Floods of warming excuses

Andrew Bolt is back:

New Prime Minister Gordon Brown - under fire for reacting too slowly to Britain's devastating summer floods - goes all holier than though, evoking the usual scaepgoat of the bungling New Age politician:

Obviously like every advanced industrial country we’re coming to terms with some of the issues surrounding climate change.

Great spin! Instead of being just the leader of a Labor Party that's failed to fix ageing flood defences, Brown poses as an apostle of the new faith.

Small problem.

All the climate change models actually predicted less summer rain in Britain, not more.

Just check what the usual suspects were saying before these floods…

From the BBC weather centre:

In April 2002 a new report, called UKCIP02, was released showing climate scenarios for the UK. These scenarios present four different possibilities of how our climate might change. The scenarios were based on four different scenarios produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change following new information about predicted global emissions;

The summer will see less precipitation than we see now and will therefore be much drier.

From the Guardian:

Geoff Jenkins, head of the Hadley Centre, released the figures at the climate change convention meeting in Milan, where politicians are still trying to reach agreement on the Kyoto protocol to start legally binding reductions in greenhouse gas releases to the atmosphere;

Winters will become wetter and summers may become drier across all of the UK. The largest changes will be in the south and east, where summer rainfall may decline by up to 50% by the 2080s.

From Britain's Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, just four months ago:

For the UK, climate change means hotter, drier summers (more heat waves), milder wetter winters , higher sea levels and an incresed flood risk to coastal areas.

From Britain's Energy Saving Trust:

The effects of climate change can be seen in our every day lives. During the last 40 years, the UK's winters have grown warmer, with heavier bursts of rain. The summers are growing drier and hotter - one of the starkest changes over the last 200 years is our summers have become drier causing widespread water shortages.

From Britain&'s WWF-UK:

Winters will become wetter and summers may become drier throughout the UK.


Never mind what the models said then. Drier, wetter - who cares? Climate change evangelists will grab any freak weather event like this as proof of the global warming catastrophe they so desperately want.

Michael Hanlon, though, just gives the boring facts in the Daily Mail:

We have simply forgotten that relatively heavy rainfall in midsummer is the norm - not the exception - in our windy Atlantic archipelago.

The records of rainfall in Britain contain numerous instances of more rain falling in a single day than would be expected in an entire month. On May 29, 1912, nearly five inches of rain fell in three hours near the town of Louth in Lincolnshire. The flood-water practically razed the town and killed 22 people.

Even more spectacular was the deluge that occurred three months later in Norfolk: Brundall, near Norwich, experienced more than eight inches of rain on one hellish August day - roughly double the total measured anywhere in the recent floods.

Much of Norfolk was still under water six months later.

And on August 15 that year, a depression moving up the Bristol Channel deposited nine inches of rain over Exmoor, spawning the lethal flood that was nearly to wash away the village of Lynmouth.

More than 30 people were killed.

The record for rainfall in one 24-hour period occurred on July 18, 1955, when nearly 12 inches of rain fell on parts of Dorset.

So there is certainly nothing unprecedented about these floods, and similar deluges occurred long before we worried about global warming.

And Tim Blair puts the icing on the cake:

Beset by unexpected summer rain, George Monbiot questions the science:

It wasn’t meant to happen like this. The climate scientists told us that our winters would become wetter and our summers drier. So I can’t claim that these floods were caused by climate change, or are even consistent with the models. But, like the ghost of Christmas yet to come, they offer us a glimpse of the possible winter world that we will inhabit if we don’t sort ourselves out.

So, although Britain's present weather seems to have nothing to do with climate change, it still indicates a future climate change deathscape - that won't be warmer, but colder. Robert Fisk, who misses his snow, will be delighted.