With the predictions of a heatwave next week the boomers of social media are getting ready to see who can be first to post – it’s bloody summer innit.
Whenever a news channel posts anything about the weather there is a virtual Mexican wave of old people coming out with totally predictable crap. Predictable because it is the same people coming out with the same crap each time.
These poor sad souls are waiting with baited Werther’s Originals tainted breath to let the world that they haven’t lost it. They get the chance to let the world know that they are still there and still bitter and sarcastic. That they can still post, “shock horror. It’s sunny in summer”, “Call this a heatwave? Pah! I remember when I were a lad we had real summers. You could cook the nackers off a ferret on the side the road” and other attempts to impress people with their ability to completely miss the point.
Some people such as vulnerable elderly people and the people looking after them benefit from such advance warnings. They are also useful to gardeners and farmers, especially if they know about how windy it might be to plan spraying or irrigation.
The more ignorant bellends might post about how “scientists were telling us there was going to be an Ice age”. Most really were not. The early 1970s were a time when climate scientists were starting to think about future climate change, and thinking about ways to collect historic data to inform the very early models. A lot of work was starting to take place collecting ice cores from remote places, studying tree rings and developing analytical techniques to investigate these and other samples such as mud cores from lakes and deep soil samples. During these early days a lot of work was being done to develop models incorporating all these disparate elements. One or two scientists did predict a cooling effect caused by increased aerosols in the atmosphere, however they were in the minority, and subsequent data collected and further analysis has dismissed these Idea. A detailed debunking of this narrative has been covered by Peterson, Connolley and Fleck in their 2008 paper The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus.