Yellow warning

Has our weather recently got worse?

Whenever stormy weather is imminent we start to get warning messages beamed at us telling us what to do and more importantly what not to do in order to keep safe. All very helpful, of course, although I have doubts about how much heed most people take of it. Why else would there be traffic jamming up our roads in the middle of a storm. We are conditioned to believe that our houses are secure and our roads are there to allow us to move about freely no matter what the weather is doing outside. Modern cars are built bigger and stronger than ever before and the messages put out by advertisers encouraging us to buy them are aimed at making us believe how indestructible they are and how safe and secure we are inside them.

Over the last year or so, however, there seem to have been more of these weather warning messages which raises the question posed above as to whether there has been a significant shift towards a different pattern of weather in our world. A greater frequency of warning messages does not necessarily mean this is the case. It could, for example, simply be that the wind strength or rainfall warning level has been reduced or perhaps it is simply that the media have convinced themselves that people are excited by those rare weather events and there will be more viewers on a particular TV channel if it shows footage of massive waves smashing into someone's house. It matters not if the footage was shot in another country where the event occurred many months ago. If it gets more viewers then put it on.

We have recently been sent four warnings about strong wind and rain - yellow is the colour - but when we look deeper into the areas affected we discover that the south west of England will bear the brunt of it. Here in the west of Scotland it will remain calm for the time being but a different storm might affect us several days later. Of course if we were planning a drive to Cornwall then we might be interested in the warning message but how many others are like us and go behind that initial warning message to see what it means. If most people assume the warning is directly personal to where they live then when the wind does not arrive they will have learnt not to trust the media and might pay little heed to subsequent messages. The ease of communication in our modern world will have let us down by failing to be tailored to where each of us live.

All of which leaves us with the question 'Has our weather recently got worse?' unanswered. What is certain is that reporting on weather events throughout the world has increased, which leaves us with the impression that we are facing climate-altering changes and the prevailing view is that these are brought on by our own behaviour.

Time will tell how immune we are from the worst of these changes in our part of the world - perhaps less time than we think if the latest weather warning proves to be accurate.

We prepare ourselves for what is coming by taking a look around the garden to see what might get blown about. Our compost bin lids have a habit of taking off but we have no overhanging trees and so far as we know there are no garden trampolines in our neighbourhood. Our conclusion is that so as long as the house roof stays on we should be safe. The predicted wind direction should mean we will have some shelter from the surrounding hills although we know from experience that this is not necessarily true. If this blog gets posted online then it probably means we have survived.

What we can see from our home's high vantage point is that the harbour below us is filling up with work vessels that normally spend their time at sea supporting the local fish farms. Tarbert is a naturally sheltered place to moor up when the weather is bad so the storm warnings have clearly been received and are being acted upon.

Later...

This one had a name, storm Boelo, and yes, our house has survived intact.

Not so lucky was the reclaimed greenhouse roof that we had repurposed as a log shelter attached securely, so we thought, to the side of a shed. Sometime in the night a gust of wind arrived, so strong that it caused the roof structure to break free and take flight, the whole thing being lifted up over the top of the shed and then thrown down towards the road. It landed rather uncomfortably on our garage roof leaving us the job of cutting it into pieces with an angle grinder so that it can be taken to the dump.

Strangely this event does seem to have provided the answer to the question posed here at the start. The log store shelter had been happily in place for years and had survived gales coming from all directions...until now, when a single unimaginary blast of air caused it to take flight. We shall try not to dwell upon what might have happened had it gone just a little further and landed on someone in the road.