IF YOU happen to be in London on June 22, you might be buffeted by a load of hot air. Climate zealots will be clustering there to mark the 50th anniversary of the scorching summer of 1976 – and my long-range forecast is that they’ll be pumping out their usual overheated propaganda and nonsense.
The event is being organised by the Meteorological Office, in partnership with the University of Reading, Newcastle University and the Royal Meteorological Society. The publicity blurb says ‘a new analysis will be presented alongside a future weather forecast for 2056 developed by the Met Office’. Well, with most of their livelihoods dependent on sustaining the myth of man-made global warming, it’s not hard to guess what that ‘future weather forecast’ will be.
Anyhow, what I find rather irksome about such a gathering is that some of those who’ll be attending probably weren’t even born in 1976, or were too young to notice the weather. They’ll have charts and computer models, graphs, films, diagrams, logarithms, projections, learned papers, etc. But they won’t have the experience of having been there, as many of us oldies were. And, of course, none of them will have the mindset most of us had back then – which was just to enjoy the God-given glorious weather and not worry about it.
I was 25 in 1976, and while my memory is now melting somewhat, I can well recall those balmy days. We’d had heatwaves before, of course – it’s often forgotten that 1975 was also a bit of a sizzler – but 1976 was the Big One. It happened when a ‘blocking’ ridge of high pressure, which keeps out other weather fronts, wobbled its way over to Britain around June 23 and decided to spend its summer holidays here. The subsequent scorcher lasted roughly until August 27. Between June 23 and July 7, the temperature reached or exceeded 89.6F (32C) somewhere in the UK for 15 consecutive days. The highest recorded temperature was 96.6F (35.9C) in Cheltenham on July 3.
As it became obvious that the heat was here to stay for a while, there was no great frenzy. Damn it, we were British and we were used to the weather being fickle. Memories of the long, sub-zero winter of 1962-1963 still lingered for many of us, and we were glad of some long-term guaranteed sunshine. Mercifully, there were no climate nutters scuttling around with their crackpot predictions to put the mockers on it.
Even more crucially, there were no 24-hour television news channels or internet influencers constantly generating scare stories, or NHS apparatchiks haranguing us to drink water, wear sunscreen and stay indoors. Instead, the Callaghan government took a laid-back attitude and the papers mainly churned out lightweight ‘Phew what a scorcher!’ stories of people frying eggs on car bonnets and pictures of scantily-clad beauties cavorting on the beach. We gratefully placed our knotted hankies on our heads and settled in to make the most of it.
Inevitably, there were downsides. I worked in the office of an evening newspaper, which meant starting early in the morning and finishing in mid-afternoon, when the heat was at its fiercest. The two-and-a-half mile walk home was sweaty, to say the least.
According to the Met Office: ‘Water shortages led to standpipes in some communities, crops and agriculture were badly affected, wildfires broke out, and the extreme heat contributed to increases in heat-related illness and hospitalisations. The government introduced emergency measures, including water restrictions.’
That’s all true. But – unlike there would be today – there was no shouting ‘We’re doomed.’ We were phlegmatic enough as a nation to realise such things will happen when it’s hot, just as in 1963 we well knew that when the temperature stays below freezing for three months, you’d better put your big coat on. It was as straightforward as that.
Older folk were even more sanguine about the heatwave. They’d seen it all before. In the sweltering June of 1940, when temperatures reached 91.4F (33C), my father had stood in his tin hat, rifle at the ready, waiting to repel Hitler’s hordes. In the cruel winter of 1947, he had worked outdoors every day as a labourer. His concession to the 1976 weather was to take off his jacket and tie, while my mother set aside her cardigan. Incidentally, you didn’t see many blokes parading around in shorts.
When Labour’s Denis Howell was made Drought Minister at the peak of the heatwave in August, he sportingly went through the motions of doing a Red Indian-style rain dance on behalf of the nation. It endeared him to many, especially when it rained two days later. These days he’d be hounded out of office by the wokery for cultural appropriation and made to apologise to the ‘Native Americans’.
In May 1976, my wife and I had moved into our first house with a garden and I planted what turned out to be a huge crop of tomatoes, ripened by the eternal sunshine. Because hosepipes were banned, I nurtured my plants with dirty dishwater, which a TV gardening expert assured us was okay to use, soapy suds and all. But our neighbours also indulged in a tomato-growing fest and come harvest time, you couldn’t give the wretched things away.
As for our lawn, it just frizzled, turning yellow, then brown – as did fields, farms and parks everywhere. But we knew the greenery would return once the heatwave ended, which it duly did over the August Bank Holiday, with torrential rain and thunder. It was a wrench to return to dreary, cloudy, drizzly old Britain, but we’d enjoyed it while it lasted. All I can say to those meteorological miseries who’ll be gathering in London on June 22 to ‘analyse’ 1976 is: Oh boy, you should have been there.
Instead, they’ll doubtless be busy concocting ever more outlandish ‘climate crisis’ stories to keep the grant money rolling in and keep them all in jobs. It would be nice to have a proper, open debate about the climate, with dissenters allowed a proper voice. But the man-made global warming myth is now such a lucrative international industry, such a firmly closed shop of ‘settled science’ believers, that it’s not going to happen any time soon. To misquote the old song, there ain’t no cure for the summertime doom-mongers.
