What a wonderful thing climate change is. A mundane, obvious phrase (of course the climate is changing), promoted well past its paygrade by the unproven suggestion that humans cause all or most of it. And what a splendid excuse it has become for any past failings – and those to come – for public bodies charged with keeping our infrastructure in good working order.
Earlier this week, the Government-sponsored Natural Resources Wales (NRW) cheered up its local population no end by telling them that, “If flooding hasn’t happened to you in the past, it doesn’t mean it won’t happen in the future.” This was the message after a series of storms – Ciara, Dennis and Jorge – in February 2020 served as a “stark warning that record-breaking flooding is becoming a harsh new reality for Welsh communities in the future”. NRW chief executive Clare Pillman went on to add: “Climate scientists have underlined that record floods are not anomalous, they are the beginning of a new normal, and the new records will continue to be exceeded, year after year.”
For some inexplicable reason, the “new normal” does not seem to have affected the amount of rain that Wales gets. Variations going back to 1850 are barely noticeable.
Wales is a very wet place. Its geography inevitably leads to heavy precipitation. Low pressure systems and storms racing in from the Atlantic eagerly dump rain over the first hilly warm land they encounter. Over 1,450mm of rain falls annually in Wales, compared with the U.K. average around 1,200mm. Cardiff and Swansea are two of the wettest cities in Britain.
Like many public bodies, NRW is now firmly signed up to the Net Zero political agenda and takes regular opportunities to blame bad weather on human-caused climate change. But flooding has long been a problem in Wales. Reporting on the weather in December 1960, the Met Office noted a complex low pressure system that led to “exceptionally” heavy rain in South Wales and southern England.
It continued: “On December 3rd, many places in South Wales had over four inches [101mm] of rain, five and a half inches [140mm] being recorded in 20 hours in the Rhondda Valley. A total of seven inches [178 mm] on the Brecon Beacons during the first three days of the month, resulting in serious widespread floods in Glamorgan.”
The phobia over climate change is very recent. In 2015, Cardiff City Council commissioned a 150 page flood risk management plan. It accepted there was a problem with flooding and went into great technical detail about flood defences. These included basic engineering housekeeping duties such as keeping drains and culverts in good repair. Climate change was barely mentioned, and typically only in parentheses – “(and related aspects such as climate change)”; there is little sign of it forming an urgent consideration.
In March 2020, the BBC reported that Storm Dennis was a “taste of things to come” for Wales. The Welsh valleys “are set to see as much as 50% more rain in the next decade”, according to a weather expert. The expert quoted was Professor Liz Bentley, the chief executive of the Met Office, who went on to claim that a warming climate is causing more rain and bigger storms and would lead to more extreme flooding. These storms used to be “maybe” one in 100 year events. “Now they’re happening probably once every five years,” she added.
Meanwhile back in the real world, the Met Office’s latest annual climate report shows that the ferocity of storms across the U.K. measured by various wind speeds has fallen sharply since 2015. In fact since 1970, there is no indication that storms have become more violent – a note of reassurance as Storm Eunice arrives. They are well down on the highs recorded in the 1980s and 90s. Maybe the fact that, according to Met Office records, the 2010s were colder than the 2000s in the UK, had something to do with it, but then again, probably not.
In 2017, two researchers at Liverpool University, Neil Macdonald and Heather Sangster, published a paper looking at severe flooding across Britain going back to 1750. They found that a recent apparent increase in flooding was not unprecedented. “While the period since 2000 has been considered as flood rich, the period 1970-2000 is flood poor.” They added: “Which may partly explain why recent floods are often perceived as extreme events.”
The researchers found strong correlations going back to 1750 across Europe between high flood periods and natural variations in the weather. The natural variations identified included solar activity and events such as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation. This latter activity is seen as important, since a “clear correlation is shown between higher North Atlantic sea temperatures and increased flood events across much of Britain”.
In conclusion they state: “The much publicised (popular media) apparent change in flood frequency since 2000 may reflect natural variability, as there appears to be no shift in long term flooding frequency.”
Stop Press: Bonkers Independent journalist Victoria Richards claims naming the recent storm after a woman is “sexist”. Woke gobbledegook par excellence.
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Storm Eunuch has just arrived outside and it’s not much to write home about. (Even though I am home.)
Likewise. I’ve seen worse in my teacup. My daughter’s school was closed for this ’emergency’. (Hmmm… I see a pattern emerging. Is this the first instance of a ‘climate lockdown’?)
Loads of schools closed all over the place. Where I am, bin collections suspended for “safety” reasons. Maybe just as well, as y wheelie bin has been blown over.
You can’t be too careful.
I hope that my facemask and plastic shield combo also protects me from the rain.
No they don’t. They protect other people.
The sole reason that it’s raining is that some people refuse to carry umbrellas to protect others from rain!
Is there an anti-meme for this?
“Save our wheelie bins” – stay safe!
There are people that have been sent home the last couple of days from a government building because the wind turbines installed for that building have become dangerous in the high winds and have bits falling off.
I kid you not.
Clown Planet
Ha ha!
Whom the gods destroy they first make green.
Hilarious
My local Royal Mail collection office is closed “due to adverse weather conditions” which meant I couldn’t collect a very important parcel.
Reading is usually quite a bit of an oasis insofar bad weather goes but the last night must have been quite wild. Lots of (fairly small) branches torn from trees everywhere, wheelie bins blown over in the streets and a highway maintenance construction site (on Oxford Road) whose fences were basically blown to bits despite the sand sacks supposed to prevent that.
I mean it is topping lorries, trees, ripping the roof of the O2, setting wind records and BigJetTV on YT is showing some pretty amazing landing attempts and Heathrow. Yes my house is still standing but still.
It’s nothing we haven’t experienced before, apart from the shrill media alarmism.
Obviously. But it hasn’t been a non-event, either. If things start to fall over in Reading, they’re probably flying away elsewhere.
My house is actually juddering! All the mirrors are rippling. Very strange…
Fracking…
That’s good to hear. Unfortunately I now have an ex woodstore, an ex greenhouse and it looks like my back fence will be gone shortly
Put your face nappy on and get boosted. Or your fence is doomed.
Sorry Annie, I find that comment somewhat ignorant. Expected better from you.
Unless it was meant as a joke.
And don’t eat meat. The cattle’s methane farts are getting stronger.
I’ve had to effect emergency roof repairs, others are clearly shrugging it off as a little bit windy… if it demonstrates anything, it’s perhaps that the ‘one size fits all, scare the bejeebus out of everyone’ approach doesn’t necessarily work for everyone?
Like: ‘we’re all going to die if you don’t all get a vaccine’. It’s like they’ve never heard about Chicken Little…
Plus, if it was Up North, it wouldn’t be being covered at all!
You’re so right, one size does not fit all. I’d waited 30 years to have a greenhouse and have only had it three years, it helped me get through the last two for sure. Some people seem to have a very ‘I’m alright Jack’ attitude, when actually we should all be aware that not everyone’s circumstances are the same.
Chris Whitty says better to stay at home and wear a mask in case the wind carries Covid!
But one of those moralising adverts (the one with two healthy young people sitting on a bench a long way apart) said: “it’s safer outdoors, because the virus particles are blown away“.
A reflection of the times we are living in, I suppose, but I have absolutely no idea if this is true, or not….
Its a case of “Much ado about nothing”. quite normal really, but hey we must keep the fear factor going.
Where do you live? If you are in a red zone I wouldn’t be complacent. We have had Eunice since this morning. Two of our three immediate neighbours have large trees down – luckily little damage and no injury – they were both big enough to easily kill someone (We have only lost several feet of wood panel fencing and the door of a garden shed). My mother (aged 100) who lives by herself 30 miles away has no power until tomorrow morning because another large tree has fallen across the power line.
By heck, it blew my wheely bin over twice! I’ve managed to survive the trauma.
Depends where you are. My daughter in Essex has lost five fence panels and gained some of her neighbours’ fencing, tools and much else, and her two rabbits, who have the run of the normally secure garden with plenty of places for shelter, have disappeared. She’s currently searching for them. The place is wrecked.
“By the end of the fourth century Britain was experiencing cooler, wetter decades that would lead to the flooding of the Fens and the Vale of York. By the middle of the fifth century much of the lower-lying land between wold edge and river had become untenable. A string of Roman-period settlements along the south side of the vale [of Pickering] was abandoned in favour of drier, more elevated locations close to the spring line and the shrine.”
The First Kingdom, p 124, Max Adams.
Severe over-reaction warning in place around the country.
MSM on alert for anything vaguely newsworthy
A lighting panel almost came off the ceiling in the public library where I work, due to wind coming in through the automatic entrance doors.
Yep. That exciting.
LIVE FROM THE STORM!
‘That’s a cast iron drain cover’ – MSM nightly news
“Spread the chaos panic and fear’ ( any subject will do!) – the new MSM FT Day Job.
Rather than journalists going about reporting on newsworthy topics we now have 24/7 propaganda with the government psych ops teams scaring the public into doing what they are told. Covid, Climate, WW3 its incessant scaremongering is a Crime Against Humanity.
Im no climate junkie but its a bad storm. Lots of damage down my way. Climate realists dont do themselves any favours by denying the obvious.
It’s not obvious everywhere…
You are arguing for the sake of it. Its perfectly obvious the UK was subjected to a ferocious storm. Only an idiot would deny that.
I live on the Northants/Rutland border and it’s not obvious to me that there’s been a “ferocious storm”: the neighbours trampoline got blown over but apart from that on my late afternoon dogwalk I saw no evidence of damage, and none of the other dogwalkers I met mentioned anything.
In contrast, a storm a couple of years ago blew the roofs of two nearby garages and I was seriously worried for my carport roof.
Your local experiences are just that.
To be fair, it is pretty blowy out there. For the first time in the 15 years I been living here I felt the whole bloody house shake in the gusts! Bit scary. But the birds are still nonchalantly eating on the feeders and the bins haven’t moved…so all good there. I lived through the 1987 storm. NOTHING, thank God, has ever come close to that!
First blustery day really since I moved into the flat I am currently renting, has highlighted some issues with the uPVC windows not being snug in their frames, nothing major. Lots of facemasks blowing past the window in the gusts though.
Weather happens. Duh. Or be hubristic enough to try and control it.
Either Nature is Nature or we can transition the world into an air-con system – with emphasis on the con.
I live in NE Wales and right now its a bit wet and windy but nothing too dramatic. Yet all the kids are at home again with many working mothers unable to work. Since NRW/Cyfoeth Naturiol Cymru was amalgamated in 2013 it has made some deeply questionable decisions and more recently has seen climate change and the Welsh governments idiotic and unfounded declaration of a ‘climate emergency’ as the excuse that keeps giving. The flood problems are largely down to their failure to maintain watercourses for ideological and budget excuses and downsizing the necessary in house expertise and capacity.
Think of how much worse these Welsh floods would have been if we’d not demolished our coal power stations or converted them to burn trees.
Just because wood emits ~one third more carbon dioxide per heat unit than coal doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. Wood is green.
Tress soak up flood water.
It’s OK. The trees are imported from across the Atlantic so we don’t have to worry about deforestation impacts. Same goes for steel from China, coal and gas from all over, electricity from France, nurses from everywhere etc. It’s all imported – which means our net zero targets are looking good. Balance of payments not so good but that’s not important any more.
We also imported Covid, lockdowns and all those proxy face masks.
South coast, Yes its windy with a bit of rain, the local school has closed, they are promoting climate change and announcing new weather records..
Not much of a storm here in Bristol. It was more windy on Wednesday when, with the wind behind me, I was forced into a trot on the Downs.
I am becoming increasingly sceptical these days – even entertaining the idea that TPTB could be promoting anything that increase angst in the general population. For example, reporting gust speeds without average speeds overplays things. Closing schools causes alarm.
According to BBC Weather this morning, at 2pm it was forecasting 70+ mph winds. Now it’s downgraded that to 51mph. And it took them a while to change the forecast too. Three hours ago I walked across Chirk aqueduct enjoying the breeze and a blue sky. When I got back from my walk, the BBC weather report had it down as 44mph winds here at that time.
I took the opportunity to teach my daughter a lesson in perception. I showed her the erroneous BBC weather site data, and then we looked out of the window at the spring-like day. I think she learned more from that one demonstration than if she’d been at school.
Very true. The mainstream media – particularly the BBC – are showing themselves to be purposeful sensationalists. It is instances like this – and protest marches that are never reported – that will gradually cause viewers to wake up.
I use a weather app on my phone called WeatherPro. It shows recent moving radar and satellite footage. That is less likely to be spun and gives a good idea of how reliable predictions are.
Well according to the EDP now,lunchtime, is peak Eunice.Mid Norfolk bit blowy ,bird feeders dancing around but other than that its just another bit of normal weather…
Catastrophe!!!!
One of our bird feeders has blown off the tree.
What am I to do!!!!!!!
Quick, switch the heating off, that will stop CO2 production and the wind will fall.
Make sure you put all your garden birds in cages until it’s safe enough outside. Three weeks should do the trick (maybe). If it saves just one sparrow, it’s worth it.
Campaign for mandatory hard hats against airborne bird-feeders!
Phone Boris Johnson and ask him!
Perhaps you ate too much meat and farted? We all need to better ourselves to save the planet
Facts and Global Warming propaganda have nothing in common.
Uh oh….
https://spanishnewstoday.com/eu-proposes-second-brexit-referendum_1737135-a.html??region=7#bottom_navigate
That’s nothing to do with Eunice – that’s EU nasty.
That’s very good; have a star…..
They won’t bloody give up.
well they have a rather large hole in their budget now that we suckers are no longer throwing money at them.
If more houses get flooded it’s because more morons are building houses in places that get flooded.
Yes… near me, they built on a place called: The Watermeadows, you may not be surprised to know the outcome.
They (BBC, politicians, media, Mumsnet) are just loving the hysteria. I haven’t seen the great storm of 1987 mentioned: was it “cancelled”? The great Michael Fish said live on TV the night before that it wouldn’t happen; does this mean it didn’t happen? Was that an early example of “it didn’t happen if we say it didn’t happen”? Like so many things happening before our very eyes in the last couple of years?
And they’re just loving parroting those three words from yesteryear: “Stay at home.”
Once again the BBC has gone full hysterical
Anyone who dies today will be a victim of the armageddon climate change wind
Prepare to put your hands in your pockets once again folks
Well, just come back from picking up my eldest daughter from work. Looks like nobody’s heeding the official advice to restrict travel today – the road was packed. On a route flanked by tall trees almost all the way, I saw two downed bins and an upset traffic cone. Blue sky’s peaking out from the clouds now. It did get a bit racy for about an hour beforehand, but the storm has passed this part of Wales. Be alert and fearful for the deadlier second wave though…
Yes its windy, but, here at least, not as bad as the Burns day storm in 1990, or some of the terrible storms that were almost a weekly event in the south in the winter of 2013/2014. (And nothing could be as bad as 1987 winds). So, yes, just a regular winter storm that certainly didn’t need all that bigging up by the media. I get rather tired of hype, whatever it may be for. Probably why I no longer engage with msm.
The trouble is that the young (obviously) don’t have our weather-memories, and neither do vast numbers of their teachers, who ‘teach’ through propaganda and ignorance. ‘Clmate change’ is the modern mantra of the young, and the attempts of we older folk to provide some facts against the propaganda fall on deaf ears.
I am put in mind of Rhod Gilbert’s line about having been 11 before he realised you could actually take your cagoule off.
The lie of anthropogenic climate change is probably somewhere in the “messaging” with this storm, but mostly I have noticed the idea of “Terrible Emergency – Stay Indoors and Don’t Travel” and also the related encouragement of utter stupidity where the actual topic of strong winds is concerned.
They’re hardly mentioning the Beaufort Scale at all. That would give people too much of an intellectual handle on what’s happening. They’re throwing about speeds such as 100 mph, 110 mph, and even 120 mph instead.
They’re not even using the good ol’ fashioned word “hurricane”.
Which I suppose is all well and good, because it isn’t one.
And they’re not encouraging people to distinguish between a wind’s background speed and its gust speed.
They don’t want people even thinking like that. Don’t make distinctions. The next thing, you’ll be making distinctions between a vaccine and an mRNA shot – or between climate change and the possible cause of climate change.
As far as I can tell, this storm has made it to force 10. “Storm” is precisely what it is. Perhaps somewhere it’s made it as far as force 11 (“violent storm”). Nowhere, as far as I know, has it made it to force 12 (“hurricane”).
Figures such as 120 mph are utter cr*p. The background speed probably hasn’t made it to half of that.
The strongest wind I have ever measured had a background speed of 49mph and was gusting up to 75mph. It wasn’t even a storm – it was a gale (a “strong gale” – force 9). On land, that’s probably stronger than most people in Britain have ever experienced. The wind at Eshaness in Shetland was stronger, but I didn’t have my anemometer with me.
A wind of 100mph, let alone 120mph, would blow at least some houses down.
I’ve told this to a few morons in Britain, the kind who love putting sticks up their noses to “test for Covid” and who’d get “vaccinated” once a month if politicians and “experts” told them it would “help the NHS”. They have said things like “A 100mph wind wouldn’t blow any houses down in Britain because British houses are much better built than woodframed houses in foreign countries”, and “This must be a hurricane because they said on the television that it reached 122 mph.”
It’s amazing how idiots who can’t think for themselves manage to think up “reasons” for why they “think” things. Usually their “real” reasons include a belief that their village (or country) is a really good one, and that what a person in authority says – in that village or country – must be true.
They find it hard to admit that they would believe 2 plus 2 equalled 5 if a nurse or schoolteacher or “expert” told them to – and if they thought they might get ridiculed if they stopped for a moment and tried to work out what 2 plus 2 actually does equal.
If people don’t pull their heads out of their a***s, we’re totally f***ed. It’s like their sorry excuses for “minds” all belong to Hitler. Except it isn’t Hitler who feeds them all the vomit – it’s some pr*t speaking behind a diagonally striped “Men at Work”-type sign in contrasting colours that shouts out the holy acronym “NHS”.
In a real 100mph wind you wouldn’t be able to stand up, and neither would some idiot speaking into a microphone from Sky or the BBC.
A gale isn’t a hurricane, and a snotty nose isn’t pneumonia.
“How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?’
‘Four.’
‘And if the party says that it is not four but five—then how many?’”
Pretty wild up here in Yorkshire; must be really bad further south! About to embark on a half hour drive to Grassington. By ‘eck!
Ecky thump!
Total rainfall per year is not expected to increase in the UK as a result of climate change. Rain in the winter is expected to increase and in the summer to decrease. I can’t find the seasonal records for Wales but that is what has happened for the UK as a whole.
This made me laugh
It’s an old one but still a cracker.
This is a joke?
Them southern softies aren’t hard like t’ northern folk
“Storm Eunice latest: London Fire Brigade declares major incident over deluge of 999 calls“.
Blowback?
Anyone who has called the fire brigade because a bush in their garden moved a bit in the wind should be prosecuted.
Fucking anthropomorphic climate change has just blown my garden wall over. Just checking the deeds to see if it’s my neighbours responsibility OR fucking anthropomorphic climate change OR Putin.
Eek. Clare Pillman. Not Uber posh quite bossy art historian from St Andrews c. 1985? It’s all beginning to make sense!
There is some interesting weather behind it. The North Pole temperature naturally varies, and this winter it has been one of the coldest for decades, roughly 20 degrees below normal. This has created a strong polar vortex, hence a storm. All within natural variation. We often hear about North Pole warming. This winter needs to be recorded for it’s North Pole cooling.
How much did Eunice contribute towards UK electricity today?
Zero is my guess – too windy
None of the eco crucifixes were turning off Brighton today
Just checked my emails:
local library CLOSED
local council tip CLOSED
local council offices CLOSED
due to red alert Storm Eunice
all with the message “Stay home, stay safe”
It is now a habit – advice to stay home to stay safe, don’t use the library or the tip coz we will be closing them forever soon…. oh and pay up your over inflated council tax bill ASAP or the bins will go unemptied (which of course they did today anyway)
“Men of Harlech, stop complaining
Wales was made for tanks to train in
And it’s always bloody raining…”
If naming a storm after a woman is sexist, should the Met Office (plus all the other meteorological organisations that name storms, hurricanes etc.) be trying to come up with lists of gender neutral names as there’s no way of knowing in advance how a storm will self identify?