It’s a little on the nose for nature to give us another drought 50 years after the one we had in 1976 but here we are.<\/p>\n
It illustrates the impact of climate change, population growth and the way we use water today.<\/p>\n
Half a century of climate change has given us the “flash drought”, which although not a proper metereological term, nicely points out, as a description of the 2026 dry spell, how much the climate has changed.<\/p>\n
In 1976 we had a dry winter, spring and then summer leading up to the drought itself. This year we have full reservoirs from a winter of endless rain but then sometime in the spring, that just stopped.<\/p>\n
As if a switch is being flipped, there’s no more rain and we enter a drought with a speed we’ve not really seen before, hence the term “flash”.<\/p>\n
I usually shorthand the impact of climate change in the West Midlands as “wetter winters and hotter, drier summers” and 2026 is the perfect illustration of this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s a little on the nose for nature to give us another drought 50 years after the one…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":731044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[1397,90,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-731043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-environment","tag-environment","tag-science","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=731043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/731043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/731044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=731043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=731043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=731043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}