Weird weather patterns in a changing world

WEIRD WEATHER, last week. After seven or so weeks of almost constant sunshine and skies as peerless blue as Andalucia, suddenly the light was grey, the air was dead and a prickly, humid heat enveloped us.

Friends remarked that this summer, even in the sun, the air seemed not as fresh as it used to be, that there was a climatic shift towards the dead heat of continental Europe. I’m not sure about that but, certainly, in the muggy weather of early last week, people not usually given to complaint, complained, and went around red-faced and sweaty, waving improvised fans.

Twenty-two degrees, and not a puff of air.

It was Murphy’s Law that our two young visitors from the blithe Canary Islands, having been assured that our recent weather was brilliant, arrived the very day the skies went dark. Clearly, it confirmed their worst fears. Skinny girls, in any case, they shivered and donned jackets; one of them even wore a woolly scarf and gloves which she had packed in fearful anticipation. They had brought umbrellas, too. When I saw them, I scoffed, saying that, clearly, they must be not umbrellas but parasols, the better to keep off the strong Irish sun which would return again, pronto, in its fierce intensity. Next day, the skies opened in a downpour (much-needed and universally welcomed), the umbrellas went up and the girls said, “We told you so ...”

Weird, indeed, the weather may be here, but in Andalucia it is even stranger. My brother sent me cuttings from two local newspapers reporting a fall of hailstones in the provinces of Jaen, Granada and Sevilla, so big that they killed sparrows, broke car headlights, house windows and roof tiles, and wiped out up to 90% of the olive crop ready to be picked on the trees. Some weighed up to 1kg and were 7cm in diameter. Imagine being clocked by one of those. The olive trees were in fruit, a good harvest expected; almonds and vines were also hammered and produce lost. The hail storm followed on freak 40C temperatures in May. After they passed, a heatwave arrived.

Happily, the spring hail storms, scourge of the peach grower, barely visited my brother’s peach farm 30km north of Seville, and the crop was long since gone to market before the giant hailstones of mid-June.

These, by good fortune, did not visit the farm which also grows plums, nectarines, apricots and olives, all in their ranks. In February, the fruit farms of Andalucia are many-coloured tapestries of blossom spread across the rolling landscape, white for plums and apricots, soft pink for nectarines, rose-pink for peaches, with native wild-flowers in their mats and millions thriving between the rows.

The route of the spring hail storms is impossible to predict. Radio reports give warning and, out on the plains, farmers anxiously watch as the cloud, spitting missiles as damaging as buckshot, sweeps across the sky. It is a bagatelle whether they will fall on this farm or that.

This year, in April, a storm peppered the nectarines on the boundary of my brother’s land, but swept away as quickly as it had come, skirting all but a few lines of peach trees. Many nectarines were pitted and unsaleable; I saw them when I visited last month. Happily, the hail was light and the peaches, protected by fine hairs on the skin, survived undamaged, fattening in the sun.

The summer sun here, when it comes, is never as warm as Spain; nevertheless, herewith, a serious health warning: sunscreens can be as dangerous as the sun.

Ultra-violet protectors may be more injurious to the skin than the rays themselves. Most sunblocks are chemical, mineral or a combination of both. Many of the ingredients of the chemical creams are oestrogenic.

Scientists believe that oxybenzone, found in many creams and surviving in waste water eventually reaching the sea, is responsible for feminising male fish feeding near outfalls. So resilient are some of the chemicals that they reach our drinking water and even enter the food chain.

The mineral screens, considered safer by some scientists, depend on nanoparticles of zinc oxide to make them transparent on the skin. So tiny are the particles that they may be able to bypass the immune system and enter the brain. Tests by independent bodies have never been undertaken; they are still to be EU approved for cosmetic use. The sun is immensely beneficial in sustainable doses; the best answer seems to be to enjoy it for short periods, without protection. Too dark a tan makes the skin look like old leather. I have seen sights I’d prefer to forget in Tenerife.