If, as this wettest summer on record continues, you Google for “hotter, drier summers, warmer, wetter winters”, you will find more than 4,000 entries. Look more closely and you will find these words on the website of almost every local authority in Britain. They all continue to predict that this is the weather we can expect, because this is what they were told in 2007 by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction. Since then, they clearly haven’t looked out of the window to see that the climate has indeed changed.
As the global warming scare continues to crumble, its true believers thresh around ever more wildly to claim every “extreme weather event” as proof that their Old Time Religion is still alive and kicking. They seized on the Russian heatwave of 2010 (which weather experts told them was “within the bounds of natural variability”), the Pakistan floods of the same year (though there had been floods just as serious in 1929), Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (since when hurricane activity has been at a historic low), the recent US heatwave (though four years in the 1930s were even hotter), and heaven knows what else. Floods, droughts, heatwaves, the record cold winter of 2010/11 – all are hailed as evidence that we live in a time of unprecedented “climate disruption” (even though the computer models failed to predict any of them).
I was reminiscing the other day about some of the “extreme weather events” I experienced before global warming was invented, such as the record 11in of rain that fell in one day in Dorset in July 1955, or the record 6.74in that fell in 40 minutes on Hampstead, where I lived, in August 1975. Further back, I recalled the Lynmouth flood disaster killing 34 people in August 1952, followed only five months later by the great North Sea flood of 1953 which killed 307 people in England alone. All the poor old warmists can go on now is a washed-out spring and midsummer – when every local council in the land is still telling us that we can expect “hotter, drier summers”. I am sure they were predicting much the same in Noah’s time.
The Sunday Telegraph, 15 July 2012