Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
Few fearmongering scares cause more deliberate panic than sudden and overwhelming flooding. The ancients were at it in the Bible and the Net Zero fanatics use it to drive modern-day mass climate psychosis. Fake pseudoscience attributions of heavy human involvement are fed to activist journalists who promote the invented idea that there is a ‘climate emergency’.
Few fearmongering scares cause more deliberate panic than sudden and overwhelming flooding. The ancients were at it in the Bible and the Net Zero fanatics use it to drive modern-day mass climate psychosis. Fake pseudoscience attributions of heavy human involvement are fed to activist journalists who promote the invented idea that there is a ‘climate emergency’. But a recent scientific paper has blown all this Noah-inspired nonsense out of the water. Studying both documentary and geological flooding records, a group of European scientists found that over multi-century and millennial periods across parts of western and southwestern Europe, floods have been of a much higher magnitude than those of the present day. In the UK, flooding in the Severn area during the last 70 years “was not considered exceptional” in the context of the 4,000-year record.
The science team, including Professor Mark Macklin of the University of Lincoln, showed that flood magnitude was “significantly higher” before the 20th century, despite there being a negligible greenhouse gas contribution from humans. In a phrase that strikes down much of the pseudoscientific weather-attribution copy, it is noted that this means “natural variability might be significantly higher than assumed by climate modellers”.
The scientists state clearly that any attempt to attribute anthropogenic causes to extreme events such as droughts and flooding needs a sufficient length of events to enable comparisons to be drawn. Attempts using computer models to attribute recent floods to human causes have been made, the authors note, but such assessments “have failed to correctly analyse the true frequency and magnitude of past floods, when anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing was low”. It becomes clearer by the day why the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) pointed out in its latest assessment report that human involvement in almost all extreme weather categories is almost impossible to discern. In fact this inconvenient conclusion has directly led to the major growth of modelled attributions. Activists have become increasingly frustrated by the IPCC and pressed ahead with their pseudoscience due to the the need for lawfare material and ‘trusted media’ scare stories.
The scientists go on to point out that their findings have “profound implications” for flood planning and climate adaptation policy, “as many recent floods cannot be viewed as unprecedented, even in the historical record”. Alas, any changes in public policy over Europe at least will have to wait for the pre-ordained narrative to be re-written, so there might be a bit of a wait.
The scientists looked in detail at the Lower Rhine in Germany, the upper Severn in the UK and the Valencian community rivers in Spain.
The above illustration shows clearly that the largest flooding during the past 8,000 years in the Lower Rhine did not occur in the recent past. Far from it, with at least 12 floods, including massive inundation in 1374, likely to have exceeded the highest modern peak discharges.
Recent floods in the Severn area are frequently used by Net Zero activists to whip up climate fear. The illustration below would appear to show that such stories are little more than the product of those possessed of over-stimulated imaginations. Nothing out of the ordinary is to be found, and it appears we are in a current period of reduced inundation.
Late last year Jonathan Watts of the Guardian said that the recent “apocalyptic” Spanish floods in Valencia showed two undeniable truths – “the climate crisis is getting worse and Big Oil is killing us”. Getting into his hysterical Guardianista stride, Watts continued to amplify his message: “The unnatural disaster in Spain – Europe’s deadliest flash floods in at least half a century – is evidence of two undeniable truths: the human-caused climate crisis is just starting to pick up ferocity and we need to quickly kill the fossil fuel industry before it kills us.” How we laughed first time around – Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale come back, all is forgiven – only to be set off again in our mirth by consideration of the actual evidence of floods in the area going back to 1400.
If we consider the Spanish area including Valencia we can see Guardian-style apocalypse floods throughout the record going back to 1400. This was no doubt very useful to promote whatever scares the sandwich board loons were peddling at the time. In fact the largest flows of the 18th and 19th centuries had peaks about 25% higher than those of the present.
Every day is undeniably Apocalypse Day at the Net Zero-crazed Guardian. Or should that be April Fools’ Day.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor.
A long time ago I became fascinated by the obsession people have that the time they live in is of epic, overwhelming significance. I hunted around for a word that would sum this up. There isn’t one, so I invented my own: chronocentricity. It’s a form of egocentricity, a solipsistic fixation with the notion of one’s own implicit importance by living in a time of importance.
A long time ago I became fascinated by the obsession people have that the time they live in is of epic, overwhelming significance. I hunted around for a word that would sum this up. There isn’t one, so I invented my own: chronocentricity. It’s a form of egocentricity, a solipsistic fixation with the notion of one’s own implicit importance by living in a time of importance.
One of the curiosities of chronocentricity is that it is almost always predicated on the belief that the present is self-evidently of especial badness, replete with disasters and an imminent catastrophe of some sort, while what went before was much better.
The present is the worst of times, the past was the best of times. Nothing could sum up today’s climate catastrophising better since, as we all know, apparently the 1830s were paradise when the world was in a perfect state of equilibrium (but see the quote that ends this piece below).
Climate catastrophising is part of the human condition. It’s always been there because it’s a mechanism we use to distinguish one day from another and because it can have a dramatic impact on our survival. One can go back to Roman times and even earlier for various accounts and explanations, but they are scattered and don’t admit the creation of an organised list.
In the year AD 16, for example, the Roman General Germanicus had his fleet scattered and wrecked by a massive storm that left the survivors claiming they had seen whirlwinds and fantastic beasts (Tacitus, Annals 2.22–24, see here). The Roman natural historian Pliny the Elder supplied the invaluable information that hailstorms and whirlwinds are driven away by exposing menstrual fluid to lightning flashes, along with some other bizarre claims that a menstruating woman walking round a cornfield would lead to pests like caterpillars, worms and beetles dying (Natural History 28.76–8, see here).
Proper, coordinated climate catastrophising kicked off when early modern records and diary-keeping began, and that wasn’t really until the 17th century.
In 2023 I wrote a piece for this site about the weather described by the diarist John Evelyn (1620–1706). He was not alone.
In the Companion volume to their 1970 edition of Samuel Pepys’s diary (written 1660-9), the editors Robert Latham and William Matthews included a section about weather, providing an excellent resource for anyone wishing to find out about conditions in 17th-century England, which, as any modern sceptic knows, comes before ‘modern records began’ (The Diary of Samuel Pepys vol. X, p. 470ff).
I thought I’d take a look, because in the half century since that edition of Pepys’s Diary was published some of the texts of the time to which Latham and Matthews refer have become easily available online.
Interestingly, Latham and Matthews added an observation about those 17th-century records that resonates very well today: “As always, phenomena such as storms are amply reported, if sufficiently disastrous, in pamphlets and newspapers.” (ibid. p. 471)
These extracts are from the Diary of Ralph Josselin (1616-83), Vicar of Earl’s Colne, Essex, which featured sporadic entries from 1644-82. I’ve modernised the spelling. You’ll see right from the start that Josselin was clear the weather was a divine punishment for the sins of humanity. None of these people thought of suing the Government for breaching their human rights by failing to protect them:
1647: Among all the several judgements on this nation, God this spring, rye in the latter end of April, when rye was earing and eared, sent such blasted, terrible frosts, that the ear was frozen and so died, and cometh unto nothing: young ashes also leaved were nipped, and blacked, and those shoots died, as if the Lord would continue our want, and penury, we continuing our sins.
June 28th. Summer: Lord goeth out against us in the season, which was wonderful wet; floods every week, hay rotted abroad, much was carried away with the floods, much inned but very dirty, and dangerous for cattle; corn laid, pulled down with weeds; we never had the like in my memory, and that for the greatest part of the summer ; it continued to August 14th when it rained that it made a little flood, and commonly we had one or two floods weekly, or indeed in the meadows there was as it were a continual flood.
August 16th. A very great flood with the great rains last day and night. The season sad and threatening. Daily rains, but especially this morning, we found it exceeding August 24th wet; it caused a very great flood, abundance of hay rotten, much corn cut and not cut groweth, and yet men repent not, to give glory unto God.
September 1st, it was very wet and hindered men in the harvesting; we feared it would cause a flood.
August 31st 1649. The summer past… great inundations in Flanders, and of the Seine by Paris doing great hurt; these signs portend something.
Note Josselin’s “we never had the like in my memory”. This is a common type of phrase deployed in these older descriptions. It purports to be a factual description of how the writer personally could not recall anything similarly disastrous.
However, the real function of the phrase and others like it is to be metaphorical and suggest that nothing so catastrophic had ever happened before since the dawn of time. On June 25th 1652 Evelyn had described a storm so ghastly “as no man alive had seen the like in this age”.
Today, in our supposedly scientific age the phrase ‘since records began’ serves the same purpose. Purportedly factual, it is no more than a piece of melodrama. Neatly obscuring exactly when that was, the underlying implication is that whatever-it-was is totally unprecedented – ever – thereby ensuring the observation is worth making.
The General History of the Air by the early scientist, friend of Evelyn and co-member of the Royal Society, Robert Boyle (1627-91) was published posthumously in 1692. It included a transcript of the Register of Weather kept at Oxford by the philosopher and physician John Locke (1632-1704) between 1666 and 1683, the first serious attempt at making a statistical record, which included some of these memorable observations:
March 8th 1667: Very hard frost, Thames frozen, carts went over.
July 1673: Memorand. That from the beginning of May, till the middle of July, there was scarce one dry day, but so great rains, that produced greater floods than in the memory of man.
May 20th 1681: Cloudy, no rain from hence. till June 20th, the driest spring that hath been known, there having been no rain from the end of March to the end of June.
May 1682. Memorand. That fitting my new barometer, here the mercury was raised by addition of more in the receiver about 2/10 inch, which is almost two of my degrees, which are eight(h)s, though I suspect it still by reason of included air, a degree or two too low.
This is a particularly fascinating observation since it shows that Locke was aware his instruments were prone to error.
Boyle included other disaster stories. Here’s a letter from Fort St. George in Madras, dated January 23rd 1668, describing a storm that took place on November 22nd 1667:
The like hath not been known here in any man’s memory. The tempest of wind and rain was so exceeding violent, that nothing could stand before it; men and beasts carried into the sea by the violence of the winds and floods: the generality of the houses in this and the neighbour towns were ruined: scarce any trees left standing in gardens or elsewhere: the wall of this town laid flat in several places… no place in the fort where we could keep our persons, books or papers free from the wind or rain: nor scarcely any doors could stand against the violence of it: and we hourly feared the falling of the fort down upon us, it was so exceedingly rocked: and yet abroad we could have no shelter, nor were able to stand against it. The repairing of the damage will necessarily require a great charge.
As for Pepys himself, he threw in occasional weather reports. On May 20th 1660 he was in Holland, a member of the fleet that had sailed across to bring Charles II home:
But through badness of weather we were in great danger, and a great while before we could get to the ship, so that of all the company not one but myself that was not sick. I keeping myself in the open air, though I was soundly wet for it. This hath not been known four days together such weather at this time of year, a great while.
The following year, on June 2nd 1661, Pepys mentioned:
It began to rain (as it has done of late, so much that we begin to doubt [i.e., suspect] a famine).
Two years later it was worse. On June 26th 1663, Pepys and his cousin Roger:
walked into the King’s Bench Court, where I never was before, and there stayed an hour almost, till it had done raining, which is a sad season, that it is said there hath not been one fair day these three months, and I think it is true.
Which reminded me of a BBC News story the other day about the effect of our current endless rain on crops. I don’t doubt that farmers in this country are under considerable duress right now, but the plain fact is that such circumstances are not new – as both Josselin and Pepys demonstrate.
…it being the hottest day that ever I felt in my life, and it is confessed so by all other people the hottest they ever knew in England in the beginning of June.
It got worse. By July 11th 1665 it was “very hot beyond bearing”, which was odd because six months earlier on February 6th it had been “one of the coldest days, all say, they ever felt in England”. And then the night of July 7th-8th 1666 “proved the hottest night that ever I was in in my life, and thundered and lightened all night long and rained hard”.
Like an endless parade of modern tabloid headlines, the weather catastrophising of the 17th century provided content for diaries, pamphlets and newspapers and an excuse to point the finger at the evils of mankind.
The main effect of all this catastrophising is to obscure the truth, whatever that truth really is, and make it more likely whatever the problems are the panicked solutions either do no good or make things worse. At least back in the 17th century no-one was foolhardy enough to think the state had an obligation to protect them from the weather, and could be sued if it didn’t, or that anyone was able to change it. By 1710 John Gadbury had come up with astrological explanations for disasters in his Nauticum Astrologicum.
One thing is for certain though. Change, and adapting to it, is what we have always had to do:
“My dear Louisa must be careful of that cough,” remarked Miss Tox.
“It’s nothing,” returned Mrs Chick. “It’s merely change of weather. We must expect change.”
“Of weather?” asked Miss Tox, in her simplicity.
“Of everything,” returned Mrs Chick. “Of course we must. It’s a world of change. Anyone would surprise me very much, Lucretia, and would greatly alter my opinion of their understanding, if they attempted to contradict or evade what is so perfectly evident. Change!” exclaimed Mrs Chick, with severe philosophy. “Why, my gracious me, what is there that does not change!”Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848)
Guy de la Bédoyère is a historian and writer with numerous books to his credit, among them several on the correspondence and writings of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys.
In my endless quest to be open-minded and well-informed I turned to the Guardian today and landed on this story by it Environment Editor Damian Carrington with the apocalyptic headline ‘Dramatic climate action needed to curtail ‘crazy’ extreme weather‘. No great surprise. There’s a similar story every day.
In my endless quest to be open-minded and well-informed I turned to the Guardian today and landed on this story by it Environment Editor Damian Carrington with the apocalyptic headline ‘Dramatic climate action needed to curtail ‘crazy’ extreme weather‘. No great surprise. There’s a similar story every day.
That’s quite a title isn’t it? Nine words only, but he’s managed to jam in ‘dramatic’, ‘action’, ‘crazy’ and ‘extreme’. Perhaps he used to be on a sports newsdesk, the crucible of journalistic cliché-packed writing. But that’s nowhere near as impressive as the 15 uses of the word ‘said’, each time following an individual scientist or ‘scientists’.
‘Scientists have said.’ What sort of science is ‘scientists have said’? Lots of things have been said in human history and most of them arrant nonsense. Here’s one of the examples: “The ‘crazy’ extreme weather rampaging around the globe in 2023 will become the norm within a decade without dramatic climate action, the world’s leading climate scientists have said.”
What does that mean? Adjust the word order and it reads “leading scientists have said the ‘crazy’ extreme weather will become the norm within a decade”. In other words, these geniuses know the future, a preposterous conceit they share with untold numbers of soothsayers, religious fanatics, demagogues, and lunatics, and how to change it. All you have to come out with is ‘scientists have said’ and suddenly the piece is imbued with pseudo-credibility.
Read on and of course the only possible route to evading Armageddon is zero consumption of fossil fuels. Not one piece of evidence is cited in the whole article, as usual. Of course, the proponents will evade being proved wrong or right since even if we did stop using fossil fuels overnight we’ll have to wait 200-300 years before we’ll know; and even then cause and effect will be impossible to prove.
Let’s go back a few years to when there were ever so slightly fewer fossil fuels being used. John Evelyn (1620-1706) was a founding member of the Royal Society. He wrote a diary, little known today but filled with gems, such as these (I’ve modernised the spelling):
February 5th 1652: It continued so ill weather as no vessels put to sea.
June 25th 1652: There fell this 25th day (after a drought of near four months) so violent a tempest of hail, rain, wind, thunder and lightning, as no man alive had seen the like in this age: the hail being in some places four and five inches about, broke all the glass about Lond: especially at Deptford, and more at Greenwich, where Sir Thomas Stafford, Vice-Chamberlain to the Queen, affirmed some had the shape of crowns: others the Order of the Garter about them; but these were fancies: it was certainly a very prodigious Storme: …
At least Evelyn knew the shapes of the hailstones were just imaginary, but he was equally confident about who was to blame as we shall see.
March 7th 1658: This had been the severest winter, that man alive had known in England. The crows’ feet were frozen to their prey: islands of ice enclosed both fish and fowl frozen, and some persons in their boats.
June 2nd: An extraordinary storm of hail and rain, cold season as winter, wind northerly near six months.
Horror of horrors, the winter of 1661-2 was exceptionally warm! Obviously global warming started before any of us realised. Luckily, the Charles II’s Government had a knee-jerk magic response up its sleeve:
January 15th 1662: Was indicted a general fast through the whole nation, and now celebrated at London to avert God’s heavy judgement on this land, there having fallen so great rain without any frost or seasonable cold: and not only in England, but in Sweden and the most northern parts, it being here near as warm as at midsummer some years. The wind also against our fleet which lay at great expenses, for a gale to carry it to Portugal for the new Queen [Catherine of Braganza]; and also to land the garrison we were sending with the Earl of Peterborough at Tangier, now to be put into our hands, as part of the Queen’s portion [her dowry]. This solemn fast was held for the House of Commons, at St Margaret’s: … The effect of this fast appeared, in an immediate change of wind, and season: so as our fleet set sail this very afternoon, having lain wind-bound a month.
Sounds familiar? All they had to do was go without food for a bit and bingo! Problems over. This self-denial brought a divine reward in God alleviating the vile and unseasonably warm weather. Sadly, the effects were short-lived. Evelyn was a very religious man. He knew where to point the finger. He thought Charles II’s Restoration Court, which came into being in 1660, was the epicentre of decadence:
February 17th 1662: this night, and the next day fell such a storm of hail, thunder and lightning, as never was seen the like in any man’s memory; especially the tempest of wind, being south-west, which subverted besides huge trees, many houses, innumerable chimneys, among other that of my parlour at Sayes Court [in Deptford], and made such havoc at land and sea, as several perished on both. Diverse lamentable fires were also kindled at this time: so exceedingly was God’s hand against this ungrateful, vicious nation, and court.
The point here of course is that any extreme weather, any perceived aberration from the norm, will do as evidence for the sins of man and which therefore requires self-flagellating, punitive, remedial action, together with the delusional belief that we have the power to change the climate through our actions. And it wasn’t only precarious winters:
June 12th 1681: my exceeding drowsiness hindered my attention, which I fear proceeded from eating too much, or the dryness of the season and heat, it still continuing so great a drought, as was never known in England, and was said to be universal.
June 19th: the dry weather had now withered everything, and threatened some universal dearth.
It didn’t get any better, even once Charles II was dead (he died in 1685):
July 11th 1689: about three in the afternoon, so great and unusual a storm of thunder, rain and wind suddenly fell, as had not been known in an age: many boats on the Thames were overwhelmed, and such was the impetuosity, as carried up in the waves in pillars and spouts, most dreadful to behold, rooting up trees, ruining some houses, and was indeed no other than a hurricane.
Things went from bad to worse:
January 11th 1690: There was this night, so extraordinary a storm of wind accompanied with snow and sharp weather, as had not been known the like, in almost the memory of any man living… What mischief it has done at sea, where many of our best ships are attending to convey the Queen of Spain, together with a thousand merchants laden for several ports abroad, I almost tremble to think of. This winter has been hitherto, extremely wet, warm and windy: such as went before the death of the usurper Cromwell, which was in a stormy day [September 3rd 1658]: the death of the Queen of Bohemia, and what this portends, time will discover. God Almighty avert the Judgements we deserve, if it be His blessed will.
Goodness me! Why it could be 2023, could it not. Despite there not being a diesel car in sight.
After another storm in November 1703, Evelyn, by then aged 83 could only ruminate in despair:
I am not able to describe, but submit to the Almighty pleasure of God, with acknowledgement of his justice for our national sins, and my own, who yet have not suffered as I deserved to: every moment, like Job’s messengers, brings the sad tidings of this universal judgement.
If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought he’d spent too much time on the BBC website.
There is no question that a couple of episodes like the ones Evelyn describes could be effortlessly transported to modern times for rags like the Guardian and its tireless environment hacks to pounce on. I could have supplied here dozens and dozens of other examples just from his writings alone.
Don’t misunderstand me. I am all for cheaper, more efficient, less polluting ways of improving the way we live. I’ve got solar panels and batteries for crying out loud (monthly direct debit for electricity now £15, thank you very much and installation costs all paid off). But a panic-stricken religious crusade will get us nowhere apart from making a small number of people an astronomical amount of money.
What amazes me most of all is the sheer lack of personal awareness exhibited by so many climate scientists about how they present their competitive apocalypticism.
On a more serious note, this is what they can do to people’s minds. This tragic story from four years ago is about how climate anxiety became the tag for some women with postnatal depression to tag their despair to. Here’s one of them:
“A doctor wouldn’t be able to control the companies responsible for 70% of the world’s carbon emissions or put a stop to recreational flights,” she says. “Only this morning, I was crying about it. It’s like a grief process.”
Having a child has exacerbated Heather’s fears for the future. She says she only realised the impact of climate change after Jack’s birth.
“It was terrifying – for days, I couldn’t sleep. My appetite went. I cried loads. I felt really, really anxious and upset. I remember being really frantic and asking my husband, ‘did you know about this?’ I felt so guilty about having had Jack.”
And I’m not being glib. For personal family reasons I know how devastating PND can be. These women, however, are only the tip of the psychological damage being wrought on people almost everywhere.
Lionel Shriver wrote a brilliant piece in the Sunday Times the other day called ‘Blaming Climate Change for everything is lazy‘. In it, and she’s not even arguing against the idea that we are causing climate change, she says, “We’re contriving hugely consequential policies in a state of hysteria… wrong answers at scale could bring on catastrophe of a different kind”. Indeed.
If we rush in, in a state of hysteria, the next thing we’ll discover is that our ‘solutions’ either don’t work at all or make an unstable ever-changing world worse. That’s unlike Charles II’s fast which would only have made everyone famished for a day or two.
And finally, John Evelyn was ahead of his time. In 1661 he produced a tract called Fumifugium, all about getting rid of London’s “presumptuous smoke” with his own version of a Ulez. His solution, just like London’s expanded Ulez, was to move the sources of pollution somewhere else, in Evelyn’s case by relocating London’s filthy industries five to six miles downriver, though no-one ever took any notice.
He had another idea too, which was to demolish “poor and nasty cottages near the City” for being an eyesore opposite the palace at Whitehall, and turn the sites into gardens to improve the atmosphere. As for those whose homes and livelihoods would be ruined, he didn’t give them a thought. But he could afford not to, as he wandered past the mulberry tree in his celebrated gardens at Sayes Court in Deptford.
Do you remember the movie Three Days of the Condor (1975)? This is from near the end:
Higgins (CIA deputy director, New York): It’s simple economics. Today it’s oil, right? In 10 or 15 years – food or plutonium. And maybe even sooner. And what do you think the people are going to want us to do then?
Condor (Robert Redford): Ask them?
Higgins: Not now, then. Ask them when they’re running out. Ask them when there’s no heat in their homes and they’re cold. Ask them when their engines stop. Ask them when people who’ve never known hunger start going hungry. You want to know something? They won’t want us to ask them. They’ll just want us to get it for them.
Guy de la Bédoyère is the editor of an edition of The Diary of John Evelyn (Boydell 1995), The Writings of John Evelyn (Boydell 1995), and The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn (Boydell 1997).
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