Reply to: Ed Miliband: 'Britain is sleepwalking to a climate crisis'

[darmstadt]

I believe the answer is to:

- cancel all renewable subsidies and feed-in tariffs
- stop wind power development
- reopen closed and don't shut any more coal fired power stations
- repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act
- urgently asses shale gas potential
- urgently build gas generation capacity
- base the energy strategy on gas, nuclear and coal

Should be sorted...

I've probably helped the UKIP here because that's their energy policy

[EternalOptimist]

And calling a 25% increase 'roughly the same' is bizarre. Plus its the intensity that causes the floods, they were probably a result of the record rainfall in January falling on saturated ground rather than the integral of the previous months.

No Nathaniel

there must be more to life

[doodab]

I disagree. Mitigating the effects costs money. Most of those affected live in the middle of nowhere.

Not.mitigating the effects appears to be rather costly, and while I concede that surrey doesn't have the tube it's hardly the middle of nowhere.

[pjclarke]

And calling a 25% increase 'roughly the same' is bizarre. Plus its the intensity that causes the floods, they were probably a result of the record rainfall in January falling on saturated ground rather than the integral of the previous months.

[xoggoth]

You are probably quite right Flashman but identifying a major short term cause does not in itself rule out the long term effect of others.

[Flashman]

Will the BBC / Ed miliband and all the rest apologise for their climate change scaremongering now?


How Somerset Levels river flooded after it was not dredged for decades - Telegraph

A spokesman for the FLAG group has got hold of meticulous rainfall records for the area around the Parrett and Tone for the last 20 years.

They reveal between December 1993 and Febuary 1994 around 20 inches of rain fell - five inches less than during the same time this year.

A spokesman for the group said: "So roughly the same rainfall but far more flooding now.

"What has changed? Dredging seems to be the biggest obvious difference between then and now."

[BlasterBates]

Never mind the length!

Polar Science Center » PIOMAS Arctic Sea Ice Volume Anomaly

2014 is starting with a January ice volume of 17,500 km3 which is 1,700 km3 larger than in 2013 and roughly what it was in 2010.

10% more ice than last year.

[pjclarke]

Not looking so good now Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis | Sea ice data updated daily with one-day lag

[pjclarke]

A weather man who has published in a prestigious journal on global weather stations

You mean Fall et al 2011 which was actually about US temperature stations, and Anthony Watts was a coauthor, his only foray into the 'literature' so far. This is a good microcosm of the 'debate'.

On his blog and in his ludicrous Heartland-funded 'reports' Watts has continually claimed that the US station record is corrupted and biased warm, and as this is the best in the world .... e.g.

Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and uni-directionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.

is how 'SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECORDS: POLICY-DRIVEN DECEPTION?' opens.

But of course blogs and self-published reports are not peer-reviewed. When subject to that scrutiny, the resultant paper, of which Watts was a coauthor, found no difference in the trend in mean temperatures recorded by 'good and 'bad' sited stations, and that the statistical QA methods applied to the data were doing a reasonable job of ensuring accuracy. Must suck to be him.

[Bunk]

If cooling was about to commence would you or would you not expect the polar ice cap to expand?



Perhaps William was a little hasty in declaring imminent global cooling as "bunk".

[BlasterBates]

If cooling was about to commence would you or would you not expect the polar ice cap to expand?



Perhaps William was a little hasty in declaring imminent global cooling as "bunk".

[pjclarke]

William Michael Connolley (born 12 April 1964) is a British software engineer, writer, and blogger on climatology. Until December 2007 he was Senior Scientific Officer in the Physical Sciences Division in the Antarctic Climate and the Earth System project at the British Antarctic Survey, where he worked as a climate modeller.

Here are some of his publications:-

William Connolley - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Not that it matters. The 'study' predicts rapid global cooling starting now.... we'll soon know who is the nutter ....

[BrilloPad]

I'm inclined to agree. Whatever the causes and the arguments, we clearly need to mitigate the effects, and at least people will agree on that.

I disagree. Mitigating the effects costs money. Most of those affected live in the middle of nowhere.

[BlasterBates]

It is not a new study, it's two years old and was published in an open-access journal with an impact factor of 0.00 and sank without trace. There's a reason for that.

Slightly better than a blog post by a weatherman I guess.

A testable prediction by a nutter – Stoat

Who's William Connelly?

Is he also a cartoonist?

Has he published in the field of Astrophysics, or is he just a "guy with a blog".

A weather man who has published in a prestigious journal on global weather stations perhaps has somewhat more credence, than "a bloke", don't you think?

[pjclarke]

the EO approach. dredge the rivers, reinstall the pumps, get the decision making back into local hands. Recover the power to dump the silt onto farmland back from Brussels

Dredging is rarely an effective anti-flooding measure, it is massively expensive, has to be repeated after each flood, and may just move the water more effectively downstream to the next town. A river only holds a tiny fraction of the water flowing through a catchment, so even if you double the flow rate by dredging it will not make much of an impact.

The river channel is not large enough to contain extreme floods, even after dredging. Dredging of river channels does NOT prevent flooding during extreme river flows … The concept of dredging to prevent extreme flooding is equivalent to trying to squeeze the volume of water held by a floodplain within the volume of water held in the river channel. Since the floodplain volume is usually many times larger than the channel volume, the concept becomes a major engineering project and a major environmental change

http://www.bidfordonavon-pc.gov.uk/p...edgingpres.pdf

In the specific case of the Somerset levels, the problem there is the land is so low-lying, the gradient to the sea is negligible, so you only get a decent flow at low tide. In fact deepening or widening channels might actually make things worse at high tide....

The closed-down pump is a red herring, there was no flood warnings in that region. But I'm with you on more local democracy.