Dellers On The Cumbrian Floods

By Paul Homewood 

 

http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/625876/Global-warming-blame-northern-floods-James-Delingpole

 

Dellers picks up on my Cumbria flood articles in the Express:

 

 

 

By James Delingpole

 

 

It is going to be a cold, wet, miserable Christmas in the Lake District this winter, especially for the thousands of people driven from their homes by the terrible flooding of the past few days.

In towns such as Appleby, Cockermouth, Keswick and Kendal, villages like Glenridding and in the city of Carlisle, at least 5,000 homes and businesses have been inundated – many of them uninsured as a result of previous floods – displacing families, destroying carpets, furniture and lovingly wrapped presents, drowning farmers’ livestock and all but guaranteeing a very unmerry Christmas.

But what makes it worse for these poor people, adding insult to injury, are the torrents of bilge pouring forth from those supposedly responsible for their welfare.

Exhibit A: Britain’s most senior meteorologist, Professor Dame Julia Slingo, Met Office chief scientist, trying to blame it on her favourite topic, global warming: “Just as with the stormy winter of two years ago, all the evidence from fundamental physics, and our understanding of our weather systems, suggest there may be a link between climate change and record-breaking winter rainfall.”

 

 

Exhibit B: Environment Minister Liz Truss, even more bizarrely, trying to rope in Islamic State as an excuse for the inadequacy of the Government’s flood response: “It’s important to spend money through international development and through our defence to protect our security. That’s important in combating IS and other threats we face and it’s also important to invest in our flood defences to protect us from extreme weather events.”

 

Exhibit C: the Environment Agency, which claimed that the weather station at Honister had recorded 341mm of rain – more than a month’s worth in one day – and that this was a “UK record for 24 hours”.

 

Every one of these claims is either dishonest, disingenuous or flat-out untrue. But they are also, unfortunately, symptomatic of the contempt in which our political class now holds us. Far better, it has decided in its arrogant way, to pull the wool over our eyes than to admit to any failings in its useless, wasteful, anti-democratic policies.

Let’s deal with global warming first. This is a nonsense for a number of reasons, starting with the fact that no one-off weather event can ever be attributed to climate change. Weather is what you get locally every day, climate change happens on a much larger scale over a period of years.

Given that Dame Julia Slingo is paid £230,000 a year to be our chief meteorological expert she really ought to have learned this by now. But when you study Britain’s weather records more closely, what you realise is that there is nothing unprecedented about the recent Cumbrian downpour.

The Lake District is very rainy (including Seathwaite, the wettest inhabited place in England) and has experienced floods at least as bad as this, most notably in two successive years 1897 and 1898.

For this information we must thank an amateur sleuth called Paul Homewood, who has become an expert at using the historical records to debunk the Met Office’s scaremongering claims that “extreme weather events” are increasing as a result of man-made climate change.

Quite simply, there is no evidence for this whatsoever. On the contrary a study just published which analysed 1,000 weather stations in 114 countries over a period of three centuries found that there has been no significant change in precipitation (rainfall) from 1850 to the present.

Unfortunately, like a lot of government agencies, the Met Office has been hijacked by green ideologues who want us to believe that climate change is the greatest threat of our age. It suits their agenda to link topical disasters such as the Cumbrian floods to their pet theory – especially when the UN’s COP21 climate summit in Paris is reaching its climax.

It’s for similar reasons that Liz Truss had to come up with all that guff about foreign aid and terrorism. Over the next five years Britain will spend £5.8billion on overseas aid – providing solar energy for Nigeria, finding female mates for an endangered fish in Madagascar, anti-flood defences in Bangladesh, etc.

This is more than twice what her government has allocated for flood defences in places like Cumbria. But while Truss surely knows that this is an outrageous misuse of taxpayers’ money, she can’t say so.

She knows David Cameron is wedded to his ostentatious (and profligate) “0.7 per cent of GDP ring-fenced for foreign aid” budget because, supposedly, it stops the Tories looking like “the nasty party”.

Furthermore, Cameron finds foreign aid a convenient place to burnish Britain’s international green credentials, showing that it is “taking the lead” on “climate change” by subsidising developing countries to build renewable energy projects.

Supposedly this will prevent the world experiencing more extreme disasters like the one that has just hit Cumbria. In fact – almost every study agrees on this – it will make no difference whatsoever.

Here’s what should be done. First, developers would be forbidden from building on flood plains; second, rivers would be dredged more often – something discouraged by the EU; third, a permanent gag should be put round anyone from the Met Office who tries blaming weather events on “climate change”; finally, the Government should use the money it is squandering on foreign aid to help the only people to whom it has a duty of care: the British.