Michael McCarthy: Another summer of sodden misery. Is it bad luck – or worse?
Tuesday, 9 September 2008
Getty
Flash floods affected much of the country following August's high rainfall
It's getting wearisomely familiar, isn't it? Last summer's toll of sodden misery is with us again as people are flooded out of their homes from one end of the land to the other and, for the second year running, a famous medieval abbey is an island. You could be forgiven for thinking, is this really all just coincidence?
Perhaps it is. But perhaps it isn't – that's an increasingly real possibility. It may be this is very much the shape of the future as climate change takes hold.
The qualification to remember is that weather and climate are not the same. Weather is what happens over this week; climate is what happens over this century. There is great variability in weather and very wet times do occur from time to time, perfectly naturally, and meteorologists and climate scientists are very reluctant to ascribe any single weather event to the influence of a changing climate. In fact, this has only been done once in western Europe, with the heatwave of August 2003, which killed 18,000 old people in Paris and was so far off the scale in terms of temperature extremes that scientists have no doubt that global warming played a part in its ferocity.
So you are unlikely to find a responsible scientist openly attributing the marooning of Tewskesbury to climate change. Yet. The proximate cause of this year's wet summer is known – the shifting southwards of the jetstream, the rapidly moving band of air between the polar and the tropical zones that directs the course of low-pressure systems across the Atlantic, and that may be caused by La Nina, the occasional cooling of the central and eastern parts of the Pacific ocean, and next year the picture may look very different.
On the other hand, there are some points that appear increasingly telling. Since the big floods of the autumn of 2001, which John Prescott, then in charge of the environment, described as "a wake-up call" from climate change, major inundations have started to occur with a regularity that was absent in the 20th century.
And the unusually heavy rain of the past two summers is certainly consistent with predictions of what will happen in Britain with global warming (a warming atmosphere holds more moisture).
Sir Michael Pitt, who reported to the Government two-and-a-half months ago on last summer's floods, certainly took the view that the future held more of the same.
He said that the importance of flood risk should now be "brought up alongside the risk of terrorism or a major flu pandemic" and to emphasis this, there should be a cabinet committee concerned solely with flooding. It is slowly starting to dawn on people that the future is not only hot – the future is wet.
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Comments
17 Comments
One of very few benefits of the growing destabilization of what was the UK's mild temperate climate,
is the fact that an increasingly hot & wet regime may raise the yields from UK forestry,
which in turn advances the viability of reforestation via traditional coppices for energy,
including yields of firewood, charcoal, woodgas, syngas, methanol, biodiesel & electricity,
and also for the farm-yield gains via carbon banking by means of plowing-in charcoal under the Terra Preta process.
However, the growing climatic destabilization of agriculture (to which, as a farmer, I can attest personally)
seems increasingly likely to impose famine on those countries lacking income from the export of manufactured goods or extracted materials,
particularly where traditional farming has been so suppressed as to drive most people off the land.
It is small consolation that the ever more shrill shills, who now infest every forum they can find,
will also starve, along with their children.
Posted by Lewis C | 14.09.08, 16:32 GMT
People are so easily duped. Especially when dealing with large numbers or complex systems. It is easier to believe someone else’s fears than taking the effort to learn the truth. Example:
All the energy man has ever produced through all history (atomic, geo ,Hydro, fossil fuels, everything from the first fire built to the last car fueled….all combined -- is woefully insufficient of the energy needed to power the weather cycle of earth for 24 hours….And insufficient to power the sun (which controls most of our weather) for one second. So my ecobox electric car is going to save the planet…Please. Why can’t the truth be good enough…Just be good stewards.
Global warming is just the newest religion of mass hysteria to sacrifice to for those that know no God or worship the god within and make themselves feel worthy.
See them worship at this link… Don’t forget to add the (www.)
break.com/index/hippies-wail-for-dead-trees.html
Posted by ???? | 13.09.08, 14:15 GMT
Oh please go and learn some science. The wet weather is in part due to the North Atlantic Oscillation being in its positive phase, giving us wet weather in northern Europe and dry hot weather in southern Europe. It is a 30 year cycle that we are about half way through. Remember the hot dry summers when we were little? They well return when the NAO is in it's negative phase.
Environmental scientists study past climate change, the very basic end being the Milankovich cycle, then get information from things like the Vostock ice cores, ocean core sediments, oxygen 16 and oxygen 18 fractionation, and a whole variety of paleoenvironmental dating methods. We therefore know the NATURAL cycles over a prolonged period i.e. since the start of the quarternary when the Panama straights closed and gave us the thermohaline circulation we rely on some 2m years ago. This is our current climate system. That is how we know it is going out of a NATURAL cycle and into an anthropogentic one.
Posted by Jo | 12.09.08, 16:37 GMT
@Andy Kadir-Buxton - have had a look at your web site and it turns out you are a loony. Punching the mentally ill, rape victims, paedophiles etc. very hard on both ears does not make them them no longer mentally ill, nor does a rape victim feel better. There is no "Kadir-Buxton" method - you just make people concussed and/or permanently brain damaged, possibly fatally. I don't think the NHS will be adopting it as a medical technique.
Your Buxton Geothermal power station, that is, a very deep hole ground to the mantel, pour in water, bring to the boil and drive steam turbine) is unlikely to work too. If you managed to drill down to the earth's mantle, you would at most heat one house, or a small number of houses if you had a wide enough well. You would then need to pump the water into the central heating. it may be hot down there, but just a well won't give enough contact area for heat transfer, so won't boil. Heat flow is proportional to to temperature difference.
Ha ha ha!
Posted by Helmut Pfersmann | 09.09.08, 21:50 GMT
Its Midgets people!.
mark my words its Midgets i tell ya!!!!.
Posted by Richard | 09.09.08, 17:31 GMT
Climate Change is now an industry employing thousands of scientists whose livelihood depends on everyone continuing to believe in... Climate Change. A heatwave in Paris? Climate change. Wet British summer? Climate change. Next year, if we get a nice dry sunny British summer... eh... that will be down to climate change too. Sound ridiculous? Not to the average Independent reader, who is fed a constant diet of Climate Change stories along with all the anti-American, pro-terrorist, Iraq war tales...
Posted by Sean Hunter | 09.09.08, 15:08 GMT
How ridiulous, cold is now the new hot. Unprecedented rain? Not if you check the history books:
1751-1766. These 10 wet summers in a row produced an overall anomaly of 127% of the modern-era mean.
1799 22nd June: beginning of long rainy spell: only 8 days without rain in a spell lasting until 17th November. (17 weeks).
1879 The three 'high-summer' months of June, July & August each had nearly double average (1961-90) rainfall amounts.
The cold, wet weather delayed the ripening of the harvest, so that in East Anglia in some places the corn had not been gathered in by Christmas.
1927-1930: A run of 4 consecutive WET years; not achieved again until 1965-68
1952 (15th/16th August): THE LYNMOUTH DISASTROUS FLOODS
34 people were killed, hundreds were homeless and many houses were demolished with cars carried away. It really is time journalists did some basic research before spouting nonsense
Posted by DennisA | 09.09.08, 11:36 GMT
Further comment if I may: Re-earlier comment regarding Laings who built 1960's iconic Carlisle Civic Centre. My late relative Chief County Surveyor for CCC was at a meeting when man from 'Laings' the builders told them that it was'nt the right place to build the Civic Centre as it was the old river sandbank liable to flooding....
The basement flooded for decades and Laings have been proved right so blame the authorities for allowing builds on floodplains.
Rumours abound now that Carlisle City Council want to demolish this iconic building which some regard as an eyesore blot on a major border route into England from Scotland - More expense for ratepayers as mistakes from past decades unfold?
Posted by Roy Gadsby | 09.09.08, 10:07 GMT
If we dont spend money tackling climate change, we will spend even more on flood defences, and on the military as we fight for oil and food.
Time to wake up people.
Posted by Ian | 09.09.08, 09:38 GMT
I'm no scientist. I always held the belief that decades of exploding tons of nuclear devices into the upper atmosphere must unbalance air turbulance and cloud cover, as forces of wind are catapulted too an excessive degree unormal on planet earth.
In regard flooding it is known that since privatation authorities have increasingly NOT cleaned storm drains. They have argued over the cost (who pays...?) of new floodbanks for decades against new and old properties that in some cases where built on floodplains with farmers draining fields close to natural river banks which in some degree hold flood water.
My late relative was chief county surveyor for Cumberland County Council in the 1950's and added to me when Carlisle was flooded.... " They should'nt have allowed builds on floodplains, Tesco should not have been allowed to build on (on platform) and I was there when Carlisle City Council was told by 'Laings not to build on an old river sand bank.
Posted by Roy Gadsby | 09.09.08, 09:18 GMT
17 Comments