From THE DAILY SCEPTIC
by Chris Morrison
Back to Biblical times and beyond, great floods and storms were the promised punishments for those who sinned against the fashionable orthodoxies and beliefs. It is of course a natural go-to for modern day prophets of climate doom. Needless to say, inconvenient scientific facts are unwelcome in the Latter Day Church of Net Zero, so alarmists are cautioned to stop reading here. The rest of us can digest recent research by Paul Homewood on the British climate in 2023 and published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation. This notes that sea level rises are showing no acceleration over multi-decadal scales and rainfall is not becoming more extreme, while storms have become less powerful over recent years.
It has become slightly warmer than it used to be, notes Homewood, “but the U.K. climate has changed very little in recent years”. Long-term trends are dwarfed by the natural variability of British weather, he continues, and there is no evidence that weather is becoming more extreme. “Nothing in the data indicates that climate will become more extreme in future,” he concludes.
Homewood observes that sea levels have been rising at between 1.3mm and 2mm a year around the U.K. after taking into account vertical land movement, and there has been no acceleration in the rate of rise on multi-decadal scales. But sea level rises are an easy hit for climate alarmists promoting the Net Zero political fantasy. Residents of Gloucester were alarmed in 2022 by local newspaper reports that their Cathedral, set at 19 metres above sea level, would be flooded by 2050. In the same year, the Mirror added to the gaiety of the nation with a story stating that large parts of the Midlands would be under water. Coastal towns in Hampshire, Essex, Sussex and Kent were at serious risk, it was claimed. Belgium, Germany, Northern France and half of the Netherlands “are expected to be under water by 2100”.
All of this is the work of Climate Central, a Green Blob-funded operation that specialises in ready-to-publish stories for particularly dozy journalists. In its own words, it “provides authoritative information to help the public and policymakers make sound decisions about climate and energy”. Apart from flooding laughs, it seems we have Climate Central to thank for the establishment in the U.K. of World Weather Attribution. It claims to have “initiated conversations with leading researchers and key journalists about bringing attribution science into the news cycle”. Rarely can Green Blob money have been better spent. The pseudoscience of attributing individual weather events to human-caused climate change is well established with “key journalists” ready to peddle all the unprovable claims under the covering banner of ‘scientists say’.
Meanwhile back in the real world it is not apparent that rising sea levels in the U.K. and elsewhere – relatively tiny compared to those just 4,000 years ago – present much danger in the near future. Many Pacific island are growing in size due to natural accretion, while a recently published science paper has published the startling news that low-lying Bangladesh has grown in size over the last 34 years by 3,274 km2 to reach 137,656 km2. Bangladesh and its position on the Bay of Bengal has long been a poster alarm for coastal flooding and population displacement. However, the vast majority of the recent land expansion is shown to have been the consequence of receding relative sea levels along the coasts and synchronous seaward coastal land growth.
Earlier this year a senior meteorologist at the Met Office told the BBC that storms in the U.K. were becoming “more intense” due to climate change. In fact the opposite is true, with Paul Homewood noting that this is confirmed by the Met Office, which has made it clear that the Burns Storm in 1990, the Boxing Day Storm in 1998 and the Great Storm of 1987 were very much more severe than any storm in the last decade.
The above illustration shows clearly the decline in wind speeds going back over 50 years. One annual analysis of top wind gusts at Bingley is said to confirm this trend and suggests that wind speeds have been falling.
The British Isles are rainy places and plenty of climate mischief can be made from all the natural variations to be expected given its northern location near the top of the Atlantic Ocean. “Why is it raining so much,” asked Ben Rich of the BBC last April. Hardly headline stuff one might think since similar sentiments have probably occurred to everyone who has ever lived in these sodden lands. According to Rich, the Met Office predicts that by 2070, winters in the U.K. will be up to 30% wetter than they were in 1990, while rainfall will be up to 25% more intense.
No doubt computer models are behind this crystal ball gazing but the actual evidence of recent trends suggests something more modest. Homewood notes that annual rainfall in England and Wales has been increasing since 1980 but the 10-year average is at a similar level to earlier periods such as the 1870s and 1920s. There was a significant rise in rainfall in Scotland during the 1980s, he observed, but there has been little change in trend since. Meanwhile, rainfall trends in Northern Ireland have barely changed since 1931. As to rainfall becoming “more intense”, Homewood notes that in England and Wales only seven days have exceeded 30mm since records began in 1931, but none of these have occurred since 2000.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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