“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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Espen says
1947 marked the end of the 1930s-1940s warm period. Maybe 2013 marks the end of the current warm period…
Henry says
As far as CET is concerned I figured it runs opposite the official global trend.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/20/its-the-sun-stupid-the-minor-significance-of-co2/#comment-1232048
Globally, global cooling has started. However, CET runs opposite the wave.
I know it is all confusing but just try to understand.
I’ll have to ask my Mom about the Winter of 1947, she would of been living in Sheffield at the time. Thanks for the story!
The big drop in the AMO and in the northern part of the Gulf Stream seen here around 1947 bottoms out in the winter of 1947.
http://s7.postimage.org/l1fi4uyrf/AMO_NGulf_Stream_Jan2013.png
They are slowly trying to adjust out/smooth out this big drop and the big peak in the late-1930s and early 1940s of course. Note that the northern part of the Gulf Stream SSTs has no increasing trend over time, only an up and down cycle, the only place I’ve found that has this pattern other than the ENSO regions.
Steveta_uk:
My reaction too. The use of metres and centigrade temps really grated as I read this post. These certainly would not have been used at that time. It spoilt an otherwise interesting article.
I just slightly remember that winter; mainly a memory of a huge quantity of snow falling off the roof.
There was an account written of the hardships of Birkdale Shepherds in a similar storm in 1836. It is to be found in Moor House records. I once spoke with a Canadian army man (Richards) who had been in Yorkshire in 1947 on the Yorkshire Moors, and he related to me that he had neever seen a worse storm, even in Canada!
You people can mock global warming all you want, but here in New England we have a real problem that’s happening in real time, right here, right now. The CO2 that we are spewing into the atmosphere as though our jobs depend on it is now causing it to precipitate out of the atmosphere in the form of tiny, white CO2 crystals. I had to shovel the stuff out of my driveway this morning, and it’s no easy task, let me tell you — it turns wet and heavy when it comes in contact with our super-heated planet. My back is killing me. My neighbor has been using a “snow-blower”, he calls it — some relic from the olden days before we went on this planet-killing rampage. I went over to give him a piece of my mind, to let him know those CO2 gas particles he was releasing from his so-called Labor Saving Device were going to come back down with a vengeance, especially now that his car was free to add to the nightmare. And that would be both our driveways, nay, the entire block’s driveways — indeed, our children and our grandchildren’s driveways! Add to that there’s some strange chemical reaction occurring that seems to make the air cool near the ground. Something to do with the ozone hole, I’m guessing.
I can (just) remember 1947 – and with my father taking our dog for a walk on the golf course at Carpenders Park in Hertfordshire – and the dog running towards what he thought was a hill – and disappearing into it..!
Also (of course) 1963, when I was commuting with my mate by car from Bookham to college at Kingston. I seem to remember that the temperature didn’t go above freezing for about six straight weeks…
Of course we’ll never witness such conditions again……
steveta_uk says:
February 25, 2013 at 3:36 am
“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!
———————————————————————————————-
The use of Centigrade in this piece is to illustrate temperature in modern terms and does not detract from the message so it is hardly ‘Nonsense’.
However just to appease your sensitivities here are the press releases from the met office for the first 3 months of 1947:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/7/l/Jan1947.pdf
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/7/s/Feb1947.pdf
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/8/k/Mar1947.pdf
all temperatures in Fahrenheit!
I was six years old in 1947 and remember going to school in the east end of London every day.. The snow at the end of six weeks was black like hard rock with the deposits from coal fires. No long trousers and a cap that was forever filled with snow and replaced on ones head by the older kids. Spring came and back on my skates which had iron wheels Jakko rubber wheel skates were much later.
I was born in 1960 and one of my very first memories was waking on the FROZEN River Thames at Walton Bridge in Surrey with my parents and siblings ………. Now at age 53 I am looking forward to doing it again in the not to distant future !!!
during the winter of 1947, which saw exceptional snowfall. Supplies had to be flown in by helicopter
Count me skeptical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_47
Maybe a few flights were made to deliver medical supplies, but helicopters were very new and very few back then.
I was born in 1960 and one of my very first memories was walking on the FROZEN River Thames at Walton Bridge in Surrey with my parents and siblings ………. Now at age 53 I am looking forward to doing it again in the not to distant future !!!
Norm Merton says:
February 25, 2013 at 6:11 am
Hey, Norm…I just cleared some of those CO2 crystals from my driveway this morning too! The climate scientists are trying to determine what these white crystals are, but they assure us that it is NOT what we used to call “snow” (which is impossible now on our human-induced hot house we call planet earth)…
/sarc
Well looking at my automotive grade model (ANSI/ASQC B1, B2, B3 1996) of NH winter snowfall unless next winter comes in at under a mean of 45 million square miles foe December to February. Then we can consider that the winters are now kicking out about 1.6 Million square miles more of snow cover than the long term mean since 1967.
[img src=”C:\Users\Michael\Pictures\Snowchart.jpg”]
One of the tribulations that made 1947 worse was that there was also a miners’ strike at the time. For me, it wasn’t so much that my school was closed, there was no way of getting there and I had a whole 6 weeks off. When eventually the roads were opened, in one section the wall of snow was higher than a double-deck bus.
during the winter of 1947, which saw exceptional snowfall. Supplies had to be flown in by helicopter
Count me skeptical. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_47
Maybe a few flights were made to deliver medical supplies, but helicopters were very new and very few back then.
—————————————————————————————————————–
The RAF had helicopers (Sikorsky R4B Hoverflies) at RAF Andover from Jan 1945, so entirely possible they would have been pressed into service in a national emergency like this.
For anyone who has not experienced this, you don’t know what you’re missing.I went through a period of ice on the inside of my bathroom windows’ sides back in the 1980s – before I got gas central heating. You really didn’t want to have a shower in the mornings.
Now, some of the “finest minds of climate science tell us that” all this snow recently is cause by a reduced Arctic ice extent. But I retort that Arctic sea ice must have been in very bad shape during some of the UK’s worst winters i.e. 1829, 1836, 1876, 1947, 1963
http://www.netweather.tv/index.cgi?action=winter-history;sess=
http://youtu.be/cl4pJwcE7JI
The Wiki link says “…Bell 47 became the first helicopter certified for civilian use….” but I think it was the army involved in supplies.
As memorable as the 1947 winter was for UK., in terms of intense cold waves for Europe as a whole it only ranks 18 th.and was comparable to the very recent cold wave that hit eastern Europe just recently during January and February 2012. The 2012/13 winter for Russia will probably add to this list. Regionally the list will be different.
The 5 most intense cold waves(based on duration of the cold wave and temperature and not on amount of snow) to hit Europe as reported by WMO were:
31 january to 3 march 1929
10 january to 9 february 1942
30 january to 25 february 1956
28 december 1939 to 23 january 1940
01 january to 24 january 1893
WMO reported on some 29 such worst cold spells for Europe between 1893 and 2012. While there were fewer during 1970-2000, there were 2-3 per decade in the period 1930-1960’s. We had 3 during 2010 and 3 during the 2000 decade. So intense cold weather is returning again . I think it shows that we all forget that severe winters and snow have always been with us and they are not due to global warming as the alarmists claim.
last time I saw ice on the inside of my windows was this morning ..
Regarding deliveries by helicopter it’s most unlikely that more than a small number were carried out as the RAF had only recently started to acquire helicopters. In 1947 the airdrops of feed for farm animals for example was by fixed wing Dakotas. In the bad winter of 1955 Operation Snowdrop was a similar operation which did use helicopters which was also done in 1963.
In various histories I read about the Winter of ’47. If I remember correclty, the UK was still practicing wartime rationing, the was a miner’s strike, and food was still in short supply. My own grand parents told me as a child that they still sent canned food and clothes to Europe well after the end of the war (they had relatives in Hamburg, and their church raised food and money for the UK). In one anecodtal story, an old timer living in Kent once quipped that Spam was the only thing on their table on many a night. And the stories about the poor heating situation reminded me of stories that my father told me about the Depression. His house was so cold at night that his gold fish bowl froze.
Life was certainly much harder in those days. Unfortunately, our current energy policies (on both sides of the pond) are only going to repeat the mistakes of yesteryear. The only saving grace for us is that winters like those in ’47, ’63, ’75’-’78 are rare.
I remember it well, 1946/1947. I was in bootcamp in Aarhus. It was dastardly cold and snowy. But it was followed by the summer of 1947 which was very warm and dry.
The first picture is of the bridge at Windsor, which is about 17 miles west of London, not in London; the river is the Thames though. The far bank, left of picture, is Eton, the picture is taken from the Windsor side. The buildings don’t seem to have changed since then, but there is no traffic allowed over the bridge now. I wasn’t aware that the river had frozen there in 1947 (before my time), interesting to see if it happens again.
Another source says the passage is a modern write-up using todays metric language.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/education/teens/case-studies/severe-winters
[Just to clarify, the whole of that passage is from the Met Office page – including the bit about helicopters!! – Paul]