Hell, I remember last year around this time I went to a beer festival wearing a T-shirt and a hat. But today we still wake up to temperatures below zero, we still get flurries of snow, and the sun doesn’t seem to warm us the least bit. What happened? Are we being punished?

Although most people are only complaining about the cold, no-one seems to know why this particular predicament is upon us. Thus, I decided to investigate.

May I present to you: the culprit – several, in fact. There’s talk all over the Internet about this being a ‘La Niña’ year. This is a phenomenon in which the sea surface temperature across the Pacific Ocean is between 3 and 5 degrees lower than usual, which has worldwide repercussions as higher pressure fronts force arctic currents to spin clockwise and so funnel cold air from the arctic into mainland Europe, Asia and America. This is where it gets really complicated.

Other, more hilarious accounts are told by the paranoid and suspicious of the Internet, who talk of global cooling attributed to the sun dying prematurely. There are fantastic claims (and unfortunately, they’re not presented as jokes) that the meteor that almost hit Russia this past February 15 was actually, and I couldn’t come up with something this ridiculous if I tried, a chunk of the sun.

Whatever the reason, be it scientific or straight out of a bad summer blockbuster, we should be expecting at least another two weeks of sad weather before things start to improve. It’ll come to pass… I hope.