June 5, LONDON: Britons, still shivering from icy winds and snowstorms that heralded the start of June, got more unwelcome weather news yesterday - things may get worse in the next few decades.
The weather picture for the past few days has looked more like the dead of winter than high summer, with northern roads blocked by blizzards, sports fixtures cancelled, and deserted beaches.
The London Times, usually given to reporting where the first cuckoo of the year was sighted, was shocked into running on its front page a photograph of an abandoned cricket pitch-covered in snow.
One research group believes it is not a freak situation. It says the Northern Hemisphere is in the grip of a cooling down process which will mean colder summers for Northern America and Europe for many years.
If this is true, it is not just a question of wearing sweaters instead of open-neck shirts. It could affect crops as some are difficult to cultivate below a certain temperature.
The theory has been put forward by the head of the University of East Anglia's climatic research unit, Professor Hubert Lamb.
His group believes that changes in the weather occur over a 200-year cycle and that the world is on a downward curve that started in the 1940s.
A researcher at Britain's Meteorological Office agrees that temperatures have dropped over the Northern Hemisphere, but sees no evidence that it falls into a cycle. "It is impossible to synthesise into a coherent pattern," he said.
A science writer, Mr Nigel Calder, thinks the world could be heading for a new ice age within the present generation. "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death," he has said.
Some scientists attribute ice ages - there are thought to have been 20 - to changes in the Earth's tilt and orbit around the Sun. These reduced the summer sunshine's ability to melt winter snows.
Others argue that temperatures could be down because an accumulation of dust in the upper atmosphere from volcanic eruptions or man-made pollution is absorbing or reflecting back into space, heat from the Sun.
Whatever the explanation, Professor Lamb's ideas are sending a chill through some farmers and gardeners. If he is right, they will have to change their ways.