Question du jour : comments [Matthew's Journal]

It's like the way we get caught out by snow which people in actually snowy countries cope with perfectly all the time. I'd say it's the problem of being "in between", but for example the maximum recorded temperature in Moscow is higher than the maximum recorded temperature here in Cambridge, so that scotches that one.

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It's not so much an 'in between' problem, but an issue that it's not worth preparing for relatively rare weather conditions. Moscow probably can't cope with the maximum temperature it reaches every couple of years. I was in Rome a few years ago when they had the heaviest snow in thirty years. It was only a couple of inches, but they responded as if the sky were falling.

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It's not "in between" so much as Britain has an atypically (I may be using the wrong word here; it's quite possibly unique, I don't know enough climatology) small range of commonly experienced temperatures. Cambridge is at a similar latitude to Moscow (slightly further south - Moscow's about level with Edinburgh) but it doesn't get as hot because it's a 500 kilometres further inland, and it takes a lot more effort to warm up water than land (the specific heat capacity of dry soil is about a fifth of that of water). Cambridge doesn't even get as cold as a normal city with a maritime climate should in winter, because Britain's on the gulf stream which brings warm water up from the tropics.

So basically, the reason Britain seems pathetically bad at dealing with extreme weather than everybody else is because, historically, we got rather less of it than everybody else did. Global warming is now screwing with weather patterns and this may be less true in the next century...

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October