Daffodils rather than snow this Christmas

Country Living with Francis Farragher

‘‘I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o’er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils.”

Well, as you might observe, what an unseasonal verse for the week before Christmas from one William Wordsworth, but such as been the mildness of our weather this Winter, that the daffodils in many parts of Ireland and the UK are coming into full bloom.

There is also talk of insects not tuning into their hibernation cycle and the ‘weather worriers’ are predicting all kinds of doom to follow through the Spring. “We’re going to pay for this later,” is one of the usual lines trotted out, but while weather does tend to even itself out over the course of a year or maybe even a couple of years, just because we’re now enjoying mild conditions doesn’t mean that we’ll endure a big freeze in a couple of months time.

Temperatures through December have been two to three degrees up on average and on the Wednesday night of the 16th, as I travelled to and from the local village, the thermometer in the car for recording external temperatures was reading a positively balmy 14˚ Celsius.

The only problem for us here in Ireland, as distinct from the Barcelonas of this world, is that our above average temperatures come with a barrage of wind and rain. So while we mightn’t need the gloves and scarves on, the oil skins and cap are an absolute essential if any outdoor chores are to be undertaken.

There’s also a temptation to jump on the bandwagon of climate change and global warming being the sole reason for this December hot spell – it may be a long term contributory factor but other forces are at play here, one of them being that weather phenomenon called El Nino.

So what really is El Nino? For a start, El Nino is the Spanish word for the Christ Child and that name is linked to this slightly mysterious weather event, because it usually tends to appear around the mid-Winter, Christmas period.

According to the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO), El Nino is a naturally occurring weather episode during which the waters of the eastern/central Pacific warm up in line with the equatorial region of South America. When the waters warm up they expand, and trigger off a whole series of secondary events such as droughts, wildfires, flooding in different regions of the world.

Here in Ireland, the UK and Western Europe, we tend to get sucked into a warm south-westerly airflow that blows in a series of Atlantic weather system, and this year the warming impact of El Nino will be two degrees above the normal, according to the WMO.