By Paul Homewood

 

 

h/t Man at the Back

When you’ve already made an idiot of yourself once, you would think you would want to keep quiet. Not ex-weatherman Bill Giles though, back with this potty article in the last month’s Radio Times:

 

It was back in  1996 that he started making these predictions, telling the Independent that he was going to plant olive trees in his Oxfordshire garden:

 

Olive groves in Oxfordshire? Bill Giles, the BBC’s weatherman, thinks so. Despite some particularly vicious nights of frost last winter, he is a firm believer in the idea of global warming. So much so that he is planning to plant olive trees in his own south Oxfordshire garden. In 20 years or so, he reckons, with the typical summer climate moving north at a rate of 10 kilometres a year, Dundee will be as balmy as Berkshire. France, he says, will be "a desert". Hard luck on the Dordogners.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/bring-on-the-olives-and-bananas-1310987.html 

 

 

Well. Bill, we’re half way to 2050, so how is your forecast going?

 

 

 

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/historic-station-data

 

The highest that average summer temperatures at Heathrow have reached since 1996 was 25.7C last year. This was exactly the same as in 1976.

The average for the last ten summers is only 23.2C. When he made his prediction, it was only slightly lower at 22.6C

In 1995, the year before Giles made his prediction, the summer temperature at Heathrow was 24.7C, which has only been exceeded once since.

The idea that London is heading towards summers easily exceeding 30C is frankly drivel.

The Independent ended their article in 1996 by talking to the famous gardener, Christopher Lloyd, who tends the Lutyens-designed rose garden at his home, Great Dixter in Sussex:

Christopher Lloyd is simply a gardener who likes to experiment, and the old roses, he argues, just weren’t doing enough to earn their keep.

Does he believe in Bill Giles’s predictions of a Mediterranean climate for Britain?

"Not a bit," he replies robustly. "Every summer produces some summery weather in Britain. That is as much as one can depend on."

One wonders how Bill’s olive trees are doing!

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

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September 11, 2019 at 04:48AM