Guest essay by Eric Worrall
According to Grist, the iconic “Great British Bakeoff” outdoor cooking competition is about to succumb to global warming, because anthropogenic CO2 is causing Britain to experience bouts of warm Summer weather in July.
Another victim of global warming: ‘The Great British Baking Show’
By Kate Yoder on Nov 25, 2020
Try to remember the fanciest spread of desserts you’ve ever seen. Now picture what would happen if it sat outside in the summer heat for a couple of hours. Mousse would morph into ooze, tiered cakes would start to slip and slide, and delicate chocolate decorations would melt into unrecognizable blobs.
The truth is, you don’t have to imagine it — just watch The Great British Baking Show on Netflix, where creating elaborate baked goods in oppressive heat has become the main drama. The show, whose season finale appears on Friday for U.S. viewers, has always been filmed outdoors under an iconic white tent around England. But in 2020, a year from hell, the famously temperate British summer became too warm for the finicky process of baking. Heat is now the show’s central villain.
“It’s like Satan’s kitchen in here,” Laura Adlington, one of this year’s bakers, joked in an episode filmed in July. Following another sweat-inducing day in the tent, Paul Hollywood — the steely-eyed judge famous for his bread expertise — told his fellow co-hosts that he had to “peel his jeans off” at the end of the day. They winced and laughed uncomfortably.
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The most notable example of this was 1980s Week, an episode filmed this July that featured quiches, finger doughnuts, and ice cream cakes. (In the real 1980s — the decade when humanity almost solved climate change, but didn’t — the average global temperature was nearly 1 degree C [1.8 degrees F] cooler than it is today.) The doughnut challenge, filmed on the United Kingdom’s third hottest day on record, required contestants to deep-fry in near-100 degree F temperatures. Contestant Marc Elliott held up his candy thermometer at one point, and it registered 35.8 degrees C. “This is torture,” Adlington said. “Whose idea was this?”
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Read more: https://grist.org/food/another-victim-of-global-warming-the-great-british-baking-show/
I love the Great British Bakeoff; my wife hides all the baking implements after I binge watch a few episodes, to avoid all my fired up enthusiasm turning into a multi-day kitchen cleanup.
But here’s a radical idea; rather than shutting down Western Civilisation to save this iconic British baking competition, how about filming the show in May rather than July?
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The Great British Jerk Off – a perfect example of the dumbing down of a once great British institution.
I think that the rise in UK temperatures is probably caused by the rising SST ,particularly to our west, if SST in the North Atlantic were to drop in the next decade then the CET may start falling back even to the levels of the 60’s. The UK and NW Europe are open to the arctic in the north, there is no landmass there, there are currents which run from the Arctic ocean to the North Sea and increased outflows from the Arctic ocean could occur in some periods, It is the same on the other side of the Atlantic.
There are very few reality show that hold my interest for more than a few minutes. One is “Curse of Oak Island”.
As for the BB Show, I haven’t lasted more than five minutes into an episode.
It’s like watching “Pie in the Sky” and choking on the false cooking facts. Only Richard Griffiths and Maggie Steed are excellent actors.
1) What ever happened to cooking the ‘other’ eleven months!? Or can the BB Show only cook during summer?
2) Baking is far more than mousse, chocolate decorations and buttercream frosting on cakes.
What about breads, pies, tarts, scones, waffles, pancakes, pizzelles, cookies, puddings (British puddings), brownies (melt the chocolate first), etc. etc.?
Though it is far harder to have stupid accidents with most of these baked goods.
Brits are wusses. Any temperature over 80 is unbearably hot, anything under 40 is life threatening cold. Midwesterners just roll their eyes at them.
First they have to learn how to brew and serve a decent cold lager. After that they have to be able to make a decent cup of hot black coffee.
I was watching this a couple of weeks ago, and the heat was a problem in the tent. One of the people mentioned the temperature outside in Celsius, and when I converted it, I realized they were complaining about “hot” summer temps in the upper 70’s. As a long-time midwesterner, with regular heat waves of 100F+ that last days and with regular cold snaps where you’ll have at least a week of -10F every winter (my personal best was a -31F day in Minneapolis in the 90’s), I just can’t help but laugh.
https://www.instagram.com/agreatbritishbakingproject/
Hot in July in the UK! Who knew? Well Charles Dickens did. Writing in 1843, A Christmas Carol, he refers to the ‘Dog Days’ which were known at the time as being typically the hottest time of the year (3 July-11 August, coinciding with the rising oil the ‘dog star’ Sirius). So sorry folks, nothing new here; move along now!