Guest essay by Eric Worrall

According to Grist, the iconic “Great British Bakeoff” outdoor cooking competition is about to succumb to global warming, because anthropogenic CO2 is causing Britain to experience bouts of warm Summer weather in July.

Another victim of global warming: ‘The Great British Baking Show’

By Kate Yoder on Nov 25, 2020

Try to remember the fanciest spread of desserts you’ve ever seen. Now picture what would happen if it sat outside in the summer heat for a couple of hours. Mousse would morph into ooze, tiered cakes would start to slip and slide, and delicate chocolate decorations would melt into unrecognizable blobs.

The truth is, you don’t have to imagine it — just watch The Great British Baking Show on Netflix, where creating elaborate baked goods in oppressive heat has become the main drama. The show, whose season finale appears on Friday for U.S. viewers, has always been filmed outdoors under an iconic white tent around England. But in 2020, a year from hell, the famously temperate British summer became too warm for the finicky process of baking. Heat is now the show’s central villain.

“It’s like Satan’s kitchen in here,” Laura Adlington, one of this year’s bakers, joked in an episode filmed in July. Following another sweat-inducing day in the tent, Paul Hollywood — the steely-eyed judge famous for his bread expertise — told his fellow co-hosts that he had to “peel his jeans off” at the end of the day. They winced and laughed uncomfortably.

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The most notable example of this was 1980s Week, an episode filmed this July that featured quiches, finger doughnuts, and ice cream cakes. (In the real 1980s — the decade when humanity almost solved climate change, but didn’t — the average global temperature was nearly 1 degree C [1.8 degrees F] cooler than it is today.) The doughnut challenge, filmed on the United Kingdom’s third hottest day on record, required contestants to deep-fry in near-100 degree F temperatures. Contestant Marc Elliott held up his candy thermometer at one point, and it registered 35.8 degrees C. “This is torture,” Adlington said. “Whose idea was this?”

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Read more: https://grist.org/food/another-victim-of-global-warming-the-great-british-baking-show/

I love the Great British Bakeoff; my wife hides all the baking implements after I binge watch a few episodes, to avoid all my fired up enthusiasm turning into a multi-day kitchen cleanup.

But here’s a radical idea; rather than shutting down Western Civilisation to save this iconic British baking competition, how about filming the show in May rather than July?

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