The Met Office put it down to torrential rain already falling on sodden ground creating flash floods and the large amount of water running off into rivers which rapidly expand and burst their banks.
The Environment Agency website states that 'as future assessments are completed it is expected that we will see a trend in the level of flood risk. These assessments are expected to show that flood risk is increasing'.
That answers the first half of the question but it doesn't explain the torrential rains that leads to the flooding. which only happened once or twice a decade previously. So what has changed that we now get two or three major floods in Britain a year?
This year bought flood chaos in early summer to Northern Ireland, Wales and the South West, again in the North of England in September and now the South West has been badly hit again this past week. .
Historically, the UK has always suffered from winter floods but these occur after a slow, but relentless, build up of rain over months and by melting snow but modern day floods are happening out of 'flood season' and rapidly after sudden, torrential downpours.
The Flood Hazard Research Centre, said: 'We appear to be shifting to a situation where you get a lot of rain and you get surface water flooding — sudden rainfall is driving the flooding’.
A study at Newcastle University concluded storms have become twice as heavy since the Sixties — and the most torrential occur four times as often.
The last Government increased spending on flood defences but one of the first things the Coalition did after coming into power was slash the flood defence budget by 30 per cent so the required level of defence is missing combined with housing being built on flood plains so with nowhere for water to go, it enters our streets, gardens and homes.
Another reason offered is the amount of grass areas, a natural soak for rain, which have been paved over so more rain runs off the concreted areas into storm drains and into the already swollen rivers.
Why are we getting more rain? The experts who study the climate and the extreme weather events point towards our old foe global warming.
The Earth System Science Centre at the Penn State Department of Meteorology: 'There is no question in my mind that the "signal" of climate change has now emerged in our day-to-day weather. We are seeing the loading of the random weather dice toward more "sixes". We are seeing and feeling climate change'
Dr Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution, at the Met Office Centre: 'The globally warmer atmosphere now carries 4% more moisture over the oceans than in the 1970s and in many places this extra moisture would be expected to lead to increased rainfall when storms form over land'.
Dr Clare Goodess, senior researcher at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit: 'An anthropogenic influence has recently been detected over Northern Hemisphere land areas in the largest daily rainfall events experienced each year.
Michael Oppenheimer, professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School and Department of Geosciences: 'The link between extreme events which have occurred recently and the build-up of the greenhouse gases is best represented by the "loading the dice" analogy – as the world warms, the likelihood of occurrence (frequency), intensity, and/or geographic extent of many
types of extreme events is increasing. According to computer simulations of climate, the likelihood that such an event would occur was about doubled by the buildup of the greenhouse gases.
Harold Brooks, head of the mesoscale applications group at Noaa's National Severe Storms Laboratory: 'We understand that warming the planet will likely lead to a more intense water cycle, with heavier rain when it rains'.
Michael F. Wehner, staff scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: 'This risk of extreme weather has already changed significantly due to human induced global warming. While these events could have occurred without the human changes to the climate, it is important to know that the amount of climate change that we have experienced so far is very small to what is projected to occur by the middle and end of this century. By 2100, today's most extreme weather events will seem relatively normal.
NASA: 'All individual weather events observed could have happened prior to the human intervention in the climate system, however unlikely that may have been. However, if the question were posed as 'would these events have occurred if atmospheric carbon dioxide had remained at its pre-industrial level of 280 ppm?”, an appropriate answer in that case is 'almost certainly not'.
Worrying, the the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre report Long-term trend in global CO2 emissions show that the amount of CO2 emissions we pump into the atmosphere is still going up.
Sorry to the flooded parts of Britain but it seems that due to a warming atmosphere and a cut in the flood defence budget, you will be paddling in your living rooms for quite a while yet.
16 comments:
"human induced global warming..." blah blah blah
the earth was once covered by volcanoes, then jungles, then forests, then ice covered most of europe, asia, north america and south america... then before cars and coal plants and all the other stuff the ice began to retract.
how do scientists know what climate change was caused by humans?
q
Q- I believe it's primarily the speed of the climate change we've been seeing that's the major thing tipping them off.
cheezy - blah blah blah
isolated observation, overwhemlingly complex system, false sense that there is a "normal" climate and "normal climate change".
q
You're so right about it being an overwhelmingly complex system.
This is the precise reason why I think climate change scientists (i.e. people who have spent their lives studying and working in this area) contribute so much more to the sum of our knowledge about climate change than do people who are armed only with internet access and an opinion.
cheezy,
i think the climate scientists do nothing but create emotion and confusion. they speak with authority when they should speak with humility. they should say things like:
“We have worked hard and made many advances. We know a lot more than people like q who are armed with nothing but internet access and opinions, BUT:
- we don't know all the forces that affect the climate
- we don’t know how to project the affects of the few factors we know
- we know our models are wrong and the long range predictions are very wrong
- we don't have good historical context
After all, the 40 year effort to track and predict hurricane season voracity proved a complete failure. So, we press on using the scientific method knowing that with enough time and enough iterations we will eventually learn, perhaps as soon as 30 years.”
Then they, and their minions, would have more of my respect...
q
They already got plenty of respect. I know who i put my faith in and that's the people with the experience and the knowledge. If 99% of the climate scientists agree and say one thing and 1% of them say something else, i know who i would believe.
Is it climate change altogether or the man-made part you struggle with?
Seems to me there are a lot of people who have total faith in scientists & the scientific method when they want to get on a plane to fly to another country... when they switch on a light... when they go and visit the doctor... and when they do a hundred and one other things, every day... but the moment that a scientific consensus grows up around an idea that they're personally opposed to... (or are motivated by like-minds to become personally opposed to), and there's no cost in doing so (as there would be, say, a cost to refusing to fly in planes) then you get a vociferous internet-based group of laymen kicking up a stink about it.
Still, I welcome the debate, if only to keep each side on their toes. It's just that the end result is often the hoi-polloi being woefully uninformed. For example, I suspect it's not well known that the scientific opinion in favour of a substantial man-made contribution to global warming has strengthened greatly over the past decade.
I just read all of that and it occurred to me that I might be misrepresenting my own opinion on this debate. So, for the record, I actually don't have an opinion on it!
I'm so agnostic on this question that I'm totally prepared to believe the possibility that it's all bollocks and not happening and the people like Nigel Lawson and Glenn Beck are absolutely right, while climatologists who work for NASA and the IPCC and the Geological Society and the American Meteorological Society and pretty much every other serious body has got it dead wrong...
After all, even a stopped clock gives the right time twice a day and all of that...
It's possible. I just don't think it's as likely as the opposite.
In fact, the only thing I'm 100% certain about this issue is that 99.99999999% of the material that you or I or anybody else will read concerning this issue, will be written by someone who doesn't know jackshit about it (say, someone like me) but level of knowledge will rarely stop the person in question denigrating the professional conclusions of people who have spent 30 years working and researching in this area.
Cheezy, you state lots of opinions and I don’t recall directing my views at you. i don't get my data from glenn beck. He is an entertainer kinda like al gore.
lucy, good for you and the 99%.
cheezy and lucy, i'm listening to respected scientists at harvard, MIT, and university of colorado (the ones that ran the hurricane prediction tests for 40 years). also, both of you totally ignored the contrary report published in october by the same british scientists that started this brouhaha in the first place. they damn near reversed their position in october.
In my view lucy, you pick the data that suits your purposes and ignore the data the you don’t like – just like a politician.
the scientific method does not allow scientists to ignore data that conflicts with their views. it demands more hypothesis and experimentation. there is MUCH conflicting data. thus lucy, i'm not accepting what the 99% say. I’m waiting for the facts that have been vetted, not correlation, observation, and opinions.
So, Cheezy, for the record, i'm agnostic on this topic too, at this time.
which means i'm not going to run around like a chicken screaming that the sky is falling and act like we need to do all the crap proposed by the far left tree huggers.
also, the big environmental problem looming on the horizon is china and india. the usa is reducing emissions while those 2 are upping theirs...
q
"both of you totally ignored the contrary report published in october by the same british scientists that started this brouhaha in the first place"
My point was that the scientific consensus is currently pointing overwhelmingly one way on this matter. If the report had affected this consensus, then it would have been worth me mentioning it. But since it didn't, I deemed it not worth mentioning. This was a judgment call on my part, I suppose, but I can't mention everything. It's not even my blog :)
I'm sure there will be plenty of other reports and forecasts in the future that will be equally wrong too, but science is intrinsically self-correcting, and over time will get closer and closer to the most precise explanations.
"So, Cheezy, for the record, i'm agnostic on this topic too, at this time."
That's cool. To be honest, I'd assumed from your comments on previous threads that you actively doubted the contention that humans are contributing in any way to climate change, but it sounds like we might be closer on this issue than I thought.
"also, the big environmental problem looming on the horizon is china and india."
Agreed. I think this is likely to be a serious problem.
Lucy, good for you and the 99%.
I can't take all the credit q, the 99% must be recognised as well. Or do they? Stuff 'em, give me all the credit.
Being serious, if it wasn't for people running around screaming like chickens then do you think we would be even this far down the road towards changing things? Just think how much worse things would be if it was left to the likes of you, Buzz and Sarah Palin.
lucy, you assume way too much
1. how do you know what changes have had an impact?
2. how do you know how much impact?
3. how do you know if the impact was good or bad?
until you can answer these questions all you are doing is tampering...
4. who has been helped?
5. in what way?
6. how much?
7. who has been hurt?
8. how much?
you are far too confident in your beliefs.
q
cheezy,
i would say that we MUST be contributing to climate change since we are part of the system.
questions:
1. how much do we contribute?
2. in what ways?
3. what should the temperature be?
4. how do we know what the temp should be?
most important question
5. if we can manipulate the environment to save humanity, but in ways contrary to nature, is that right or wrong?
i mean, everybody says we are harming the envrionment. doesn't that imply we are changing what would happen naturally?
what if what would happen naturally meant the extinction of humans? would it still be ahrming the environment to change it?
thoughtlessly in texas, and totally dependent on the UK for thought
q
All great questions, Q, for which nobody on earth has a 100% cast iron perfect answer, but for which climate scientist's responses are the most informed and therefore the best we currently have.
cheezy,
100% confidence about the future is essentially impossible other than droll comments like "everything changes".
as you know scientists use data and logic. good logic cannot overcome bad data (unless it is known to be bad, what is wrong, and to what extent).
bad data
1. SAMPLES – Samples must be used carefully because by default they introduce error. To manage the error of sampling, scientists must have adequate sample size and random selection from the population. Circa 2000, scientists monitored global temperature using samples from a few hundred sources. I don’t exactly recall my statistics, but this small sample size introduces something like plus or minus 35% error. We also do not know if the locations are truly a random selection of the population (whole Earth) - more error with an unknown degree of impact! Recent expansion of monitors to thousands has now brought the earlier data into doubt – in that report I mention that Lucy and the other scientists ignored.
2. UNTESTED ASSUMPTIONS – Since scientists do not know all the factors that affect the global climate, or the impact of each factor, or the interdependency of the factors they must use assumptions. This introduces an unknown amount of error. But, when modeling a large system (Earth’s climate), especially over a large number of iterations (years) even a small error is magnified dramatically. Key assumptions are now being reversed, like NASA’s regarding the impact on the climate of ozone depletion.
3. OBSERVATION versus PREDICTION – Observation is the basis for hypothesis. Hypothesis is the basis for experimentation (results). Using observation to substantiate hypothesis is a vile violation of the scientific method and enables people with an agenda to introduce error. Much of what gets reported is observation, not experimental results.
4. SELECTIVE REPORTING – If a scientist runs a model and one of the results (expected: number of hurricanes, strength of hurricanes, average size) are wrong then the model failed because the hypothesis was wrong. Scientists learn from this and create a different model – well, they are supposed to learn and adjust. Reporting that one of results was correct is falsehood – and this seems to happen on a regular basis. This introduces error.
5. HUMAN – Scientists are human. Sometimes poor humans, but human. That means they are susceptible to human foibles of pride, greed, and sloth. This introduces error.
6. VALUE – The economic principle of value applies to global warming. Economically, relative value can be determined easily. One wants an outcome, therefore it is automatically has value. Once achieved, value is received. However, the degree of value is not measurable because there is not a “fixed and objectively assigned value”. Someone (like Al Gore) has decided the Earth is warming too fast using a “relative and subjectively assigned value”.
I understand your position, generically restating what you said: “it is the best data we have”.
I’m not disputing just to be contrary. I have witnessed all the factors above, 1-6, and in addition, I think there are enough “credible scientists” questioning global warming and the human impact on global warming to be intellectually justified in advocating cautious action – as opposed to the actions suggested by the American far left. Further, I’m cynical politically. When the far left (like the far right) wants to achieve something there is usually a hidden agenda to use government to change society – usually for their own “relative and subjectively assigned value”. I see the global warming debate as primarily a political maneuver by the far left to redistribute global wealth as they seem obsessed with making everyone “even” economically – except for the rich of the far left (it doesn’t seem to bother the far left that their leaders are ultra-rich).
q
Cautious action is the way forward, agreed.
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