“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!
The winter was similar in Canada and USA.
Check the following:
http://deltajoy.blogspot.ca/2011/01/1947-extreme-snowfall-across-canadian.html
http://www.riderfans.com/forum/showthread.php?95779-Winter-of-1947
There is a picture somewhere of people shovelling a train out in Saskatchewan.
Hey Norm Merton, those white co2 crystals are threatening Domino Pizza supplies. What is the world coming to? Why can’t we just have back that white fluffy stuff from the past. You know, that thing children aren’t supposed to know about.
Please come back you thing of the past, all is forgiven. We can’t take anymore of this hot ice.
Curiously, in Florida that year, they also had legendary weather. One oldtimer told me you could have motored a boat from Fort Lauderdale to the Gulf of Mexico, across the peninsula, without hitting land at all.
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1990-09-09/features/9002130092_1_lake-okeechobee-water-hurricane
Note that the term “cold snap” denotes the sudden onset of a brief spell of cold weather. Warmists like to use it to refer to months of sub-freezing conditions, implying that such winters are trivial and should not be taken as a sign that global warming is a fiction.
My late father lived in the Peak District at the time. He told of a steam locomotive going up and down the railway line all through the nights to keep the lines clear. The picture of a house in the Peak District is actually of a pub – the “Devonshire Arms” is just visible. Not sure which pub though. The name is quite common in the area, as Chatsworth House – the home of the Dukes of Devonshire – is in the area.
My mother was at high school in the far North of Scotland at the time. At least once a year I hear how show walked over a mile to school over 6 foot of snow to school, only to be sent home by the headmaster, who was the only other person to turn up that day.
To have two metres (6’6″) of snow is very rare in Britain outside of the Scottish Highlands. The heaviest snowfall of the last winter was 30cm (1 foot) in parts of South Wales.
“…The only saving grace for us is that winters like those in ’47, ’63, ’75′-’78 are rare.” –JP
Of course, at the time, despite the temperatures, the winter of ’47 was still a time to rejoice that Great Britain would never be ruled by unelected European oligarchs from a city starting with “B.” Oh, wait…
“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.”
771 Squadron Fleet Air Arm had been flying the Sikorsky H4 Hoverfly since Feb 1945 and handed them on to 705 Sqn FAA in May 1947. British built helicopters from Westland and Bristol were being acquired but weren’t in service before the early ’50’s
I was born in March 1947 and my mother often talked about walking on the frozen Thames shortly before I arrived. In 1963 I was at a Scout camp near Biggin Hill Aerodrome and we got snowed in for a week sleeping in a freezing Nissen hut. We ran out of our own food but could buy cans of food from the camp at a fixed price each because the labels had fallen off and we never knew what we had bought until we opened the can. Usually beans, but sometimes we were lucky and it was mincemeat or something a bit more exciting.
Eventually the guys at the aerodrome managed to plough a route in and we could walk out through drifts way above our heads, and my father had been contacted so he was there to take us home.
To those of you who share my concerns about CO2 crystallization, I should add that in addition to the bothersome crystals, my family and I are also having to deal with an increased incidence of horizontally-driven CO2 gases sweeping across our neck of the woods at speeds approaching 200 MPH, in many cases not exceeding that figure. Thank you so very much, my fellow humans, for inconveniencing us in this fashion with your short-sighted Industrial Revolution. And so you don’t get the wrong idea, that it’s all about me, I note with interest that some of these anthropogenically-induced high-velocity molecules have been known in the Midwest to twist violently, in many cases with insufficient warning, travelling first in one direction and then, insidiously, in the other. When will we wake up, finally, to the reality of our selfishness and do something meaningful about… Jeepers! I think an old lady on a bike just flew by my window! Is that a DOG in the back? Gotta run…
er, helicopters in 1947? you sure?
Much has been said about the lack of or not of helicopters in 1947.
At least we had a lot of military personel to help out then.
Fascinating footage of the UK winter of 1963 (in fact a entire documentary made for the BBC immediately after the event) is included in this episode of Winterwatch, a BBC nature program.
@ur momisugly Norm Merton,
You forgot the ode to the deadly dihydrogen monoxide, also a byproduct of our evil industrialized luxury lifestyles.
Other than that damn fine satire.
I have been thinking about writing my local paper along similar lines, the cause can be mocked more effectively, by agreement than honest fact and science.
I am still 1/2 convinced Mike the Mann is a sceptic, posing as a true believer.
Sir John Houghton, former head of the Met Office said in 2007:
George Monbiot, the expert Calamatologist said in 2010:
Monbiot forgot that he said something entirely different in 2005.
What isn’t “absolutely in line with what we expect from global warming”???
For the many comments about helicopters, I can only say this is the official Met Office account.
From many years afterwards, I do recall stories of airplane drops of food etc, though.
Helicopters or not, that winter was what it was. It can’t have been easy with rationing still on, central heating not accessible to many, many toilets were outside in the garden, and people generally poorer than today. How many Warmists would like to live like that??? You’d better thank your lucky stars for fossil fuels.
Jim says:
February 25, 2013 at 10:51 am
Fascinating footage of the UK winter of 1963 (in fact a entire documentary made for the BBC immediately after the event) is included in this episode of Winterwatch, a BBC nature program.
—————————————————————-
That was well worth a watch, Jim, thanks. There were a couple of rather worrying issues raised though.
Firstly, at some point near the end, they estimated the number of deaths attributable directly to the cold to have been 120. According to the Metro link posted earlier, in 2008 / 09 that figure was about 36000. What would it be if a winter like ’63 DID happen again?
Second was the matter of energy supply. Gas, electricity and coal all failed in ’63 but at least most people could burn things (assuming they had anything to burn). Today, with so few houses having fireplaces, without gas or electricity homes would quickly be as cold inside as out. Somehow I doubt that solar or wind would be contributing much of anything in those conditions either!
Winter in the UK, 1955. I was 9 then. I remember my Mum opening the back door for me to go to school and being confronted by a white wall of ice which went above the door. I stayed home that day but went to school the next because my Father had shifted a lot of the stuff which had accumulated. Ice inside the windows? We loved the ferny patterns!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ugIoMD495E&w=420&h=315%5D
Will the embed work?
Today, people don’t understand how much poorer people were in those days and how little heating people could afford. Energy was much more expensive relative to income.
I grew up on the northern outskirts of London in the 50s and early 60s, and 2 things come to mind. One was we measured how cold a night was by how far up the inside of the window condensation was frozen. On the coldest nights it would freeze right to the top. The other was my mother would hang the washing out in the morning, and it would immediately freeze solid and stay frozen all day. In 1963, this went on for weeks, and we had no other way of drying clothes. I remember it drove my mother to despair. No tumble driers or central heating in those days.
And the next summer of 1947 showed in the Netherlands three terrible heat waves on a row. My mother told me because I was an unconscious being in the cradle.
Elizabeth says “OT But this graph is probably the MOST important and significant graph to totally kill AGW should be posted everywhere immediately …“.
I thought that once, but actually it doesn’t (kill AGW). What it shows is the year-on-year (y-o-y) changes in temperature and CO2. Temperature goes up and down, of course, and as it goes up so the oceans emit more CO2, or absorb less CO2. And vice versa. So, as is clearly seen in the graph, y-o-y CO2 lags those temperature changes.
But it doesn’t kill AGW because the y-o-y changes in man-made CO2 are smaller, and the y-o-y changes in hypothesised CO2-driven warming are much smaller. So although they do not show in the graph, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. To kill AGW you have to look elsewhere.
Oh dear. Embed didn’t work.
1947…. hmmm…. not too much CAGW at that point….the Guardian allowed this bit in a 2010 article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/08/winter-1947-worst-snow
Excess winter deaths and five-year central moving average, England and Wales, 1950/51–2011/12
http://tinyurl.com/adq7tcq
‘The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe’ was published in 1950 – was it inspired by spring 1947?
More UK spring ’47 here:
http://www.ukweatherworld.co.uk/forum/index.php?/topic/49288-the-winter-of-1946-47-a-special-report-with-times-articles/
Late summer 1946 was pretty wet, a bit like last last year. Here is a Pathe clip:
http://www.britishpathe.com/video/stormy-weather