mercury rising
Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the majority of my adult life playing a sport which takes place in the leisurely equivalent of an oven, kindly turned up to gas mark eight, or perhaps it’s because I survived the summer of ’76 on a Blackpool beach with n’er a coconut whiff of Hawaiian Tropic, but, either way, summer temperatures never seemed to bother me that much. However, as the mercury rose past 40 degrees, last week put paid to all that. Man alive, that was warm.
There’s no denying that in the UK many people enjoy themselves when the sun comes out to play. Extended spells of hot weather make sun-lovers relive their gilded youth of tasty tapas, sweet syrupy sangria and shade-inducing sombreros, and even now, record-breaking temperatures are, more often than not, welcomed like the prodigal son rather than feared as a harbinger of extreme danger ahead. That said, the Met Office’s issuing of its first ever ‘red-warning’ represented a danger to life not merely limited to the old and vulnerable.
We homo-sapiens need to maintain a constant body temperature of around 37 degrees. Once the air temperature is higher than that, only latent cooling, ie sweating, can cool us down. If the combination of temperature and associated humidity prevents evaporation, even healthy people sitting in the shade will die within six hours. When your core temperature rises too much, heat stroke ensures: the body’s proteins start to break down and its enzymes stop regulating organs’ functions. In short, your body starts to cook, your major organs shut-down and you peg-it. Ouch. But hey, look at that beautiful golden sunset.
We present news of heat cheerfully, ignoring the blatantly obvious. Newspapers show crowded beaches of splashing swimmers and this generation’s Ulrikas smile benignly as they confidently promise us a delightfully sunny bank holiday. Deep down we too are equally pleased and goes some way to explaining how British culture narrates the experience of increasingly extreme weather in our historically damp and overcast climate. Struggling seaside towns might see their short-term economies boosted but the inextricable trend ever upwards ain’t going to benefit anyone, anywhere, not even the vine-growers and wine-makers of coastal Kent. We need to wake-up and smell the climate-coffee and accept its cataclysmic outcome. The big issue is Mother Earth and we need a new narrative about our glorious new weather. Hot should be the new cold.
