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Heating and cooling

Gas boilers might leak much more methane than generally assumed, suggests an interesting new report from the UK’s National Physical Laboratory. I should caution that the research was conducted under lab conditions and included a very small sample of just five gas boilers. Still, it’s a useful prompt that more work is urgently needed to quantify how much of this potent greenhouse gas is really seeping out of domestic gas boilers.

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Heating and cooling

An interesting blog caught my eye this week, on the efficiency of various kinds of domestic air conditioners. Should the most inefficient ones be banned? I’m sure there will be many views on this, and it has clearly sparked a conversation around how to cool your home responsibly.

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SPECIAL: Report criticises UK’s climate readiness

“The UK was built for a climate that no longer exists today” – that was the stark warning at the top of a major new report from the UK government’s independent advisers on climate change, the Climate Change Committee. The more than 500-page document highlighted the lack of preparedness in the UK for what climate change is bringing. 92% of existing homes could overheat in future heatwaves; peak river flows will be up to 45% higher, and will occur more frequently, leading to flooding; and water scarcity caused by droughts could reach more than five billion litres per day. The Committee recommends that the UK install more air conditioners and other cooling devices, boost flood defences, and improve management of water resources. The public are already demanding such reengineering, the report notes: “People want to see adaptation happening now and for it to be done ‘properly’, with long-lasting preventative solutions.”

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Heating and cooling

If you live in York or nearby and are considering getting a heat pump, you might be interested to hear that York Community Energy, a social enterprise, is holding a heat pump café on 21 May. “Come along to chat heat pumps with some friendly folk over tea and cake,” they say.

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Heating and cooling

Heat pump sales jumped by 31% in Germany and 21% in France during the first quarter of 2026, according to new data from the European Heat Pump Association. Heat pumps, like solar panels, are seeing renewed interest as the US’s war with Iran continues to inflate fossil fuel prices.

An army base in the US state of Louisiana has installed a geothermal heating system as part of efforts to heighten resilience and reduce dependency on fossil fuels. This is despite so-called US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s claim that the US military is “not in the business” of fighting climate change.

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Heating and cooling

Chester Zoo has got a new set of heat pumps that will help keep some of its animals warm. Mitsubishi supplied the zoo, south of Liverpool, with heat pumps for habitats housing zebra, ostrich and roan antelopes.

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Heating and cooling

New York’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has announced that thousands more dwellings in the city will get heat pumps, solar panels, electric vehicle (EV) charging points and electric stoves. This is part of a scheme fun by the New York City Housing Authority.

A Dutch start-up is testing thermoacoustic heat pump technology in residential settings. The devices transfer heat with the help of high-intensity sound waves. BlueHeart Energy’s heat pumps could reach the European market as early as next year, the company says.

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As spring began to unfurl in Japan this year, environmental biophysicist Genki Katata was wondering: “Who will track the cherry blossoms of Arashiyama?” For decades, researcher Yasuyuki Aono had recorded the spring flowering dates of cherry trees in that Kyoto district, revealing how the blossoms have appeared on increasingly earlier dates, on average, during the 20th and early 21st centuries. It’s a well-known proxy measure of climate change.

However, Aono died last August and, over the winter, no-one had emerged to carry on his work. Sources in Japan told me there were no obituaries of Aono, which surprised me, given the significance of his 1,200-year cherry blossom record. There’s a bitter irony to the fact that this devoted annalist seems to have died without many people noticing.

Katata, however, who works at the Canon Institute of Global Studies in Tokyo, was well aware of Aono’s death. In March this year, cognisant that some people would be keenly awaiting news of the 2026 cherry blossoms, he privately began looking for the same newspaper source that Aono had used to find such data in recent years. Reams of springtime forecasts and articles about cherry blossoms are available from all over Japan but Aono’s dataset captured the flowerings of a specific kind of cherry tree in Arashiyama. Where did he find that information?

A few weeks after Katata began his detective work to locate Aono’s source, a colleague serendipitously told him that the UK-based data platform Our World in Data was looking for someone to carry on Aono’s contributions. Tuna Acisu, a data scientist at the organisation, had put out a call on social media to this end in April.

I broke the news in a story for The Guardian last week that their hunt for a cherry blossom researcher had been successful. Our World in Data had made contact with Katata but, at the time my article was published, the arrangement had not yet quite been formalised so Katata asked me not to name him. Happily, the partnership is now official, however, and on Monday of this week Our World in Data updated their chart of cherry blossom flowering dates with Katata’s new entry for 2026: 29 March.

Sakura, sakura

Occurring on the 88th day of the year, that 29 March date represents one of the earliest peak flowering records in the entire series, which – rather astonishingly – reaches all the way back to 812. Aono had used court documents, diaries and other archival sources to estimate when historical cherry blossoms peaked in Arashiyama. Cherry blossoms, known as sakura in Japan, are “culturally important” says Katata. “They enable us to recognise that […] winter ends and spring comes.”

The same species of cherry, Prunus jamasakura or “mountain cherry”, is still prevalent in Arashiyama today, which is what makes continuing the long-term record possible. Katata tells me that, this year, the pretty pink blooms did not stick around for long, and were declining after just four days or so.

Aono had used a local newspaper to confirm peak cherry blossom dates in Arashiyama. However, the publication in question was not actually named in his studies or final updates. (A photo he posted to social media last April shows his spreadsheet, including the blank row for 2026 that he did not live to fill in.)

So, one of Katata’s key contributions was working out which local newspaper it was. He did this by heading to the library back in March and, through a careful process of deduction, he eventually found it. “I started monitoring [that] newspaper,” he explains, though he declines to reveal its identity just yet. The newspaper-reported dates form the basis of further research that Katata could potentially do on the data series, such as verifying those dates by analysing additional sources, or comparing the records to weather readings.

Katata adds that he is thrilled to be able to continue Aono’s legacy, however, he was taken aback by the sudden global interest in his efforts. “I was surprised,” he tells me. “It was kind of a drama.”

The flower press

I was intrigued that the contemporary cherry blossom flowering data is sourced from a local newspaper. Katata explains that this sort of information is commonly included in newspapers around Japan. Readers may wonder why he wouldn’t gather the data more directly, or through some high-tech method – a webcam trained on cherry trees in Arashiyama, for example. Katata says he sought to maintain the same approach used by Aono.

When I ask Acisu, at Our World in Data, about this she says, “[When] working with long-run data sets, methodological consistency is always a very high priority. Being able to continue the series using the same sources is the best case scenario in my opinion.”

The only way Aono could have accumulated flowering data from many centuries ago was through archival records. Switching to completely different data sources for today’s updates could have made the methodological change visible in the data, detracting from the overall picture. Therefore, Katata’s approach allows him to preserve not just the spirit, but also the method, of Aono’s work.

The cherry blossom data is just one example of phenology, the study of seasonal effects or occurrences. Various other such records also carry the signature of climate change. In 2019, researchers published a more than 650-year-long dataset of grape harvests in France, covering the period from 1354-2018. It shows a sharp deviation during recent decades, another climate signal.

In Japan, society is gradually coming to terms with climate change’s impact on ecosystems and everyday life. I mean that literally – there is actually a new word in Japanese, announced last week, for days when temperatures climb above 40C: kokushobi. It means “brutally hot” or “cruelly hot”.

When I ask Katata what he thinks about climate change in Japan, he emphasises that understanding the phenomenon through scientific studies is really important, and also that few actually take the time to comb through a wide range of data sources.

“There aren’t many people like Aono-san,” says Katata. “We really need to do that [kind of work] – to understand the current climate.”

Further reading on this week’s story

Richard Primack, a professor of biology at Boston University, met Yasuyuki Aono in 2006 and wrote a very interesting article about the experience. You can find it online here.

A Guardian editorial referencing my cherry blossom story highlights the economic significance of the blooms: “Japan’s tourism industry relies on the $9 billion a year generated by cherry blossom season. Such is the craze in the country that a town near Mount Fuji cancelled this year’s festivities because it was being overrun by visitors in search of ‘Instagrammable’ spots.”

Another signal of climate change appears to have turned up in temperature and humidity records written down by church organ tuners, as The Reengineer revealed last year.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, don’t forget to share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also subscribe to The Reengineer and follow me on Bluesky.

Heating and cooling

Supplying industrial heat in the 200-550C range from renewable energy sources in a cost-effective manner can be tricky. But we could use curved solar panels to focus sunlight and heat up a molten salt thermal energy storage device according to researchers in the US, who have evaluated such a setup in a new paper. The work was inspired partly by GlassPoint, a US company already innovating in this area.

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SPECIAL: Middle East war accelerates the energy transition

It’s become very apparent that the war in the Middle East, started by the US and Israel last month, is catalysing worldwide efforts to transition away from fossil fuels. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and now this latest geopolitical crisis, it’s hard to ignore the fact that relying on fossil fuels comes with some big supply chain risks. Analysis from energy think tank Ember shows that the UK’s deployment of wind and solar since 2022 has actually noticeably insulated the country from the worst of the current energy price shocks.

Relatedly, other recent calculations suggest that record wind and solar electricity generation in Great Britain has prevented the UK paying £1 billion on gas imports during March of this year.

The i Paper reports that grants worth up to £12,000 to help people install solar panels will be fast-tracked in light of the war.

Globally, nations are accelerating the shift towards electrification and renewables in response to the Middle East war. Southeast Asian countries, for example, are now backing faster electric vehicle (EV) rollouts. “Indonesia aims to have 100 gigawatts of solar power in ‘no later than two years’, up from its current 11 gigawatts, said [President Prabowo Subianto], with earlier plans including battery energy storage system deployments,” reports news site Argus.

The International Energy Agency has said the war will “profoundly transform” energy systems around the world, specifically by accelerating the move towards renewables and nuclear power.

Industry analysts concur – but they make another point. Wood Mackenzie, for instance, stated this week that while the war is expected to cut demand for oil and gas globally, it will likely also boost the burning of coal in the short-term, which means rising emissions. Overall, the energy squeeze is still likely to see costs go up in the near future, the market research firm says.

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Heating and cooling

The march of the emerging refrigerants continues! Panasonic has just announced a new domestic air-to-water heat pump that uses R454C rather than, say, R290. R454C is viewed as an alternative to more traditional refrigerants such as R-134a, which has a high global warming potential (GWP) of more than 1,400. R454C’s GWP is much lower at roughly 148. R290’s GWP is significantly lower still, at just 3 – however, R290 is flammable whereas R454C so in some situations it may be desirable for safety reasons. If you want to know more, here’s an interesting paper from October 2025 that compares these refrigerants against some others. R290 comes out looking very good in that analysis, it must be said.

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Hello, Reengineers! This is a much shorter-than-usual edition of The Reengineer Monitor as I’ve been travelling this week and taking a little time off.

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Heating and cooling

Politico journalist Karl Mathiesen has described his hair-pulling experience of acquiring a heat pump for his London home, which he says was a “daunting and confusing” process. Mathiesen discusses his bewilderment over how the system would perform once installed and whether he should include a battery or not. He also had questions over planning permission and costs that were not initially easy to answer. The article is a fantastic overview of the confusion that many consumers feel right now on this topic. They might understand heat pump technology, and its potential benefits, but practical hurdles around how to install it in their specific home, or who they should pay to do the work, may still remain.

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At first, it was just a shadow in the deep, lying on the seabed, 60m below the surface. Divers gently kicked their way towards its dusky form. As they got closer, beams from their torches picked out the silhouette of a long-lost ship – the sharpness of its bow clearly visible. Mark Ryan, founding president of Southern Ocean Exploration, a maritime archaeology firm, had spent years waiting for this moment.

He knew exactly what he was looking at – the wreck of a ship called the City of Hobart, which sank off the south-eastern coast of Australia, north of Tasmania, in 1877.

Adrenalin took over. Ryan looked across at one of his diving buddies as they exchanged nods. Silent gestures in the gloom that telegraphed what they were feeling. It’s here. They’d found it.

“It’s just mind-blowing,” says Ryan, recalling the moment, “knowing that you’re the first person to see that ship in 149 years.” They made the dive in February 2026.

Footage courtesy of Southern Ocean Exploration.

So close

However, it’s nearly 20 years since Ryan and his colleagues first began searching for the City of Hobart. As part of that journey, in 2015 they carried out an extensive survey using sonar equipment to scan the seabed in the hope of catching sight of it but came up short. Incredibly, at one point they were just 47m away from the ship’s actual resting place.

That was as close as they came, until another sonar survey was carried out last year by Iberdrola, a renewable energy firm seeking to build an offshore wind farm in the area.

Iberdrola found two shipwrecks during that work in 2025 and after they asked Ryan and his colleagues to investigate further, the dive crew confirmed that one of those wrecks was the somewhat mysterious City of Hobart. This is the latest example of an archaeological discovery made possible due to work on renewable energy installations. In 2024, for instance, archaeologists found important Anglo-Saxon artefacts at a location in north-eastern England, where cables were being laid for the Dogger Bank Wind Farm.

The City of Hobart sank without a trace on 24 July 1877 – while carrying 558 tonnes of fossil fuels in the form of coal. “It is a little bit ironic,” says Ryan. “The people that helped find it are a renewable energy company.” Iberdrola says it plans to construct a 700 sq m, 3 gigawatt offshore wind farm in the area, comprised of roughly 150 turbines – each with a capacity of roughly 20 megawatts.

The company estimates that the wind farm will be able to supply 2.25 million homes and the wreck of the City of Hobart, which is to be left intact, will not affect the ambitions of the project, a spokeswoman says.

Ryan praises Iberdrola’s handling of the latest discovery and, on wind farms turning up archaeological finds in general, he says, “If that’s what these things are all about then I think, bring it on, it’s a good thing.”

Elsewhere, the rapid expansion of offshore wind farms has at times concerned archaeologists – such as in 2022, when researchers voiced fears that offshore wind developments in the North Sea might not coincide with sufficient opportunities to excavate the now-submerged region of Doggerland, which was an inhabited landmass between 15,000 and 8,000 years ago.

Anatomy of a sinking

When the City of Hobart sank back in 1877, the vessel’s crew were thankfully able to abandon the ship safely. But the exact location of the sinking had remained an enigma until now because nobody at the time had recorded the ship’s last known coordinates.

“Back [then], no-one’s thinking that anybody’s going to dive and see the ship again,” says Ryan. “But, of course, with the invention of modern day scuba, and guys like us, we are.”

As for why the vessel ran into trouble in the first place, the story goes that the City of Hobart’s aging propeller shaft snapped, causing a leak in the hull. The now heavily-corroded propeller and part of the shaft are clearly visible on the seabed separated from the rest of the wreck, says Ryan, which he says is evidence that backs up the old tale of the sinking.

“This wreck has been undisturbed,” says Phillip Massaad, an independent researcher and author of the book Rusting Relics: Exploring Australia’s Shipwreck Heritage. “That’s fantastic from an archaeological point of view.”

He says that there could be some artefacts belonging to the crew still within the wreck and that it might also be possible to work out how the City of Hobart was converted from a passenger and cargo vessel into a cargo-only ship, the details of which are now lost.

Ryan adds that he would like to study the site in more detail using photogrammetry, a method of making 3D models of something using many thousands of still images.

The City of Hobart has piqued the interest of maritime researchers partly because it was designed at a time when commercial vessels were transitioning from classic sailing ships to steamships. The Hobart was actually able to use both means of propulsion. “It’s like a hybrid,” says Ryan – a hybrid from the other end of the industrial revolution, when fossil fuels were coming in, rather than, arguably, on their way out.

Built in 1853 in England, it was a time when people understood steamships were “the future”, explains Massaad, but the technology had yet to be perfected. “You had this wonderful fusion of a classic-looking sailing ship,” he says. “It even had fake gun ports painted on the side – that was a fashion choice.”

‘It boggles my mind’

Other shipwrecks have been located thanks to offshore wind farm explorations. In 2023, a Lithuanian energy company detected a strange form on the seabed of the Baltic Sea, which was confirmed to be a shipwreck the following year.

“The whole idea that these wrecks are being unintentionally discovered, it just boggles my mind,” says Massaad. He also suggests that Australians tend to prioritise the land, and the outback, when considering their nation’s history. But “these shipwrecks matter”, he argues: “They tell us what our past was.”

Ryan is itching to get in touch with Iberdrola again to see if there are any other projects that he might get involved in – now that his nearly two decade-long dream of finding the City of Hobart has finally come true.

Further reading on this week’s story

There is a long list of archaeological discoveries related to wind farm projects. Two more worth mentioning include the mysterious 3,300 year-old mass burial unearthed in Scotland in 2020 and 2021, and the medieval artefacts found in Suffolk during wind farm cable excavations in Suffolk last year.

Wessex Archaeology, a company that specialises in archaeological and heritage services, has published a succession of guides detailing best practices for how to handle archaeological investigations alongside offshore wind farm development.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, don’t forget to share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also subscribe to The Reengineer and follow me on Bluesky.

SPECIAL: Energy crisis deepens

As the war in the Middle East continues, I covered the situation affecting commercial shipping earlier this week for BBC News. Specifically, how GPS jamming is causing navigational headaches for mariners in and around the Strait of Hormuz.

Separately, I recommend you watch this interview, which contains some really great detail about why Iran’s threat to oil and gas infrastructure and transport in the region is so serious, and also difficult to counter.

Heating and cooling

2025 was a record year for heat pump installations in the UK, according to government statistics published yesterday. There were 51,886 government-supported heat pumps installed that year – an increase from the 48,677 installed in 2024. This does not include installations that went ahead without a government grant. “Recent geopolitical tensions have exposed just how vulnerable households are to energy price shocks beyond their control, which is all the more reason to electrify heating and insulate consumers from volatile global gas markets,” says Rob Metcalfe of the Centre for Net Zero, a non-profit research founded by Octopus Energy, an energy company that installs heat pumps.

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SPECIAL: War in the Middle East hits energy supplies

When war broke out in the Middle East this weekend, many observers immediately recognised the huge threat to global energy supplies, since roughly a fifth of the world’s oil and gas is shipped via the Strait of Hormuz – where shipping has now come to a near-standstill. In the UK, government ministers have begun discussing the possibility of stepping in to protect the public from soaring energy costs. The price of petrol, diesel and home heating oil has already risen in the UK. Many have pointed out that relying on renewables and domestically generated electricity can protect countries from supply shocks like this. However, rising fossil fuel prices can still have a knock-on effect on renewables deployment, notes Bloomberg: “Higher energy prices could spark inflation, leading central banks to raise interest rates and make it more expensive to deploy clean energy, especially since the industry is so capital intensive and sensitive to borrowing costs.”

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Heating and cooling

A major UK geothermal energy project became operational yesterday, when the United Downs power plant in Cornwall was switched on after nearly two decades in development. It will access temperatures above 190C at a depth of 5km. The plant, run by Geothermal Energy Limited (GEL), will provide enough energy to heat 10,000 homes and will also become the UK’s first supplier of lithium. GEL plans to scale lithium output to support the production of 25,000 electric vehicle (EV) batteries per year, ten years from now.

German lawmakers have dropped a controversial renewable energy quota for new heating systems. The quota would have stipulated that all new heating systems be powered by 65% renewable energy. Incoming regulations will allow the ongoing installation of oil and gas boilers and there will be a gradual increase in requirements for green or renewable energy sources in the coming years.

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It rains quite a bit in the UK, anyone can tell you that. But this is different. In some dreary stretch of autumn late last year, the downpours started – and they’ve barely ceased since. At some point, people noticed. They noticed the leaking section of their roof on a visit to the loft. They saw the road they take to work blocked by a flood. They heard the trains were off, or that their local park was waterlogged. Many have asked in quiet disbelief: will it ever stop?

But the rain kept coming. Lashing sideways in the storms. Leaping in gutters. And heaving rivers into adjacent fields. We are powerless. It’s an air raid – water assaulting us from above, turning everything amphibious.

“It’s been so extreme,” says Adrian Hall, a resident of Wanstrow village in Somerset, where flooding has occasionally cut some people off. Locals there have used Facebook to tell each other whenever the main road through the village has been submerged. “I can’t remember when there’s been so many days of just relentless rain,” says Hall. “It gets so bloody depressing.”

Drenching rains and deluges have bothered this part of the world for many centuries. We live in a warm, damp corner of the north-east Atlantic Ocean, after all. But climate change is making even the familiar rain unfamiliar.

Stuck on you

One Cornish village recently experienced 50 days of unbroken rain. The sun didn’t shine on Aberdeen for a full three weeks. Northern Ireland had its wettest January in 149 years. And much of southern England, and eastern Scotland, have also had persistently wet weather. There’s more to come. “The seasonal forecast is saying we’re more likely to see wetter-than-average conditions over the next three months,” says Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society. “It doesn’t look good.”

“Our climate has shifted into these more persistent patterns,” she adds. Endless rain, yes, but also heatwaves and drought that won’t budge.

People tend to have special terms for unusual periods of weather. Heatwave. Nor’easter. Dunkelflaute, or wind drought. Anticyclonic gloom. Or what about the German word for dull, wet weather: Schmuddelwetter, or “filthy weather”.

And when things get stuck for weeks or months on end, perhaps we should say: weatherjammed. As the UK was in the winter of 1962-3, when an extraordinarily cold winter brought a series of blizzards, lasting from Boxing Day right through to early March. The Big Freeze blocked roads and railway lines, trapped people in remote areas, and disrupted electricity and water supplies. Because it went on for so long, it was guaranteed a place in the national memory. No winter storm has come close to it since, though that might change in the future.

The Great Washout of 2025-6 may not be quite as serious but it is still having extraordinary impacts on people’s lives. Again, its persistence is a key part of the problem. Drains are overflowing in some areas, washing sewage into people’s homes and gardens. Meanwhile, farmers are running out of containers in which to store slurry, or liquid manure, which is used to fertilise fields. They are not allowed to spread the stuff in the rain.

‘Pothole pandemic’

Countless sporting events have been cancelled, with many football pitches and other grounds left unplayable or underwater. Construction of a hospital in Sussex has been delayed by the rain. And beware the so-called “pothole pandemic”. Water seeps into depressions in the road surface, forcing material loose whenever a tyre pummels over. If temperatures drop, the water freezes, expands and erodes the tarmac yet further.

Roofers have been showered with calls for help as leaks reveal themselves in rain-lashed abodes. “I feel sorry for the customers, more than anything,” one roofer in Cornwall, who wished to remain anonymous, tells The Reengineer. “If you haven’t got two or three days of dry weather you can’t really complete the work. The more rain we get, the more calls.”

There are also fears that the drought last year followed by recent heavy rain will send food prices rocketing – especially because both summer and winter crops have been hit.

Perhaps most troubling of all are the psychological effects. “The recent weather has been especially difficult for people suffering with Seasonal Affective Disorder,” says Debbie Keenan, a BACP senior accredited psychotherapist. “I’ve noticed an upsurge in enquiries over recent months.”

The unbroken, dull, wet conditions have the power to intensify anyone’s feelings of isolation and low motivation for doing things. Keenan notes that reduced opportunities for outdoor activities – even going for a walk – has an impact on both physical and mental health.

Feeling the pressure

What’s caused the weatherjam, exactly? Bentley says it has to do with a jet stream, an atmospheric current, bringing successive pockets of low pressure over the UK in recent months. This jet stream has been in an unusually southerly position, with Great Britain and Ireland squarely in the firing line. Plus, a blocking area of high pressure over some of Europe has given our weather little chance to shift or vary. “[The low pressure areas] were just getting stuck on top of the UK – and not just us but western parts of Europe,” explains Bentley.

A similar system of blocked pressure zones was behind The Big Freeze in the early 60s. Blocking patterns may become more common due to climate change, though there is some debate over that. Regardless of the mechanism, various studies suggest that some weather events may become increasingly persistent – from long summer spells of hot, dry weather, to extended periods of warm or cold conditions in northern parts of the globe, for example.

The UK’s rain has caused many problems but it is, in a sense, welcome. That’s because last year was very dry in many areas, leading to prolonged hosepipe bans. In parts of Sussex and Kent, such bans were only lifted a few weeks ago. “We’re in a very fragile state at the moment,” says Jess Neumann, a hydrologist at the University of Reading. “Many [reservoirs] are still well below where they should be at this time of year, despite all of this rain.”

Neumann also says that saturated groundwater can take a very long time to dry out, meaning there could be a long tail to the recent rainfall, with effects such as localised flooding lasting for weeks or more. She suggests that the whole country ought to get better at saving water in water butts and other storage systems such as mini reservoirs, which could serve a dual purpose: the water will be there when needed, while capturing more rain could itself alleviate flooding. De-paving areas by removing concrete and tarmac, where possible, can allow more precipitation to soak into the ground, too, which may also prevent flooding.

As climate impacts such as the persistent rain become more pronounced, requests for interventions are getting louder. The Institution of Civil Engineers, for one, has called on the government to conduct a national economic review of resilience to help the country move away from reactive spending.

Going from one long-lasting extreme to another might be a little easier if we were able to better manage the effects of successive weatherjams. From endless rain one winter to drought the next. Neumann says, “It needs a whole shift in our thinking, our investment and infrastructure to be able to cope with these swings in weather.”

Further reading on this week’s story

Some pockets of the UK have seen truly extreme weatherjams. There’s the Cornish village mentioned in the story above but also Katesbridge in Northern Ireland, which has recorded more than 40 days of consecutive rainfall. “It’s miserable,” one resident tells BBC News.

The UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology monitors water flow in rivers and rainfall collectors. Their interactive map reveals just how wet everything is, with high levels of water flow recorded practically everywhere.

A 2024 study suggests that the world’s population will be split into two groups, with each experiencing one of two futures: significantly wetter or significantly dryer.

Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, don’t forget to share it with your friends and colleagues. You can also subscribe to The Reengineer and follow me on Bluesky.

Heating and cooling

Northern Ireland might finally be getting the heat pump grant system it has long lacked – in stark contrast to every other part of the UK and Ireland, where heat pump grants have been available to homeowners for years. More than one third of homes in Northern Ireland are heated with a particularly dirty fuel, heating oil, so decarbonising those homes is a particular challenge. A grant system would require new legislation, however, meaning that it would not come into effect until 2027 at the earliest – and knowing the Northern Irish political system, there is always the chance that major disagreements could get in the way of such legislation. Definitely one to watch, though.

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