The recent floods in Spain have caused a deluge of ghoulish commentary that seeks to make political capital for climate policies out of the tragedies experienced by many thousands of people. The green claim is that manmade global warming has created a different climate, which brings more rain to the region, and hence more floods. But even if it were true that Europe faces a new climate, this understanding of floods, their causes and consequences, is completely false. And it exposes the urgent necessity of interrogating green ideology.
According to the BBC’s Matt McGrath, 'Scientists say climate change made Spanish floods worse'. The claim is produced by the green movement’s go-to quote-machine, Dr. Friederike Otto of Imperial College London and founder of World Weather Attribution (WWA). WWA was established by Otto and colleagues, outside of their academic work, to estimate the probability of an event being “linked to” climate change. Hence, Otto et al. are at the top of every environmental journalists’ contact list, and every extreme weather event in the world produces headlines along the same lines: 'Scientists say climate change made X Y times more likely'.
Otto and colleagues may well be scientists, but is their science of “attribution” really a science, or just an infinitely redeployable meme? For sure, there is a statistical method behind the claims, but many a sleight-of-hand hides the trick behind the method. Put simply, for each meteorological event that WWA generates headlines for, two computer simulations of weather
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So dams are wholly unnatural, engineered artefacts of culture.
But wind turbines and solar farms aren’t?
At least dams are nominally functional and worthwhile.
This Green ideology is basically the return of Paganism. If something goes wrong, it is because we have displeased the gods of the natural world.
Our world has turned its back on Christianity and re-embraced the primitive religion that Boadicea would have respected and probably followed. See The Wicker Man for further details.
The Viz, again.
If anyone is interested, please read Professor Willie Soon, an astrophysicist. He explains very clearly, there is no man made climate change. Watch his interview on X with Tucker Carlson, if you are interested in the truth about “climate change”.
Most on this list are converts. The problem is how to get his and many other similar messages out into and accepted by the majority of the global population.
“I call this sport eco-hyperreality,” I have a better name for this and all the other numerical gibberish that underpins the CAGW scam – ‘arithromancy’. Wish I could claim authorship, but honesty forbids…
Global warmimg is not the real problem, it is global idiocy.
“… are in the grip of a movement that requires the demolition of dams. On that bizarre green view, dams degrade society’s relationship with nature.”
The same movement wants us to build dams to provide pumped storage to solve the problem of unsustainable, unreliable, intermittent wind/solar power.
Funny old World.
A lot of towns in the hilly area of Valencia are built in river valleys, flooding has happened before and will happen again,very rarely reported until now, a point completely ignored by the likes of the BBC
What a great couple Ferguson and Otto. Maybe they could model a relationship together?
Preferably while locked in a room in the basement of Imperial.
It seems to be standard practice in climate modelling to add uniformly distributed noise to some of the continuous variables. This is the only application I’ve heard of in scientific simulation and I’ve never seen anything but a hand waving justification. As Einstein might have said, God does not play die.
Ben, is it or is it not true that a number of flood-control dams in the Valencia catchment have been de-commissioned for environmental reasons?
I went to Valencia a few years ago and the town was very proud of their solution to constant flooding that used to happen on a regular basis. They diverted the river that ran through the centre of town and made the river bed into a park.
This brief article from 2012 explains the scheme.
https://metropolismag.com/projects/how-valencia-turned-crisis-river-into-park/
I wonder if the removal of dams upstream then affected this scheme in unimaginable, or at least un-modeled ways?
Same as the “unprecedented” flooding of the Somerset Levels a decade ago.
It was only unprecedented in the sense that there were no official records of the extent of flooding before Civil Engineering and the Levels were drained.
The Eco Nutters at the Environment Agency thought it was a good idea not to dredge the drainage channels in the interests of prioritising and protecting wildlife …. most of which drowned when the floods occurred.
And remember some farmer in Herefordshire who dredged a river, and saved local houses from being flooded, the busy-body Council took legal action against him. Can’t have independent people looking after locals can we!
GREEN Politics is destroying the western world. We can see the almighty mess Germany has got itself in. The UK now has the highest electricity prices in the entire world and everywhere Greens go they leave a trail of destruction in their wake. They are a a pseudo-scientific fraud and motivated entirely by ideology that uses the environment and the planet as the excuse for every one of their policies, which amount to Central Planning and total control of every aspect of people’s lives (Communism) and the photo above shows us the result. ——These people are being booted out now in Germany and only when the entire world gets rid of this garbage can we all start to flourish and live normally free from this tyranny. ——Here in the UK we unfortunately are heading in the wrong direction (as usual) but Miliband and Labour must be removed before our mothers freeze to death in their house and the blackouts come thick and fast.
Spain has been leading Europe’s dam removal programme, with 108 dams taken down alone in 2021, and an estimated 200 dams removed from its rivers in total since the EU’s Water Framework Directive was issued: https://expose-news.com/2024/11/06/are-dam-removal-projects-the-cause/.
Whenever Imperial College is mentioned as a source of data early in the story, you know where it’s heading.
I thought you were going to say, you stop reading the article.
Does anyone else find it odd that we are re-introducing beavers because their dams reduce flooding, whilst removing dams because they interfere with nature?
And yet Beavers are good at felling trees, ask any Game keeper.
It’s not odd. It is because greens are not very clever. They are a product of the past 50 years of apalling tertiary education. Also this is normally what happens when you have female stem graduates in charge of stuff. Sack them all