Staying at home has become the default

One of the great boons of living on an island whose climate is tempered by warming seas and currents is that the weather is rarely particularly problematic. We get no hurricanes, little long-lasting severe cold or stifling heat, no tornadoes demolishing entire towns, no blizzards that dump five feet of snow, which freezes until the arrival of spring.

Occasionally, nature does throw a reminder our way of how bad the weather can be. The storm that ran up the English Channel registered the lowest pressure ever observed in England in November. Wind gusts of more than 100mph were recorded on Jersey, though northern France appears to have borne the brunt of the ferocious gale. Trees came down, power cuts ensued, ports were shut and heavy rain and hailstones teemed from the sky.

This was a severe storm, though not by any means unprecedented, but inevitably nowadays one to which a name was attached: Ciaran. Naming storms is a relatively recent phenomenon in the UK. The first was Abigail in 2015; since then there have been about 50 more.

What is the purpose of this exercise? If it is to enable a recollection of a particularly bad weather system, does anyone remember Storm Georgina (January 2018) or Storm Barra (December 2021)? Once, terrible storms were considered rare and identified only after the event, like the New Year’s Day storm that hit Scotland in 1992 or the October “Hurricane” in 1987, which caused spectacular damage to woodland in the south of England.

The problem with naming storms days before they arrive is that they generate irrational responses in advance, not just in the area destined to be hit but elsewhere in the country. Public services start to shut down unnecessarily, trains are cancelled before it is apparent that they need to be, and people are told to stay indoors.

A legacy of the Covid lockdowns is that working from home has become the default option for people who previously would have made an effort to get to the office in adversity. It is another example of the “precautionary principle” in action.
Some will doubtless argue that it is far better to get ahead of the game by closing down transport systems and schools. But with so many named storms, and dire warnings issued on an almost weekly basis, we are increasingly in thrall to weather anxieties out of all proportion to the threats we face.