cliveb
Head Pro
Well yes, as a general rule the UK's weather is less predictable.What I suspect he's referring to is the fact that in this country we struggle to predict the type of weather we are going to get and cannot normally plan accordingly. I spent some time in Canada as a kid as I have relatives there. They used to put snow chains on the cars on a specific weekend. Almost invariably, the snow would hit within days. We have virtually zero chance of emulating this. In America, probably due to the land mass, they can be very accurate with weather predictions. As a small Island, our weather is incredibly variable. We therefore get relative "extremes" of weather - Torrential rain when mild sun was predicted 24hrs earlier.
(But we're not unique. My wife has a friend who lives in Alberta, and a few years ago she told us that one day it was -20 celcius with snow on the ground and the next day it was +25).
But the basic point is that the UK's weather is never THAT extreme.
When we have torrential rain, we get some unpleasant flooding and a bit of damage. Other countries get entire infrastructures destroyed.
When it gets hot in the UK, things are a bit uncomfortable. Other countries have people dying by the thousand.
If you want to define UK weather as "extreme", then you'd have to describe the stuff they get in some other places as "apocalyptic".
It's the very fact that the UK's weather is never that bad which means it's not cost-effective to invest in the means of coping on those rare occasions when is does get OTT.
There's no point in spending the sort of money required to have systems and equipment to deal with stuff that only happens once in a blue moon.