Will Scarborough be the next Barcelona?
Tonight I'm presenting the weather for Look North from the White Rose Awards - the annual event celebrating the best of Yorkshire's tourism industry. The industry has had a great year. A combination of recession, a weak pound and the early promise of a barbeque summer (!) meant more people stayed at home.
In fact Yorkshire tourism should get a huge boost in years to come if climate predictions are correct.
Based on the most optimistic low emissions scenario, average summer temperatures in Scarborough by 2050 will be around 23C and summers will be 10% drier. Looking at the high emissions scenario, summer temperatures by 2080 could be as high as 26C - similar to those in Barcelona in June. The Yorkshire tourist industry would be transformed.
But the climate change message has been a difficult sell here in Yorkshire over the last few years. July, in Bradford, was the wettest since 1920. In fact it's only the fourth time since records began in the middle 1700s that we have had three consecutive Julys with more than 100mm of rain - 2007, 2008 and 2009 were all very wet.
The good news is that we have never before had four very wet Julys in a row. Also, we came very close to having another sequence of wet Julys in 1956, 1957 and 1958. And what followed in 1959 was one of the driest summers of the last century, with stand pipes in the streets! Some food for thought before you throw in the towel on the great British summer and decide to head abroad next year
And talking of wet summers, an interesting snippet I found out in a meeting with weather boffins last year. I was complaining that our viewers just weren't buying this drier and warmer summer story that climate models were telling us about. On the contrary I said, August 2004 was the wettest in Sheffield since 1922; and the summers of 2007 and 2008 were poor (and now 2009). How can we expect the viewers to accept what the climate models were saying, I said?
The answer surprised me. It turned out that looking at twenty model simulations from across the world, all said winters would be milder and wetter. All said summers would be warmer. But although a majority (13) said summers would be drier, a sizeable minority (7) said summers would get wetter. That's more than a third. That was news to me, and I'm sure news to a lot of you, too.
Hello, I’m Paul Hudson, weather presenter and climate correspondent for BBC Look North in Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. I've been interested in the weather and climate for as long as I can remember, and worked as a forecaster with the Met Office for more than ten years locally and at the international unit before joining the BBC in October 2007. Here I divide my time between forecasting and reporting on stories about climate change and its implications for people's everyday lives. 
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