This Aquatic'd Isle.
This royal barge of kings, this aquatic’d isle,
This flooded land, this seat of Zeus,
This other Venice, water-paradise,
This water park built by Nature for herself
This blessed lake, this marsh, this bog, this England.
Or as Richard might well have said – ‘My kingdom for a flat bottomed boat’….
Just one more time I am going to listen to Sky drumming up fear and indignation by claiming that the damage to the railway line at Dawlish has ‘cut off Devon and Cornwall from the rest of the country’. If not being able to pass through Dawlish cuts Cornwall off from the seat of ‘all that is good and interesting’, otherwise known as Metro London, perhaps someone could tell me how the feisty Cornish mackerel get to London on a Sunday? ‘Tis a mystery to be sure how this obscure tourist branch line which, according to the anorak who works in the office of the rail regulator and laboriously records these things, saw a mere 400,000 people last year -and that figure includes Aunt Betsy travelling by train from Teignmouth to see her sister, rather than walk three miles, not to mention all the rain soaked tourists who just fancied a cheese sandwich and a cup of tea – has managed to morph, in Sky’s reportage, into the conduit between the powerhouse of Cornish industry and ‘London, saviour of the world’. Dawlish is not Clapham Junction.
Last month, they were obsessed with Yalding. Wide angle shots of expanses of water in an area known as Little Venice – the clue was in the name, folks – contained ‘homes’ belonging to people who were angry and surprised to find that buying a ‘mobile home’ sited on a piece of land that the planners would not allow a permanent home to be built on, overlooking acres of marshland, meant that sometimes those flood plains might flood. This was the government’s fault. Many times did Sky show the footage of David Cameron besieged by angry voters incensed that Cameron hadn’t put a lid over Yalding…..
It is distressing to find your house full of water. I do have sympathy with the 40 homes in Somerset that actually are flooded. I have been there myself. Over the past 25 years Mr G and I have restored 11 houses. 10 of them were riverside properties. We have always been aware of the risk.
House number 11 was at the bottom of a slight gradient – perhaps a rise of five yards, this was East Anglia after all, and a good half mile from the nearest stream. I didn’t want to buy it, it seemed a bad omen to me that it wasn’t ‘riverside’. Guess which house flooded? The only house which flooded? All the rain in all of East Anglia gathered at the top of that ‘hill’ as it was laughingly described, and rushed straight down towards us……it isn’t a pleasant experience.
But if you buy a house in ‘Fordgate’ – hello? Ford? a clue in there somewhere – which is near Bridgwater – another clue there, surely; in Somerset, the ancient summer grazing lands of pre-Christian era farmers, then is it really reasonable to expect the environment agency to decimate the great crested newt population by draining the entire area so that you don’t get wet feet? How far do the rest of us have to dig into our pockets to support the environment agency’s efforts to ensure that you never, ever, have to replace your washing machine because it flooded? Should everybody who has had to replace a washing machine because it filled with limescale be given air time to demand the environment agency remove all the lime from their water supply?
The answer seems to lie in numbers. 40 houses surrounded by water picturesquely cascading off tractor wheels is good TV.
40 houses scattered independently round the country where the occupants have ‘lost everything’ because the next door neighbour decided to rig his shower up to the gas mains/set fire to the boyfriend’s x-box – or just because they bought a house at the bottom of the nearest thing Norfolk possesses to a hill – don’t provoke a political crisis.
By the way – this area of Southern France is just as bad: this was Bordeaux when I went to the hospital on Friday. You won’t see it on the TV; it’s not news. It happens every year. Even the French don’t blame Hollande.
Did you know that one of the first roads built in Britain was in Somerset? 4,000 years before JC! Ancient man took one look at the Somerset levels and thought – “Chances are me feet’ll get wet rounding up them hairy Bison, best I build a raised road then”.
6,000 years later, modern man builds a collection of 1970s bungalows on the same site, and he reckons it’s David Cameron’s responsibility when his feet get wet.
- Moor larkin
February 9, 2014 at 12:55 pm -
Time for a Kevin Costner revival I reckon.
- ivan
February 9, 2014 at 1:25 pm -
Interesting that the Norfolk Broads don’t have the flooding problems that they have in the Levels. Also the Levels didn’t have the flooding they have now before their upkeep was taken over by the EA.
Maybe, just maybe, the problem lies with the EA not doing their job correctly because it is filled with people that have no engineering experience, whereas the Broads Authority, that is NOT part of the EA, still relies on those that know what they are doing.
- Jeremy Poynton
February 9, 2014 at 1:34 pm -
The Broads managed somehow to keep out of the hands of the EA, and are still run by their local Drainage Authority, who employ, as you note, people who know what they are doing.
Interest blog on the EA here from an employee. The oft used phrase “not fit for purpose” springs to mind.
http://www.insidetheenvironmentagency.co.uk
Samples …
Felix: “I have been working with the EA since 2004. If the people of Somerset knew the distaste our line managers have for them, there would be revolts in the streets. Environmentalism comes first followed by flexi working. People, homes and businesses comes right down at the bottom of the list. The only time we have done something in the interest of people and homes is when MPs or the media get involved, and then it’s all hands on deck.”
Mr D Duck: “I can only talk for what I have observed over my 10 years. Some people do exploit the system, others often work over their mandatory 37.4 hours/week and do not book the flexi-time. I typically have a 20 minute lunch break perhaps once a week, the other 4 days of the week I work through, but continue to book a 30 minute lunch break. I am not the only person who does this or something similar in our Area. Other people stroll in outside of core hours. Who knows what they book on their flexi-card!? Other, especially EM/H&T Officer often book 2pm site visits and are not seen again that day. Everyone knows what they are doing, but nothing ever happens. The system is open to exploitation. It is left to the employees morality.”
Rick Blade: “I will never forget my team leader saying he “didnt really know how many team members he had as some had been on maternity leave so long, it had literally been years since he had seen them.”” – “My sympathies were always with the older guys marking time till their retirement, and hating every hour of form-filling, and desk-work-procedures that their river supervision job had been reduced to. One old timer said sadly to me once ” See.. that gully there overflows now and then and needs keeping clean, or those houses will flood. When I`m gone no one will remember or will do it, on them dark nights.” “Certainly not them lot” and he waved his hand, office-ward, toward the banks of new generation children sitting at their PCs, in the warm.”
EO: “The chairman has sent a message to all staff saying how hard everyone is working and not to take the negative media stories seriously. Thing is, half my team are still taking the p*ss coming and going whenever, not putting in their hours and neglecting workloads. He wants to get his a** on the frontline here and see the lazy c*nts that cause stress for the rest of us!”
- The Blocked Dwarf
February 9, 2014 at 2:59 pm -
The reason you don’t hear much grizzling about flooding from Norfolk is probably due to the fact that generations of sister/sheep/sugar beet fucking have left most of them with webbed feet (and extra digits) anyways.
However Norfolkers are just as prone to building new builds on land that is below sea level and near a patch of considerable wetness. I posted this on Joolz’s blog a while back, it’s on the side of a new block of riverside flats in Norwich http://tinyurl.com/nw2b8q6
Kinda says it all I think.
- Jeremy Poynton
February 9, 2014 at 7:23 pm -
A certain Mr. Prescott decided that building on flood plains was a good idea.
- Jeremy Poynton
- Major Bonkers
February 10, 2014 at 3:03 pm -
The Guido Fawkes website has a good article on the issue:
I see mi’lord Smith mincing around my local park every so often. So far as I can see, his qualifications for being in charge of the Environment Agency boil down to:
(1) Friend of Tony Blair. Lives in Islington.
(2) A plague-carrying homosexualist. Chalk one up for the diversity quotient!
(3) Walks his dog in the park.
Anyone listening to his interview this morning on the Today programme won’t have been impressed. It’s quite clear that the job has been treated as a sinecure and that Smith is part of the problem. If they had some retired brigadier running the show, instead of treating it as an old folks home for warmed-over politicians, the floods would have been dealt with far more efficiently.
- The Blocked Dwarf
- Jeremy Poynton
- expofunction
February 9, 2014 at 1:29 pm -
I too have considerable sympathy for anyone who’s suffering with the increasingly extreme weather of recent years, and of course we should be ready and willing to come swiftly and empathically to their aid. That said, this fundamental lesson is surely so ingrained in our culture (from the biblical Parable of the Wise and the Foolish Builders below to the Story of the Three Little Pigs), there’s surely no avoiding the issue of moral hazzard even for those of us who are not religious:
“Everyone therefore who hears these words of mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man, who built his house on a rock. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat on that house; and it didn’t fall, for it was founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of mine, and doesn’t do them will be like a foolish man, who built his house on the sand. The rain came down, the floods came, and the winds blew, and beat on that house; and it fell—and great was its fall.”
— Matthew 7:24–27, World English Bible
The populist calls for massive capital spending to (endlessly try to) contain nature do indeed seem rather absurd, especially if – as seems likely – they may only delay the inevitable for a few more years or decades.
- Radical Rodent
February 9, 2014 at 3:33 pm -
“…increasingly extreme weather…”?
“Extreme” weather has been an inherent part of the climate of these islands since time immemorial. Read about the Great Storm of 1703, or what happened to the Spanish Armada before you take the gullible line of falling for what you are told by people with a different agenda to most of us, and one which looks increasingly like requires our total and utter subjugation. To do this, they have to keep our fear levels up – global warming, climate change, terrorism – and, now that we have come to accept the tosh about liquids on aircraft, it turns out that bombs could be carried in toothpaste. Keeping the fear level up is what is needed for control of the masses; AR is right, showing that one of the main reasons for the flooding of these homes is that the homes have been built where flooding is likely – nothing to do with “increasingly extreme” weather bought on by “climate change” caused by “global warming” as a result of “increased CO2 levels” by human activity. We are being lied to; the sooner we realise this, and let it be known that we know, the sooner the lying will stop.
- expofunction
February 9, 2014 at 7:19 pm -
Weather is highly variable and extreme weather events such as the Great Storm of 1703 have always happened, if very infrequently. There is no simple answer but it’s the change in frequency of more extreme weather events that has much greater significance than any one individual event as I’m sure you already know. Changes in the frequency of extreme events coinciding with global warming have already been observed, and there is increasing evidence that some of these changes are caused by the impacts of human activities on the climate. (See links in earlier post for detail.)
I’m extemely uneasy about – and critical of – much of the way we’re governed these days, but given the hitherto unprecedented access to information the electorate has, it’s difficult to conclude otherwise than that we continue to get what we – collectively – vote for (perhaps deserve).
In respect of the Somerset Levels, I think Anna’s article and the resulting comments make a good case to suggest this current specific incident may primarily be the result of changes in policy, funding or (mis)management within one or more environmental agency or government department. However, it may also be – just to try to offer one possible scenario – that the official policy for this area is now to protect it against “1 in 100 year” events when previously it was to protect it against what would, until fairly recently, have been considered “1 in 200 year” events and that there may have been some obfuscation by the authorities to mask some slight of hand in the way they went about changing policy (without reference to anyone perhaps). I think that might satisfy both the “neglect” and “climate” viewpoints, at least to some extent.
I hope you’ll excuse me for rejecting the label “gullible”. I’m neither afraid to be sceptical of what I’m “.. told by people with a different agenda to most of us ..”, nor am I eager to reject out of hand the overwhelming and still growing scientific concensus that we ought to be concerned about global warming (http://www.theconsensusproject.com/), and especially not on the basis of your own simple assertion that “We are being lied to; the sooner we realise this, and let it be known that we know, the sooner the lying will stop”.
It seems to me that Anna is pointing to a question – much wider than in relation to the Somerset Levels – that if we can take account of all the facts – as best we can establish them – at any given time, should we also take responsibility for whatever decisions we make on that basis. That applies to those who – perhaps for very valid reasons – chose to live in areas which present quite specific (& unusual) risks such as: a) being naturally prone to flooding; and b) requiring the ongoing maintenance of significant geo-engineering works to remain viable.
It then seems perfectly reasonable to question – no matter how much sympathy we have for the predicament of those emerged in a crisis – whether or not everyone else has the responsibility to pay for: a) the consequencial losses if the geo-engineering works prove inadequate for any specific event or series of events (including possible effects of climate change); b) the ongoing maintainance costs of those works when mostly all are faced with comprehensive cutbacks to general and specific service provision; and c) the repair / enhancement of geo-engineering works – and to what extent & to meet which criteria (given the possibility of climate change) – simply to preserve the way of life of the relatively few people involved.
These are complex and difficult issues of course and they deserve careful thinking and full consideration. This and the other issues Anna covers here should certainly not – in my view – be determined by how much short term advantage the media and politicians can gain from the events by whipping up hysteria or a full-blown moral panic. My fear is that we seem all too prepared to go along with most of this way of doing things. I wonder if the Easter Islanders perhaps behaved in rather similar ways as they hurled themselves headlong towards the day when they cut down their very last tree.
- Radical Rodent
February 10, 2014 at 12:13 pm -
Oddly enough, I am not disagreeing with you, nor with the inestimable Anna, I am merely asking you not to be fully taken in by the “…overwhelming … scientific consensus…” as it is not really overwhelming, nor particularly scientific. Since when did science ever depend upon consensus? Most of the main media are determined that we should swallow the whole CAGW scam, so do not base your ideas solely upon them (and certainly not the BBC!); check out Bishop Hill, and the many pro- and anti- sites that he can link you to.
- Radical Rodent
- expofunction
- Radical Rodent
- Jeremy Poynton
February 9, 2014 at 1:30 pm -
Anna,
You’ve completely misread what is going on. It’s always flooded in the levels. Those who live there know that. However, it also always used to drain away quickly. Now it doesn’t. That is down to the EA being a bunch of fuckwits, and also that they do what they are told to do by that other bunch of fuckwits, the EU.
For more, hi thee to http://www.eureferendum.com/ and read all about it.
- expofunction
February 9, 2014 at 2:16 pm -
I think it’s a little unreasonable to suggest this is a complete misreading of the situation. Most people will be aware of the controversy over the changes in levels of intervention (for example dredging) by the authorities and that there may be a variety of reasons for that, yet it does not change the fundamental fact that this is an area highly susceptible to natural flooding and highly dependent on the (wider) human population’s motivation to intervene to protect, prevent and or negate those natural factors. That motivation has probably always been closely linked to commercial factors (economic advantage).
I have a great deal of sympathy with the notion that we’ve de-professionalised so much of public service and that the results can often be catastrophic. I’m sure that may be a significant element in this issue too, but my feeling nonetheless is that there’s an inevitability staring us all in the face which we need to think clearly about and plan carefully how to manage. When it comes to the sheer power of nature and our ability to resist that, it’s unlikely to be affordable, possible or even sensible to do more than (radically adapt or) plan a retreat in many cases.
- Jeremy Poynton
February 9, 2014 at 7:26 pm -
This need not have been anything like as bad as it is. That it is so bad is down to the EU and the EA. Smith said 6 months ago he was going to sort out the (increasing) problems with floods on the Levels, and then sat on his fat arse and did nothing. I do like Pickles intervention though. Smith refuses to apologise; Pickles apologises, and then says that the government thought they were dealing with experts.
The EA sums up all that stinks about the Quangocracy.
- Jeremy Poynton
- expofunction
- Jeremy Poynton
February 9, 2014 at 1:31 pm -
expofunction February 9, 2014 at 1:29 pm
I too have considerable sympathy for anyone who’s suffering with the increasingly extreme weather of recent years,
========================================================================And your proof of the above? The IPCC say there’s no proof of this. Even the IPCC, I should say.
- expofunction
February 9, 2014 at 1:54 pm -
In view of what the IPCC do say, (for example here: http://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/docs/ar5/ar5_wg1_headlines.pdf), and given what the scientific community make of the data, (for example in summary here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php) I’d suggest it’s difficult to deny there’s any basis for my – admittedly non-expert – comment.
- Cascadian
February 9, 2014 at 11:23 pm -
Reference to the IPCC precis of the summary to policy makers is laughable, you are referencing a document for the the hard-of-thinking (politicians mostly) put together by a bunch of lobbyists and pseudo-scientists such as Greenpeace and the cabal at the UEA cutting and pasting endless “trends” to suit a desired outcome, then implying a scientific concensus where none exists. That they have been proved to be charlatans, if not outright liars is beyond debate. You might just as well referenced Cosmopolitan as a reliable scientific journal. As for skepticalscience I would put them in the same league of mostly frightened lobbyists, scared that their meal ticket is diminishing fast.
You could have referenced real scientists and retained a veneer of respectable comment-some of what you had said was quite sensible.
The landlady once again gets to the nub of the problem, the disease that afflicts most of yUK, the inability of citizens to take responsibility for their own decisions. In the land of the welly boot it seems that I have only seen one example of self-reliance, the builder who has used his own land and resources to build a simple dyke system with a pump backup. That government support should be available in a disaster is undeniable, but so far I have seen more politicians on-site than military personnel and nothing done of a practical nature to alleviate the flooding on a local basis.
Welcome back landlady, I hope your physical health is improving with treatment. There has obviously been no diminishment of your mental faculties.
- expofunction
February 9, 2014 at 11:59 pm -
And for the hard-of-understanding: the original reference to the IPCC wasn’t mine.
Cascadian February 9, 2014 at 11:23 pm: “That they have been proved to be charlatans, if not outright liars is beyond debate. You might just as well referenced Cosmopolitan as a reliable scientific journal.”
The logical thinking you apparently asire to seems to have been displaced by powerful emotional polemic. Raising emotions to silence discussants tends only to block the thinking process you claim to value, with individuals finding themselves shut out or included purely on account of their presumed worth or lack of it within the assembled company.
- Cascadian
February 10, 2014 at 3:42 am -
It matters not who originally referenced the IPCC, however it matters who attempted to use that ridiculous assemblage of nonsense within their report to support their comment “Changes in the frequency of extreme events coinciding with global warming have already been observed, and there is increasing evidence that some of these changes are caused by the impacts of human activities on the climate”. Which was you I believe. Having made such an outrageous claim, you act surprised that I should question it.
Had you confined your statement to the line that you seem to find objectionable, we would have had the basis of a conversation.
I have no intention of attempting to silence you, the landlady would not allow it anyway. My intention was to ascribe the quality of analysis found in the IPCC summary to policy makers, to that found in a popular womens magazine of no particular value. That you have taken offence to that is notable, that you feel you could be shut out by my contribution is laughable, strong facts can surely overcome polemic, if you find my statements so outrageous argue your “facts”.
We come here to a a virtual pub to discuss topics of the day, if you find the confines of it less genial than a gentlemans club or university lounge might I suggest it is for you to adapt. I am not inclined to tug my forelock or show deference to the likes of the charlatans who lie about receiving Nobel prizes and use government facilities to excite public opinion about “global warming” and “weather events” that are clearly related to natural cycles.
- Cascadian
- expofunction
- Cascadian
- expofunction
- GildasTheMonk
February 9, 2014 at 2:03 pm -
I see your point at once Anna, and there is some force in it. Bu I think Jeremy Poynton has a point. There is something more important too. I was pottering around making toast on Friday morning and listening as usual to my Radio 5 (Radio 4 is too miserable and I need my sport) when Nicki Campbell interviewed a woman called Jan with house, a small holding of four acres and a horse in the Somerset village of Moorland (?). It was being threatened with flooding. She sounded the sort of no nonsense, straight talking salt of the earth battle axe that serves this nation so well. And she proceeded to give the Environment Agency and Lord Smith and the Establishment generally a total tonking for doing, in her words, “bugger all”. She pointed to a total lack of care from the Powers that Be, in contradistinction to the lavish care which is pent on overseas aid. Water Aid for Ethiopia? Send them some of this, she raged! What she expressed was my theme of the disconnect between the Ordinary People of the land who are ignored and indeed despised by the Political Classes that rule them. Bird sanctuaries and overseas aid – no problem, chuck money at it. Dredge rivers? Nah, no money.
Only now is “Call Me Dave” beginning to recognise that this is not playing out well. Whilst is may not be a disaster of Biblical proportions it is an illustration of the priorities of the Establishment. Interestingly, the phone/texts went crazy, with a great deal of support.
The interview can be heard here just after the 7 am news.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03szmpd - kaz
February 9, 2014 at 3:09 pm -
there is also a talk of the flooding being man-made
http://www.ishtarsgate.com/forum/showthread.php?4882-The-deliberate-flooding-of-the-Somerset-Levels&p=27845#post27845 - the moon is a balloon
February 9, 2014 at 3:35 pm -
I sit here about three feet above today’s river level. Fortunately, this pile of stones was set one atop the other by somebody who had looked about a bit and who didn’t want to get wet feet in the winter. This is now the fourth time in just over a decade that every single property nearer to the river has been flooded. That extra three feet of water by the way will require so many million cubic metres of water on top of the flood plains that the earth will tilt on its axis before I have to change my socks.
The property on the river edge though is flooded every year. So they “live” upstairs and have their bedrooms downstairs – with tiled floors and electricity points at waist height. They have little pumps that sit in sumps and pump the water out thats seeps past their barriers. This sort of arrangement is understood near rivers. It’s inconvenient sometimes but they get to look out over nature’s bounty, and presumably they find the bargain worth it. They do not complain.
And earlier this week, I was where? Bridgwater. And the sensible lady I was dealing with mentioned in passing that, yes, the amount of rain was unprecedented but “the Levels are a bowl” and the lip of the bowl has only few places where the water can get in or out out. Unfortunately the major out-lip has many feeding channels almost all of which are silted up. So the water cannot get to the lip fast enough to get out before the bowl fills up. This from a farmer’s wife making me a sandwich in a kitchen. No drama, no shouting, just farmer’s wife common sense. Nobody down there is surprised and few are whining about the price of living in that rather fine part of England – if you like that sort of thing. They are though mightily pissed off that the simple preventive notion of dredging a few channels has somehow been forgotten, or more likely they suspect is being neglected through cant.
The idea also that all the birdy-wirdies will die if you dredge forgets that one can manage the levels after dredging with little gatey sluicey things – a technical solution now some thousands of years old. Controlled flooding – like is happening outside my window right now – can maintain wetlands but without the extra two or three feet of water that cocks up the bargain that people have been making with nature for centuries.
The environment agency – God, yes, we do have them here too – is staffed by a great many overgrown kids who think that they are scientists or that they are “green” or that they “care” but who have little common sense or practical knowledge (that I can see evidence of anyway). Nice enough people but blighted with the I-know-bestism of the text-book ignorant. And now that it is a national agency where careers take people across and away from regions and areas, there is precious little of the local knowledge (see above) that used to build up. Like that, for instance, which has quietly been built up on the Broads and which is deployed so quielty and which yet manages to avoid all this nonsense.
- Cascadian
February 9, 2014 at 11:58 pm -
Thank you for relating your experiences, it restores my faith in the innate good-sense of most people. Too bad it does not exist within government.
- GildasTheMonk
February 10, 2014 at 10:55 am -
Quite so
- GildasTheMonk
- Cascadian
- The Slog
February 9, 2014 at 5:30 pm -
Here I sit in the Lot, chiefly suffering from a lot of water where my drive used to be, and not a peep out of the media. This is how the MSM repress the blogosphere, and that’s a fact.
I went down to the Pyrenees earlier today, and feel bound to break the media silence about vast amounts of snow sitting on the mountains. There are people everywhere, improvising with long metal slats on their feet – a plucky attempt to deal with this unprecedented example of global warming that I fear is doomed to failure.
No matter: in the midst of all this chaos, it is good to see that one truly honest politician, Mr Fibogel Garage, has tweeted his disciples to say, “I’ll come back from Somerset knowing more than I did about the situation, not just for some photo opportunity”. And as if to prove this fine man’s point, UKip has been tweeting a photo-opportunity of him standing in Somerset water ever since. Words like left hand, right hand, arse, elbow, Viagra factory and sex orgy spring to mind. But then I do have a history of mental illness.
A classic Raccoon destruction of drizzle turned to Noah’s Flood by drivel. Lang may har lum reek.
http://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/econo-fiscal-leadership-and-the-retailing-of-parrots/ - Michael
February 9, 2014 at 6:10 pm -
It does seem like a massive cockup to me. You can’t charge folks drainage fees and then not do the job:
From the DT:
Michael Eavis, the farmer and organiser of the Glastonbury Festival, said the Environment Agency had sold off 50 dredging machines for scrap several years ago because it had decided its priority was “to preserve the riverbank life – river oysters and little voles and things”.
…
Critics of the Environment Agency have pointed out that it recently spent £31m creating a bird sanctuary at the mouth of the Parrett river in Somerset – six times the estimated cost of dredging. - Joe Public
February 9, 2014 at 7:21 pm -
Perhaps the EA was given a false sense of security?
Met Office 3-month Outlook – Period: December 2013 – February 2014 Issue date: 21.11.13:-
“SUMMARY – PRECIPITATION:
Confidence in the forecast for precipitation across the UK over the next three months is relatively low. For the December-January-February period as a whole there is a slight signal for below-average precipitation.
The probability that UK precipitation for December-January-February will fall into the driest of our five categories is around 25% and the probability that it will fall into the wettest category is around 15% (the 1981-2010 probability for each of these categories is 20%).” [My bold]http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/m/8/A3_plots-precip-DJF-2.pdf
If the MO’s models can’t accurately predict ‘the weather’, why should we believe the predictions of their climate models?
- Jeremy Poynton
February 9, 2014 at 7:36 pm -
Met have predicted it to be warmer than it has been for 13 of the past 14 years. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they had an agenda. What is reassuring is that however badly they perform, we still get looted to pay them bonuses.
- Jeremy Poynton
- MTG
February 9, 2014 at 7:51 pm -
It’s not all doom and gloom, Anna. News is flooding in of a hosepipe ban for Huddersfield residents.
- Ed P
February 9, 2014 at 10:52 pm -
I just spent the weekend in Cornwall, now back in the south-east. There was not much more flooding than usual at this time of year.
But the meejah needs/feeds on sensational stories… - dave roderick
February 9, 2014 at 11:30 pm -
eu rules followed by the said agency = saving money and less work
also what about geoengineering with all sorts of muck chucked into the air by the yanks.just asking
- Margaret Jervis
February 10, 2014 at 9:19 am -
It really does seem to be the case that EA had , or entertained, a policy of increased flooding tauntondeane.gov.uk/irj/go/km/docs/CouncilDocuments/TDBC/Documents/Forward%20Planning/Evidence%20Base/Parret%20Catchment%20Flood%20Management%20Plan.pdf …
- Moor Larkin
February 10, 2014 at 9:35 am -
According to a guy in the Sunday Telegraph yesterday, this is indeed the case and he maintains that in order to start dredging the rivers at the root of the Somerset problem, they will need to get permission to vary from EU Policy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/10625663/Flooding-Somerset-Levels-disaster-is-being-driven-by-EU-policy.html- Moor Larkin
February 10, 2014 at 11:01 am -
Just noticed the link had already been made upstream…. :-}
- Moor Larkin
- Moor Larkin
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