What to Learn from Bad Weather

Today my back garden is deep in snow. Probably thirty cars have passed my house, which is on a relatively busy suburban road, usually fairly solid with cars during the hours when people commute to work and undertake the school run. And as I type this, just after noon, it’s snowing again.

I know that my American and Canadian friends will be hooting with laughter. Six inches of snow and the south coast of England has come to a more or less complete halt, but we’re just not prepared for this kind of weather.

>>See also: Cold Snap: Yes, It’s Global Warming

Snow and Consumer Frenzies

Actually, judging from what I saw when I went down to the local supermarket (on foot, in snow boots, for research purposes only) we’re not prepared for anything much. The shelves were empty, and not just the shelves you might have expected to clear swiftly, such as those for bread, milk and newspapers. There were no toilet rolls left, no soft drinks, and precious few hard ones: some spirits remained on the shelf but just about all the beer was gone. The vegetable racks were empty and the freezers had been raided to exhaustion.

I asked half a dozen of the people standing in the long, slow queue why they’d come out, on such a terrible day, to shop. The answers were illuminating. “For nappies,” said one mother, clutching a 28 pack of disposables. “This is all there is left. I don’t know what I’m going to do if she gets through all these before the snow clears.”

“Booze,” said an older man who was so wrapped up in jumpers and coats that he could barely bend his arms. “I’m not being stuck at home with nothing decent to drink in the house.”

Global Warming – What Global Warming?

Nobody seemed to be thinking ahead in other ways – wondering what the future would be like if this kind of weather becomes more common again. Even in Victorian England the Thames froze over regularly and Frost Fairs took place on frozen rivers across the country. We’ve got into the habit of thinking that Global Warming means warmer, wetter winters, but suppose it doesn’t? Suppose our climate becomes unpredictable enough for us to have to plan for both warm periods and icy spells?

The panic buying I saw really astounded me. While we live within a couple of miles of the city, we are only the same distance away from rural countryside and farms, and I honestly expected people to be more resilient, but they seemed utterly unable to calculate the likelihood of the weather to continue (I saw one woman with two eighteen packs of toilet roll, either she has a huge family, or toilet issues!) and equally incapable of understanding risk. Most of them had driven to the shop, on ungritted and unsalted roads, with their entire families in the car. At least two that I spoke to had experienced near misses in terms of skidding, and one car in the car park had been in an accident on the way to the shop. Yet none of the people I spoke to had considered the weather bad enough to leave their families at home, or to walk to the shop, despite feeling it was serious enough to indulge in a bit of food, toilet paper and alcohol hoarding!

We have become seriously adrift from our environment if our response to heavy snow is to pile into a vehicle and head to the shops.

Photograph author’s own