Summer 1998 got off to a bad start in Ireland this year when nine people were injured by a tornado in Dungarvan in the early days of June. Of such a strange anomaly one could only surmise, like Hamlet, that "it is not, and it cannot come to, good". And neither did it: last month turned out to be the wettest and the dullest June for many years, rainfall in the midlands totalled more than three times the normal for the average June, and long-standing records for rain and sunshine were close to being broken - in a very negative sense - in nearly every region of the country.
July so far, although you might not think so, has not been quite as bad. Indeed, in general it has been a drier month than average, but it has been remarkable for its lack of sunshine, so that the warm, sunny, sultry conditions that we associate with this time of year have been noticeable only for their absence. Summer, insofar as it has come at all, has been confined to small windows of sunny opportunity that anyone who blinked might miss.
Of course it has all happened before. To take an extreme case, the year 1816 is recorded in the history books as "the Year Without a Summer". Temperatures were 2 or 3 degrees below normal, the weather was dull, cold and stormy, harvests were late or rendered impossible, and famine was widespread throughout Europe. But there was good reason for the poor weather on that occasion. A year or so before the volcano Tambora had erupted on the island of Sumbawa in the East Indies, and blasted millions of tons of solid matter into the atmosphere; the ensuing worldwide veil of dust in the stratosphere interfered with the incoming energy from the sun, so that the average temperature of the earth declined, and the global wind pattern was significantly distorted. But no such dramatic happening has featured in our recent past.
The immediate reason for the poor conditions is easily identified. Normally, at some stage during the summer months, the area of high pressure semi-permanently resident in the vicinity of the Azores extends northwards for a week or two, giving us a period of dry, warm, settled weather. But so far in 1998, this has failed to happen. Instead, the relentless procession of depressions from the Atlantic has continued unabated, and pursued a more southerly track than normal so that, unusually, the southern half of the country has been worst affected.
This, too, has happened before. We all recall the glorious summers of 1995, 1975, and 1976, but there have also been bad ones in the recent past - such as 1980, 1985 and 1994 - that are less well remembered. Nowadays, however, we tend to blame ourselves for such anomalies, assuming that the great amounts of carbon dioxide that we inject into the atmosphere must be the cause of our misfortunes, or that this latest enfant terrible, El Nino, must bear responsibility.
While there is now convincing evidence that the enhanced greenhouse effect is indeed taking place, it takes a great, and quite unjustifiable, leap of the imagination to blame it for one wretched Irish summer. And as far as El Nino is concerned, the infant has now gone back to sleep, and his place at the meteorological clearing house has been taken by his baby sister, whom we call "La Nina".
El Nino, as surely everyone must know by now, is Spanish for "baby boy", and is the name given to a periodic warming of the surface waters of large areas of the Pacific Ocean; this causes oscillations in the world's climate, bringing unusual weather patterns to many regions of the world in the lower latitudes, and even, some scientist say, to parts of Europe. But the recent El Nino has now been replaced by cooling in the Pacific - a phenomenon that we have come to call La Nina, "the girl child". What she may have in store for us we have yet to see, but it is far too early to blame her for showers in Ballyshannon or deluges in Dingle.
There is one glimmer of hope on the horizon, however. You may recall that last Wednesday, July 15th, was St Swithin's Day, about which they say:
Saint Swithin's day if it do rain,
For forty days it will remain;
Saint Swithin's day if it be fair,
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.
As it happened, St Swithin's Day this year was dry nearly everywhere in Ireland except for a few parts of Mayo and the extreme south-west. So if the saint is to believed, this augurs well for the remainder of the summer.