Enjoying the sunny weather
Sure, kids, go play with the chainsaw, just wear a sunhat and you’ll be fine.
It was with some trepidation that I set off into the hills of Pyrenees Orientales on Saturday. The temperature was forecast to rise to 37°C by the afternoon – a level that is lethal, according to British news sites, even if you are sitting around in the garden. Apparently, today and tomorrow’s heatwave is going to kill thousands of Britons.
Haw haw, aren’t people stupid for understanding that excessive heat kills.
Was I going to end up being recorded in the local French newspapers as the foolish Englishman who perished after going out in the midday sun? I needn’t have worried. I didn’t see many people at first, but by the time I reached the more used paths, there were plenty of locals out enjoying the weather, including at least one family who had taken their young children on a stroll of several miles. Take a sunhat and plenty of water and there is nothing to be afraid of.
So there you go! The Spectator columnist has spoken! Just take your kids out in dangerous heat and hope for the best! He saw some people who did it and they weren’t corpses so that’s research enough, yeah? Of course.
The heatwave is just the latest manifestation of our own public authorities’ obsession with doom. Dominic Raab was in trouble on Sunday for merely suggesting that people might enjoy this week’s weather. In the grim orthodoxy of climate panic, sunny weather is not something to be enjoyed; it is a portent of doom, punishment for our excessively wealthy lifestyles and capitalism in general.
The trouble is, climate doesn’t read the Spectator. Climate doesn’t care how far the Spectator columnist walked or didn’t walk, it doesn’t care how much he taunts people who understand that excessive heat can kill, it doesn’t care whether he enjoys sunny weather or not. Climate isn’t political in that sense; climate just does what it does.
The relative humidity at Heathrow Airport – a contender if any records are broken today or tomorrow – at 10
a.m.this morning was a perfectly pleasant 41 per cent. Britain is essentially in the same body of air as down here in South West France.There is a side-effect to ordering us all to stay indoors during the heatwave. All we will soak up is the usual climate hyperbole being fed to us via our TV and websites – that we are being boiled alive in a man-made cataclysm. Fortunately, for now, I am somewhere where life is going on in spite of high temperatures, and people are allowed to enjoy, rather than feel guilty about, hot weather.
There is a long distance between “sunny weather” and “global warming”. Sunny weather has always existed (well, maybe not in the UK; it was always raining when I was there). Global warming is a new state of being. Of course, in July, it’s difficult to tell anyone that hot temperatures are anything unusual. In December, hot temperatures seem so welcome to people they won’t hear that it’s not good. Every other month that is not July or December, there is some other excuse for why we don’t have to do anything.
We’re visiting family and vacationing in the north of Spain, first in Bilbao, where the temperatures were well into the 90s* while we were there, and over 100 yesterday, temperatures almost unheard of. The north of Spain used to be cool and rainy in the summer, but those days are gone.
We went up to the Picos de Europa, gaining several hundred meters of altitude, but it was still well into the nineties during the day. Again, mostly unheard of, and apparently there was very little snow last winter. The cheese caves stay cool, at least, and as long as you shut the windows and shutters the houses don’t heat up too much. We tried to keep our hikes to the early morning and late afternoon, but the heat was still bad. At least we’re not in the fire zone.
Even in Madrid the people are complaining that the heat is unlike any they’ve ever experienced. And summers in Madrid are normally pretty hellish.
We’re down by the coast now, and it’s cooled off, but I’m beginning to seriously rethink our plan of retiring in the north of Spain.
*Using Fahrenheit because 100 sounds a lot more severe than 40.
Thank you, good to have local informant.
As much as the Speccies want you to believe it, UK is not Arizona. Brendan O’neill is in full sarcasm mode on this very same topic. At the same media source:
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-heatwave-green-hysteria-is-out-of-control
Well, yes, Brendan, you’ve thought all along that our carbon emissions were a free lunch way to run our SUV’s to the corner store.
Climate change activism has been stuck in “Will you finally look up?” mode for at least 30 years, and the O’Neills of the world think that’s just ludicrous.,
If you ask me, the political Right has given us the greatest scientific breakthrough since I dunno… Archimedes. Every scientific law stands or falls on one question: is it good or bad for business-as-usual? Newton and his Universal Gravitation pass the test; also Einstein and his Relativity. But Arrhenius and all who followed in his wake, including the 198 scientific organisations worldwide that endorse the global warming (AGW) hypothesis: well they can go take a running jump. The whole bang lot of ’em. Royal Society, AAAS, CSIRO…etc, etc, etc. Straight into the bin!.
God that Brendan piece is terrible. There’s not a word about why he doesn’t believe there’s a problem, just sneer after sneer after sneer. It’s stupid.
He’s just another wealthy white man who is quite incapable of imagining the existence of people who aren’t like him.
He reads “People are going to die”, thinks “I’m a person, and I didn’t die, and nor did anyone I saw” and utterly fails to consider the people who are not out hiking in the heat, because doing so would kill us.
Elderly people. Very young people. People who have an infection. People with heart conditions. People with dysautonomia. People with asthma. People with all kinds of disabilities and health conditions. Nobody is saying all people are going to die, but sometimes the way someone finds out that they have an undiagnosed condition which is exacerbated by heat is when it nearly kills them. It happened to me; it could happen to anyone. So the sensible thing is to avoid strenuous activity in excessive heat, especially heat which is greater than having a fever.
tigger, that is so important I wish people would recognize it. Through the COVID pandemic people say to me “I’m not in one of the at risk demographic groups, why should I care?” and deny that people are actually dying. Presented with names and dates, they simply point out that “they are all elderly or disabled”. Like, so what? That makes them less worthy of life? No, what they are saying is they are not at risk, and they are so narcissistic they don’t give a flying fuck about anyone else. Even knowing their grandmother is elderly and has an autoimmune disorder, they can’t be bothered to care, even though grandma has been nothing but loving to them all their life.
To me, this whole idea of “I don’t see it because it isn’t happening to me” falls in the same category of the “pics or it didn’t happen” approach people used to defend Michael Shermer and others during MeToo. I didn’t see, with my own eyes, this man rape you, so obviously he did not rape you. If they did have pics (unlikely that a rapist brings a camera along, except those youngsters foolish enough to put evidence of their crime on YouTube), the next cry would be “Plainly Photoshopped!”
So we show them things happening in climate change all over the world, they can even see the temperature hotter in their own space, but all they can say is “didn’t happen to me.” Their air conditioner keeps it cold. They can walk in the heat without keeling over. For me, though, I cannot. My asthma doesn’t allow it. But I suspect I would care even if that wasn’t the case, since I care about abortion, and I am not going to need one.
OB:
Stupid, as in, say, https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/07-08/the-madness-of-net-zero/ , where we read: “It should be remembered that carbon dioxide has a residence time in the atmosphere of about a century, so Western Europe has done most to cause the problem—especially given the logarithmic effect that sees every subsequent molecule of the gas warm a little less.” Well, a little less in theory, perhaps. But IMHO such experts should bear in mind the principle of the microwave oven, where the water molecules energised by the microwaves pass that energy on to the rest of the oven’s contents: molecules in pie crusts, meat, vegetables, leftovers, etc, etc, etc.
Around 100 firefighters tackled a blaze covering nearly 100 acres in Wennington (a small village in the east of Greater London, near Dartford), which destroyed nearly 20 homes, 12 stables and five cars.
90 people were evacuated from their homes yesterday, fearing they might not have one to come back to.
Apparently the dried out scrublands surrounding the village caught fire and the flames just surged to engulf the houses. The church survived, due to its stone construction, but locals that sheltered there had to evacuate due to smoke build up.
This year we have not any really serious periods of rain and the ground is already fairly dry. It has taken just a few days of ‘abnormal’ heat to escalate the problem.
But those people don’t write for the Spectator so pfffffffffff, it’s all a big fuss about nothing.