Climate change...my arse!

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article2120684.ece?openComment=true

Shocking news: Britain?s a wet country

What on earth is going on with our weather? Three months? worth of rain fell
in a few places last week, 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. Yes, it
comes as a shock. Over the past few years we?ve become so used to years of
scorching, Mediterranean-like summers, when hosepipe bans were the norm,
vines were bursting with vintage grapes and water diviners were doing big
business. But the truth is that our summers are supposed to be wet: it?s our
climate.

The accoutrements of the British summer holiday were thick pullovers and
waterproofs. You expected to shiver on wet promenades, ?Rain stopped play?
was the national mantra and sunblock cream was something for film stars and
models. That is why the August Bank Holiday was shunted to the end of the
month, because the beginning of August was so awful.

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.

Farther back still were the sodden summers of 1845 to 1850, when jungle-like
humidity and relentless rains triggered the potato blight outbreak that led
to the great Irish potato famine, in which a million people died and another
million emigrated from Ireland.

Rain is only the half of it. The abysmal summer of 1956 was an assault
course of monsoonal rains, big floods, giant hail, houses set ablaze by
lightning, howling gales and miserable cold. Just to rub it in, August was
one of the coldest and wettest on record across Britain.

It is a very human tendency to blame someone for the vagaries of the
weather. A run of bad summers in the 1950s was blamed on nuclear bomb tests,
the rains during the First World War were blamed on artillery going off on
the Western Front and two centuries ago it was the battles of the Napoleonic
Wars that were blamed for upsetting nature. And now it?s global warming.

But climate change was supposed to be making our summers drier, not wetter.
Leaving that aside, even if we accept that the recent downpours are a sign
of global warming, then a single wet summer hardly adds up to any particular
trend. No, it?s far more plausible to explain this latest wet spell as a
natural blip in the climate.

If so, then which politician or minister is going to have the courage to
propose spending billions of pounds on building new river walls,
embankments, ditches and other flood defences? How will we feel about
spending large sums of money on such big projects when next year may bring
another drought ? and the inevitable demands for more reservoirs, leak-proof
pipes and desalination plants?

And let?s not forget that an even greater threat comes from the sea. A
recent study reveals that London and the Thames Estuary is subsiding faster
than anyone had estimated; and with sea levels rising relentlessly, the
Thames Barrier is looking increasingly vulnerable. We need to fix that
problem before London disappears under a storm surge like New Orleans.

The hysteria over this summer reveals more about our education. The daily
forecasts and news reports are all facts and no explanation about why the
weather is behaving the way it is. The explanation for the past few days of
drama is that Britain lies in a part of the world that is finely balanced
between wet and dry, warm and cold weather. The dividing line is the jet
stream, a river of wind rushing overhead a few miles high. This summer the
jet stream has been very sluggish and buckled into big loops, leaving
Britain drenched on the wet side of one of those loops. However, on the
other side of the jet stream large parts of Europe are roasting in a
ferocious heatwave that has killed dozens of people and brought wildfires
blazing across Greece.

This European split has happened before. In the summer of 2002, a large
swath of Central Europe was battered by rains that set off huge floods along
the Elbe and Danube, drowning more than 100 people.

But there is another story about this summer that has gone virtually
unnoticed. Despite all the gloom and doom, temperatures are fairly normal
for the time of year. In days gone by, a wet summer would invariably be
cold, even with snow in July and frost in August.

The prize for the most diabolical summer of rain and cold should be awarded
to that of 1816. Not for nothing was it called ?the year without summer? ?
this time of great storms, massive rains and appalling cold led to the crops
rotting, the price of bread soaring and food riots breaking out. Some
200,000 people died of famine across Europe, which was then followed by a
typhus epidemic.

So, let?s look on the bright side. At least we haven?t got any hosepipe
bans ? and the reservoirs are full.


.

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