Hottest September in Poland?

The last week (today excepted - it rained for a while) gives me mixed feelings. On the one hand, who could complain about six unbroken days of cloudless skies and heat (26C - 28C maxes) - dry heat, without mosquitos - at the end of September? Except that it is the end of September. We are a week past Equinox, night is longer than day, and the forecast for Tuesday, 3 October, suggests a daytime high for Warsaw of 26C. (If it exceeds 25.9C - then that will be another temperature record broken this year.)

While we are benefiting from the gorgeous weather in terms of our samopoczucie (perceived mental/ physical wellbeing), we must also be aware that climate change is real and is unfolding before our eyes. Tracking data is one thing, and we must ground our understanding of climate change on scientific data, but the subjective memory - that can play tricks - is important too. Septembers in Warsaw do happen to be sunny. However, yesterday, Poland's meteorological institute announced that September 2023 was 3.9C hotter than the average temperatures for the month. [An excellent breakdown of September temperature this year in Poland here.]

Here in Chynów, the apple harvests are in full swing, trees full of fruit - another good season, despite the relative lack of rainfall. We have also been spared any extreme weather events - no tree-uprooting winds, no flash floods, and no thunderstorms yielding golf-ball-size hailstones. Yet when the weather doesn't play the cosmic trickster, folk keep to their old ways - tractors standing in fields or orchards, engines idling, burning diesel and pumping emissions into the air. The farmer fails to see the need to turn the engine off. Same at the level crossing - when the barriers falls, it's around three minutes until the train passes and the barriers rise. Yet only the newest cars which have engines that automatically cut out when stationary aren't spewing CO₂ into the air.

New York City hasn't been so lucky, hit with flash floods that led to a state of emergency being declared yesterday. Yet because Poland has to date escaped the wrath of climate change, the subject is not an issue in the discourse leading up to the parliamentary election in two weeks' time.

The extra days of summer warmth mean I've not had to switch on my heating (last September I first felt uncomfortably cold enough to do so on the 19th); my electricity consumption is down 18% compared to the same period next year. So - the warmer it gets, the less energy we consume? 

Now that we're in the dark half of the year, let me turn my attention to hours of sunlight. Plentiful between the equinoxes, it starts to plummet.

Below: annual sunshine hours, Warsaw. Note the steep falling-off that occurs between October and November - this is the 'hammer of darkness' effect that I've noted (click here on on label below right). October sees more than twice as many hours of sunshine than November; December's the worst by far, followed by January.

Comparing Warsaw to London is interesting (below) - whilst summers in Warsaw see much more sun than London (over 25% across June, July and August), the four months between November and February are sunnier in London, despite only a small difference in latitude. In terms of UV index, a less-precise measure, the two capitals are similar across the year.

It is time to gird myself psychologically for the coming darkness and cold; one hack I have developed in recent years is to ignore the time change, and not to accept that extra hour in bed 'they've' given us - it's a trap. Go to bed at the same time as before (that is, an hour earlier) and wake up an hour earlier. Don't let the time change mess with your body clock. The time change is responsible for many cases of seasonal affective disorder being worse than they could otherwise be, and for a 20% increase in heart attacks in spring when it changes the other way.

Final point from the end of Q3 2023: my food bills (excluding entertainment) for July, August and September this year totalled 3,125.53zł; a 27.7% increase on Q3 2022, when I spent 2,448.44zł. Like for like - I have all till receipts if anyone's nerdy enough to want to check.

UPDATE 13 OCTOBER 2023:

The EU’s earth-observation programme Copernicus found monthly average surface air temperatures of 16.4C, almost 1C over the 30-year average and 0.5C above the previous September record.  Berkeley Earth, an American research group, found that September was the most excessively hot of any month since 1850. This summer’s scorching weather makes it almost inevitable that 2023 will be the hottest year ever. It seems likely, too, that temperatures for 2023 will approach or exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

This time last year:

Box-top art in the Sublime Aesthetic

This time two years ago:
Trains of thought, insights and 'voices'

This time four years ago:
Parliamentary train at West Ealing station

This time five years ago:
Progress in Jakubowizna

This time seven years ago:
Miedzianka by Filip Springer

This time eight years ago:
Out of the third, into the fourth

This time nine years ago:
Inverted reflections

This time ten years ago:
Observations from London's WC1
and Observations from the City of London

This time 11 years ago:
Civilising Jeziorki's wetlands

This time 12 years ago:
Warsaw's Aleje Jerozolimskie

This time 14 years ago:
Melancholy autumn mood in Łazienki

This time 15 years ago:
Autumn gold, Zamienie

This time 16 years ago:
Flamenco Sketches - Seville