Weird weather? That’s the pub bore forecast

Forget the anecdotes and face the facts: weather always fluctuates. Arctic springs and angry summers are not oddities
The east wind could cut tungsten, the daffodils are weeks behind and the first  chiffchaffs are late. It’s a cold spring and the two things everybody seems  to agree upon are that there’s something weird about the weather and it’s  our fault. Both are almost certainly wrong.
On weird weather it is true that the contrast with last year’s warm  March is striking, as is the difference between the incessant rain of  the past 12 months and the long drought that preceded it in most of  England. In the past year America has had a heatwave, a superstorm and  now a bitterly cold spring. Australia has just had an “angry summer”. And so on.
Sir John Beddington, the Government’s retiring chief scientist,  claimed this week that we are seeing more variability. Is he right? On  the whole, no. Forget the anecdotes and examine the data.
Start with America. Professor Roger Pielke of the University of  Colorado has documented that floods, hurricanes, tornados and East Coast winter storms have shown no increase since the 1950s, while droughts  have shown a slight decrease. The only thing that has changed is the  financial damage done by storms, but as he drily remarks, “The actual  reason for the increasing number of damaging tropical storms has to do  with the reporting of damages.”