This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.
Two weeks ago we asked our Imagine newsletter subscribers: what climate-related changes have you noticed in your lifetime? We wanted anecdotes, not data.
We received dozens of vivid and often rather moving memories. A big thank you to everyone who contributed.
A few themes stand out, which we’ll illustrate with your words alongside expert analysis from The Conversation.
1. The loss of cold winters
“My father was at university in Cambridge during world war two – he was in the university’s ice hockey team, which practised on the Fens whenever they froze over – there was no need of an indoor ice stadium then!” – Hazel Agnew
“The frost would penetrate 20cm into the ground … such hard frosts are a distant memory.” — Graeme Brown
“I grew up in Hertfordshire. When young, it snowed well every winter, with some drifts above my head. Nowadays, [300 miles north, near Newcastle] we are lucky to see an inch of snow.” – Alan Page
Recollections like these are echoed by many of you: frosts that needed scraping off the windows, head height snowdrifts, frozen puddles to smash through. These are no longer shared, common experiences in the UK.
Scientists studying the UK climate confirm there has been a strong drop in frost and snow days in recent decades. In fact, winter is warming faster than any other season. That’s according to a team of climate scientists from the University of Bristol who we asked to investigate the decline in snow days.
A fast changing climate is more volatile, and there’s always a chance of a “Beast from the East”. But, they point out, “disruptions [like these outlier blizzards] that do occur sit on top of increasing background temperatures, reducing the likelihood of the cold spells that bring widespread snowfall.”
Read more:
Why snow days are becoming increasingly rare in the UK
Future Imagine newsletter subscribers, 1960.
Black Country Images / Alamy
2. Shifting seasons
“There was snow on the ground when I went into hospital in Chelmsford, Essex, to have my first baby on April 18, 1969. The daffodils were finally in bloom when I took him home on May 1. Daffodils are always over several weeks earlier than that now” – Jill Bruce
“Often we’d come back over to Britain [from Trinidad & Tobago] in the height of either summer, or winter for Christmas … Part of why we would come back was the UK had seasons, now we just get nine months of cool to warm drizzle then summers on fire!” – Dean Hill
We have published a lot on seasonal breakdown over the years. Academics have looked at unusual midsummer storms, leaves that linger through autumn,
why April showers are becoming more intense and how that has delayed the annual arrival of swifts.
For more stories like these, check out our series Wild Seasons.
3. Wildlife disappearing
“As a young man driving around the West Country in the summer months in the mid-80s, I would have to stop and scrape a thick layer of dead insects off the windscreen at least once on every journey. Today my windscreen is bug-free for hundreds of miles.” — Steve Tooze
“When I was young every buddleia bush was covered in butterflies during the summer, and I mean covered. We had large flocks of starlings and sparrows on the lawn in our garden during winter. My mother still lives in the same house. She does not see any butterflies on her buddleia now, and no starlings for years, but a very occasional sparrow.” – Andrew Strong
“You hardly see hedgehogs anymore … there have not been any blackbirds or thrushes for even longer.” — Claire Bristol
You told us again and again about butterflies, bees, moths and wasps – once abundant, now rare. You remembered birdsong and hedgerows teeming with life. Small mammals that once wandered quietly through gardens.
Research confirms there has indeed been a steep decline in insect biomass and species diversity. In 2022, for instance, Tim Newbold and Charlotte Outhwaite of UCL wrote about their research which found climate change has triggered a global collapse in insect numbers.
They stress there are winners as well as losers. Freshwater insects are recovering in the UK, for instance. But they say that insects are facing an unprecedented threat due to the “twin horsemen” of climate change and habitat loss, which “do not work in isolation”. “Habitat loss can add to the effects of climate change by limiting available shade, for example, leading to even warmer temperatures in these vulnerable areas.”
This loss goes far beyond insects: the UK is widely regarded as one of the world’s most nature-depleted countries. Richard Gregory, also of UCL, has written about research showing that one in six UK species are threatened with extinction. “Climate change,” he writes, “is among the biggest threats to wildlife in all ecosystems.”
4. A positive change: less pollution?
“The leaves of evergreens were coated with soot, but there were still sparrows. When I first saw a laurel in the countryside, I had to be told what it was, because I didn’t know it with its clean and shiny leaves.
“Pollution was very visible. Hair brushes and combs had to be frequently washed due to the soot on your hair.” – Carole Hegedus
Let’s end on a more positive note. Carole is a few decades older than me and grew up in the same area of London as I did. Yet I recognise none of this. By the 1990s, the coal power stations and factories that once coated the city in soot were long gone. One power station is now a world-famous art gallery. Another is a more controversial shopping centre.
Future shopping centre.
GLC Pix / Alamy
But let’s not rest on our laurels. In a piece marking 70 years since London’s “great smog”, Suzanne Bartington and William Bloss of the University of Birmingham note: “Poor air quality still contributes to somewhere between 26,000 and 38,000 early deaths each year in the UK.” The days of thick smog clouds may be largely behind us (in the UK at least), but Bartington and Bloss warn that “health harms exist even at low pollutant levels and that there is no ‘safe’ level of exposure to PM2.5” (tiny particles invisible to the human eye).
Thank you again for sending such interesting recollections and I’m sorry we couldn’t feature all of them.
I hope this illustrates that the story of climate change isn’t just written in graphs and data, it’s also in frozen puddles, vanishing butterflies and February daffodils.
This roundup of The Conversation’s climate coverage comes from our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter. Every Wednesday, The Conversation’s environment editor writes Imagine, a short email that goes a little deeper into just one climate issue. Join the 45,000+ readers who’ve subscribed.