Storm Henry has followed Storm Gertrude with barely a day of calm weather in between. Not quite three months since the Met Office started naming winter storms, and we’ve already reached H. Another storm is on its way, the neighbours from up the glen have told me. I’m sitting by the window, watching the white horses on the Clyde, and wondering whether to bother with French runner beans at all this year. They need reliably warm and dry weather for about six weeks and plenty of pollinators; both are increasingly rare. I can’t make up my mind and instead wander the internet for a while. There’s a colder-than-average patch in the North Atlantic this winter. In fact, the North Atlantic is just about the only place on Earth that’s colder than usual. And that could mean that the Gulf Stream is weakening.
I’m deciding not to buy the runner beans, and include a tomato variety suited to short, cool summers to my seed order. But the uneasiness is there now. Is this how it starts? Not loudly, not with a catastrophe, but slowly, incrementally, a creeping change that you almost wouldn’t notice, except it keeps on building. It keeps on building until you’re surrounded by it.
Scotland will be wetter, stormier, and more changeable, the climate models say. Precisely more of what we don’t need. I wonder how we’ll continue to grow food on the West Coast, if it gets much wetter. Soil erosion is a problem as it is. I’ve come across this graphic recently: it shows the impact of rainfall on soil erosion levels across Europe, and it has confirmed what I see outside my window most days. Of course, even more rainfall will mean even more erosion – and it’s not as if the soil is fertile round here to begin with. All these steep slopes are incredibly vulnerable.
Of course, there’s always the polytunnel. Polytunnels are where Scottish horticulture is going, people will tell you. And they are right. But then, polytunnels are vulnerable in strong winds, and we’ll see more of those.
Perhaps I’m being too negative. Somebody twice my age told me this week that “we’ll adapt, as we always have”. And we certainly will, one way or the other. I’m just not sure whether I should feel hopeful or fatalistic about that.
Human Natures 