Revenge of the Lawn

A couple of weeks ago I tuned into the PM programme on BBC Radio 4 on my way home from work, and listened to a report by Andrew Bomford from the Royal Horticultural Society’s garden at Wisley. The occasion was a survey being organised by the RHS and Reading University into people’s perceptions of how climate change might be affecting their gardens, and as usual my interest was immediately aroused when I heard the words “climate change”.

Later I found it again on iPlayer, and have written up the segment on my transcript website.

The report is interesting, I find, for several reasons. One is the changing narrative of global warming and the – to my mind – rather reactive nature of the predictions being made about how climate change is going to manifest itself. Many forecasts seem to be more about what was happening when they were being made, rather than about times to come. As Andrew Bomford said, on PM:

…I think a lot of people get quite confused about this and think about global warming – you know, ten years ago, when we talked about this, I think people imagined that right now we’d all be growing cacti and that clearly hasn’t happened.

I commented about this on the Bishop Hill blog (“Unthreaded” page) and also linked to an old National Geographic article from 2003, in which horticulturalist Richard Bisgrove looked forward to the delicious things that might be grown in a hotter, drier England.

Bananas, dates, olives, pomegranates, palms, yucca plants, and other plants not usually associated with the typical English garden may also become increasingly common in the English gardens of the 21st century.

I then got a response from famous commentator ZedsDeadBed, in that person’s typically rather uncompromising style:

Yet more denier quote mining and attempts to mislead. The timeframe in the article you mention is around 70 years. It is also almost exclusively drawn from the work of gardeners, are they really who you look to for your climate science Alex? Or are you just slinging mud around in the hope that some of it sticks?

ZedsDeadBed does have a point about the time frame. The Gardening in the Global Greenhouse report was about climate trends up to the year 2080, which is still 67 years hence – climate-wise, pretty much anything could have happened by then, including, of course, England indeed becoming more like Spain or the south of France. From a starting point in 2003, we are barely a sixth of the way there.

On the other hand, though, who on Earth plans a garden on a 70 or 80-year time scale? Gardeners (of which I am one – I have the scars to prove it, from a weekend of weeding and root removal) tend to want advice they can heed and results they can appreciate during their lifetime. A horizon of ten years, give or take, seems just about right.

As to whether I look to gardeners for climate science, the answer would be: no, not really. A more interesting question, from my point of view, would be: who did the RHS gardeners look to, for authoritative statements about the climate? And the most likely answer would appear to be: they looked to climate scientists such as Myles Allen, who works at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute (ECI), which hosts the UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP), which in turn was one of the partners of the RHS and Reading University in producing the Global Greenhouse study, over ten years ago.

(By the way, I thought the “slinging mud” remark, in the context of gardening, rather clever, although I also suspect it might have been unintentional.)

Interestingly, there’s an article this year on the Reading University website which does mention the discrepancy between what was predicted then and predicted now.

Vines growing in Scotland, olive trees in England and longer, drier summers – these were among the long-term predictions 11 years ago in a landmark report commissioned by, among others, the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), based on work by scientists at the University of Reading.

Now scientists are conducting the biggest survey of its kind to find how gardeners are responding to the reality of Britain’s changing climate, which has been dominated in recent years by cold spells in winter, extended periods of drought, record rainfall and flooding.

Climate change plant scientist Dr Claudia Bernardini adds:

The latest projections indicate that the climate is likely to affect gardens and gardening in a significantly different way than that predicted in 2002.

Will these latest projections be any better, I wonder, than their predecessors, though?

At the turn of the 21st century, when the future was one of long, hot, parched summers, the English lawn seemed to be doomed, according to some, being “increasingly difficult and costly to maintain.” As late as 2009 it was even suggested that lawns would become a “sign of moral decadence“, due to climate change.

They’re still going on about this. In an article in the Telegraph, back in January, Richard Bisgrove – who had dreamed of English olive groves and banana plantations back in 2003 – “believes people will have to abandon the dream of having the perfect lawn.”

And in the PM report from Wisley earlier this month, RHS gardener Leigh Hunt expressed his doubts about the future of the lawn, because “we’re not going to have those moist, warm summers” (although at the same time he recommended establishing a green roof to soak up water and reflect heat, which seems to suggest that he nevertheless thinks summers will be moist and warm. Go figure.)

No-one really knows what weather patterns will emerge, between now and the mid 2020s – including, it’s becoming ever more apparent, the experts. However, I think it would be a delicious irony if the good old-fashioned English lawn, despite being virtually written off and consigned to climate history’s compost heap, were to thrive and prosper, regardless.

UPDATE

(Just to quickly express my gratitude to Richard Brautigan – wherever he is now – for the use of his wonderful title, which I’ve always loved and intended to borrow at some point. Thank you!)

Sir John Beddington

Sir John Beddington, the current Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK government, is due to be replaced next month and he spent most of this Monday in various radio and TV studios, taking part in some of what will be his final public appearances in that role. He was on BBC Breakfast News, BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio 4 in the morning, and on ITV News and Channel 4 News in the evening.

What did he talk about? Well (not surprising, perhaps, as he’s a Professor of Applied Population Biology) he briefly mentioned the extra billion people there will be in the world at the end of the next 12 years, and he noted the fact that more and more people are living in cities.

However, what he talked mostly about was climate change, and a few of the things he said were quite remarkable.

I have transcribed Monday’s interviews, and here are the links:
BBC Breakfast News
BBC Radio 5 Live
BBC Radio 4 Today programme
ITV News
Channel 4 News

These sequences are interesting in that climate scepticism routinely gets a mention nowadays in the mainstream media. The BBC’s Bill Turnbull quoting Richard Lindzen, Radio 5 Live bringing in Benny Peiser to provide a counter-argument (also transcribed) – all this would have been highly unlikely back in the Copenhagen era, which, lest we forget, was less than four years ago.

The background to the interviews is of course the freezing weather we are experiencing in Britain right now – it is almost April and farmers are digging dead sheep out of snowdrifts. But beyond the UK and its recent string of cold winters, there also looms the great hiatus – 15 years or so with no statistically significant global warming.

With that in mind, here’s the quote I found most intriguing, from the Channel 4 News segment.

Everybody’s sort of looking out of the window and saying “God, it’s damn cold! It’s not global warming – this is nonsense”. “Climate change” is a much better descriptor of what is actually happening in the world, and just one of the symptoms of it is an increase in world temperatures.

So world temperature increase is now “just one of the symptoms” of climate change?

And not a particularly important one, he seems to be implying.

Catastrophic Storm Tide, 1953

Last week saw the 60th anniversary of the great North Sea storms and flooding of 1953, which occurred over the night of 31st January and the following morning, and which wrought terrible havoc across Britain, Holland, Belgium and France, when a strong area of low pressure acted in combination with a high spring tide. A trawl through the newspaper stories at the time makes for some grim reading.

On 1st February 1953, an AP news article reported on the loss of the ferry Princess Victoria (she was one of the first roll-on/roll off ferries), which was sailing between Stranraer in Scotland and Larne in Northern Ireland, a distance of only 20 miles.

Dazed survivors said the 2,694-ton vessel plying between Scotland and Ireland went under after “five hours of hell”.

At 11:13 p.m., hours after the disaster, port officials announced there were only 49 known survivors [Wikipedia says 40 survivors] out of the 177 [Wiki has 179] persons aboard the Princess Victoria.

She was battered by 115-mile-an-hour winds. Huge waves splintered lifeboats before they could be launched.

Terror-struck passengers, all outfitted with lifebelts, plunged into the seething waters as the skipper, Capt. James Ferguson, gave the order to abandon ship. It was barely five miles off the mouth of Belfast harbor in the Irish Sea.

Survivors reaching this port said the Princess Victoria went down within minutes after Ferguson gave the abandon ship order.

She was not the only ship to founder in the storm – many fishing boats and other vessels were also lost that night. The situation was no better on land, however, as the storm surge battered North Sea coastlines, from Scotland down to the Low Countries. AP news again, from 2nd February:

Tidal seas – churned by hurricane winds – flooded thousands of coastal towns and drowned at least 408 persons in England, Holland and Belgium. Fears grew Tuesday that the toll in the three nations might go far higher.

The death of 132 persons on the British carferry Princess Victoria in a hurricane in the Irish Sea Saturday boosted the toll to 540 in two days.

Winds were abating but thousands of relief workers – including many American airmen – worked through the night in near freezing waters to evacuate survivors in flooded English coastal areas. It was estimated that 25,000 persons would have to be moved from their homes.

Hundreds were drowned or made homeless in Scotland and in England along the North Sea coast, at places like Crovie in Scotland, King’s Lynn, Hunstanton and also Canvey Island in Essex. The Sydney Morning Herald reports, 5th February:

The battle to reclaim Britain’s flooded areas is the biggest combined military and civil operation ever staged in peacetime.

It must be won in 12 days before the new high tide which is expected about February 16.

Planes, ships, trucks and trains are carrying millions of sandbags to troops, airmen and civil defence teams of volunteers, who are toiling round the clock to plug the gaps in the sea walls.

However, it was in the Netherlands that the true scale of the catastrophe revealed itself, where almost 2,000 people and 30,000 animals died when the storm surge overcame sea defences and flooded vast areas of farmland, destroying 10,000 buildings. The Age reports, 5th February:

News has been lacking for three days from parts of Holland since the pounding North Sea breached the dykes.

Many Dutch defences which withstood the first onslaught are reported crumbling today, brining danger to the farms and villages which hitherto had escaped.

The North Sea is rolling unhindered across the shattered dykes of the Scheldte estuary islands and south-western Holland covering with salt water an estimated one-sixth of Holland’s total area.

Out of this catastrophe arose the construction some of humanity’s most ambitious flood defences, including the mighty Delta Works in Holland, and the Thames Barrier in London.

As with “Superstorm Sandy” last year in the United States, several events happened coincidentally to make things worse – in the case of the North Sea floods, there was a powerful low-pressure weather system bringing gales, a high spring tide and also the fact that the disaster happened at night, on a Saturday (when local radio stations in Holland were not broadcasting, for example) and in the freezing cold of winter.

If a similar episode of storms and flooding happened again in the North Sea, it would naturally be taken by some commentators (as was Sandy) to be evidence of man-made global warming, which they claim is contributing to the severity of extreme weather events. However, this took place at a time when the globe was relatively cooler – in fact, over 30 years before the late 20th century warming was even a gleam in James Hansen’s eye.

And, although there have been storms and floods in the region after 1953, nothing quite as bad as this has happened here in the decades since.

Some links:

Rome News Tribune – Feb 1, 1953: Howling Storm Sinks British Ferry; 128 Perish Within Sight of Shore:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=J5UFAAAAIBAJ&sjid=UDEDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6320,4761405&dq

The Milwaukee Sentinel – Feb 2, 1953: Hundreds Dead as Floods Sweep Britain, Holland:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=jUMxAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EhAEAAAAIBAJ&pg=6926,2109405&dq

The Sydney Morning Herald – Feb 5, 1953: Hundreds Still Missing:

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/18356010

The Age – Feb 5, 1953: Gale Endangers Flood Rescues: Deaths in Holland Exceed 1200:

http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=u8NVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=SsMDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6220,3565919&dq

Norwich Under Water

In a recent interview with Deutsche Welle, neuroscientist Stephen Emmott talked about his play Ten Billion (about which, I will write soon) and also mentioned some of the notable weather events of the summer, including the floods in Manila.

…60 percent of Manila is currently under water. I mean, can you imagine? It’s a capital city of a very populous country – the Philippines. Can you imagine if 60 percent of London were under water, or 60 percent of Washington, D.C.? It’s just unimaginable.

It’s not unimaginable, though. If you have access to history books or the internet, and take an interest in these matters, you will know that Paris had very widespread flooding in 1910 (which I blogged about, last year.) As for the Phillipines, according to the journal Engineering News (January-June, 1913) Baguio City had a record 46 inches of rain over 24 hours in July 1911, an event which caused colossal landslides, destroyed roads and at least one bridge and caused the city to be entirely cut off from the outside world for eight days.

The trouble is, of course, there was no television and no internet in those times. Were the same events to have happened in summer 2012, there can be no doubt that people like Professor Emmott would make quick use of them in interviews to support the case that we’re currently heading for immanent climate doom. But go back in history, and you will find similar or worse events almost wherever you look.

Exactly a hundred years ago it was the turn of Norwich in England, the city where I grew up, to experience catastrophic flooding.

In Norfolk it had rained continuously for two days (Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th August 1912) and after a break for the Sabbath, the storm resumed in earnest on Monday 26th August, 7 inches of rainfall being measured over 30 hours, and many places ending up with five times the monthly average. Powerful winds caused havoc, rivers burst their banks across East Anglia, 40 bridges were destroyed, railways were blocked and the harvest was lost.

After the storm, the river Wensum burst its banks and flood water began to surge into low-lying districts of the city, forcing residents to be evacuated by boat. Here are some newspaper accounts from the time.

DAMAGE ELSEWHERE.

London 27th August. Owing to the floods, Norwich resembles an island city. The railways and telegraphs are interrupted. The flood is the greatest for a quarter of a century. Harvest fields are submerged. Many houses in Huntingdon are flooded, and the inhabitants of parts of Leicester are living in the upper stories, the lower stories being invaded by water. There have been heavy losses of stock in the Midlands.

RAIN FALLS INCESSANTLY FOR SEVENTEEN HOURS. BUSINESS AT A STANDSTILL. CITY IN DARKNESS.

London 28th August. Telegrams dated Norwich, Monday, arrived in London (ninety-eight miles distant) last night. They conveyed the information that it had rained incessantly for seventeen hours, and there were several feet of water in many of the streets, on which boats were plying. Hundreds of people had quitted their houses and taken refuge in the schools on the higher levels, where food was being conveyed to them. Business was at a standstill in the city. The rainfall for twelve hours was 6.32 inches, and it was still raining. The rising waters yesterday stopped the majority of the dynamos on which the electric lighting system is dependent, and the city was plunged into darkness. The flood-waters have washed away a portion of the high mound on which the old Norman castle stands, near the centre of the city. King’s Lynn and the East Coast resorts, Cromer, Sheringham, and Mundesley, are still isolated. A goods train fell through a viaduct which had collapsed near Fakenham, twenty-four miles north-west of Norwich. Several county railway bridges have been destroyed. Further floods are reported in Warwickshire. In the poorer quarters of Norwich yesterday the flood waters reached a depth of thirteen feet. The city is threatened with a shortage of water for domestic purposes, the waterworks pumping station being flooded and the machinery useless. The high-level reservoir contains only sufficient water for two days’ supply.

FLOODS IN ENGLAND

London, Aug 31. The damage in the city of Norwich is estimated at £100,000. The trees are infested with rats, which are taking refuge from the flood. The waters receding have left the flood gauge again visible. It has been hidden for the first time since 1614.

As the above newspaper accounts have mentioned, the floods were not limited to Norwich – they affected many areas in East Anglia and the Midlands. However, Norwich appears to have been hardest hit; four people drowned there, including a local hero – George Brodie, a fish porter – who rescued others before losing his own life.

Not far from where I was born is Cringleford Mill, situated on the River Yare, south of Norwich. During the great flood of 1912, the water rose to what has been described as unprecedented levels, inundating both the mill itself and the mill house and requiring the owner’s daughter to be rescued by boat from a first-floor window. About a mile upstream, there is an area of land, very close to the river and also perhaps threatened by the rising waters, that was then part of the Earlham Hall Estate but which later became a golf course and after that the site for a university campus, where in the 1970s a unit was formed to study the changing climate.

That university is, of course, the University of East Anglia or UEA, and the unit is the Climatic Research Unit, or CRU.

“And it was scientific malpractice”.

The transcript of a recent radio interview with physicist Prof. Richard Muller (leader of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project or BEST), forms the basis of an excellent article by Barry Woods on the website Watts Up With That. For fellow climate obsessives, there’s plenty to find of interest in his dialogue with radio host Betsy Rosenberg and conservative commentator D.R. Tucker.

You can also listen to the podcast of the interview on the Progressive Radio Network website.

A Very Rainy Drought

Sitting at my computer, once again I can hear the gentle pitter-patter of raindrops, a very familiar sound of late. I live in the South-east of England, where we are meant to be languishing under drought conditions and are banned from using hosepipes to water our flowerbeds or wash the dust off our cars. However, it seems to have been either raining – or threatening to do so – just about continuously since the first now-ironic “We are in drought” posters by Thames Water (with a background picture of parched soil) started appearing on bus shelters back in April.

On the BBC News at Ten last Thursday was a story about this continual rainfall, which caused much of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee pageant to be a bit of a washout, and has brought about localised flooding here and there (my thanks to commentator Shevva at Bishop Hill for alerting me to to this item). It’s vanished from BBC iPlayer now, but I made a transcript, which you can read here. Along with the good news (the “record-breaking April weather has dramatically increased our river levels, and it’s given the reservoirs an opportunity to fill as well”) there’s the bad – “a warning today that the hosepipe ban should be a wakeup call, that we need to do much more to preserve our future supplies”.

A comment by Phillip Mills, a member of the Institution of Civil Engineers delivers the ominous message: “The water situation in the UK is becoming critical, and so we do need to think about it now. The situation is just going to get worse because of the impacts of climate change, with less rainfall, so less water availability.”

As other bloggers, and also Christopher Booker, writing in the Daily Telegraph, have pointed out, there’s more to the story than that. Our population is on the rise, and even as demand is going up, capacity is not being increased to match it (as per EU guidelines, the emphasis appears to have shifted from increasing capacity to reducing demand, i.e., using less and making do without.) One additional point I’d like to make is that lengthy droughts are actually a feature of the UK, and not some sort of horrible surprise that global warming is bringing upon us. Here’s the official blog of the Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, from March this year:

Skimming through the Weather paper I was intrigued to find that the longest UK drought episode in recent times lasted 20 years(!), when the ‘Long Drought’ of 1890-1910 led to “significant water supply problems” and “major and sustained groundwater impact” – including a period in London’s East End when a 73-day sequence of rainless days was reported! The paper states that “Although punctuated by several notably wet interludes, the 1890-1910 period includes the most sustained drought conditions captured in the instrumented record” and goes on to say, “A defining characteristic of the ‘Long Drought’ is the long sequences of very dry winters, especially in the English Lowlands.

So all in all, I think it unlikely this current episode will turn out to be all that special in the grand scheme of things. By the year 2112, who’s to say the rainy drought of 2012 will not have become a minor part of the climatic wallpaper, an unremarkable detail in one of its many recurring patterns? However, it has served to provide yet more shining examples of institutional wrong-headedness, where weather and climate are concerned. And talking of which – here is the Met Office’s 3-month outlook, dated 23 March 2012 (courtesy of the GWPF):

The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier-than-average conditions for April-May-June as a whole, and also slightly favours April being the driest of the 3 months. With this forecast, the water resources situation in southern, eastern and central England is likely to deteriorate further during the April-May-June period.

Poor old Met Office – turns out that it “has been the wettest April in the UK for over 100 years”. Oh dear.

Summer’s End

It’s that time of the year again. Mornings and evenings are becoming noticeably shadowy and chill. August is behind us and we’re starting to head back down into the cold and the dark of the year. Time to bolt the doors, draw the curtains, turn up the lights and settle down to some blogging once more.

This is a particularly beautiful time of year, I always feel. The autumn leaves are just starting to fall, fungi are ripening, the woods and parks and riverside areas of west London are still full of colour. This is when garden spiders are at their largest and most fearsome, and when the dew on their webs sparkles in the bright morning sunshine. Michaelmas daisies are everywhere, suddenly.

Definitely time to get down to some more writing – and there’s lots to write about.

UPDATE

And now it’s November. Yes, must do some writing before year’s end! I’ll probably do a sort of round-up edition of “100 Years of Climate Change” towards the close of 2011, but before then, I’m planning to write a few book reviews.

100 Years of Climate Change: Part 5

In my little area of the world, we’re enjoying something of a mini heat wave at the moment, with temperatures in this neighbourhood set to reach 27 degrees Celsius tomorrow. However, we’re also assured that, in true classic English summer style, it will all end on Tuesday in a crescendo of thunderstorms, hail, driving rain and flash floods. I’m looking forward to that, in a way, as we haven’t had a decent thunderstorm in ages.

And talking of which… On Saturday 4th June the Derby took place at Epsom, as it does at around this time every year, and the weather was pleasant, according to an account by MeteoGroup – fine, warm, rather breezy. It has not always been thus – the MeteoGroup article mentions previous Derby Days when the weather was a lot less nice – heavy snow showers in 1867, a gale in 1830, torrential rain in 1891.

And in 1911 – there was the mother of all thunderstorms.

A hundred years ago, the Epsom Derby was held on 31st May, a Wednesday. It had been a hot day, and in the late afternoon, just after the conclusion of the race, the weather broke. It rained, it hailed and it thundered, several people dying in the vicinity of the racecourse itself, under a fusilade of lightning strikes. This was no ordinary storm. A total of 15cm of hail fell to earth over the Downs, and the London Weather website tells us that 91mm of rain was recorded on this day at Banstead in Surrey.

Multiple storm centres converged on the London area, thunder shaking the houses and rain flooding into cellars and basements, also causing landslides which blocked railway lines near Merstham and Coulsdon, a few miles north and south-east of Banstead, respectively. At Sutton, a ferocious lightning storm killed or injured several people, and hailstones up to 2 inches in diameter smashed down, stripping the leaves from trees and shrubs.

Juliet Nicolson, author of The Perfect Summer: Dancing into Shadow in 1911, takes up the story:

As the race-goers left the Epsom stands the sun was just visible through the veil of clouds, a shimmering ball of hot metal. Early that evening the stable lads taking the horses for a final gallop on the Downs heard a distant rumble, and as dusk began to settle there was a stupendous crash, followed by lightning which landed in flat white patches, irradiating rooms with a ‘ghastly illumination’. Hailstones the size of sovereigns began to fall, and rain hissed and whipped against windowpanes. Forty-five cars travelling back to London had to be abandoned between Epsom and Sutton. Four horses were killed by lightning that evening and seventeen people died, including a stable lad in a van at the course, two policemen, and Mrs Hester, a grave-digger’s wife, who had slipped out to the village churchyard to take her husband a cup of tea as he worked. She died in front of him, crushed by the graveyard wall that collapsed under the force of lightning and fell on top of her.

Now imagine if this had happened in 2011, instead… There is no doubt that such a violent and destructive thunderstorm would be held up as an example of just the sort of extreme weather event we can expect to see more of, due to man-made global warming. There would be sombre articles in the Guardian, and wise people like Bill McKibben telling us it was a perfect example of the way we are “making the Earth a more dynamic and violent place.”

Well, it might certainly look that way, to someone who was completely oblivious to the historical record.

Via the very helpful Google News function on the internet, I’m now looking at a page from a New Zealand newspaper called the Grey River Argus. It’s dated 1st June 1911, and there’s an article about the Derby Day storm, which provides a very brief but fascinating account of the event and its consequences:

A spell of tropical heat culminated in a series of thunderstorms in the Home counties. The streets in many places were flooded. The Epsom crowd returning from the races were in a sorry plight. The lightning killed two policemen, and three other racegoers. Although seven deaths are reported already, many were severely injured by lightning. Two city churches were struck. The underground railway was flooded and the system short circuited the water [sic]. There were extraordinary scenes at Bostock’s gungle [sic] at the White City. The thunder infuriated the pumas, who attacked and mauled the lady trainer. The pavilion was crowded with people escaping from the torrential rain, and there was great excitement. The trainer was rescued by the attendants using crowbars.

The article writer is referring to Bostock’s Jungle, which was a sort of travelling menagerie and wild-animal show that was popular at the time. I’m wondering what became of the lady trainer, by the way – did she survive and recover from her ordeal? What became of the pumas, for that matter?

I suppose I shall never know.

UPDATE

Weather expert Philip Eden quotes an even more dramatic passage found by John Bird, a local meteorologist, in a contemporary newspaper:

It would have taxed the skill of the finest word painter to describe the scene at the height of the storm. It was an inferno of water, mud, thunder, lightning and hail. Innumerable cars hors de combat, horses plunging with fright, a confusing heap of figures inextricably jumbled together in narrow roadways, half-drowned pedestrians, drenched cyclists, terrified women and children, and battalions of men helpless against the mighty powers of nature in one of here savage moods.

1911 – “Global Weirding” Then and Now

Last week I read a couple of rather dramatic articles about recent weather events (hat tip to Jeremy who runs the Make Wealth History website – he’s not an AGW sceptic but publishes much that is of interest to believers and sceptics alike.)

The first is this rather scary piece by John Vidal of the Guardian – Warning: extreme weather ahead.

Drought zones have been declared across much of England and Wales, yet Scotland has just registered its wettest-ever May. The warmest British spring in 100 years followed one of the coldest UK winters in 300 years. June in London has been colder than March. February was warm enough to strip on Snowdon, but last Saturday it snowed there.

Welcome to the climate rollercoaster, or what is being coined the “new normal” of weather. What was, until quite recently, predictable, temperate, mild and equable British weather, guaranteed to be warmish and wettish, ensuring green lawns in August, now sees the seasons reversed and temperature and rainfall records broken almost every year. When Kent receives as much rain (4mm) in May as Timbuktu, Manchester has more sunshine than Marbella, and soils in southern England are drier than those in Egypt, something is happening.

And so it goes. Droughts, mega heat waves, floods, tornadoes, the signs are all there. Something is happening. And while no scientist can point to an individual weather event and blame man-made climate change, “many argue that these phenomena are textbook examples of the kind of impact that can be expected in a warming world.”

The second article is an op-ed in the Washington Post by climate campaigner Bill McKibben, entitled A link between climate change and Joplin tornadoes? Never!

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. When you see pictures of rubble like this week’s shots from Joplin, Mo., you should not wonder: Is this somehow related to the tornado outbreak three weeks ago in Tuscaloosa, Ala., or the enormous outbreak a couple of weeks before that (which, together, comprised the most active April for tornadoes in U.S. history). No, that doesn’t mean a thing.

And so it goes. When Bill says don’t make connections between these extreme weather events, of course, he’s being ironical, in a rather heavy-handed way, and meaning do please make connections between these tornado outbreaks and that it is vitally important to go ahead and link the lot of them (and much more besides) to man-made climate change.

On reading these and similar articles (and, for my sins, I’ve read plenty of them over recent years), it is difficult to avoid the impression that the climate system of planet Earth is falling apart at the seams, like a person on the edge of some sort of devastating nervous and physical breakdown. At this point, one might be forgiven for wondering how many months this can all continue, before the entire world spirals into an insane, chaotic, flood-drenched, drought-scorched, tornado-battered, lightning-blasted, freezing, blazing, melting, belching, squelching inferno of total and utter weather-related doom, which will threaten to make the scariest of Roland Emmerich’s disaster movies seem like the most sedate and uneventful of teddy bears’ picnics by comparison.

With these articles in mind, what sort of typical year might we expect to have in future? What kinds of extreme weather events and accompanying humanitarian disasters can we anticipate, once out-of-control “global weirding” has tightened its grip?

Perhaps the following scenario can give us a few hints.

- In March, tropical cyclones devastate coastal towns in Queensland, Australia, and sink a large passenger ship with all hands.

- At the end of May, a violent thunderstorm creates havoc in southern England, killing 17 people.

- Over the summer, the river Yangtze in China floods, causing an estimated 100,000 deaths, creating a vast lake, 80 miles long and 35 miles wide, and also creating 3.7 million “climate refugees”.

- July brings a crippling 11-day heat wave in the north-eastern US, causing almost 150 deaths in New York City alone and setting temperature records in some places that will stand for a century.

- Also in July, the Philippines endure record rainfall, with 46 inches falling in Baguio City over 24 hours, during a super typhoon.

- In England there is a summer heat wave, with temperature records broken in the east of England and in Epsom, milk shortages due to parched conditions, farming coming to a complete standstill in some parts, food rotting on the London docks and also the threat of civil unrest.

- In Ontario, Canada, an early spring and an abnormally dry summer leads to one of the most devastating forest fires ever recorded there.

- In August, an Atlantic hurricane causes great damage in Charleston, reducing houses and ships to matchwood and taking 17 lives.

- In southern Angola, this year marks the start of a period of almost unbelievable hardship, in which a total of 250,000 people will die from drought, famine, disease and forced labour.

- In Australia, some regions are at their driest for the entire century, with the start of a major period of drought, punctuated by one of the heaviest downpours ever recorded in Western Queensland.

- In November, there is a remarkable weather anomaly in the American mid-west, with many cities, such as Oklahoma City, recording record high temperatures and record lows all on the same day, and with blizzards, a dust storm and outbreaks of tornadoes thrown in.

A picture of things to come?

Actually, this was the year 1911, exactly a century ago.

I suppose the point I’m trying to make is that for many writers in the climate debate, history seems to have begun sometime in the late 1970s, with everything before that in a kind of climate limbo. But “global weirding” has always been with us! And 1911 wasn’t even particularly unusual, disaster-wise – the only reason I’m singling it out is that it was precisely 100 years ago. The “new normal” of weather extremes is actually not very new at all.

If the idea of dangerous man-made global warming had been prevalent at the time, what sort of newspaper articles the Edwardian counterparts of John Vidal and Bill McKibben would have written, I wonder?

And how many months or years might they have given the world, before things got even worse?

100 Years of Climate Change: Part 4

The weather is pleasantly warm here in the South East of England, the sun is (mostly) shining, birds are tweeting, trees and garden plants are in full leaf and there’s talk of drought and hosepipe bans on the way – yes, it seems that summer is almost on us.

Weatherwise, plenty was going on in the summer of 1911, so I’m busy getting prepared for quite a few instalments of “100 Years of Climate Change” in the months ahead.

For now, though, I’d like to look back a bit. We’ve had devastating earthquakes this year in New Zealand and Japan, which are still very fresh in the mind, but a few weeks before those disasters burst upon the world’s media, do you remember the floods and storms that were impacting Queensland, Australia?

In particular, you might recall Cyclone Yasi, a tropical cyclone that hammered Northern Queensland at the beginning of February this year, destroying houses in several towns and causing billions of dollars of damage to the sugar cane and banana crops. In an article dated 2nd February, Damian Carrington of the Guardian wondered whether this new “monster, killer storm” would affect attitudes to global warming. Professor Ross Garnaut, climate change advisor to the Australian government, spoke of even more extreme events to come, and warned that “if we are seeing an intensification of extreme weather events now, you ain’t seen nothing yet.”

In the event, although it did great economic damage and destroyed homes and infrastructure, Cyclone Yasi turned out not to be quite as devastating as it could have been. It missed the city of Cairns, where over 150,000 people live, and there was but a single death attributed to the storm (a man died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a portable generator.)

Compare this, if you will, to Cyclone Tracy which mauled the city of Darwin in 1974 (under similar La Nina conditions, by the way, which also saw Brisbane under more flood water than it experienced this year), destroying 70% of its buildings, killing 71 people and causing a humanitarian disaster which was “without parallel in Australia’s history”, according to one commentator and which occurred well before the late 20th century warm spell began.

Back in 1911, there were also some pretty destructive cyclones making landfall in this region. In January, a big storm and gale-force winds caused havoc at Marburg in South West Queensland. In February, two great cyclones struck at Port Douglas, destroying crops, almost completely flattening the town and taking two lives.

And then, when a further massive cyclone approached the coast in March 1911, there was a further tragic loss. The steamer S.S. Yongala, a 350-foot vessel built in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, had just put out to sea from Mackay, heading north to Townsville. There were 122 people on board, and the ship’s cargo included a bull and a racehorse called Moonshine. On 23rd March, a signal station at Mackay received a telegram warning of the cyclone but they had no way of warning the Yongala, which had just left, as the ship had no radio. And although the skipper, Captain William Knight was an experienced and well-regarded seaman, the storm proved to be a disaster for the steamer – she sank, with all aboard her perishing. The only body to be washed ashore was that of Moonshine, the racehorse. The wreck lay undisturbed for almost half a century and was not fully located and identified until 1958.

There was a tragic irony in that a radio had actually been on its way to the Yongala – a wireless set had been ordered from the Marconi Company in England, but it arrived too late. If there had been a radio aboard, it would probably have made the difference between life and death.

Earlier this year, the centenary of the sinking of the Yongala was marked by a memorial ceremony at the maritime museum at Townsville.

There are two points I suppose I’d like to make. Firstly, to see cyclones, hurricanes and floods in their proper context, look at history (as today’s global warming enthusiasts seem unwilling to do.) These are not new phenomena, whipped up out of nowhere by man’s fondness for fossil fuels. The sort of extreme weather events we see taking place in recent times have also taken place repeatedly in times past, with – as far as we know – no greater frequency or intensity than they are taking place now.

Secondly, modern technology is the key to having a better chance of surviving these tantrums of nature. Using radio and telephone communications, towns and cities can be evacuated, isolated people can be warned and lives can be saved. This is what happened in Queensland earlier this year when Yasi was threatening, and it is what could have saved the Yongala and her passengers and crew a hundred years ago.