Ed Hawkins’ Wet Weather Claims Don’t Hold Water
By Paul Homewood
It is behind the FT paywall, but they have just reported this claim by Ed Hawkins:
England has experienced its wettest 18 months since records began in 1836, leaving farmers struggling to plant crops in waterlogged fields and transport networks disrupted by flooding. Climate change has exacerbated weather events around the world, creating warmer and wetter conditions in some parts, and drier and hotter conditions in others, after last year was the hottest on record globally and second warmest for the UK. While the UK had always had “very variable amounts of rain”, said Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, there had been a “large increase in the amount of rain that falls on the island, particularly in the wintertime, but also in the autumn and spring”. “This is a consequence of our warming world,” Hawkins said. “As the world continues to warm in the future we would expect to see more rain falling on these islands.”
You might find it strange that Hawkins has cherry picked an 18th month period, ending February! It is called data mining – repeated analysis of data until you get the answer you want. In this case, a warmer world means more moisture means more rain.
In theory this is true, but the extra amounts of rain we are talking about are tiny – about 5% in terms of the warming trend in the last 100 years, barely noticeable in the overall view of things.
But let’s see whether Hawkins’ 18 month claim stands up under scrutiny.
We know that 2023 was the 6th wettest on record in England, far from the record set in 1872. And there does not appear to be any obvious evidence of long term trends, merely periods of wetter and drier than average scattered throughout the record.
This pattern becomes much clearer when we look at the two-year totals. Far from the wettest proclaimed by Hawkins, 2022/23 were only the 26th wettest. And we can see clearly wetter interludes in the 1980s/80s, 1910s/20s, and early 2000s.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Rainfall/date/England.txt
We also know that the winter just finished was only 6th wettest in England, and that no month in the last two years has been anywhere a record rainfall month.
For a theory to be validated, it needs to pass all tests, not just a cherry picked one. And the data clearly does not support the theory. On the contrary, what the data shows is the wide range of natural variability.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
So 18 months includes 2x winters.
It wasn’t so long ago that the Met Office’s Julia Slingo slung us her opinion:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/mar/14/met-office-arctic-sea-ice-loss-winter
In addition, I am pretty sure that I was told that global warming would bring us perennial droughts.
They are making this up as they go along. They will say anything, to generate another grant, and another 5-star holiday in Cancun.
R
And cannibals … (Felt pretty edgy in Sainsbury’s on Saturday when it was cash only!)
April 2008, media mogul Ted Turner, “Not doing it will be catastrophic. We’ll be eight degrees hotter in ten, not 10 but 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow. Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals. Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state like Somalia or Sudan, and living conditions will be intolerable. The droughts will be so bad there’ll be no more corn growing.”
Which was an absurd claim, because the poles were 5 degrees warmer than now, just 8,000 years ago, and the biosphere was fine.
In fact the Sahara turned green and fertile….!!!
R
As ever these claims get nowhere even close to the UN IPCC definition of Climate Change:
“Climate change refers to a change in the state of the climate that can be identified (e.g., by using statistical tests) by changes in the mean and/or the variability of its properties and that persists for an extended period, typically decades or longer.”
Hawkins needs to look at a 30 year period
before making such bold claims. Furthermore, even the IPPC admit:
“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
IPCC Third Assessment Report 2001
“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
And yet that never seems to stop them does it or using their ridiculous RCP8.5 scenario.
Hunga Tonga
What goes up must come down.
Knickers !!!
Plus a very wet El Nino, no?
Now that’s a coincidence….. 🤣
Maybe he would prefer the “Little Ice Age”. Farmers couldn’t plant crops then also. If I were him I’d be glad the world’s warming, as where I live would be under a glacier 2 kilometres thick. Mm, “Thick” makes you ponder. Nothing changes, the more the population grows, the more, please excuse me, with St. Patrick’s day apon us, “the more EEJITS” we seem to aquire.
he got it on the MSM so hob done. Annual bonus assured -tick.
Let’s not be too blasé about this.
This is the 13th Spring since I moved to France. Yesterday was the latest by at least three weeks that I have planted my onions and even now I’m concerned because the ground is so wet.
I’m as climate-sceptical as the next man, as anyone in here will know, but our weather has been more than a little out of sorts over the last year or so by the standards of the last 13 years. Taking the last 12 months as a whole it has not been excessively wet but our rainfall record for seven out of the first 10 weeks of the year have been this year.
Hunga-Tonga, El Niño, or whatever. If people want to find reasons to fit their agenda, they will.
And another 14mm overnight hasn’t done them any favours either. 😡
Yes, it’s a bit freakish but it’s still only weather.
Hosepipe ban within 6 weeks is now a certainty.
The climate alarmists are confused and one cheek of the ass doesn’t know what the other one is saying . .