Stormier weather

In September 2018 I was up most of the night running the engine to help keep Skylax off the quay while ‘Medicane Zorbas’ went through Greece – and that was with three mooring lines bar-tight on the front. Thankfully, Skylax was on the hard for ‘Medicane Victoria’ lashing the Mediterranean in November 2019. In fact, there were two medicanes that month – and this seems to be a pattern that is occurring most years in the autumn, when the sea has warmed up over the summer and the conditions are there for these hurricane-like weather systems to form.

Disruption of normal weather patterns

Compared with 20 years ago, when I first wrote about the effects of global warming, there are fewer climate change deniers around now. Whether on the land or sea, the number of catastrophic weather events where climate change is an agent has increased dramatically: floods in Britain and Europe, where a month’s rain falls in a day; the droughts and devastating wildfires in Australia and California; and the increasing number of super-hurricanes (and typhoons and cyclones) of Category 4 and 5