What's happening to our weather?

The Independent had a good article about the weather a few days ago by Michael McCarthy - see it in full here - or read on for highlights...

Photo: Pond earlier this year

While this summer is set to be the wettest ever, it is only the latest in a series of broken records which suggest climate change is here already. All of the smashed records are to do with temperature and rainfall - the two aspects of the climate most likely to be intensified by the advent of global warming.

While no specific event can be ascribed directly to climate change, the sequence of events is strongly suggestive of a climate that is now unmistakably altering before our eyes - and the pattern of increasing heat and wet weather has been visible all around the globe, with temperature and rainfall records broken in many other countries, from Australia (record drought) and India (record monsoon rains) to Greece (record forest fires).

Here in the UK alone, in the past 14 months we have experienced the hottest July, the hottest April and the wettest June since records began. We have seen the hottest autumn and the hottest spring, and the second-hottest winter. We have also seen the hottest single month, and - by a considerable margin - the hottest single 12-month period. Now we are on the brink of seeing the soggiest British summer as a whole since records were first kept for the United Kingdom in 1914.

The evidence is becoming totally overwhelming - in recent years, extreme and record-breaking real events, entirely consistent with global warming predictions, have started to mount up - beginning with the remarkable heatwave of August 2003, which caused 35,000 excess deaths in France and northern central Europe. That was the first event whose severity was ascribed by scientists directly to climate change.

As any gardener will know this is playing havoc with wildlife... earlier this year hedgehogs have been fooled by the warmth into having extra litters, thinking it was still early autumn; the young then died when the cold finally did arrive because they had had insufficient time to put on weight for hibernation. Swifts arrived back from Africa in the middle of April, when they would normally get here at about the end of May's first week. Meanwhile the summer floods have led to catastrophe for many ground nesting birds (see more at Glos Wildlife Trust here). Last year holly berries were fruiting in mid-October, six weeks early.....