The Burns Day Storm of 1990
By Paul Homewood
There have been many claims that Storm Ciaran was somehow almost unprecedented, all caused by climate change of course!
In Britain, it was no more than a damp squib for most; even on exposed coasts, the highest gusts reported were only 71 mph, the sort of winds we see every year.
How anybody can compare Ciaran with storms like the Burns Day one in 1990 beats me. This is what Philip Eden wrote ten years ago:
While the Great Storm of 1987 produced even stronger winds, Eden believes that Burns Day was even stronger in terms of geographical extent, longevity and intensity. Note he also comments that the storm was just the start of six weeks of strong gales.
The Met Office’s report on the storm proves that any attempt to compare Burns Day and Ciaran are utterly absurd. Note particularly the sustained wind speeds, which hit 60 kts and higher in parts of the country, 69 mph and higher. Apart from exposed coasts, Ciaran never got much above 20 mph.
But to get a real impression, just take a look at the BBC’s news coverage that day in January 1990, when 47 died as a direct result of the storm:
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
To crusaders like the UK media, facts are what you want them to be (like Humpty’s words) and must not get in the way of the cause. I believe that people are aware that the hype is dishonest and this is part of the reason people are moving away from the establishment media.
The irony is, the scientific method was invented because people just believed stuff and didn’t care about actual, empirical evidence. Now we have the BBC and others just believing stuff and proclaiming truth regardless of empirical evidence whilst sincerely thinking they are following science.
Whenever a named storm hits, the mainstream media go into overdrive, making all sorts of unsubstantiated claims. We hear the usual eye witness accounts saying it’s the worse weather they’ve experienced. Such people must have memory issues or be too young to remember October 1987 or January 1990.
Ciaran was nothing more than a typical autumn storm. What I fear is regulation being introduced to effectively silence media outlets that won’t follow the script.
Even Talk TV are parroting the establishment line.
Appreciate if Paul Homewood could clarify the graphs that the BBC Scotland website have published under the article Polluters Face 20 yeas in Jail. The graphs demonstrate the rise in the air temp from 1940. Appreciated thank you
Gaenor,
I assume you mean the graph entitled “Daily global average air temperature, 1940-2023”?
If so, unfortunately, nobody can sensibly answer because the term is absolutely meaningless and not accompanied by a reference to a dataset (whether adjusted – as ever – or not).
Sensible studies by the likes of Christie and Spencer (see WattsUpWithThat) using satellite lower troposphere data indicate an average warming rate of perhaps 0.14C per decade – significantly less than this graph seems to imply.
In short, that graph is rubbish designed to mislead.
Thank you for sharing the link much appreciated.
I was living close to the North Wales coast in the winter of 1989-1990 and there was a series of very high tides and very bad storms that winter that meant the sea front was very badly affected on repeated occasions. There was a series of very bad gales, one after the other that made one nervous at every peak cycle of the tides that winter. There was the Burns Day storm itself on 25 January, but there was a second major storm on 26th-28th February. I recall reading that 3 million trees were blown over and I think nearly 50 people died in the Burns Day storm alone. The February storms breached the sea wall at the nearby town of Towyn, many square miles were under water and nearly 3,000 houses flooded and damaged. Even 30 years later I think back to this winter every time someone comments about how bad storms are now – for me that winter was a worrying time living in a very exposed coastal location.
What I find most perplexing is that it is mostly older people who watch the BBC and pay for TV licences. My three children are aged from 25 to 31 and all live independently from my wife and I. None of them have a TV license and they all say only very few of their similarly aged friends have one. They simply no longer watch live main stream TV.
So who do the Met Office/BBC believe they are trying to con? Do they really think us older people do not have a memory nor can check data?
In 1987 I was without mains power for 11 days, in 1990 it was 8 days. On both occasions my home sustained physical damage to both the roof and chimney.
Ciaran came and went without me noticing anything more than a bit of “wet and windy” and on the nearby Golf Course I noticed several players happy to brave the elements not seeming too concerned at damaging their handicaps..
“Much of the Country”, eh? Sums up the MSM … do they refer to the Geog. AREA or the Population( density) As usual I feel I must be living in some far-flung foreign land ….. When YOU guys get it, WE don’t! Let’s be clear : WE DO NOT GET that weather, and when we DO, YOU guys don’t want to know. Oh and what about all those Remoaners… THEIR Kind didn’t tell you anything ( or very much ) about the extent and degree of storminess across ALL of Europe over the past few weeks. German TV has “Special Programs” covering the “extreme” weather events, just to rub in / reinforce the nonsense, to the same degree as we are bombarded with images of the current conflict(S) – think the MSM has forgotten a few recently.
The very mention of the phrase “attribution study” should ring deafening alarm bells. Pity it doesn’t to those ignoramuses who nod wisely as if it meant anything more than yet another cobbled-together computer program aimed at producing the result required by the pseudo-expert that created it.
Personalising storms by giving them silly names was a trick intended to make them more memorable and therefore get them to stick in the minds of the weak minded. Hence they would remember far more of the recent storms than they used to. Hence the global warming scammers would get people to believe that storms have recently become more frequent.
So, please do not use these silly names. Use their date as we always used to.
Absolutely right. The Met Office can witter on about storm this and storm that, storm storm storm. In my book Beaufort Ten is a storm force – read it up. It’s a product of the alarmists cult – ooh look we are like American hurricanes.
‘rapidly intensified’ is the new scary term for Weathermen.
‘At least seven people were killed and dozens injured across Europe with widespread damage and flooding reported in the UK.’
An appeal to pity.
‘The storm was driven by a powerful jet stream’
Not one of them weak ones.
‘While storms during autumn are fairly normal for the UK, experts say such events are now “more damaging” due to the impacts of the climate crisis. ‘
Appeal to anonymous authorities.
‘“There are a lot of attribution studies and other lines of evidence showing that autumn/winter storms like this are more damaging because of climate change,” Dr Friederike Otto, senior lecturer in climate science at Imperial College London, said.’
‘Attribution studies’ are NOT evidence. Dr Otto knows better. He is lying, and he knows it. He can’t not know it.
‘That’s because the rainfall associated with these types of storms is more severe due to climate change’
Climate change makes water wetter.
‘and the storm surges are higher and thus more damaging due to the higher sea levels’
Yep. Sea level up 4 cm this century. That changes everything.
‘The Met Office says that in the future, the last three months of the year will likely see more days with rainfall totals over two inches.’
Predicting the future.
‘A person walks through flood water on Market Street in Downpatrick’
Another appeal to pity.
Every sentence in the article can be picked apart. It is junk science writ large.
I have to admit that I had never heard of the “Babylon Bee” until you referred to it elsewhere. Having investigated the Bee, I have to say this article from the “I” was surely written for inclusion in the Bee.
“He is lying”
You mis-gendered the lady! Here are some random extracts about her:
Friederike Otto has a doctorate from the Free University Berlin in philosophy of science in 2011. She joined the University of Oxford in the same year and was director of the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford before joining Imperial in October 2021.
December 2021 works as a Senior Lecturer at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at Imperial College London
https://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/people/fotto.html
Honorary Research Associate of the Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford, and a Professor in the Global Climate Science Programme.
Otto is the co-lead of World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international effort to analyse and communicate the possible influence of climate change on extreme weather events.
Co-Developed by Friederike Otto, “Event Attribution Science” makes it possible to determine the extent to which any weather event is caused by human-made climate change. Otto’s approach serves as a starting point for designating responsibility. She offers a basis for providing concrete global measures to understand and fight the impacts of climate change and discredit false information.
https://www.research.ox.ac.uk/article/2021-07-01-deadly-heat-the-pleasantly-terrifying-dr-fredi-otto-talks-extreme-climate-events
“One of her students has been following attempts to bring climate change claims against companies and governments through the courts. The impact could be enormous, says Dr Otto, who talks positively about the prospect of litigation forcing bodies into honouring their climate change pledges, ‘If countries are forced to act and show that they can transform, others will follow.’
She maintains, ‘The legal route will not be the only one, to solve problems. But there could be a ripple effect, [after a court ruling] and governments will do more…But it is especially important for companies to show they are doing something…and a lot of companies have more power than nation states.’”
She also spent time at Potsdam with Schellnhuber and Rahmstorf, which explains a lot. Her time at Oxford meant she was working with Myles Allen who was an early “attributor”, check out “Playing Climate Games ” https://web.archive.org/web/20210625083829/http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/playing_climate_games.pdf
. . . but she is a dick.
“Otto is the co-lead of World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international effort to monetize weather events.”
Fixed it.
What days with rain over 2 inches?? In all the rain in the recent weeks I never measured more than an inch except for the one day it was slightly more but there are no graduations above an inch or 25mm.
Meanwhile in other news, the High Priestess of collagen filler and silicone implants is to leave BBC Wales. It would appear someone at the BBC is finally growing a pair of their own (growing a pair of what I can’t say on gender inequality grounds)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-67357877
Oh yes, the ‘legend in her own lunchbox’. What on earth did the Welsh do to deserve her half-baked opinions.? Wasn’t voting in Drakeford enough penance for them?
‘BBC host Carol Vorderman has claimed she has been sacked by the broadcaster over her public criticism of the U.K. government.’
What’s her point?
You mean the one who was proved to be completely wrong on a post but couldn’t bring herself to apologise for her error? Good riddance. Now if we could just get rid of St Gary of Crisps & leftie bollocks….. I hear that Match of the Day will continue as no other channel thought it was worth bidding for the highlights package with a rapidly shrinking audience. Licence payers should demand his pay is linked to viewer numbers.
The BBC is fear mongering again.
It is now “virtually certain” that 2023 – a year of deadly heatwaves, floods and fires – will be the warmest on record, new data suggests.
July was so warm that it may have been the hottest month in 120,000 years, while average September temperatures smashed the previous record by a “gobsmacking” 0.5C.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-67332791
I don’t believe that the hottest month in 120,000 years is provable in anyway whatsoever. But I know what, probably word for word, the BBC response to my appeal to their first rejection of my complaint about this article will be.
The BBC can claim any record they like when adjusted and cherry-picked data is used. Par for their course. They should study the many (hundreds to thousands) analyses of original data by Tony Heller.
Glen I don’t know if this is relevant but my last complaint to the BBC is being treated completely differently to others in the recent past. I complained of factual error to an article and referred to a BBC GCSE Bitesize link to prove it was factually incorrect. No reply in the required time frame so I was about to escalate. But then I got an apology for their not replying quickly enough, saying they were taking my complaint very seriously and detailing discussions they were having so far to “rectify” the issue. They have claimed they will be back in due course. Quite weird for them, perhaps the recent policy change over complaints is making a difference. I have already notified poster Joe Public who got a fob off response to his querying the same point before me so I will try and get the response, when/if it arrives, on here.
Dr Friederike Otto is from the University of Potsdam and she is the one making silly statements. She was ~8 when the 1990 series of storms occurred.
She should have investigated prior European weather rather than whatever (attributions?) she has spent her time on.
Silliness is rampant in “TheClimateCult”™.
Maybe Burns was predicting for this storm:
” The wind blaw as ‘twad blawn its last;
The rattling showers rose on the blast:
The speedy gleams the darkness swallow’d;
Loud, deep, and lang the thunder bellow’d;
That night, a child might understand,
The Deil had business on his hand.”