UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2017 –Part II
By Paul Homewood
More from the government’s UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2017:
This is a rather muddled piece, which tries to prove that heat related deaths could exceed reduced deaths in winter.
For a start, it needs to be restated that summers have not been getting hotter in the last decade.
The summer of 1976 remains by far the hottest on record, and even 2006 was not as hot as 1911.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/actualmonthly
Perhaps more importantly, there have only been two days of 30C or over in the Central England Temperature series since 2006.
There were thirteen such days in 1975 and 1976.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html
Last year, according to the ONS, excess winter deaths added up to 24300, with the death rate 15% higher in winter months than non-winter months. (Winter months are defined as Dec-March).
But it is also worth noting that even deaths in mild months like April and May are also higher than in summer.
Without underestimating the effect of hot weather on health, it is clear that a warmer climate would on balance be beneficial.
Of course, increasing demands for water will create big challenges, but it is not clear exactly what this has to do with climate change!
As for likely precipitation trends, we seem to be being told that we will get more rain at the same time as we get less!
So, just for the record, let’s see what has been happening.
Over the UK as a whole, rainfall has been on a generally increasing trend.
For England though any trends are much less obvious.
If we just look at the southern half of England, where droughts are predicted to hit hardest, and where demand pressures are greatest, there is effectively no trend at all.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Rainfall/date/England_S.txt
The only conclusion we can reach is that climate change has had no effect on water supply at all.
The final part will come tomorrow.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Forty thousand people die each year, right now, from sepsis, and no one is duggedtimg that we risk our entire evonomy and spend billions to prevent it.
But two thousand a year might, just might, die in thirty years time and we have to risk the whole farm to prevent it.
Where did I miss the logic in this?
The same logic can be applied to dozens of conditions, almost all treatable with suitable funding in place. But that’s not Saving The Planet and empowering the UN, so it’s a no-go.
The UK, including the Met Office are on board with the new field of “climate medicine”, by which medical scientists look for their share of the climate change funding, aided and abetted by IPCC. It is unsupported by the facts, of course.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/07/10/climate-medicine/
Over the last 11 years I have been unable to find any reports on laboratory experiments which demonstrate conclusively the Green House Effect. in spite of it being a relatively simple thing to do. i.e.: A long pressure tube fitted with radiation sensors and emitters. All controllable for temperature, pressure, frequency and type of gas or mixtures involved.
All hypotheses require experimental proof before being accepted as valid. Albeit perhaps with the exception of the Thermodynamic Laws.
Without this we all at the mercy of fake news such as this report.
I am in despair at the way this viral Meme of AGW has so infected the body of the scientific community.
The boil needs to lanced; but my puny scalpels are no match for the tough skin.
You did not look hard enough. Physicist John Tyndall first correctly measured the IR absorbtivity of a variety of gasses including CO2 in 1859, and his paper on his results to the Royal Society appeared in 1861. Still available online. See footnote 6 to the climate chapter of The Arts of Truth for the detailed reference. Wiki even has his experimental setup illustrated for you. And last year Dr. Roy Spencer published a series of illustrated blog posts on a do it yourself home setup using ice, a cooler, and a simple thermocouple on a suspended ‘lid’, with results proving yet again that CO2 is a GHG. Google fu will take you there in one click.
You do yourself no credit claiming otherwise. Doubling CO2 by itself raises Temp about 1.1-1.2C. 1.2C is MIT professor Lindzen’s value; a more precise calculation is 1.16C. The open question is feedbacks. Discussed at length in the climate chapter of the book. Perhaps you need to read it to become better informed. Lindzen critiqued the chapter before publication.
So based on the CO2 level we should have seen 0.05℃ rise 1895 to 1945, and 0.35℃ from 1945 to the present. (Linear extrapolation for what that’s worth from Aarhenius’s CO2 figure (295 ppm) which I assume is most likely correct). So less than half the claimed rise based on selected land sites mostly in the northern hemisphere.
And as I like pointing out the maps of ice in Glacier Bay, Alaska indicate that warming seems to have started earlier and slowed recently.
https://soundwaves.usgs.gov/2001/07/fieldwork2.html
Note: the mouth of the bay had ice gouging the bottom so intrusion of warm water is an unlikely cause. Also that the ice is at sea level (and in contact with it) so the retreat of the glaciers isn’t affected by a change in height.
G3, I have no doubt about irrefutable natural variation. I have great doubt about the mix with AGW. Including recently.
Nobody doubts that CO2 absorbs and emits IR at certain frequencies. However the atmospheric greenhouse effect is an attempt at an analogy by a work of pure fiction. All that happens is cooling of the Earth’s surface by conduction, convection and radiation and cooling of the atmosphere by radiation.
Paul, I’m glad you pointed out the absurdity of this report in that it claims the CC will increase rainfall over the UK yet, at the same time, cause drought conditions such that communities will need to manage their water supplies. The stoopid…………..it hertz. Of course, as long as it enriches Deben….
The US produces a similar report every few years. The last was the 2014 National Climate Assessment, a joint product of 14 federal agencies. It is nonsense. In essay Credibility Conundrums in ebook Blowing Smoke I deconstructed just the first chapter, which alleged increasing US weather extremes. A bowl of picked cherries and ignored historical facts. Not even speculations, outright official US government lies. There is no other possible description. Trump and his team have several herculean tasks. Bringing honesty to climate information is one.
Garbage in Garbage out all you have to know!
All they know is that climate is and always has been. Overall the general trend is cooling (for the last 300 years or so) with some short lived upward spikes.
Apart from that they know nothing!
If they know more they would be able to say (to within a month or two) when the hottest and coldest years will be in the next 100 years and why. They can not because they have no method they have only guesses!
Solar variability. Volcanic events. Meteors and other space debris. These all affect the climate can they predict any of them with precision?
All this about climate and its future change is unverifiable — it’s just BS in large stinking dollops.
Paul, isn’t it odd that the UKMO are the ones advising the CCC. But when you point out their own data, none of the facts in the reports are true.
I despair with the CCC not wanting to find out about the data available, for not wanting to analyse that data and to discover what really has been happening with climate change.
It is such a shame that we are led by such uninformed and ignorant people.
Who thinks they are in danger of overheating in the UK?
Go to any big airport, Brits are queuing up to get to warmer countries at every time of year.
Last year the BBC did several pieces on the summer of 1976, it being the 40th anniversery.I heared one interview wih an endocronologist who explained how due to the droubt tree rings showed little growth that year. Perhaps the climatologists of the future will use them to show how cold it was.
The only conclusion we can reach is that climate change has had no effect on water supply at all.
I think it is safe to say that we can also conclude that the Climate Change Committee has no grip on reality.
Water shortage is man made or more precisely government made. There is an EU directive that makes water a resource to be controlled by price to reduce the mythical carbon footprint. In the south-east more planned water storage by the water companies was cancelled by the liberal coalition. So don’t blame the water companies. Richard North blogged on this in May 2012.