The Met Office was wrong. There was no barbecue summer, no mild winter. Instead came the big freeze of 2009/10, the coldest in almost 50 years.
Rivers became skating rinks and hillsides a paradise. The novelty soon wore off though as significant amounts of snow continued to fall.
Less than a year later the country is once again in the grip of dramatic Arctic weather and Siberian winds and the chaos that accompanies them. Wales is now colder than Greenland and we are experiencing the earliest widespread snow across the UK for 17 years.
No one could have predicted that we would once again be plunged into a second record-breaking winter so soon after the last. Or could they?
According to a new book this big freeze is only the beginning. By interviewing leading experts in the UK, author and climatologist Gavin Cooke has set out the most controversial weather forecast ever.
“Forget about global warming – what most forecasters have failed to acknowledge is that Britain is on the cusp of a mini ice age,” he says.
This is a fact accepted by many climatologists but one that the Government prefers to keep quiet by cutting funding for some academics who dare to publish their findings. Yet, according to these scientists, the worrying truth is that we are facing another 30 frozen years, each one colder than the last.
“There is mounting evidence pointing to a string of Arctic winters that are bound for Britain and Northern Europe before the effect of man-made global warming kicks in,” says Cooke.
These freezing temperatures will irrevocably change the way we live and the impact will be felt in every corner of British life from basic food production, the housing market and even citizenship regulations.
“Property values will crash, the economy will disintegrate and the nation might well find itself in a state of near anarchy by the middle of the next decade,” he says.
Cooke has been monitoring trends in the weather for most of his life but the patterns of 2010 have left him deeply concerned about Britain’s changing climate. His predictions are dramatic, far-reaching and have a chilling precedent.
“The big freeze of 2010 is part of a much broader climate change phenomenon,” he explains. Most alarmingly it appears to be following a similar pattern to the most recent seriously cold spell when the River Thames froze over in the 1700s.
The so-called Little Ice Age, which lasted about 70 years and was the coldest period in 1,500 years, was significant because it enabled astronomers to discover an unexpected connection between Earth’s climate and the action of the sun. “We get all our energy from the sun and it dictates our climate but the role of the sun is traditionally overlooked by meteorologists. The scary thing is that sunspot activity has a direct correlation to climate. When the sun is producing a lot of sunspots [cooler patches] – normally in a year there are 30,000 to 40,000 of these – the temperature on Earth is traditionally warmer.”
In 1645 there were no sunspots whatsoever, five years or so later the Little Ice Age began and lasted for seven decades.
“The scary thing is that NASA scientists discovered there were no sunspots in 2008,” says Cooke. “Now, as predicted, Northern Europe is once again entering a period of exceptionally cold winters.”
And 2010 is apparently just the beginning. According to Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, we can expect the cold weather to peak between 2025 to 2040. The problem for us is the impact that low solar activity has on the jet stream, the current of air that blasts across the Atlantic carrying all our warm weather with it.
“Britain lies just outside the Arctic Circle and on the same latitude as Labrador. If it wasn’t for the jet stream and to a lesser extent the gulf stream – the warming of ocean water – our winter weather would be similar to that the Eskimos experience every year,” says Cooke.
In simple terms sunspot activity keeps the jet stream going. Take them away and the warm air won’t reach us during the winter months. Instead freezing air from Siberia in the North rushes in to fill the vacuum.
And it’s not just the jet stream that is changing. Evidence that the gulf stream is slowing has come from Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University who began hitching rides under the North Polar ice cap on the Navy sub HMS Tireless in 1996. At first his aim was to measure the thickness of the ice to find out if it was shrinking due to global warming. Over the past 20 years his surveys have revealed a 46 per cent reduction in the thickness of the ice.
It was the results of Wadhams’ research that caused the scientific community to take a collective gulp, explains Cooke. “Wadhams had been below the Arctic ice sheet measuring the dense cold water ‘chimneys’ that sink to the sea bed to be replaced by warm water. These are the engines that drive the North Atlantic drift, our climatic lifeline in winter.”
Wadhams found that 10 of these chimneys had all but disappeared. There remained only two giant columns of sinking water, both significantly weakened. Wadhams explains: “As the water sank it was replaced by warm water flowing in from the south which kept the circulation going. If that mechanism is slowing it will mean less heat reaching Europe.”
However, as of January 2009, Wadhams has had his last 10 grant applications turned down by the Government’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC).
This includes work on the disappearance of the giant whirlpools off Greenland that may point to a slowing down or shutdown of the gulf stream. Wadhams believes the Government and NERC are preventing his research work continuing. “NERC is constantly saying in its publicity that sea ice is a critical parameter of climate change. But it won’t provide me with any funding, even though the submarines are being provided free of charge. I am the most experienced Arctic researcher in Britain so I have to conclude that it is personal.”
So what lies ahead for Britain as we are increasingly battered by Siberian winds and a lack of warm sea water?
“We are about to waste millions of pounds planning for heat waves but what we actually need to be preparing for is a prolonged cold spell lasting until 2040,” says Cooke.
“Global warming is fact globally but it’s not fact in northern Europe. Last year was the 14th coldest winter in Britain in 350 years yet globally it was the fifth warmest taken as an average across the planet.”
He adds: “Here, we are at the edge of an ice age that may last for as long as 30 years and will have disastrous effects for everyone living in these fragile and frosty islands. We are heading for 30 to 50 cold winters before the actions of global warming become predominant again.
“The worst-case scenario is that millions of people will die in Siberian temperatures that reach two digits below freezing. We will see power cuts as well as a doubling of the average annual heating bill over the next 10 or 15 years. The carrying capacity of the country will be so much less – you can’t grow food under a sheet of ice – yet we are expecting our population to increase by another six million between now and 2030: that’s the equivalent to six Birminghams. How on earth are we going to survive without mass chaos and a huge mortality rate?”
Why haven’t we been told about this? “People aren’t really told the truth about a lot of things. A lot of the statistics about global warming have been provided by the Met Office but their computer models don’t allow for the actions of the sun, which leads them to get things wrong. However there is now an increasing body of research showing the influence that sunspots have. The Danish National Space Centre recently made similar findings. Make no mistake, what we’re currently experiencing is just the snowflake before the avalanche.”
To order Frozen Britain by Gavin Cooke (John Blake, 7.99) with free UK delivery, send a cheque payable to Express Bookshop to Frozen Britain Offer, PO Box 200 Falmouth TR11 4WJ, call 0871 988 8367 (10p/min from BT landlines) or visit expressbookshop.com
A FROZEN HISTORY
1620 – A frost fair is held on the River Thames.
1683 – The Thames freezes for two months as deep as 11in.
1708 – Temperatures hit -18C in some areas and frost lasts for more than three months.
1795 – Temperatures drop to -21C in London on January 25.
1819 – Tunbridge Wells records temperatures as low as -23C.
1829 – One inch of snow falls in early October, followed by 6in in London in November.
1895 – On February 11 Scotland experiences temperatures as low as -27.2C.
1907 – Norfolk and Suffolk record 1ft of snow in April.
1916 – The Midlands see up to 14in of snow.
1940 – On January 21 the temperature in Wales sinks to -23.3C, the lowest ever recorded there.
1947 – Essex reports temperatures as low as -21C.
1962-63 – This winter is the third coldest for more than 200 years. Surrey reports more than a foot of snow and the sea freezes over in Poole in Dorset. Temperatures in Scotland hit -22.2C
1978 – A blizzard blasts the south of England in December forcing Heathrow to close its runways for several days.
1982 – Temperatures plummet to -26.1C in Newport, Shropshire.
1995 – In December temperatures drop to -27.2C in Altnaharra, Scotland.