Chilly summer for global warming obsessed UK

Houston Chronicle:

Summertime in England is supposed to be drab and rainy, but not this drab and rainy, and certainly not this cold.

Things have been so soggy for the last month that some London stores have given up on the summer season and started marking down their beach items, even though it's only mid-July.

Suntan lotion sells for half-price all over town. Shoppers can also get a bargain on barbecues, garden furniture, sandals and outdoor loungers. Hardly anyone, it seems, is spending any time outside this July, and those who do often bundle up in rain gear and light parkas.

With half of the brief season already gone, Britons face their own inconvenient truth: Despite all the talk of global warming, summer may not happen here this year. There have been virtually no hot days for the beach and lots of incentive to stay inside.

"It's a nice day, for November," has become the refrain of more than one TV weather forecaster straining for humor in a wet spell that has seen at least two severe hailstorms in London.

The weather has settled into a bizarre pattern: minutes of sun in the morning followed by periods of heavy rain, then another half-hour of bright sun in the afternoon before the torrents resume.

"It's a bit repetitive, isn't it?" said postman Digby Ridge, 52. "You start to think, will the sun ever come back out?

"We get like troglodytes, living in dark tunnels in the cold and dark, and then we all rush out of the house when we see a bit of sunshine."

Hopes for even a passable summer are dwindling here, even as cities in America, including Houston, sizzle. The official figures are daunting. Not only was June the wettest June since record-keeping began in 1914, but the entire summer so far has been marked by a near absence of hot days, said Keith Fenwick, a spokesman for the Met Office, which monitors the weather in Britain.

The data for the next two weeks suggest there is no reason to expect that real summer weather is just around the corner.

"We're not expecting to see very hot warm sunny weather over the next two weeks," Fenwick said. "There will be further days of rain or showers. It will continue to be cool."

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Don't worry they will still find a way to blame it on global warming or its latest label "climate change." I think they are trying to relabel because global warming looks more and more silly, like the snow that plagued the South African Live Earth concert for Gore's crusade. No one is more obsessed with "climate change" than the UK liberal papers who usually make it a lead story and keep trying to find some angle to either blame President Bush are say the US is finally becoming "enlightened" on the issue. They are absolutely nuts about it and attempt to find ways to discredit any challenges to their nutty theory. The latest to to suggest that solar activity does not cause warming. How logical is that? Hmmm, isn't it warmer when the sun is out than it is at night or when clouds and rain block the sun?