The problem, says Professor Jon Simons, may not be just the weather, although that’s certainly a problem. It could also be your memory. “There is a term in the scientific literature called ‘rosy retrospection’,” says the neuroscientist, speaking from a damp, chilly and largely un-rosy University of Cambridge.
In his mind, he says, his childhood summers were a lot warmer and sunnier than this. He knows from his research, though, not to trust his mind. “There’s a cognitive bias that leads us to remember past things more favourably, and current things more negatively.” Is this summer really so bad?
As we approach the midpoint of the summer, things are certainly, currently, negative. Outside our collective windows, drizzle coalesces into droplets and drips down. On our weather apps, grey stretches for days and weeks ahead, as dank, uninviting and mizzle-swept as the beachfront at Bournemouth. It feels historically awful.
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But, says the Met Office, it isn’t. At least not yet. It is bad, but it is within the bounds of summer glumness. June was chilly, but not notably so at 0.4C below the long-term average. It was also averagely sunny and slightly drier. July has been a fair bit colder and wetter so far, but not unexpectedly so given our climate variability. “We’re in northwest Europe. We’re an island next to the Atlantic Ocean. We’ve got the jet stream that flows close to the UK,” Greg Dewhurst, a meteorologist, said. Sometimes, that jet stream is to the north and it’s sunny, sometimes it’s to the south, and it rains a lot.
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Even if nothing changes for the rest of July, “there will still be Julys that have been colder and wetter,” Dewhurst says. “It’s not record breaking.” If it feels like it is, he says, “it’s that it’s not up there with recent Julys.”
That’s not to say people wouldn’t be justified in feeling miserable. After a brief warm spell at the end of June, the start of July has been more than 2C below the monthly average — comfortably the chilliest since the turn of the century. In the first eight days the UK has seen 44 per cent of its expected rainfall, and London 86 per cent. The Met Office has issued yellow weather warnings for thunderstorms on Tuesday in Wales, western England and northern Scotland. So it is indeed wet and cold. The medium to long-term forecast tentatively suggests that while nothing so spectacular as warm weather is heading our way, there should be a return to mediocrity that will ensure we end the month with July being merely unremarkably unpleasant.
Professor Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, says that we perhaps sometimes forget, particularly given recent record breaking heat, what our weather can be. “The UK’s weather is dominated by the position of the jet stream which can spend lengthy periods in certain positions which bring wetter or drier weather.” It is currently in the former position. He said that as a consequence 2024 is so far, like 2012, a “relatively cool, dull and damp summer”.
He added: “However, we are living in a warming world, often without realising it, so that even what we thought was a cool June 2024 in the UK was still warmer than several Junes in the 2010s, and 1.5C warmer than June 1985.”
One reason it might feel so much worse, then, is that we have got used to the effects of warming. Another, says Simons, is our rosy retrospection. “Our brains emphasise pleasant sunny days, and outdoor fun,” he said.
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“We are less likely to vividly recall more negative memories or more mundane boring memories.” A wet Sunday watching the rain does not make for a compelling memory, the long hot summer of 1976 does. Interestingly, one of the more similar summers to 2024 is the summer of 2012 — which is today remembered for the briefly good weather around the Olympics; while the near-continuous downpours either side are forgotten.
Professor Barbara Sahakian, a colleague of Simons at the University of Cambridge, said there might be good reasons for this. We remember unusual things, because they are important. We also remember positive things, because that can be psychologically useful. “If you’re a healthy person, that’s what sticks in your mind. It’s an adaptive mechanism for resilience and staying positive,” she said.
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That may explain, she says, why for her it took two washout family holidays in Devon for her to choose a different destination — and yet, still, it’s the sunny ones she remembers.
A misconception about memory, Simons says, is that it’s like a recorder of what happened to us. In fact, each time we retrieve a memory we construct it and it can change. Part of Simons’ research is recruiting people with less selective memories who do remember far more. His hypothesis is that this isn’t always helpful for them, and that without a positivity bias they may suffer psychologically.
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One place they may suffer less, though, is in their choice of holiday destination. As Cornwall vacationers sit in damp car parks, eating sandwiches while watching the windscreen wipers swish, they may curse the rosy retrospection that meant, back in February when they booked their holiday, they imagined the weather would be different.
Simons concedes the point. “I guess we evolved our memory systems before we thought about our summer holiday plans,” he says. “That probably wasn’t a major evolutionary driver at the time.
