When the wind is warm, you know something is up. Naturally, I have been well aware of the awful reality of the climate crisis, but it has taken the warmth of the wind to really panic me. Not the endless 30C+ days, the desiccated garden, the tap slowing to a drip. No, it is the warm wind blowing on me. I can just about manage in punishing heat, even though it is particularly suffocating when the air is still. But I thought I had a tacit agreement with the British climate that at least when there was a breeze it would cool me down a bit. When a breeze warms me up, here in the UK anyway, it feels nothing less than un-British, and I wonder if we really are getting into the end of days.
I first noticed it a couple of weeks ago on the streets of Cardiff. I turned a corner on St Mary’s Street and there it was, a strong gust of properly warm wind, right in my face and down into my lungs. Reeling, gasping a little, I looked around for the idling bus that had surely generated this unpleasant blast of air. But this wind hadn’t emanated from a bus’s rear, for there was no bus in sight. It was the weather and it felt alarmingly wrong.
I have spent much time in south Wales and the weather has thrown a lot at me over the years. It’s one of the many things I love about it here: rain hammering down on a caravan roof; rain coming at you horizontally; wind to lift you off your feet; tempests whipping the sea into a frenzy; fog so thick that you can’t see the sea even when it is lapping around your ankles. And punctuating these various weather events are frequent spells of sunshine lighting up the colours so brightly that your eyeballs ache. But a wind that is warm? Never.
The last time I felt wind this warm it was coming off the Gulf of Mexico into Galveston. In Texas, it was tolerable. It came with the territory. But blowing hotly into Cardiff off the Bristol Channel? Nah, sorry. All wrong. We’re doomed.
• Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
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