(WUWT)
So what should we learn from all of this?
1) While it has been an exceptionally wet winter in the South West of England, it is far too early to be talking about it being unprecedented, or to be looking for links to “climate change”.
2) As the graph below shows, precipitation during the “six winter months” has actually been at historically normal levels in recent years, and the trend looks to be a declining one. If nothing else, this rather makes a nonsense of the theory that global warming is leading to wetter winters.
3) Whilst the continuing wet weather is prolonging the agony for the Levels, the situation in December and January was not an unusual one. I will leave others to judge what effect the lack of dredging and other maintenance work has had on the floods.
4) If any year was “unprecedented”, it was 1929/30. (And as I have shown previously, the wet winter of that year affected the whole country.) I find it incredible that the Met Office have not carried out a detailed analysis of that winter, and indeed some of the other wet years, to see what they have in common with this winter.
There is little doubt that scientists such as HH Lamb would have done precisely that. Instead, we see a desperate attempt to find a link to “climate change”.
Surely, to do science properly, you should first look for natural causes for events such as these. And to do that, you have to learn from the past. Only then can we hope to understand the present and the future.
5) We have been bombarded with claims of record rainfall months, and forecasts of record winters. Meanwhile, David Cameron describes the Somerset floods as “biblical”. Am I the only one that cannot remember being told that 1929/30, or other years, were much wetter?
At least the media have an excuse – they are trying to sell newspapers. The Met Office have no excuse at all.
We deserve better.
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