Britain has had its coldest, wettest summer in nine years. I feel a bit guilty even talking about it, given the wildfires destroying parts of Western Canada, the corn sweat choking the American Midwest, the record-breaking heatwave impacting nearly five billion people. But I’m cold.
In some ways, this wet cold British summer is a positive change from recent years’ summer temperatures, when even here in cooler Scotland I experienced trains cancelled due to overheated tracks and afternoons sweating in stone-walled buildings designed to retain as much heat as possible in our always-damp winters. I’ve met people, usually nearer retirement age, who’ve moved up here because they don’t want to face another sweltering English summer. The chill is a return to form.
The cold mostly appears as rain. Spitting rain, torrential rain, rain that spurts and stops just enough to make dressing for the outdoors an unwinnable game of guesswork. Sometimes the rain clears, and the bright sky entices we warmth-starved Aberdonians out into still-cold, wind-rattled air.
And it’s always, always humid. Wearing a rain jacket guarantees rivulets of sweat running down my back before I reach my destination. I can under-dress and feel cold for an entire walk, then melt into a puddle the moment I return home.
Yesterday I walked along the beach through incredibly dense fog. Haar, it’s called here. The mist clung to my hair, dampened my clothes, left my hands feeling sticky. In short sleeves and 16 degrees (61ºF), I felt swallowed in the muggy embrace of the haar.
The haar has marched in from the sea as long as anyone can remember, a thick curtain falling over the land so densely as to form a visible wall between it and the open air. Writing from the security of modern conveniences, I find some comfort in this shroud of grey that has clung to generations before me. These are age-old conditions in an era of unprecedented weather events; of once-in-a-lifetime storms that happen every few years; of a climate crisis that is truly, in every sense, a crisis.
Extreme weather has affected me less in Scotland than it did in Michigan or Ontario, where ice storms, tornado warnings, and dangerously high temperatures narrated the year. I’ve fortunately never lived in a hurricane zone or an area prone to wildfires or through a heat wave with no access to air conditioning. Here, the crisis feels less present. It happens out there, down there, over there, up there.
But how long before what happens up there affects us right here? As I watch the coast pass me by from the train, I can’t help but notice how close the water seems to the tracks. How many farms and homes have the sea on their doorstep. The waves are unlikely, in my lifetime, to fully overwhelm existing barriers and levees. Maybe even the lifetime after that. Maybe even enough lifetimes that my ancestors, buried in cemeteries overlooking the water that gave them life, will be forgotten anyway.
The cold reminds me that our trudge into climate catastrophe is not linear. I don’t know whether to be grateful for the reprieve or to fear it.
