I knew that there was something wrong in Adelaide recently when I started seeing the volume of people on Facebook discussing the weather: ordinarily not a topic that so many people lock onto. Housemate Emma returned from Melbourne yesterday, reporting the ludicrous temperatures that she’d survived on the last couple of days of her trip, and over brunch this morning Charlie waxed nervous about the upcoming days of heat she’ll need to navigate upon her arrival in Melbourne next weekend. Marty’s been sending me updates all week from the Bureau of Meteorology, and Dad texted me with the factual nugget that it was 48 degrees Celcius under the pergola at the Standing Ranch the other day. All this evidence, combined with the reports I’ve been reading of buckled train lines and the like, all point to the same general conclusion – in Australia it is currently frigging hot.
The English climate, conversely, could not be accurately summarised in this way. Historically I’ve avoided paying any attention to weather forecasters, as their efficacy and by extension credibility has ranked right up there with horoscopes, and people who read aurae and/or tea leaves. During Charlie & my walk from our excellent brunch spot to the Natural History Museum however we found ourselves proffering an uncharacteristically large number of phrases rlating to the ambient temperature: specifically how gonad-excruciatingly chilly it was out there today. The trouble with all that though is that one sort of feels like a serial complainer unless there’s any externally verifiable evidence that in fact it is as cold as suspected.
This evening that proof arrived in the form of some pretty heavy snow. We occasionally get an embarrassing dusting of snow around these parts, but it’s fairly seldom that you get a proper snow-dump in significant enough quantity that it doesn’t just instantly melt away after hitting the ground.
Seriously, if it continues at the rate it’s been dropping this evening there’s a good chance that Primrose Hill will be good for a few runs down on the fancy plank tomorrow!
Naturally this will mean that the transport systems will all be in chaos tomorrow, but as they typically are (the only variable being what type of chaos) there’s probably no cause for alarm.
Based on Adelide being ludicrously hot and it being freezing here I was working on a theory that if you were to measure the temperature at all points on the surface of the Earth they would collectively cancel out to reach a constant figure, and assert that it could never be disproven as there would never be a reilable way of making such measurements of the entire globe. There hardly seems a point to that though, because there’s more than likely a way to make a better than average guess at it, and even if you were to know what the number was, the only benefit to knowing it would be to see if global warming was actually happening – that’s where the number wasn’t cancelled out by lower temperatures at some other point. Surface temperature would need to be some constant height above the ground/sea surface at the exact point you were measuring, too. Maybe I could just claim that my theory’s true, then assert that it’s impossible for anyone to disprove me?