THE Met Office has just extended its series of climatic data for the UK back from 1862 to 1836, after 16,000 volunteers analysed thousands of old handwritten records.
Embarrassingly for the Met Office, they have had to admit that our weather was just as wild and extreme in those distant years as it is now, in stark contrast to its efforts to persuade us otherwise.
For instance, England’s driest May was not in 2020 as previously thought: it was in 1844. The driest year was 1855, while November and December 1852 were exceptionally wet months, with the year seeing the wettest November on record for many regions in southern England.
1852 was also the wettest year overall for parts of the UK including Oxfordshire, where there was significant flooding, known as the ‘Duke of Wellington floods’ as it coincided with the military hero’s funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral, London.
Professor Ed Hawkins, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading, tried to make the best of a bad job by claiming that these were really all just isolated incidents, and that we were now seeing ‘dramatic changes in our climate’, with more rainfall and extreme rainfall records much more common now.
Sadly for the Met Office’s reputation, their own data tells a different story.
For example, average annual rainfall in England is barely higher now than in the 1870s. The tiny increase in the average is not due to ‘wetter years’, but instead to the fact that the extreme drought years of the past are no longer a feature of our climate. In other words, as far as rainfall is concerned, our weather is less extreme now, not more.
Hawkins also claims that ‘most of the wet records are more recent’. Again, this is a grossly dishonest statement.
If we look at annual rainfall, for instance, only one year since 2002 features in the top 10 wettest. This was 2012, but that year was nowhere near as wet as 1872:
UK Met Office
In terms of wettest months, only two months occurred in the last decade, January 2014 and February 2020. Given that there have been 29 months over 150mm since 1836, this is close to average:
UK Met Office
There certainly have been much more extreme interludes, for instance the 1860s, when three months made the list. Unquestionably the most extreme decade was the 1910s, with five such months – in 1911, 1912, 1914, 1915 and 1918.
1929 was also a remarkable year, with November and December receiving 173mm and 163mm of rainfall respectively.
The wettest month in recent years was November 2009, with 170mm. But that was only the sixth wettest month on record. By far the wettest was October 1903, with 191mm.
By every measure Hawkins’s claims fail to stand up to scrutiny. Yet it is a narrative we are fed over and over again by the climate mafia, from the Met Office to the BBC, and the Committee on Climate Change to the Environment Agency.
Quite simply, we are being lied to.
The BBC’s anti-fracking campaign
The BBC has long been at the forefront of the campaign against fracking, regularly devoting undue amounts of coverage to the views of Greenpeace and other extreme eco-groups. In contrast they rarely report the opinions of the experts in the field, such as the British Geological Society, who maintain that fracking is perfectly safe.
There was a very good article in Spiked last month, which highlighted the role played in this campaign by Roger Harrabin, the BBC’s environment analyst. Written by Andrew Orlowski and titled ‘The BBC’s fake news about fracking’, it relates how Harrabin began using the term ‘explosions’ to describe the fracking process in 2011:
‘Harrabin began to deploy the word ‘explosions’ in his reports in 2011, when the UK’s coalition government and the public began to warm to a new and emerging energy resource: shale gas.
‘But the BBC saw things differently. Extracting gas from shale required ‘small controlled explosions’, Roger Harrabin reported on April 1, 2011. This linguistic curiosity was not a one-off. Nor was it an accident, as you would expect from a graduate of English at St Catherine’s College, Cambridge. He repeated it weeks later, on May 24, 2011. Shale gas was controversial, Harrabin insisted, because it had to be released by “tiny explosions”.
‘The proposition that “fracking requires explosions” leads to another – that “explosions cause earthquakes”. But both are false. Neither owes anything to science. They are crude propaganda . . .
‘Even after the 2019 moratorium [on drilling], Harrabin was still deploying his rhetorical “explosions” with the gleeful enthusiasm of a child who has discovered a pocketful of bangers. “The industry will have to improve,” he opined, “especially on earthquakes caused by the small explosions set off underground to release trapped gas”.’
The full Spiked article can be read here.
When the wind stopped blowing
It will not have escaped your notice that the last week or so has mostly been dry, sunny and settled, courtesy of a high pressure zone parked over Europe. As a result, the output from our wind farms plummeted to near zero.
Wind generation has averaged just 1.0GW in the seven days to March 28, which is just 3 per cent of total demand for electricity. It means that all our windmills, which have cost tens of billions to build, were working at only about 5 per cent of their capacity.
National Grid Live Status
March 22nd to 28th
In contrast coal and gas have been generating 57 per cent, with most of the rest from nuclear.
Our betters plan on increasing UK wind capacity to 45GW in 2035 from its current level of 25GW. That will be enough to give us 2GW in a week like this. Double nothing is still nothing!
One of the pieces of disinformation fed to us by the renewable lobby is that the wind always blows far out to sea, unlike inland. Turns out that was a lie. Analysis of the official data for this January shows that offshore wind output fell as low as 7 per cent of capacity, and was at abysmally low levels for half of the month:
Another piece of deception is that the wind is always blowing somewhere, so we can rely on the rest of Europe. Another lie, I am afraid.
Last week’s weather, which was by no means unusual, left much of Europe in the doldrums as well. Over the same period, Germany, for instance, only got 9 per cent of its power from wind, around a third of its average output.
Energodock
http://energodock.com/germany/electricity-shares
Don’t count on solar power either, because in the middle of winter in Germany it only provided 2 per cent of the country’s electricity, and then at times of the day when it was least needed.
As in the UK, electricity only accounts for about a quarter of total energy in Germany, of which 80 per cent still comes from fossil fuels. Wind provides only 9 per cent:
Our World in Data
https://ourworldindata.org/energy/country/germany?country=~DEU
The idea that we can rely on Europe for our energy when the wind stops blowing is suicidal, because they will be just as desperate as us.
All of this raises the question of why policymakers are steering us towards an energy disaster which should be obvious to anybody with an ounce of common sense. The answer is that disaster is precisely what the architects of our energy policy want.
Greenpeace, the Committee on Climate Change, Tyndall Centre and the rest, as well as their fellow travellers in the BBC, have never concealed their real intention, which is to do away with our consumer orientated society and make us live with less.
Cutting energy usage is key to this, whether by blackouts, rationing or simply making it unaffordable.
Can’t afford an electric car? Hard bun, take a bus!
No electricity? Light a candle!
Lost your job? Stop moaning!
This dreadful future, which nobody voted for, will be with us much sooner than we think.
