Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Well, the BBC, which as I understand it is an acronym for “Blindly Broadcasting Cra- ziness”, gives us its now-standard tabloid style headline, that
Climate change is ‘killing penguin chicks’ say researchers
Of course they’ve included the obligatory “awwwww-inspiring” picture, viz:
Naturally, the researchers didn’t say what the Beeb claimed. What they said was in their paper, Climate Change Increases Reproductive Failure in Magellanic Penguins, viz:
Statistical Analyses
We tested whether chick age, amount of rain, or low temperature affected a chick’s probability of dying during a storm using our 28 years of data with multiple logistic regressions.
Mmmm … testing to see whether more young chicks die in extremely cold, rainy weather … seems to me that even city kids would know the answer to that one.
In any case, how does this blinding insight into penguin mortality tie into climate? Glad you asked. It has to do with their model … or rather their models.
Figure 1. A list of the combinations of three predictor variables used in their twenty-one different models. These are used to model the odds of a penguin chick dying in a storm. The three predictor variables are age (a), amount of storm rain (r), and low minimum temperatures (l). Sadly, they did not archive their data … so this is just pretty pictures at present. Click the image to embiggen.
Their logic and observations go like this. They’ve noticed that the period during which the penguins lay their eggs has gotten longer over the last 30 years. Their hypothesis is that this will make them more vulnerable to the storms. Only thing is, how to prove it?
Why, make up a bunch of computer models of chick mortality, of course. Why not? Or as they say:
We simulated the effects of breeding synchrony on chick mortality in storms. We simulated the proportion of chicks likely to die in a storm on a given day by the hatching spread: for 13 days (the mean for 1983–1986) and 27 days (the predicted value for the early 2080s, based on an increase of 0.15 days per year; see results).
I do love the “extend a trend to infinity” logic of saying that by 2080 (or to be exact, the “early 2080s”) the Magellanic penguins will have a 27 day spread in their egg-laying dates … and using that same logic, we can be sure that by the year 2500 they will be breeding randomly throughout the year … but I digress …
So they simulated the chick deaths from storms, and then to connect that to climate change, they say:
Climate models predict that the frequency and intensity of storms will continue to increase.
Hey, that settles it for me. Since the data says there’s been a change in the length of their laying season, and since models say that the storms will kill more chicks if their laying season gets longer, and since they’ve included one sentence to establish that climate models predict more storms in the future, heck, their work is done.
It’s a beautiful chain of imaginary causation, the scientific version of the bumper sticker that says, “God said it – I believe it – That settles it!”, with “Models” in place of the Deity.
I have to say, this all seems to me like a huge waste of good data. These fine folks have done a solid, workmanlike job of collecting a very large mass of data over 28 years … but then they simply waterboarded the data until it confessed. One example of this is their choice of models.
First, while it is legit to try 21 models, at the end of that process the model you find should be pretty amazing, or else you’re just flipping coins until you get seven heads in a row and declaring victory … especially when you just keep adding parameters.
Next, they make a laudable effort to only use real-world variables in their models. For example they say:
We included all 2-way interactions except age × age squared because we did not want to include a cubic fit for age which is unlikely to have biological meaning.
I like that point of view, that the predictor variables should be real-world variables with physical or biological meaning, and age, rain, and low temperatures certainly fit the bill. Now that seems legit until you get to some of the combinations they use. For example, the model that they finally chose has the predictor variables of the following form.
A + A2 + R + A*R + A2*R + A2*L + A2*R*L
where “A” is age, “R” is rain, and “L” is low temperatures.
And that all looks logical … until we factor and simplify it, and we get
R + A (R + 1)+ A2 (L + 1) (R + 1)
So in fact, rather than the 7 variables they say they are using, in fact they are only using 5 variables:
A, R, A2, (R + 1), and (L + 1)
Unfortunately two of these variables that they are using, “rain plus one” and “low temperatures plus one”, have no conceivable physical meaning.
And that, in turn, means that their best model is actually nothing more than curve fitting using unreal, imaginary parameters without biological or physical meaning.
It is for this reason, among others, that I’m very cautious when I make models, and in general I don’t like combination additive-multiplicative models of the type they use. Yes, I’m sure that people can make an argument for using them … I’m just saying that such models make me nervous, particularly when they end up with eight or ten parameters as in their models.
Here’s the strange part for me. Since they have good data on the length of the egg laying season, and good data on storms and chick deaths, why not just use the data to actually calculate the relationship between storm-related chick deaths and the length of the egg laying season? Perhaps I missed it, but I couldn’t find that calculation in all of their work. Instead, they make a complex model of the situation for which they already have data …
I see this as another tragic casualty of the ongoing climate hysteria. But I suppose I’m just being idealistic, and I’m overlooking the fact that in this current insane situation, it’s much easier to get funding if you say “Hey, I’m not just studying a bunch of birds that are too dumb to remember how to fly, I’m doing vital work on the climate crisis! Think of the grandchildren!” …
Finally, despite their whizbang model, I strongly doubt the researchers’ conclusion that the change in the length of the breeding season will lead to more chick deaths. Natural species survive in part because their methods of living and eating and giving birth are flexible, and they are able to change them in response to changing circumstances in such a way as to increase their odds of survival. The idea that the penguins are changing their breeding habits in the direction of communal suicide seems like … well, like an unusual claim that would require supporting evidence that is much more solid than a computer model with imaginary parameters to make me believe it.
Ah, well … onwards, ever onwards …
w.
N.B: If you disagree with me, please quote EXACTLY what it was that I said that you disagree with. A claim that I don’t know what I’m doing, or that I’m just wrong, or that I should go back to school, any of that kind of vague handwaving goes nowhere because I don’t have a clue what has you (perhaps correctly) upset … you could be right and no one will ever know it. So quote what you object to, that way we can all understand what you are referring to.
Traditionally, BBC stands for ‘Buggers Broadcasting Communism’.
“… but then they simply waterboarded the data until it confessed.”
—
I like the way you put that, Willis. Models are only useful in areas where the science is well-established; otherwise, they are biased by the unproven assumptions used to program them. There are many things about climate that are too complex and chaotic to fully understand at this time. So a climate model is basically an echo chamber that produces what it was told to produce. Until we gain a much better understanding, climate models will “confess” only what we force them to confess. This reinforcement of unproven (and probably false) premises only delays the advancement of science. It does nothing to help us gain a better understanding. However, climate models are useful in telling governments what they want to hear to keep the grant money flowing, so we can expect this waste of time and money to continue.
You heartless lot! Thanks to Global Warming, penguins will soon be hanging themselves in despair from the palm trees in Antarctica.
Oh dear,Willis, are you bored this evening? Who on earth has upset you? Read the rest of my all of my posts,try and look at the general thrust of my argument. You are not being harsh, just firing from the hip as usual. Think and reflect before posting and take a tip from Jimbo on keeping the discussion civil. As for specifics, read the thread again and there you will find references.
You can ignore what is happening in the UK because it does not fit with your philosophy, but that is no help to the people suffering from floods and continual rain. This thread is apparently about the validity of research on the impact of climate on an organism. My point is that there are organisms in the UK who are being affected which are a bit more obvious than Penguin chicks.
But thanks for your response you miserable old goat, I don’t agree with you much of the time, but I try and read your posts because I Iike the way you write. However I’ve obviously caught your attention and obviously scored big time to deserve such a response. Maybe I’m starting to get through?
Finally a point you may find useful, please read it carefully.
N.B: If you disagree with me, please quote EXACTLY what it was that I said that you disagree with. A claim that I don’t know what I’m doing, or that I’m just wrong, or that I should go back to school, any of that kind of vague handwaving goes nowhere because I don’t have a clue what has you (perhaps correctly) upset … you could be right and no one will ever know it. So quote what you object to, that way we can all understand what you are referring to.
Apologies for the wind up, but you do ask for it sometimes, Keep writing, you are generally wrong, regarding climate, but you certainly have literary talent. Cheers G
Thanks DS,have a look at Jimbos’ discussion with myself on this for a response.
Ostia Antica, the ancient Roman seaport 2000 yrs ago, is now 3 – 4 miles (2km) from the sea and Pevensley Castle, England, where William The Conquerer landed in 1066, is now one mile from the sea – indicating the probability that water temperatures are now cooler. Todays Chicks should be very happy at that.
More ice at the Poles and Glaciers.
Todays edition of penguins are at least 20 million years old and have been around since Antarctica iced over permanently about 25 million years ago. Of the last four interglacials (450,000 yrs) the Holocene has been the coolest and is cooling down from the Holocene optimum, 6700-5700 calendar years BP. SEE: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0033589411001256
Penguins are going to do just fine and homo sapiens will probably get a boost to their intelligence the hard way via the next glaciation.
See my comment: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/01/29/counting-your-penguin-chicks-before-they-hatch/#comment-1554453
leo danze:
At January 30, 2014 at 4:17 pm you say
Sorry, but no. It does not indicate anything about water temperature. It is a result of isostatic rebound.
Scotland was covered in ice that was kms thick in the last ice age. The ice went with the end of the ice age. And Scotland sank under the weight of that ice with the result that the South (especially the South East) of England and Wales lifted up. With the loss of the ice Scotland started to rise up and the South of Britain began to sink back. This recovery from the ice age continues to this day.
Richard
PS Ostia has lifted as a result of Earthquakes.
richard says:
January 30, 2014 at 7:39 am
Indeed. I ws gonna delve into that, but at the end I left it out of the head post. They show the following chart:
ORIGINAL CAPTION Figure 1. Schematic diagram showing causes of death of Magellanic penguin chicks.
Starvation and predation killed chicks in all years; rain and heat killed chicks in some years. The overall mean percentages of chicks killed by rain and heat are smaller than the means for starvation and predation, but the variability is higher for rain and heat than for starvation and predation. In 2 years, rain killed more chicks than starvation and predation. Height of the inner arrows is proportional to the means. Height of the outer arrows is proportional to the mean ±1 standard deviation. Days in parentheses under each arrow refer to the range of ages at which a chick is most vulnerable to that cause of death. Means in the arrows do not total the overall mean mortality rate in the rectangle because the overall mean includes unknown and other causes of death. The list on the right indicates ways that climate change will increase the mean and variability of chick mortality by rain and heat. N = 28 years, 3496 chicks.
Ok, fair enough … but there still are a couple of problems. The first one is that there is a mistake in their estimates of variability. They say that the central box, which is the sum of the mortality causes, is 65% ± 18%. The problem is that the sum of the various estimates of variability is equal to the square root of the sum of the squares of the individual variabilities.
This means, as you’d expect, that the variability in the sum of various estimates absolutely must be larger than any individual variability. The minimum variability of their total, IF there is no annual variability at all in the 10% “other causes of death” column (not shown, see caption), is 22%, not 18% …
I do hate seeing that kind of an error in a study, particularly where they haven’t revealed their data. The problem leapt off the page to me, I took one look and said “starvation ± 18%, total ±18%?? No way!” And missing something as obvious as that means, of course, that I can’t trust any of their numbers, I have to redo their figures … grrr … and they haven’t archived their dataset, AFAICT … double grrr …
[UPDATE—RomanM points out below that the rest of my claims in this comment were incorrect.]
Next, are we truly to believe that the storms kill ” 6 ±12% ” of the chicks? How does that work out? Six minus twelve is minus six chicks killed by storms? Some years it kills eighteen percent of the chicks, and in other years it brings six percent of the chicks back to life?So I thought, well, perhaps it’s possible depending on the distribution. I checked the starvation data with a poisson distribution, but the tail isn’t long enough. However, I can reproduce the data for starvation (mean = 39%, std deviation = 18%) no problem using a gamma distribution, which has a longer tail. The same is true with the predation data, mean 9%, std dev ±4%, I can reproduce that with a gamma distribution as well. So far, so good.But I can’t think of any distribution of counts of events that has a mean which is less than its standard deviation. I tried, but the gamma distribution can’t do it.So I figured I’d see if I could generate such an odd dataset randomly, viz:Out of that search, I got zero. In other words, I find no example where the mean of a series of counts of events is smaller than the standard deviation. So I thought, can I prove this result? It turns out that yes, for any set of positive integers the mean has to be larger than the standard deviation. This is derivable from the definitions, viz:andWhich makes their claims quite strange, that storms kill “6 ±12%” of the chicks, and heat kills “1 ± 3%” of the chicks …I suppose I should add this to the head post …w.
“If breeding is more synchronous, more chicks die in an early storm, but if breeding is less synchronous, more chicks die in a later storm (Fig. 7).”
—
This quote from the study seems to state the obvious but doesn’t say which condition is worse. Their Fig 7 seems to show that the best results occur at a hatch interval of 19 days. But I can’t tell by eyeballing the curves whether 13 days or 27 days results in more chick deaths. The 13-day curve is taller, but the 27-day curve is wider. Perhaps Willis, with his experience reading graphs, can tell us which interval shows the highest mortality rate and whether it is significant.
They also say that “The shortest laying interval was 11 days in 1985 and the longest was 21 days in 2006.” In 2010 it was “17 days.” That means the interval has not been steadily increasing with time as they seem to imply. It actually decreased from 21 days in 2006 to 17 days in 2010. So unless the local temperature decreased during that time period, there may be other reasons than temperature for the variation in hatch intervals. There could also be a random factor. I certainly don’t see any valid reason for confidence in their prediction that the hatch interval will increase to 27 days in 2080.
It just seems logical to me that penguin chicks that carry genes from their parents for the optimal hatch time (whatever it may be at the time) will be more likely to survive. So the laying interval will adjust itself as the climate changes. The up and down variations these researchers report during their 28 years of observation seem to indicate that to me. So even if the climate does warm between now and 2080, the hatch interval will adjust accordingly to whatever interval results in greater survival. More frequent storms could be a more difficult issue for the penguins to adjust to, but we have yet to see any real evidence that storms are becoming more frequent, or that they will if temperatures rise.
Gareth Phillips says:
January 30, 2014 at 11:16 am
There’s no stopping the man. If he didn’t exist, I’d invent him just for the entertainment value of his comments.
w.
Gareth Phillips says:
January 30, 2014 at 4:03 pm
“Thanks DS,have a look at Jimbos’ discussion with myself on this for a response.”
Okay…
“things have happened before and will happen agin, but the difference now is the frequency of multiple issues affecting our weather”
Well, skimming above I see you mention Rain and Flooding. That is your major issue in your post to Willis, as well
“You can ignore what is happening in the UK because it does not fit with your philosophy, but that is no help to the people suffering from floods and continual rain”
On rain – I have already shown that Rain in the UK today is no different then Rain was over the past. And even if you didn’t want to take my word for it, you could take the Center for Ecology and Hydrology who has already stated ‘data does not support the view that rainfall is increasing in the UK, or that rivers are flowing faster than in years past’ when they were dismissing the Global Warming crowd who were similarly insisting the 2007 floods were somehow because of Climate Change.
On Flooding – well, here is that England Rainfall data from another website. This one took the time to include the most noteworthy floods the area has seen
http://headingtonheritage.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/flood_weather_chart.png
You can see, Flooding isn’t a “today” kind of issue either; it too is a forever thing. It’s been happening the same way in the same places with the same frequency for hundreds of years. The only way one can be overly concerned with these things is to ignore all of history and instead go purely off what you visually see today (in the day of constant news coverage, where we have it literally at our figure tips at all times) against solely what you think you might remember about years past. Oh, and listening to alarmists who insist everything is somehow worse today despite all evidence saying otherwise; that is a way to be overly concerned as well…
Now, you also say this to Willis
“My point is that there are organisms in the UK who are being affected which are a bit more obvious than Penguin chicks.”
If you are really worried about the “organisms” who are suffering because of the nonexistent increase in rain and frequency of flooding, then maybe you should start by going after the Governments and “Green Movements” – they are the leading causes of whatever increased damage/suffering there is. In your case, on your perceived issue, by their attacks on Drudging. Your end results are this
http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/Flooding-Agency-failed-dredge-local-rivers/story-20438412-detail/story.html
“the environment agency had failed for years to clean our ditches, streams and rivers causing massive silting and debris build up”
And
“In July 2007, a Government watchdog declared that the environment agency had failed to maintain 63 per cent of the English flood systems and the National Audit office described the Environment Agency in one word “incompetent” and warned MPs that inaction on their part would spell misery for “at risk” homes.”
It is not unlike the situation we face here in the States. Ours is not Drudging of course, but instead Brush Removal. And it has led to some pretty massive issues
http://mediatrackers.org/colorado/2012/07/11/clinton-era-environmental-rules-increased-wildfire-risks-in-colorado
Your end results are minor floods your area has been experiencing for hundreds of years seem much more problematic then they need to be. Our end result is the Greens ensured we have the biggest, most devastating fires we can possibly have every couple of years out West. Massive brush fires do wonders for nature (and CO2 levels) apparently. (Not to mention the chaos it causes on the border, where Border Patrol is literally kept from patrolling hundreds of miles of “nature reserve” because we can’t have roads. Surprisingly, the human traffickers and drug smugglers don’t seem to abide by the same signs prohibiting such travel over the land though. Weird, huh?)
But that really is about par for the green movement. Another case in point; Wind Turbines & Solar Panels. Endangered bird species (especially California Condors and Bald Eagles, again out West) are being devastated by the largely useless things. Yet they are given a special permit to kill these endangered species in the name of “Global Warming” needs. Seriously! End result, these ugly things destroy nature, destroy the economy and produce just short of none of the energy used despite 40 years of them being forced down our throats. That is “the energy of the future” we are told
Anyway, that is where your complaints need to be addressed – Green Movements and the Governments that encourage them. Otherwise your concerns are just fear caused by alarmists rants, and suffering caused by those same alarmists haphazard (and extremely destructive) attempts to ‘protect’ nature.
“Well, the BBC, which as I understand it is an acronym for ”Blindly Broadcasting Cra- ziness”,
I had heard it was originally the British Broadcorping Castration. Anyway, the chicks look fat and well fledged – is this a subtle comeback for the BBC? Also, its worth than we thought; cold weather results in higher mortality among penguins and poor European pensioners. Mitigation? Lets build a coal fired plant in Antarctica and a few dozen in UK. Yeah, it looks like a BBC makeover.
Gary Pearse,
Have you looked at this peer-reviewed paper? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15642948
(It is a short abstract)
Willis Eschenbach says:
January 30, 2014 at 5:49 pm
Gareth Phillips says:
January 30, 2014 at 11:16 am
… From my view we should stop quarrelling about the causes and look at what the weather is doing and how we need to address those challenges.I know someone will pop up and say it rained like this in Hicksville in 1926, but this is not 1926 …
There’s no stopping the man. If he didn’t exist, I’d invent him just for the entertainment value of his comments.
w.
Thank you Willis, it looks like we have found common ground, we entertain each other for quite paradoxical reasons, but that’s ok. Cheers G
@ur momisugly DS Your end results are minor floods your area has been experiencing for hundreds of years seem much more problematic then they need to be.
Thanks for your analysis DS, but it looks like you disagree with myself and the UK government who have just convened COBRA to deal with the flooding emergency. The perspective from our side of things is that this is a much more serious situation than a minor flood which happens on a regular basis. The point about not dredging canals and drainage dykes was to try make fields flood instead of towns, it was a deliberate policy to try and address the increased rainfall and flooding. I think the issue with brush wood over your side was an unintentional mistake, whereas ours was an attempt to deal with a specific threat. I must admit though, it is wonderful seeing the Isle of Avalon as an island once again in the same way as it must have been hundreds of years ago.
“PS Ostia has lifted as a result of Earthquakes.”
And Pevensey is now inland because of drainage and land reclamation.
Hi DS, Here is another view of how land management can make flooding worse and enhance the damage caused by rainfall. http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/30/dredging-rivers-floods-somerset-levels-david-cameron-farmers
Willis, I was thinking about this today. Did they mention anywhere in their study that quadratic equations sometimes have two solutions? For example, this is a common error with internal rate of return calculations. It’s such a glaringly obvious error, surely they didn’t miss it?
IRR example:
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=yNHuleaCMOkC&pg=PA383&lpg=PA383&dq=irr+two+roots&source=bl&ots=p-7v1udnYa&sig=4FQrFhZFcFBhIzNgdVwb-V9_dN0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=eHzrUteqNcfNkQWcloDABQ&ved=0CDsQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=irr%20two%20roots&f=false
Willis,
In response to my previous message regarding the factoring, you said:
> In passing, Frank, let me object to “could have” and “might contain” and “will possibly” and “may lead to” and every other kind of weasel words that are so popular these days. […]
> Either you can come up with a physical meaning for a number like “normalized temperature plus 11″ or you can’t … and I can’t. If you can, fine.
Sorry, you’re right. I was trying to make a succinct point in limited time, but I do agree with you that it’s too easy to use weasel words. So, I’ll elaborate.
Adding precisely 1 (or in fact, precisely 11) to a variable is suspicious, in that it is very unlikely that nature would use precisely that number. There we agree, I think.
However, I don’t think it’s suspicious if nature has some kind of offset value. Take just this term: “x4 A (R + x1/x4)”. The ratio x1/x4 (say, -100 mm/year?) can relate to some “critical” amount of rain at which point having more rain increases death rate, and less lowers it (maybe in reality it is the opposite, I’m no penguin expert, but that just depends on the sign of x4).
As for your example with temperature plus 11: actually I’ve seen reports that death rate amongst human elderly increases around oh, 30-40 degrees Celsius. That 30-40 degrees Celcius is not without physical meaning. Probably the optimum is around 20 degrees, so I would say having term ” -x1 (T-20)^2″ would make perfect physical sense.
Hope that clarifies my point. Anyway, thanks for the great work you do.
Frank
{ We simulated the effects of breeding }
I’ve been doing that for 25 years.
@Willis January 30, 2014 at 4:57 pm
As you point out, some of the statistical analysis done in the paper is at best naive and inadequate. In the case of the deaths due to “heat”, it appears that they have taken the percentages of deaths attributed to that factor for each year (as evidenced in Figure 2A) and calculated the mean and standard deviation. Digitizing the 26 values produces a mean of 1.21 and an SD of 2.88 which would round to the values in Figure 1. A data set consisting of mostly zeroes along with several large values can indeed produce SDs greater than the mean. In such a case, a Normal based confidence interval would not be reliable.
Without the data (or a description of their procedures), it is not possible to determine whether their averaging was done correctly – the values should be weighted according to the sample size in that year. If that were done, the mean would be equal to 100*40 / 3496 = 1.14%, i.e. the overall percentage of deaths due to that cause. Using the binomial SD for this would also not be suitable since the individual deaths within any year are not independent. Proper error bounds for the percentage of deaths is more complicated than what they seem to have done.
There are other question marks concerning their analysis, particularly involving the logistic regressions. For readers who may be unfamiliar with the procedure, in this case, they are expressing the log of the odds ratio of a chick dying (i.e. P(chick dies)/(1 – P(chick dies)) ) as various configurations of second order polynomials involving the the three variables, age, rain, and low temperature. In the paper, they then state: “When the explanatory variables are standardized, the regression coefficients reflect their relative importance” so each of the predictor variables is transformed to have mean zero and standard deviation 1. This can have a material impact on the results of the analysis when there are terms in the predictive equation which involve products and/or squares of the predictors.
Although the overall fits to the data and the AIC statistics for comparing models to each other are not usually affected, there can be differences in the interpretation of the equation coefficients (as in. Table 2) within the individual models. For example, the product term for Age and Rain expands to (here m_age and m_rain are the centering means) :
c*(Age – m_age)*(Rain – m_rain) = C*(Age*Rain + Age*m_rain + Rain*m_age + m_age*m_rain)
The coefficient Age and Rain is correct, but the separate coefficient for Age shown separately in the calculation output results would be reduced by C*m_rain from the value that one would get when using the unstandardized variables. This would affect the p-values for such individual coefficients (none of which are shown by the authors for any of the models). A simpler solution would be to use the original variables and then divide the coefficients by the standard deviation if that is a comparison one wishes to make.
There are more questions as well, but data would be needed to answer those.
Gareth Phillips says:
January 31, 2014 at 12:38 am
Thanks for your analysis DS, but it looks like you disagree with myself and the UK government who have just convened COBRA to deal with the flooding emergency. The perspective from our side of things is that this is a much more serious situation than a minor flood which happens on a regular basis. The point about not dredging canals and drainage dykes was to try make fields flood instead of towns, it was a deliberate policy to try and address the increased rainfall and flooding.
First, again, Rainfall has not increased – how is this so difficult for you to understand? Only “models” say it will; actual evidence says it hasn’t at all.
So anyway… wow, so you’re saying the Government didn’t admit that Government failure led to the problem being bigger, and instead the Government (initially) doubled down on their excuse? That sounds a lot like…
I think the issue with brush wood over your side was an unintentional mistake, whereas ours was an attempt to deal with a specific threat.
Yeah, an “unintentional mistake” which we still cant get the Government to undo because they still insist they did the right thing in the first place (well, our Democrats at least – they are the only side that bows down every single time environmental groups say boo over here). Look into the 2012 Colorado Wild Fires – they were probably the most devastating we have seen yet, burning more then 200,000 acres of land (it is quite an “unintentional mistake”, you know.) Much more then 10 years later, the “unintended mistake” is destroying the countryside like never before and there is no end in sight as Democrats double down on their policy absolutely refusing to admit the mistake and accusing people of “politicizing fires” if you try to correct what is causing the fires to be so damaging.
So anyway, our Brush, like your River Gunk, is still there, still causing massive fires – and we are still being told that not removing it is the “best thing to do”, just like you are.
Again, your Rain is not increasing and your Flooding is not happening more frequently – those are just hard facts. The only difference is people have a tendency to always think what is happening today is more severe then it has been (especially with News being provided 24/7 to our finger tips – and that is even more so when most of the news sources and talking heads fall into the categories of…), Alarmists are jumping up and down screaming every single instance of Weather is somehow “proof” of their comically incorrect predictions and Governments never want to admit when they make something happen/worse.
So while you somehow point to one article from an Environmentalist site who insists Dredging will not help, and quotes Government people to back that up, we also have hundreds and hundreds of others from plenty other sources that say otherwise, including
http://www.gloucestershireecho.co.uk/Dredge-rivers-prevent-flooding-Gloucestershire/story-20488427-detail/story.html
in which the state of a couple rivers is talked about
“The Severn and the Avon in Tewkesbury used to be 32 feet deep. What we find now is that a duck could walk across the river and not get its feathers wet.” – Councillor Vernon Smith
And let’s remember too, the lack of Dredging on the UK Governments part is largely because of… economics. Every single time one of them opens their mouths we see “dredging is often not the best long term or economic solution” (funny though, apparently it is a short-term fix, and considering long-term is heavily influenced by those comically incorrect predictions from climate models and alarmists…)
But now that the Government is finally drastically cutting funding to the Climate Crowd who have been sucking at its teets forever producing little more then more dramatic doomsday proclamations that are eventually shown to be comically inaccurate (sometimes even the opposite of what they claim) maybe they will have some money to do what is actually desperately needed to be done to help real people for a change instead of just the usual Government-funding addicted “scientists” out to make a fortune and name for themselves, at the expense of everyone and everything (including real Science.)
I know they cant wait to start dredging Somerset
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-somerset-25977254
after Cameron finally came to his senses, apparently just now realizing this is “not acceptable,” and is now sending Dredging and Pumping equipment to the unfortunate county.
But imagine that, keeping Rivers deep enough to hold the water that flows down them might actually decrease the level of water that flows over the edge of said river – crazy concept, I know, but maybe it will just work… and actually, it does work! That is evident by every other country that does it quite often and doesn’t end up with the problems they used to face with flooding. Of course, sadly, that does also eliminate the ability of sites such as the Guardian to point to said flooding and scream “Climate Change did it!”
But in the end, what is more important; peoples safety or the ability of alarmists to make a bunch of noise and act like they are somehow correct for a change when they themselves helped create the problem they are screaming shouldn’t exist?