Global cooling

[MalibuGuru]

I hardly think GT needs a chill pill. Practical men are aghast at the lengths the alarmists will go....like cattle to the slaughter, blind at how they destroy our economy.

[GURGLETROUSERS]

Our Environmental Agency, in the face of the ridicule they are being subjected to, has at last admitted that their failure to maintain dredging and pumping operations in the prone to flooding areas, has been a cause of the present situation!

The present weather pattern (Jet stream driven intense Atlantic lows) is similar to others which have occurred irregularly over the centuries. One such (more severe than present one) overwhelmed the same area over 200 years ago, but they, at that time, didn't have our technological capability to cope - nor did they blather about global warming!

I regularly visit and stay at a South Coast area (Romney Marsh) which is BELOW sea level, (and has been for centuries) but IS maintained properly, and rarely floods. Half of Holland is similar, I'm told!

You state you know nothing of England - I agree!

[GURGLETROUSERS]

By the way. I know that Unicorns exist, and can prove it, even though we never see them,

When I leave food out for them at night (poor things must be freezing and starving) it is gone in the morning.

That's logic! (Of the political kind!)

[mac]

GT--do you not realize that the problems of pumping out areas below sea level are fundamentally a matter of the head difference between the sea and the below sea level areas? And that 14 inches of additional sea level rise will make things worse? I may not know England--but I do know hydraulics.

From the Met, on these storms:

[GURGLETROUSERS]

Mac. (Will have to post in instalments- with errors- since I keep getting timed out.)

As your piece admits 'there is no definitive answer on the possible contribution of climate change to the recent storms.' Every weather/climate event to hit our island (at the juncture of 3 major air masses) has a past precedent. The most modern accurately documented devestating event was (as I said before) 1953, which still surpasses any subsequent disaster.

Whether or not the frequency of 'bad' events is now greater cannot be accurately determined, since nothing but anecdotal evidence is on hand from the past. But those anecdotal events, with detailed descriptions from a variety of sources (Pepys, and other such trustworthy witnesses of flooding and sea storm disasters) cannot be ignored.

(To continue.)

[GURGLETROUSERS]

(Continued.)

The world only has such anecdotal evidence going back a couple of thousand years or so, with SOME facts to back things up. I've frequently quoted the Viking Greenland thriving farming settlement in an area which today, despite the global warming average world temperature rise of the 20th century, could NOT sustain such a settlement, because it is too COLD!
Clearly, it MUST have quite a lot warmer in those times, and the Polar ice-cap may well have been almost non existant. We simply don't know.

As you are aware, our island is no stranger to rising and falling sea levels (or isostatic adjustment over the last 100,000 years since the lifting of the ice from the land). In general, the south and east coasts are gently subsiding (drowned valleys and shifting shore lines fron erosion and redefining currents and spits. (A village fron King Henrys time is now a mile beneath the North Sea,)

(To continue, before I los it.)

[GURGLETROUSERS]

Continued.

But the north and north west (Scotland) is still rising, with raised beaches at different levels. I park on a rocky flat at the foot of a cliff, with a nice little cave, about 20 feet above the current high tide level.

Simply put, I don't know what to make of all the contradictory claims (warming, cooling, and all stations between)!All I can say with certainty is that or government ministers are now squabbling over whose fault the current flooding fiasco is, and are fighting like ferrets in a sack!

My anger is on many levels. I've just received my latest electricity bill which is a full 3 times what it was just 3 years ago. A large part of that is to pay the subsidies to bloody windmill construction (Billions spent) when half of them are barely reliable. (As stated, the 40 of them out off our beach are now out of commission less than a year after being brought on line, and are going to cost further millions to repair. (Under sea power lines knackered!)

[GURGLETROUSERS]

(Last batch.)

To put things in perspective is difficult, but I will finish by saying that,The Environment Agency are now claiming that they were limited by spending cuts to spending mno more than £400,000 a yera on maintenance, yet 14 Agency officials are paid more than £100,000- a year. This claim of limited funding due to spending cuts is bullshit, since they stopped dredging operations over 20 years ago.

In 1999, Barbara Young from the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) was appointed chief executive of the agency, and she called for pumping stations on the flood plains 'to be BLOWN UP!' to put bird habitats, and animal welfare before that of farming, food production (a food surplus at the time) and rural village dwellers..

To further madden us, our government gives £11 billion pounds a year in foreign aid to countries including India, and CHINA (FFS!), for them to combat global warming. WE are closing needed coal fired power stations, yet India is spending our money in opening NEW coal fired power stations!

And you wonder why we are hopping mad? Believe me, this lot is just a part of the great political con we are being subject to!

[mac]

GT--I am not going to defend stupid things done by government. But it is not automatic--government agitation has led to a dramatic decrease in smoking, and use of booster seats for children. Those have saved money and lives, far in excess of the investment.

In studying sea level--which I've done since the early 1980's, any scientist takes into account relative sea level. Tectonic activity and rebound from glaciation are causing relative sea level to fall in some places--the best coasts to build on. In other cases, compression and/or oxidation of sediment is causing sea level to rise without taking climate change into account. Complicating all of this is the fact that sea level continued a very slow rise over the last 8,000 years, independent of CO2 emissions. All of this is well established in the literature, and taken into account by reputable scientists--none of whom work for the denier industry.

Back to flooding in England. The summary from the Met that I posted did not blame storm surges on climate related sea level rise--that's why I highlighted it. The 12 cm of SLR compares to surges that sometimes measure in the meters, see these: http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/cambridge-researchers-learn-lessons-from-recent-storm-surge and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-25687872

But I disagree with your blaming flooding wholesale on the lack of dredging. There may well be cases where dredging exacerbated, or perhaps even caused flooding. It may be amusing, or sad, to watch politicians point fingers to try to avoid being blamed themselves. But the fundamental cause of those surges is wind shear stress--with winds to 90 km/hour, who would have thought?--and record atmospheric lows.

The points to understand about climate change are 1) accelerated sea level rise, which is now well established, will make such flooding more common and marginally worse; 2) the greater heat trapped in the atmosphere and the oceans is the ultimate fuel for storm activity--and is one of the predicted/forecast impacts of climate change.

It will cost trillions to cope with this.

[GURGLETROUSERS]

Well, we'll agree on that note (until the mini-ice age ).

But in some areas we are ahead, with slow but steady maintainance and improvements, of low lying lands. (Comes of being short of space.) I referred to just below sea level Romney Marshes (will be there in 3 weeks time) which have been run and managed for over 1000 years.

Just 10 years ago, massive works were carried nout to shore the sea defences, and half a Scottish mountain side was blown up into giant irregular shaped house sized boulders, and transported and dumped into the sea in front of the concrete sea wall defences, to make sure. Also, massive rebuilding of the shingle beaches was completed.

Agreed it will cost a lot, but, thankfully, we at least have a head start in such works, which will now certainly take a reasonable rise in sea level. Others, may not be so forytunate.