Two remarkable British summers - 'perfect' 1911 and 'calamitous' 1912

The contrasting summers of 1911 and 1912 were remarkable not only for their individualcharacteristics but the fact that theyoccurred in successive years.The hot, dry summer of 1911 saw the thirddriest July in England and Wales in over200 years and the UK's highest monthly sunshinetotal on record. During the Augustheat-wave, a UK temperature record was setwhich stood for almost 80 years. The cool, wet summer of 1912 was significantlywetter even than summer 2007. Thiswas the wettest summer in over 200 yearsfor England and Wales, with only summer 1879 coming close. August 1912 was thecoldest August in the CET series from1659 and the wettest in the EWP seriesfrom 1766. A century ago, life in the UK was very differentfrom that of today, so the weather ofthese summers would have had differentimpacts. Technology was, of course, far lessadvanced and this was reflected in domesticlife, health-care, agriculture, transport andmass communication - Including the productionand dissemination of weather forecasts.Working conditions were also verydifferent, although a National Insurance Acthad been proposed to provide some medicaland unemployment protection. So in manyways people are likely to have been moresusceptible to the impacts of extremeweather. The agricultural sector probably sufferedmost, being affected by both abnormaltemperature and rainfall - and without thebenefit of modern mechanisation (Figure 6).However, society was less complex in 1911:expectations were lower, people were moreself-sufficient and journeys were fewer andshorter. Perhaps most importantly, the UKpopulation in 1911 was only aroundtwo-thirds of today's. These factors implythat extreme weather had less impact100 years ago. It would be a difficult, butthought-provoking, exercise to assess the netoverall difference in impacts between thenand now. It is possible that the very poor weatherof summer 1912 was influenced by a volcaniceruption in Alaska. Nevertheless, thesesummers emphasise the large variability of the UK's climate and the fact that theweather of one year can bear little or norelation to that of the next. The summers of 1911 and 1912 serve asa reminder that extreme weather eventsoccurred in the past just as they do today there are parallels with the record-breakingsummers of 2006 and 2007, for example.They also aroused the same scientific interest:in discussion following Harding's summer1911 paper (Harding, 1912), Mr Goldsaid Mr Harding had given an excellentaccount of the summer- but that the ordinaryperson was even more anxious to knowwhy it had been hot than how hot it had been.The exceptional summer must be due eitherto an exceptional but accidental course of thecirculation of the atmosphere arising from terrestrialcauses, or to a change in the intensityof solar radiation. 100 years on, such questionsremain central to climate science. © 2011 British Crown Copyright.