Tuesday 24 July 2007

The biggest floods since Noah got his sea legs?

It's been impossible to watch, listen or read news of Britain's floods without a certain phrase being rudely inserted into the reportage: "global warming" (or the phrase to which it's changed since temperatures began flattening instead of rising, "climate change.") Said the near hysterical Baroness Mucky Muck on behalf of some environmental bureaucracy on the BBC the other night, "this is what climate change will look like." [Barf.] But writing in The Times, Paul Simons brings Shocking News: Britain's a Wet Country.
...Britain is drowning under floods of biblical proportions and nothing like it has been seen since Noah got his sea legs. In a wave of hysteria, the cry goes out for millions of sandbags, better drains and more flood defences. And fingers of blame are pointing at global warming.

But a simple fact has been overlooked: Britain is a wet country... Of course, British summers weren’t always as wet as this year’s, but some were certainly worse. 1912 was the wettest and dullest summer on record, far ahead of this summer’s downpours. It pretty much rained all summer, reaching a peak in late August, when a seven-inch downpour in one day in Norfolk left Norwich completely marooned in a sea of mud and devastation. Even that deluge is overshadowed by the 11 inches of rain that fell in less than a day on Dorset in July 1955 – about half of London’s yearly average rainfall. The longest nonstop rainfall record in the UK was more than 58 hours in London during June 1903, in a summer when there was an epidemic of lung disease in farmworkers caused by mouldy hay and grain.
Read on here to avoid ahistorical panic. [Hat tip Samizdata]

10 comments:

Brian S said...

Last year at this time London had temperatures in the mid thirties and it was loudly proclaimed that this was evidence of global warming. Britain would become like the south of Spain and we could expect temperatures touching nearly 40 degrees this summer.

Clearly that was in violation of the first rule of British weather forecasting: never predict a warm summer!

So now the big wet has arrived does anyone want to admit their error? No, it's all global warming is going to lead to higher rainfall in Britain.

Seemingly there is no weather pattern which cannot be attributed to global warming.

Anonymous said...

"Seemingly there is no weather pattern which cannot be attributed to global warming."

Last week saw Sydney having its coldest days in some 25+ years, the same week that saw the ABC screaming heresy at Durkin and indeed anybody who might question AGW and the findings of the IPCC.

Well, I enjoyed the irony anyway.

Oh, and there's no bigger 'wet' in Australia right now, than John Howard.

Anonymous said...

Brian and Sus...that's why they changed "global warming" to "climate change"...clever F@#*ers.

Anonymous said...

test

Anonymous said...

For once PC has a good point. The media (unlike climate scientists) often do latch on to "global warming" as a way of making sense of extreme weather events. This shows they don't understand the difference between weather and climate.

So, once again for the paying seats: individual weather events neither "prove" nor "disprove" human climate change.

Anonymous said...

By the way, new research indicates that climate change is likely to blame for a trend of greater rainfall, while underpinning the idea that individual weather events are not proof or disproof of human-caused climate change in and of themselves.

The new study, carried out jointly by several national climate research institutes using their supercomputer climate models, including the Hadley Centre of the UK Met Office, does not prove that any one event, including the rain of the past few days in Britain, is climate-change related.

But it certainly supports the idea, by showing that in recent decades rainfall has increased over several areas of the world, including the mid-latitudes of the northern hemisphere, and linking this directly, for the first time, to global warming caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.


The study will need to be given time to be digested by the scientific community, but note that there is no study showing a lack of correlation between human greenhouse gas emissions and extreme weather events.

Anonymous said...

More from the report touting 'the new study' to which EVO points:

"The conclusions of the new rainfall study are regarded as all the more robust as they are the joint work of several major national climate research bodies, led by Environment Canada, with each using its own supercomputer climate model."

And there'd be no authoritarians associated with Environment Canada, eh.

Anonymous said...

That's the climate porn industry for you. They keep churning out objectional filth in the form of theoretical climate "models". The "models" are the porn stars and they just keep doing the most disgusting things. Guess there must be a demand for it among the depraved.

Trouble is, the perverts insist their fantasies be played for real. There is no excuse for demanding the destruction of Liberty and individual property rights just to satisfy some snuff movie fantasy (like Al Gore's latest production).

How about the climate porn perverts snuff themsleves first and leave the rest of us alone. That'd be excellent.

H

Anonymous said...

Eddie wrote: 'individual weather events neither "prove" nor "disprove" human climate change.'

Quite right.

And neither do theoretical "models".

The Little Green Man

Anonymous said...

Hamilton had -4 frosts with -7 wind chill recently.
Now when I was a weather boy at Tauhei primary school (Waikato/Hauraki reigon) in the 1970's I remember reading a -4 on the school 'weather station'.
So as far as I can see...no climate change!
-4 is Bloody cold!
In fact I am sure Summers were much hotter back then.