UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2017–Part III
By Paul Homewood
The final three categories from the government’s UK Climate Change Risk Assessment 2017.
A rather vague and woolly statement.
It is important to put some of these claims into perspective.
As HH Lamb reported in his book, “Climate, History and the Modern World”, growing seasons in England reduced by nine to ten days between the mid 1950s and 1980. (Page 274).
Similarly there were southwards shifts in species during this period.
It is not apparent why this stage of the cycle is in any way unusual or dangerous.
Also the claim about soil quality is not substantiated, and should be ignored.
The bottom line is that the UK’s ecosystem has managed perfectly well over the centuries when the climate has swung from warm to cold and back again, and there is no reason why it should not continue to.
This does not mean, of course, that there are no other, non-climate related, threats to the environment.
There is no evidence that extreme weather is increasing on a global basis, which rather undermines the first sentence.
There is also no evidence that incremental changes in climate will affect agricultural productivity.
On the contrary, agricultural output has been on a steadily increasing trend since 1960, for whatever reasons.
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
As for the UK, 2014, the warmest year on record since 1910, brought record wheat harvests:
With DEFRA commenting:
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/11/06/warmest-year-brings-record-harvests-for-uk/
The very real danger to British agriculture would be a return to the shorter growing seasons of the 1960s, as HH Lamb noted:
This period coincided with the cold phase of the AMO, which has been alternating with warm phases on a 60-year cycle for at least the last millennium.
It is pretty much inevitable that the next cold phase will come along in the next decade or so. This is what the government should really be planning for, and not some imaginary global warming.
In short, they don’t actually know, but are guessing.
We do know that invasions of assorted pests and diseases have become an issue in recent decades, purely because of the massive increase in international trade and travel.
As far as humans are concerned, experts in such matters, like Prof Duane Gubler and Prof Paul Reiter have rubbished claims that diseases such as dengue fever and malaria would spread with global warming.
SUMMARY
In total, the government’s UK Climate Change Risk Assessment fails to prove that climate change will adversely affect the country in coming years.
It appears as if they have only taken advice from the Committee on Climate Change. Perhaps if they had invited genuinely independent contributions from expert sources, they might have reached more realistic conclusions.
Given the pressure on public funds, it is hard to believe that the government would even waste money producing this rubbish.
When the next one is due in five years time, I’ll make them this offer- give me a couple of hundred quid, and I will write it for them!
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The fallacy of “The Science is Settled” is daily being increasingly eroded by the erudite skeptics on blogs such as these (and what a public service they are collectively providing!)
The Alarmist AGW cabal insists “The Science is Settled” based on what they are studying down their microscope in their own secretive labs. … anthropogenic CO2 … and trying to ignore (in best struthian [ostrich-like] fashion) the much wider range of relevant topics.
My ancient brain is long-since removed from coping with the erudite subject of the Laws of Therodynamics, but have these been fully explored in the context of paleo-climatic cyclical energy fluxes which increasingly appear to be metronomic influences (albeit erratically for reasons yet to to be fully researched and tested)?
Please bear with my analogy for the lay-person (me included!) to get a handle on this topic:
Imagine a model of the earth, skewered by a spit, mounted in an oven, heated from grill-burners. The “earth” has a small, centroidal heating element to maintain a hot core. The spit rotates ‘daily’, and the axis of the spit varies over the ‘year’ by 23deg. either way. The grill (sun) is cyclical in its heat output (11 years +/-?) There are also microwave elements in the top of the oven which blast different forms of radiation into the oven from time to time. And electromagnetic field generators, ditto.
Once every few million years, the polarity of the earth’s core flips for reasons I’ve yet to hear of.
Earth’s core, being magnetic, and liquid to some extent, and ‘plastic’ to a greater extent, will respond to these influences, right?
The earth’s crust is fractured and moves over the plastic interior, likely driven by magmatic thrusts.
Abscesses (volcanos) pop-up and spew magma and other hot detritus and gases over the landscape and into the troposphere. Science is yet incapable of determining where these abscess-points are going to be, which is indicative of the fluid-churnings in the earth’s mantle.
Add to the mix the fact that this ‘cauldron’ has lots of water. We now strongly suspect that these vast bodies will possess their own fluxes, just as a sub-simmering kettle will be a chaotic spiralling, rising and falling convection-currents, aided & abetted by surface wind-shear and polar temperature extremes.
To say nothing of the troposphere with its own powerful eddies and energy fluxes. and the Meteorological can’t forecast more than about 1 week ahead, right?!!
To my point …. surely Gaia is a cauldron of energy fluxes? And until we identify, study and get to understand each and every one, and each interrelated coupling, HOW CAN ANYONE SAY “THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED”?
“Given the pressure on public funds, it is hard to believe that the government would even waste money producing this rubbish.”
Perhaps this is why they have just copy & pasted the CCC report since the risk assessment
merely informs and does not direct, as opposed to legal obligation within the CCA 2008.
http://www.thegwpf.com/uk-government-faces-legal-action-over-failure-to-fight-climate-change/
Click on “latest expert report” to see who the “experts” are!
I say bring it on. A point of contract law is that if an obligation (such as 57% emission reduction by 2032) is shown to be impossible, it is null & void.
http://dictionary.findlaw.com/definition/impracticability.html
The [climate impact assessment] report in total is a work of fiction, done by a bunch of green zealots and as they do weaving a global warming mattress filled by straw men, bogus projections, fanciful predictions and all done with notable propensity to plant arrant hyperbole.
Did Baroness bird brain Bryony Worthington or for that matter her just as bent – Scotland, anyone……….come one! come ye all!…. inclusive of the DfiD and Defra, NGO’s, charidees, save the workforce’s stipends and paying the chuggers action aid offer their services? Hmm, whatever, the whole miserable output smacks of the same desperate none facts and sensationalist burbling and gurgling half wit soft films put out by WWF-Plymouth university-beeb,ABC,CNN and which gum up the Nat Geo channel.
To wit:
“We do know that invasions of assorted pests and diseases have become an issue in recent decades, purely because of the massive increase in international trade” unquote.
Now, i can’t begin to think of the ever increasing list of invasive tree diseases the UK has imported into Britain thanks largely, insofar as horticulture is concerned – gardening shows on telly notwithstanding…………….to the UK being no longer responsible for what can and cannot be allowed into THIS country.
It gets worse, one of the chief culprits guilty of introducing a myriads of foreign pests are great pests in themselves – the National Trust and the Forestry [commission] Kommissars, run by the greens and killing off England’s green! Whodathunk it, quite honestly the left hand doesn’t tell the other left hand what it is that they want nor do they care – deconstruction plants and people: is all they are about.
There are three main problems to a return to sanity:
1 The BBC and other media propaganda.
2 The civil servants who don’t allow the truth to be put to the Government.
3 Politicians and the Government who are not allowed to hear the truth by the civil servants, but are ignorant and don’t want to know the facts anyway.
And only the third group have any accountability for their faults: and that is very diffused: these reports allow taxation and subsidy to be justified without comeback. TRAGIC.
Reblogged this on Wolsten.
Hi Paul, Love notalotofpeopleknowthat, but you missed the best Christopher Booker report in yesterday’s Telegraph ever! Please publicise it. Best Wishes Andy
Slightly off topic, but according to ex-National Grid boss Steve Halliday, the UK ‘need not fear electricity blackouts’. Ironically on the Radio 4 BBC news this morning there was an item on fake news immediately followed by Energy Analyst Cardinal Harrabin reporting on it and telling us that wind energy was “virtually free” – I thought he was Environment Analyst, but there you go, BBC employees are experts on everything and can multi-task at will.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-38791572
I should have added that the horrendous cost of the capacity auction needed to keep power stations on standby is very much glossed over with the usual statement from a government spokesman.
“virtually free”? Really? Because the energy company that supplies power to our
local history / archaeology clubhouse has just emailed us to say that we can elect to have
“100% renewable energy” . But it will cost us about 10% more than our current mongrel mix of power. So if they charge more , but it costs them “virtually nothing” then they must be doing nicely . Perhaps we should invest in them.
I heard that interview, Philip. Incredible chutzpah!! Halliday was relying on flexi-power contracts, smart meters, and batteries to get us through. He was not challenged at all on who was supplying the contingency (STOR, anyone?) nor the costs involved – and who was benefiting (no doubt some of his mates). If the new HoC committee on fake news needs an example to be getting on with…..
In haste I did not use this link, perhaps I set that to right, here. Often enough – too often, I’ve heard various talking heads in the media and ranting on about ‘the decline and spread of diseases in and of British woodland’ and tagged on to the idea that ‘man made global warming’ is by somehow through some recondite, incomputerable association made the culprit…………. whereas, I rather think not.
” Role of the plant trade
There is no doubt that C. fraxinea’s introduction and spread has been due to the global plant trade. Millions of native tree and shrub species have been imported into Britain over the past 30 years, and planted in farm hedges, to replant woods and create new ones. Over a decade ago, members of the Horticultural Trades Association Tree Seed and Nursery Group and Flora locale were jointly lobbying for this to stop.”
We are importing large quantities of woodchips for Drax from forests in the US (where Dutch Elm disease originated I think). Are we also importing diseased wood . Is it sterilised at all before shipment? If so, is there quality assurance documentation before the wood is despatched from the US or landed in the UK? Does anyone from Customs and Excise or the Environment Agency check the deliveries and the paperwork?
All good points, not ones that I have considered and indeed I’m sure HMG haven’t either.
As I recall reading about this, because of EU regulations we cannot stop cross-border trade in plants. Thus tree seeds may be germinated in one country (say Holland), then the seedlings may be grown on in another country (say Poland) before being imported to the UK with all the diseases they may have picked up en route. It would be illegal for the UK to ban such trade. Thus any lobbying to stop this trade would be useless against the might of the EU bureaucracy, which does not worry about such trivial things as unintended consequences (or perhaps, given the hatred of the EU for the UK, they are intended consequences).
It’s all such a mess and “intended” – the EU never would – surely? Ah but there again……………………..
“The science is settled” – always an interesting argument. This is a good starting point: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superseded_scientific_theories