Week 8 2014

Tendring Topics………on line

‘Headless chicken!’

          That is how HRH the Prince of Wales recently described those who deny the reality of global warming or claim that, if global warming is taking place, human activity has anything to do with it. 

            One of the revelations with regard to the weather that has become apparent in recent months has been the accuracy of the Meteorological Office’s weather forecasts.  If they say rain will reach the East Anglian coast around noon – then it probably will (possibly even reaching drier-than-most Clacton-on-Sea!)  The Met Office has come a long way since the evening when a BBC weatherman confidently assured an enquirer that ‘there will be no hurricane,’ just a few hours before hurricane force winds did strike us!    The severe gale and storm-surge that struck us in early December, uprooting trees, stripping roofs, cutting off electricity – and wrecking the helter-skelter on Clacton pier -  arrived almost exactly on the hour that had been predicted - and so have the many other gales and downpours that have since plagued us  this winter.

 It follows that when the Met Office tells us that the exceptional weather that we have been – and are – experiencing, is probably linked to climate change and that this climate change is most likely the result of human activity, it is time for even the most sceptical (and the most stupid) to pay attention.  The weather definitely has been exceptional!  More than 130 severe flood warnings have been issued in the first six weeks of this year - and that was before the Thames Valley was flooded - compared with only nine in the whole of 2012.   During those same six weeks of 2014 more than 5,000 properties have been flooded (again before the Thames Valley was flooded) and the Environment Agency says that 1.3 million homes have been protected from flooding only by flood defence work carried out during the past decade.

            A Met Office report links ‘the recent extreme weather in Europe and North America to perturbations in the North Atlantic and Pacific jet streams, partly emanating from changing weather patterns in South East Asia and associated with higher than normal ocean temperatures in that region.  The attribution of these changes to global warming caused by human activities requires climate models of sufficient resolution to capture storms and their associated rainfall.  Such models are now available and should be deployed as soon as possible to provide a solid evidence base for future investment in flood and coastal defences’.

 At a recent Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons, David Cameron said that he suspected that the recent storms battering the UK and the extreme weather in North America were connected to global temperature changes.  However pressure from parliamentary ‘headless chicken’ particularly in his own party made him modify that reply;  ‘You can’t point to one weather event and say that is climate change but many scientists were talking of a link between the two.  The point I was trying to make is whatever you think – even if you think climate-change is mumbo-jumbo – because these things are happening more often, it makes sense to do all you can do to prevent these floods affecting so many people, and that is exactly what we are doing.

In the Barrack Room of the POW ‘camp’ in Germany where I spent the last eighteen months of World War II we had a daily tear-off calendar with a ‘thought for the day’, in German of course, for every day.  One or two of those ‘thoughts’ have stuck in my memory to this day.  One was from the German poet Friedrich von Schiller

Mit der Dumheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens (with stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain!)

The Climate Change deniers ‘diabolical cocktail'.

          One member of the government who is prepared to speak his mind about global warming and its effects is Lib.Dem MP Ed Davey, Energy Secretary.  He says that the political consensus about the need to tackle climate change is breaking down as some Conservatives and members of UKIP, driven by ‘a diabolical cocktail of nimbyism, denial of science, and fear of Europe, try to discredit the science by undermining public trust in the scientific evidence for climate change’.

            The chief scientist at the Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, declared recently that evidence suggests a link between the extreme weather gripping Britain and climate change. Prime Minister David Cameron has also said that he suspects there is a connection.  However the Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, has regularly downplayed the risks of climate change, leading to calls from environmental groups and the Green Party for his dismissal.

            Lord Lawson, former Chancellor of the Exchequer says that the link between the floods and global warming is absurd.  He claims that the Met Office denies it and that, ‘It is just this Julia Slingo woman who made this absurd statement. There’s been bad weather before and anyhow, climate change is a global phenomenon and you don’t attribute local things to some global picture’.  If our floods were an isolated incident that argument might have some weight – but other recent meteorological phenomena in the Philippines, Australia, the Indian sub-continent and northern America surely demonstrate that our floods and storms are part of a global phenomenon.  

            Nigel Farage, leader of Ukip, also denies any link between the floods and climate change.  On a recent trip to the flooded Somerset Levels he told locals that the cause of the flooding was ‘just the weather!’  What a pity he doesn’t read our local Clacton Gazette.  One of his disciples claims on the  latest ‘Readers Letters’ page that he has proved, at least to his own satisfaction, that the European Union must bear the blame for the floods!

            If I want advice on getting votes from a gullible electorate or evading awkward questions from prying journalists I might well seek the advice of politicians like ‘those Lawson and Farage fellows’.  But for an informed opinion about the weather I prefer to take the word of  an acknowledged expert such as ‘that Julia Slingo woman’ better known as Dame Julia Slingo the Meteorological Office’s chief scientist.

Meanwhile, across the North Sea…..

Holland (the Netherlands) resembles the Somerset Levels and the Norfolk Broads – but on a much larger scale.  Practically the whole country is at or below sea level.  Their weather is not unlike our own and they are certainly subject to the same tidal surges and storms as eastern England.  Like us, they were severely affected by the storm surge of 1953 that brought unprecedented death and destruction.

They learned its lessons though.  The Netherlands is much smaller than the UK. Despite this the Dutch government spends five times as much annually on flood defences as ours does.  It is money well spent.  The Netherlands has had none of the destructive floods that we have suffered and are suffering. Nor do they talk of the necessity of surrendering some rural areas to the sea in order to have more funds to protect major towns.  Much of their land has been reclaimed from the sea.   We saw on tv some of the Dutch sea defences under construction – they make our defensive walls of filled sandbags, and even of concrete, look pretty pathetic!

How can they afford it?  I know very little about the Netherlands’ economy. I do know though that their government doesn’t spend millions of pounds annually on Trident submarines, prowling the world’s oceans, bearing nuclear deterrents that haven’t yet deterred any actual threats (and there have been plenty of them!) to civilisation.  If those nuclear weapons were ever to be used they could herald the extinction of the human race.  I doubt if any native of the Netherlands loses a moment’s sleep at the thought that their country lacks the so-called ‘ultimate deterrent’.  They know that their tax money is spent combating the forces of nature, a real and present danger, not frittered away ‘impressing the neighbours’ and protecting the Netherlands from an imagined peril.

            Mind you, money spent on flood defences is only postponing the day of reckoning unless at the same time, at least as much money is spent on the development of sustainable sources of energy – sun, wind, waves, tides – to reduce, and ultimately end, humankind’s reliance on the fossil fuels that are producing climate change and extreme weather conditions world-wide.     

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