“Climate disruption” before the current lunacy of “CO2 caused extreme weather” era
By Paul Homewood
The Great Freeze of 1963 was the coldest winter in the UK for over 200 years. However, the winter of 1947, while not as cold, was one of the snowiest.
The UK Met Office describe what the conditions were like.
Thousands of people were cut off for days by snowdrifts up to seven metres deep during the winter of 1947, which saw exceptional snowfall. Supplies had to be flown in by helicopter to many villages, and the armed forces were called in to help clear roads and railways.
Between January and March that year, snow fell every day somewhere in the country for 55 days straight. Much of this settled because temperatures stayed very low, just above freezing most days.
No-one expected this winter to be severe, as January started with very mild temperatures at up to 14 °C recorded. This was soon to change, however. An area of high pressure moved over southern Scandinavia, setting up a weather pattern which dominated the UK for the rest of the month. The first snow came on 23 January, falling heavily over southern England. Blizzard conditions occurred across the south-west of England, leaving many villages in Devon isolated.
The cold, snowy weather continued through February and into March. Any breaks in the cold weather were short-lived.
February 1947 was the coldest February on record in many places. Woburn in Bedfordshire registered a low of of -21 °C early on 25 February.
If February hadn’t been bad enough, March was even worse. In the first half of the month, there were strong gales and heavy snowstorms, making for blizzard conditions. On 4 and 5 March, heavy snow fell over most of England and Wales, with severe snow drifts forming. On 6 March, drifts were five metres deep in the Pennines and three metres deep in the Chilterns.
On 10 and 11 March Scotland had its heaviest snowfall of the winter, with snow drifts up to seven metres deep reported by 12 March. The snowstorm heading over Scotland was to be the last over the UK for this cold spell, however. As it moved away, temperatures were already rising in the very south west of the UK. Temperatures rapidly got up to about 10 °C, and the leftover snow began to thaw rapidly. This created a serious problem. The ground was still frozen solid due to the weeks of cold weather, leaving the melting snow with nowhere to go.
As the warmer weather moved across the UK, the melt-water poured into rivers and caused many to burst their banks. Flooding problems began to spread across England from the south west, as a new depression came in from the Atlantic, bringing rain and severe gales. During the afternoon of 16 March, winds over southern England averaged about 50 knots, with gusts of 80-90 knots. This caused damage to buildings and caused even more problems as the strong winds created waves which pounded and even broke some flood defences.
River levels continued to rise. The banks of the Trent burst at Nottingham on 18 March and hundreds of homes were flooded, many to first floor level. While floods in the south-west England began to subside, other rivers continued to rise in eastern England. The Wharfe, Derwent, Aire and Ouse all burst their banks and flooded a huge area of southern Yorkshire. The town of Selby was almost completely under water. Only the ancient abbey and a few streets around the market place escaped inundation. Seventy per cent of all houses in the town were flooded. The flooding issues continued into the spring, bringing a nasty end to the cold and snowy winter.
For the future Rolling Stone Bill Wyman, growing up in Penge, South London, the atrocious weather meant that his bricklayer father was laid off work and no money came in.
‘There wasn’t enough food to go round, so he’d hit a couple of us, send us to bed without any dinner,’ one of Bill’s brothers recalled. ‘”Get to bed, don’t argue!”
Then you’d get hit, kicked up the stairs – vroom, that was it. And in the house we lived in, you didn’t want to go to bed. It was freezing, really nasty, with ice on the inside of the windows.’
Pictures, though, tell the story best of all.
Hardy cyclist David Joel cycling on a frozen Thames near Windsor Bridge in London during the 1947 cold snap
Winter test: A bus abandoned in a snow drift on the Poole-Dorchester road near Bryantspuddle in January 1947
Cold diggers: Men clearing snow on the Gravesend-Meopham road in Kent
Wrong type of snow: Tunnels to front door of a house covered by snow in the Peak District, Derbyshire in 1947
Snow drifts at Farley
The aftermath – floods in York
The finest minds of climate science tell us that snow is caused by global warming. It really must have been scorching back in 1947!
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“very mild temperatures at up to 14 °C recorded”
“drifts up to seven metres deep”
This is nonsense – Britain had no idea what “°C” or “metres” were in 1947!
OT But this graph is probably the MOST important and significant graph to totally kill AGW should be posted everywhere immediately
http://tomnelson.blogspot.com/2013/02/graph-shows-changes-in-atmospheric.html?spref=tw
Any chance of setting up a “Climates of Our Forefathers” movement on facebook? Kids in the climate cult might get pulled out if they knew the identities of people in these old photographs. The family connection is always the first to be severed by cults, and, the one used to bring people out.
That picture of the Peak District reminds me of the stories my father used to tell. I was born that winter in an old stone cottage in the Peak District, and my father told of walking level with the tops of the telegraph poles to get to the village shop.
Ah, the winter of 1962. I remember it as if were, ahem, 1962. It snowed on Christmas night, and on boxing day I woke up to the magical sound of the silence of snow. For a snow-loving 10 year old it was nirvana. It was cold in my bedroom, frost on the inside of the windows, but that was normal. The snow lay for a month, right through the school winter holiday.
In the town park, an amazing sledge run materialised. Solid ice from top to bottom. I’d go there in the morning, and come home after dark, soaking wet, freezing cold and exhausted. What fun! In retrospect, the sledge run was in a groove which ran from to to bottom of the hill. Wearing my geomorphology hat, I’d guestimate that it was an artefact, a product of centuries of townspeople sledging there.
I remember the 1947 winter very well, I was a nine year old and walked to school every day in short trousers (US pants). I don’t remember the school closing.
Today, if there is an inch of snow, the schools in the UK close.
Do we have Any indication of what the Arctic region was like during the mid-40s? I also seem to recall there was a lack of temperature data in some regions during this time, due to the war?
I know someone here had found detailed maps of the Arctic, year for year, but that there were gaps in the sequence.
Roflol
Great Colonial Hurricane of 1635, just sayin’….
The real lesson to take from the winter of ’47 was not the severity of the weather, bad as that was. The biggest problem was that six years of all out war had left the UK flat broke and without the resilience to overcome what mother nature was throwing at us. We should remember that when warmists propose bankrupting the economy in the name of reduced CO₂
Ice on the inside of windows,that was every winter
in Nant-y-Glo Pennsylvania.To see out you would
hold a penny to the ice.It would melt a nice round
hole.Then you could peek out.School was never closed.
Thats the way it was.Just another winter day. o]”?)
Alfred
Ahh, but most people’s memories only stretch as far as their own childhood, So things from the 40s aren’t relevent for anyone much younger than 75 to 80.
Have you noticed how few of those seem to believe in AGW? It’s not old age, or dementia, or refusal to accept the science that stops them, it’s experience.
1947 marked the end of the 1930s-1940s warm period. Maybe 2013 marks the end of the current warm period…
Thanks, Paul.
I am old enough (4) to remember the winter of 1947. at the time I lived in Bolton – just west of the Lancashire moors at an elevation of about 500 feet. I remember the snow and the roads out of town being blocked (even our cul de sac)- my father was a car mechanic and spent most of his time with the breakdown truck digging out cars and unfreezing them! Like Bill Wyman we had ice on the inside of the windows and relied on a coal fire to provide all the heating – both water and living. Pipes (lead) regularly froze as a result and the toilet soil pipes as well. Deliveries of coal were few and far between and unless you “stocked up before winter chances are you would run out of coal. Most of the coal was “nutty slack” ie dust and very small pieces which was next to impossible to burn. The warmest place was in bed ( many old people died of hypothermia that year). To compound all this the supply of electricity was very intermittent ,,,, so called “load shedding” an alternative word for power cuts! Although Britain had huge reserves of coal there was a shortage of miners and where coal stock existed it was invariably frozen either at the mines or at coal depots. Hard times, I wouldn’t wish this on anybody.One of my main memories was cooking smoked haddock on a tine plate over a kettle of water on the only fire we had. There were also good times snow balling sledging was the main sport although I didn’t have long trousers and got “chapped legs” over the top of my wellies!
great article brings back many memories
Tony Berry
I remember as a Trainee Draughtsman back in the 1970s, doing survey work for various Thames & tributary flood alleviation schemes being driven in a Land Rover along roads west of London where flooding was rife along the Thames etc! As said in previous post, Flood Alleviation schemes were all the rage back then, when the EPA didn’t exist & it was the responsibility of Water Authorities to maintain catchment areas, as well as supply potable water! I’ve heard of it & seen it all before!
I remember it well. A few days after the melt had caused flood havoc the temperature dropped sharply in South London and much of the flood water froze. After a game of football instead of making our timely way home to Croydon, several teammates and I decided to go running across the superb ice fields on Mitcham golf course. Some thin ice broke and I went through into the freezing water. Fortunately my mates were able to extract me and strip me of my clothes.and get me home on the trolley bus that ran in those days, and handed me over to my very concerned mother. Ah, heady days!
“The finest minds of climate science tell us that snow is caused by global warming. It really must have been scorching back in 1947!” I think you missed two points, it was either (a) just weather or (b) nature’s early warning about climate change, global warming or climate disruption that we failed to heed or (c) both. Only recent history counts. Things that may have happened in the dim, ancient past of 66 years ago do not count because they were natural. The same big storm now would be an anomaly brought on by climate change.
I remember 1947, I was 6. London was under about 12 ins of snow, so had it easy. According to friends living in Lincolnshire at the time you could walk on the snow touching the telegraph lines. Oh those times of mild weather not driven by climate disruption. (Sarc. Off)
It looks like solar cycle 24 will be similar to the Dalton Minimum. It is possible that next winter will be interesting.
What made 1947 feel worse than 1963 was that food and (I think) fuel rationing was still in place, so it was a miserable time for everyone.
By the way, the bus on the Poole-Dorchester road is a Bristol-ECW LS which wasn’t made until the fifties. Probably a 1963 photograph.
http://oi50.tinypic.com/14vl7oz.jpg
Post war and pre-war drop in temperature match variations in distance of aphelion Earth-Sun separation. Caused by major planets.
This also can be seen in El Nino regions SST, suggesting that El Nino cycles are inertially driven.
This kind of event will happen again…. and with modern society’s complete dependance on electricity, transportation and technology, it will be a tragedy of epic proportions.
I never had heard about the winter of ’47 in the UK – but I grew up hearing about the winter of 1947 in Milwaukee, Wisc, where both of my parents lived at the time. The beginning of the blizzard of ’47 still ranks as the greatest 24 hour snowfall in the history of that city. My parents, who were children at the time, remember it as the great month long snow holiday for all children, since it took an amazing 46 days for the city to finally be cleaned up and returned to normal!
http://www.jsonline.com/news/29480419.html
So there were snowfall extremes across the northern hemisphere that winter.
I wasn’t born in 1947 but I did arrive in Surrey to enjoy the winter of ‘63 after having lived the first ten or so years of my life in Mediterranean Tangier. I do remember it was frickin’ bitterly cold; the water pipes in our new home froze … no cooking water, no drinking water, no bathing water entered our house for days. We had no heat either ‘cause the door to the coal bunker was solid with ice and I was the eldest kid and couldn’t move it because I was so feeble and so cold and Dad was on a business jaunt in some exotic warm country and Mum was pissed off and that is the reason I now live in Australia.
But I have to say that although 1947 looked pretty awful, I am glad that I wasn’t in Surrey during the Great Frost of 1683–84 when the Thames was frozen for two months and ice extended for miles off the coast. I do hope that we aren’t entering another ‘Little Ice Age’.