By Paul Homewood
Verity Jones, over at Digging in the Clay, reminds me of an interview with Lord Smith, the politician formerly known as Chris Smith, in the Sunday Telegraph.
According to Smith, a former Environment Secretary and now head of the Environment Agency
Last year taught us that weather patterns are getting more extreme,” says Lord Smith. “If you’d said to me a decade ago that we’d have a year in which the first three months would be facing a serious prospect of very severe drought, but we’d then have nine months of the wettest period since records began, I’d have just said, ‘No, that sort of extreme weather does not happen here in Britain.’ Increasingly, it does.
The weather is highly unpredictable and presents new challenges, he says, adding: “We are experiencing a new kind of rain.”
It may sound like an excuse from a railway company, but Lord Smith insists that it is true. “Instead of rain sweeping in a curtain across the country, we are getting convective rain, which sits in one place and just dumps itself in a deluge over a long period of time. From the point of view of filling up the rivers and the drains, that is quite severe.”
According to Wikipedia,
Convection occurs when the Earth’s surface,mainly in the equatorial region, within a conditionally unstable, or moist atmosphere, becomes heated more than its surroundings, leading to significant evaporation . Convective rain, or showery precipitation, occurs from convective clouds, e.g., cumulonimbus or cumulus congestus. It falls as showers with rapidly changing intensity. Convective precipitation falls over a certain area for a relatively short time, as convective clouds have limited horizontal extent. Most precipitation in the tropics appears to be convective.
You will note that there is an immediate disconnect – Smith claims the rain falls “over a long period of time”, not the “relatively short time” defined in Wikipedia. There is, of course, a second problem. Summer temperatures last year in the UK were well below normal, so convection should have been much reduced.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/actualmonthly/
Nevertheless, if Smith is right, his claims should be borne out by the monthly rainfall statistics for June to August, as logically that is when the convective effect should be at its greatest. It is also the summer months that have seen rainfall trends on the increase in recent years.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/actualmonthly/
So let’s take a look at the England & Wales Rainfall Series, that is maintained by the Met Office and goes back to 1766. The following graphs show the monthly rainfall totals for each of the three months.
The rankings for 2012 were :-
June – 1st (out of 247)
July – 33rd
August – 80th
So the following points stand out.
- Even though the wettest June occurred last year, June 1860 and 1768 were almost as wet.
- Although wetter than average, July and August 2012 were by no means exceptional months, when placed in the historical context.
- In none of the months is there any indication that rainfall in recent years has been unusually high, or is exhibiting any particular trend.
- The summer, as a whole, was the wettest since 1912. However, this has occurred largely because all three months were wetter than normal, with no really dry interludes in between. This simply reflects the inherent variability of English weather, the coincidence of events and the workings of the jet stream, rather than any deep climatic changes.
It is not surprising that Smith attempts to connect last year’s rainfall with climate change, particularly when he is responsible for the UK’s flood defences and the problems experienced last year. However, if there was any basis to his claims, the monthly charts would show evidence of it. They don’t.
Footnote
I thought it worthwhile to repost the Met Office’s summary for June 2012.
The weather was dominated by low pressure over or close to the UK, with associated weather fronts. These brought rather cool days, some very large rainfall totals and also some strong winds early in the month. There was an almost complete absence of warm, settled spells.
The UK mean temperature was 0.7 °C below the 1981–2010 average and it was the coolest June since 1991. Daily maximum temperatures were well below normal, particularly in many central and eastern areas, with few warm days.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/2012/june.html
Not exactly tropical!
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And when next summer turns out to be “extremely” dry, it will be a new kind of dry, even if it is not unusually warm (or it is even unusually cool). Any which way, a win for the AGW intelligentsia.
It seems to be a deeply held article of faith with the climate catastropharians , that there will be no more rain/snow and that any that happens after their proclamation is the wrong sort of rain/snow,
Naive question, perhaps. Has a copy of this excellent analysis been sent to Lord Smith with an invitation to reply or is he just expected to look it up for himself? I would expect the former and would look forward to hearing his comments even if it were only “No comment!”.
Dave G
I love how the portraiture of Lawdy Smith shows him in thoughtful pose…like the “Thinker”. Yea, verily, one smells a rat.
[img]http://poopiepoems.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/the_thinker.jpg[/img]
“On the night of Saturday 31 January 1953 and morning of 1 February 1953 a storm swept down the east coast of Britain. Sea levels rose by as much as 3 metres and coastal defences were overwhelmed. Over 1,000 sq km were innundated and 326 people were killed. Some 30,000 people had to be evacuated and another 220 were lost at sea. It was Britain’s greatest peace time disaster.”
The Guardian has given the Great Storm some elaborate 60th birthday coverage, with photos. It is being raised, of course, in the context of Climate Change alarms, and warnings of those “extremes” to come.
It does not occur to the writers or readers of The Guardian that non-Guardian types (me!) might ask the simple and obvious question: “If it’s change, why is it old?” Similarly, when that NZ “climate scientist” warned his nation of scorching temps last week (didn’t happen), we weren’t supposed to ask the obvious: “Why was NZ’s hottest temp recorded 40 years ago?”
It’s very contorted spin: you talk about old climate disasters to evoke new climate disasters…which have not happened yet, but which are proof of change.
The spin is worse than we thought, everything else is as good or as crappy as it always was.
I expect that he would have said similar things about the weather in 1975-6……..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_United_Kingdom_heat_wave
…..it’s just the weather! Nothing new, move on!
I have to deal with some of the folks in the EA – and they are all fairly sensible people. Smith is obviously out of his depth and about as knowledgeable about climate as a tadpole. Even the Met Office accepts that the wet weather has been as a result of an unusual Jet stream configuration – unusual, as in not normal – but exceptional, definately not.
The green hair – a result of hard water and copper pipes, surely. So fitting, though. That is commitment to the cause.
What year was the rain correct?
Following the “Wrong type of snow” led me to this quote:
” Other specialists in the matter of Eskimoan languages and their knowledge of snow and especially (now endangered) sea ice, refute this notion and defend Boas’s original fieldwork amongst the Inuit of Baffin island.[3]”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
Yeah, wrong snow and endangered sea ice! I guess that’s the ice the endangered Churchill Polars Bears wait for?
Wow 240 odd years of rainfall data and there has been no need to make “corrections”. No rain shadow or poorly calibrated rain gauges, of course I forgot only temperature data needs “correcting” .
Peter Miller is far too kind.
Smith is an absolute pillock.
Smith is the type of politician that manages to rise up a mountain of their own incompetency.
If he told you the time of day you still check for yourself to see he just not got its horrible wrong.
I was born in 1964 and the only extreme weather I have experienced in the UK was “the Great Storm” – but that was way back in 1987. That’s 25 years ago.
We should be careful here, this has nothing to do with any fault of the Met Office.
What Chris Smith said was totally contradicted by the weather as recorded by them. This was the Met Office doing what it is supposed to do, recording the weather and predicting it over the next 5 days, which it is actually rather good at.
What it is clearly not good at is predicting seasonal weather or the “climate”, but then again nobody has proved to be any good at that so far.
I have no idea where Baron Smith of Finsbury got the bizarre idea that the UK had suddenly been transported to the equator but it was not from the Met Office!
“New type of rain”? Hardly. Scotland has more types of rain than the Eskimos have for snow. The type that Lord Smith describes – which sits in one place and just dumps itself in a deluge over a long period of time – we know as “summer”.
He must be right, he has a PhD, in Wordsworth, but then Pachauri has a PhD in economics and he’s a climate scientist!!!!
I don’t think ”convective” rain is new even here in the UK. Smith should go back to reading Wordsworth and wandering lonely as a cloud looking for daffs.
mPaul, you made my day! Actually my week. I’ll be smiling all day…
Head of the IPA? Why is a non-scientist in that job? As usual it`s jobs for the boys – that is, failed politicians. It also sums up the poor quality politicians we have in the UK these days: some now proven to have been economical with the truth; others introducing policies not in their election manifestos (that is, fraud). Alas, they (politicians) seem to be the same everywhere.
Further to the post by
mfo says:
February 4, 2013 at 4:39 pm
Smith is trying to hide the real facts of the matter.
1. Massively increased population since the 50s.
2. Privatised water companies not building any new water storing Reservoirs and not fixing leaks in delivery pipes.
3. Building on Flood Plains.
4. No dredging of rivers.
5. Inadequate maintenance and cleaning of Drainage.
6. The latest FAD for “Low Maintenance” gardens which do not allow water to Soak away.
7. Very little improvement in Flood Defenses.
8. Wholesale acceptance of “AGW”, it will only get hotter and drier, We were told we would have a Mediterranean climate.
All failings of the Environment Agency.
You should have seen the public’s Comments on the Daily Mail article on this subject.
And today the Water Companies announce a 3.5% increase in Prices.
Drought followed by above average rainfall is nothing new in the UK. In 1976 (or around then) I lived in Kent – that’s in the far south-east and one of the driest parts of England. Our average annal rainfall was about 26 inches. By late August we had had only 7 inches of rain, a hosepipe ban lasting for months and months, and even the big trees were dying. The drought broke at the end of August and by the end of the year we had had more than our average annual rainfall..
I don’t remember anyone making any great song and dance about `global weirding’ (or equivalent then, just worry about the dry conditions and what it was doing to crops and trees.
So nothing much has changed except the rhetoric – after all, if anything it was worry about global cooling and the sea freezing up around Kent in those days.
Dave says:
February 4, 2013 at 6:15 pm
Hmmm…Lord Smith, formerly Chris Smith. Maybe I’m just uninformed (being from the U.S.) or I’m overly pessimistic (more likely)… but I suspect Prince Charles had a hand in getting this guy his “lord-dom” (or whatever it’s called).
No, nothing whatever to do with Prince Charles. Life peerages are handed out by the government of the day, and are commonly give to retiring MPs who’ve been government ministers – it’s a way of getting lapdogs into the House of Lords.
One thing is for sure, Smith certainly didn’t get to be head of the EA on merit, he was a political shoe-in.
“I’d have just said, ‘No, that sort of extreme weather does not happen here in Britain.’ Increasingly, it does.”
What utter rubbish. When a drought breaks it’s often followed by heavy rain. And if you look back over the last few centuries, the weather was so extreme that, during the Little Ice Age, many witches were burned for the crime of ‘weather cooking’. There were storms that each killed around 100,000 people. In the UK and globally, we are fortunate to live in unusually benign conditions. But if the climate starts to get colder, that may quickly change.
On shorter time scales, it seems the UK experienced a period of low rainfall for several decades until recently. If there has been a recent increase in rainfall it’s probably more a case of the weather returning to the more long-term averages. That period of low rainfall may well have deluded the planners into thinking that it’s okay to build houses on flood plains.
Meanwhile, another Chris has been in the news: Chris Huhne. Huhne was previously the UK energy and climate change minister, and shares a lot of the blame for covering our country with those monstrous windmills that don’t work most of the time, and for forcing up the cost of energy in the name of the climate change religion. Yesterday he pleaded guilty to the serious charge of perverting the course of justice. From the comments of the judge, it seems certain he will go to jail.
Extraordinary text messages between Huhne and his son have been released. It seems clear that even his son hated him. It’s certainly good to see that, for once, true justice has been served.
Chris
It’s all very simple really. Even Orcas get confused by a new kind of ice-http://www.voanews.com/content/canada-killer-whales-climate-change/1582342.html
Roger Harrabin managed to slip a “weird weather” comment into a BBC report on Breakfast News a week or so ago, talking about water companies and infrastructure in the UK.