia!
DeleteI suppose it all depends on your criteria for evaluating a "good" summer. If it's a matter of sunshine and outdoor days and that kind of thing, then I can see how this would be a good one. For me, there's an ominous overtone to it all, and the dryness seems very harsh. But we've been hotter (and maybe even drier?) down here in LDN. A green summer sounds wonderful to me now and I hope we get one next year.
ReplyDeleteIt is going to be bad year for many farmers,
ReplyDeleteI find brown English rolling green hills rather sad.
ReplyDeleteIt hasn't happened here for some years, but I do remember massive leaf drops by our elm and plane trees after successive 40 degree days.
I always look forward to coolness and crisp early morning air in autumn. But not to the cold of winter.
I hope your rain comes soon to quench your dry land. Enjoy the rest of the best summer you've ever known.
ReplyDeleteIt's the end of the world, I tell ya...
ReplyDeleteEven here in North Florida where we are used to punishingly hot summers this one has seemed relentlessly miserable. And indeed, temperatures are regularly above normal for this time of year.
ReplyDeleteLet it rain. Oh please let it rain.
We've been getting a lot of rain - almost too much at times with flood warnings in the weather forecast. I wish I could send some your way. I'm not a fan of the heat but I'm lucky to have A/C and I remember it seeming hotter when I was a kid and we didn't have A/C.
ReplyDeleteI have definitely not enjoyed it. Far too hot in London and sleeping in a bedroom that doesn't drop below 32C at night has not been fun. Somewhere in the mid-20s Centigrade is about as much as I can take.
ReplyDeleteSouth Carolina has had a truly awful summer with day after day of record high heat and humidity. It's been relentless. I'm so tired of it
ReplyDeleteI’ve watered my laburnam in the graveyard today , 8 gallons at leasr
ReplyDeleteLike Addy, I have not enjoyed it, at least not as much as you.
ReplyDeleteI like the fact that for almost three months now I have not had to think at all about what to pack for my weekends at my husband's or whether or not to take a cardigan with me when leaving the house for work in the morning, but I do NOT like the nights being so warm that it is nearly impossible to sleep.
Also, I am sorry for the farmers who have already started on feeding their livestock with the hay that was meant for winter, and no chance of another healthy cut of grass this year, and for those families who live perched together in small flats on badly ventilated, overheated high rises made of concrete, steel and glass. Also, I am thinking of the more than 12,000 people who have died in Germany due to heat strokes and other heat-related issues this summer, and the doctors and nurses who work in hospitals and nursing homes not equipped for weeks and weeks of temperatures in the 30s and no respite during the nights.
Like you, I make sure the water bowl on my kitchen windowsill is replenished daily, sometimes twice. It is not much, but it is popular with birds, insects and the occasional squirrel.
It's been a horrible working environment. The heat causes loads of issues that need to be overcome in a workplace not equipped for +30 temperatures. I'm glad it's now cooler, i can finally sleep.
ReplyDelete