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.
It was certainly a dull and wet month across the country, but in overall terms it was not unusually wet:
As with all wet weather, the announcement was naturally accompanied by the usual blaming of climate change, with the BBC claiming without any evidence that increased burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil causes heavier rainfall.
But what about Worcestershire?
Data since provided by the Met Office under the Freedom of Information Act has now shown their claim of record rainfall does not stand up to scrutiny.
The Met Office only currently has three official weather stations in Worcestershire – Pershore, Pershore College and Astwood Bank. According to the Met Office data released, rainfall last month was 128mm, 121mm and 146mm respectively. If we discard Pershore as effectively duplicating the College, we get an average of 133.5mm. None of these stations were around in 1836; the College has the longest record, dating back to 1952 and Astwood only goes as far back as 1976.
How do these rainfall totals compare with other Februarys?
February 1923 was certainly exceptionally wet across the country, it is still the second wettest in England overall. It was no exception in Worcestershire either. In those days, the Met Office published detailed weather summaries and data every month. (For some reason, they no longer do this; one might think they don’t want the public to see the actual data behind their public pronouncements!).
Below is the section of the table showing rainfall for Worcestershire:
We can discard Sparkhill, as it is now part of the West Midlands. That leaves us with two stations – Malvern and Tenbury, with 153mm and 164mm.
So we clearly have a very large discrepancy. A range of 121mm to 146mm this year, compared with 153 and 164mm in 1923.
We also have further data for February 1923 from the annual British Rainfall publication that year. Again, we must discard Dudley, as it is also now part of the West Midlands. That leaves us with 121mm at Kempsey, 153mm at Bewdley and 138mm at Alvecurch.
If we average the six stations in 1923, we come to an average of 145.8mm, which is much higher than this year’s figure of 133.5mm. Three of the six were higher in 1923 than this year’s high at Astwood.
As the Met Office no longer have data for Malvern, they suggested I look at nearby Ross-on-Wye, just across the border in Herefordshire. In February 1923, the rainfall total there was 170mm. This year it was 148mm, reinforcing the conclusion that February 1923 was a much wetter month in the region.
All of the evidence points in one direction only – February 1923 was much wetter.
The Met Office pretends it has “comparable data” back to 1836. However, the only stations listed in the British Rainfall publication in the early days were Worcester and Tenbury, both of which closed years ago. As we have seen, the current stations only have short records, making comparison with 1836 a nonsensical concept.
The Met Office’s temperature datasets have already been discredited, following FOI requests which revealed their reliance on junk stations where temperatures are artificially increased by poor siting.
Now there are serious question marks over their rainfall datasets. This is not just a one-off glitch.
Is British weather really getting wetter as they claim. Or is it just a figment of their computer’s imagination?
When the BBC makes claims about record rainfall, I suggest you check your wallet!
Official statistics for January have been released by the Met Office and confirm what many will already suspect – it has been very wet for many areas.
Northern Ireland, south-west and southern England, and the east of Scotland all had one of their wettest Januarys on record.
With 70% more rain than average Northern Ireland experienced the wettest January for 149 years. Culdrose in Cornwall recorded two and a quarter- times its average, while Aboyne in Aberdeenshire had nearly four times its January average of 68.9mm.
It was not a record January in N Ireland – it was wetter in 1877:
In the small print, you will see “the wettest January for 149 years” – most people will assume that was the start of the record. Either way, the BBC’s headline is false – no records were broken in N Ireland.
Nor was it a record in East Scotland, it was only the ninth wettest:
The BBC also fails to put any of these numbers in proper context. Instead, they only want to spread “record rainfall” propaganda.
Rainfall in N Ireland totalled 195.6mm last month. Across all months, there have been a total of 24 months with more than 190mm there. The wettest month came in October 1870, when 247.9mm fell.
In simple terms, it was the wettest month in N Ireland for six years – but that does not make scary headlines!
It was, of course, very wet in certain localities, as often happens when the jet stream gets stuck. It was the South West which came off worst last month, as people who live there have rightly commented.
The Somerset Levels have flooded, but it was not as wet in Yeovilton last month as it was in January 2014 – 147.2 v 166.4 mm.
Since the start of records there in 1964, there have been fifteen months with more than 140 mm of rain, with the wettest being 192.4mm in November 2002:
The Met Office are, frankly, piss poor at providing meteorological data to the public. They offer no historical daily data at all and only monthly data at a handful of sites, such as Yeovilton.
I gather there was 271 mm in Torbay. But even that pales into insignificance in comparison with some of the totals registered in November 1929. October 1960 was also extremely wet in Devon, with 311 mm falling in Exeter.
Mainstream media is strangely quiet about an unfolding flood catastrophe in China.
Three Gorges Dam on alert as heavy rain and floods kill 6 in China
Shweta Sharma
12 July 2024·2-min read
The Three Gorges Dam, China’s largest, is on high alert as floods triggered by torrential rains wreak havoc in the southwestern part of the country.
Record rainfall in Chongqing has caused flooding in a dozen districts and counties since Thursday, raising the water levels in 29 rivers, state news agency Xinhua reported.
Six people have died in the region which has received over 250mm of rain, according to the Chongqing Hydrological Monitoring Station.
An aerial drone showed a township submerged in muddy waters.
Dianjiang county in Chongqing received 269.2mm of rain on Thursday, the highest in a single day ever.
However, China Observer regularly shows footage from inside China which is difficult to obtain from other sources.
Why do concerns about the collapse of the Three Gorges Dam emerge every time a severe rainfall event strikes the headwaters of the dam? The answer is there is evidence the Dam is badly sited and badly constructed, like a lot of other questionable construction projects in China.
In 2020 operators admitted a large flooding event had deformed the dam wall, but claimed that the dam was still safe.
Three Gorges Dam deformed but safe, say operators
Peripheral structures buckle when record flooding from western provinces puts feat of engineering to the test
In a rare revelation, Beijing has admitted that its 2.4-kilometer Three Gorges Dam spanning the Yangtze River in Hubei province “deformed slightly” after record flooding.
The official Xinhua News Agency quoted the operator of the world’s largest hydroelectric gravity dam as saying that some nonstructural, peripheral parts of the dam had buckled.
…
The deformation occurred last Saturday when the flood from western provinces including Sichuan and Chongqing along the upper reaches of the Yangtze River peaked at a record-setting 61,000 cubic meters per second, according to China Three Gorges Corporation, a state-owned enterprise that manages the dam and the sprawling power plant underneath it.
Government officials have long defended the $24-billion project as a major source of renewable power for an energy-hungry nation and as a way to prevent floods downstream. When complete, the dam will generate 18,000 megawatts of power—eight times that of the U.S.’s Hoover Dam on the Colorado River. But in September, the government official in charge of the project admitted that Three Gorges held “hidden dangers” that could breed disaster. “We can’t lower our guard,” Wang Xiaofeng, who oversees the project for China’s State Council, said during a meeting of Chinese scientists and government reps in Chongqing, an independent municipality of around 31 million abutting the dam. “We simply cannot sacrifice the environment in exchange for temporary economic gain.”
The comments appeared to confirm what geologists, biologists and environmentalists had been warning about for years: building a massive hydropower dam in an area that is heavily populated, home to threatened animal and plant species, and crossed by geologic fault lines is a recipe for disaster.
There is little in the western media about this failure, but Chinese language news sites have some details. The location is reported to be Jiajiadian Village, Guizhou Town, Zigui County, Hubei Province, on the banks of the Three Gorges Reservoir. Reports indicate that the landslide has a volume of about 800,000 cubic metres.
The context for this landslide is a spell of very heavy rainfall that has been affecting a large area of China. To manage downstream flooding, the Three Gorges Dam has been used to store water, but in the last two days the gates have been opened to create new storage capacity ahead of the next round of rainfall. This raises the possibility that the landslide might have been associated with the twin effects of local soil saturation and drawdown of the lake. It is interesting to note that in the video, as shown in the still below, there appears to be some freeboard in the reservoir:-
A much larger rainfall or Earthquake triggered landslide inside the geologically unstable reservoir region could generate a colossal tsunami shockwave, which could smash the dam wall like throwing a bucket of water at a sand castle. Landslide Tsunamis can be enormous – the Alaskan Taan Fjord landslide Tsunami in 2015 was over 600ft high. I’m not sure what kinds of forces an impact from a 600ft Tsunami generates, but I’m guessing the dam wall would not hold in such circumstances.
I don’t know how likely such a landslide is in the Three Gorges region – but given the unstable geology of the region, I do not believe the risk of a landslide driven mega tsunami or even a regular Earthquake which shatters the wall supports should be entirely discounted.
Obviously there is no way to know if this will be the year the Three Gorges dam collapses. People have been hi-lighting the problems with the dam and warning of the risk of collapse for decades, yet the dam is still there. But I would not be keen to live down water of such a structure.
I wonder what it costs to insure factories or realestate in the Yangtze Delta against flood risk? Perhaps someone in China can tell us – a sizeable fraction of China’s population, and around a quarter of China’s most important economic assets, are located down river of the Three Gorges Dam in the Yangtze Delta.
No doubt when, not if, the Three Gorges Dam finally collapses, climate change will be blamed.
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