Phil Randal wrote:
>> It is well known that substantial development
>> has taken place in vulnerable areas with limited attention to flood
>> risk, rather like New Orleans. On the other hand, maybe it is "optimal"
>> to allow such flooding on a 50 year return basis rather than pay up
>> front to defend against it. People still buy the houses!
>
> Areas which have never flooded in hundreds of years got flooded last
> weekend. This really is a weak argument of yours. Tewkesbury is an
> old established town, not some new careless "flood plain" development.
The issue is (partly) the increased speed of upstream run-off due to
increased "hardening" of the surface. I don't know how significant this
effect is in your particular case, but I don't think it is reasonable to
dismiss it as lightly as you seem to be doing above.
>> Of course the usual suspects will try their best to pin it on AGW,
>> because that is their get-out-of-jail card for inadequate planning and
>> their main "give us more money" argument.
>
> Ad-hominem attacks against straw men, you should know better. Shame
> on you.
I think it is merely a statement of the obvious. If people agree that it
was all "unprecedented" then that absolves them of any responsibility of
planning for rainfall that, as I mentioned, did not approach the
observed daily record.
> The problem's like the cigarette and cancer conundrum. You can't
> prove which cigarette (if any) caused the cancer, but there's still a
> demonstrable link. Similarly whilst climate change could produce
> intensified storms and changes in the jetstream, it is impossible to
> "prove" any single incident. Absence of evidence, however, is not
> evidence of absence.
I think we all agree that increasing CO2 will change rainfall patterns
in some way - it would be bizarre and implausible to claim that it will
not have any effect whatsoever. Indeed I rather wonder what all the fuss
is about the recent Nature paper - surely they all know that the
difference between statistically significant, and insignificant, is not
in itself significant? Maybe not, it seems. But anyway.
The issue is, I would say, whether such rainfall could reasonably have
been anticipated and planned for (answer: rather better than it was) and
to what extent it will change in the future (answer: probably an
increase in total rainfall and in extremes, although the summers are
supposed to be drier, and the long-term changes will depend on
cumulative emissions). Obviously improved estimation of the latter will
have some influence on the former, but probably not a great deal over
the next 3 decades (say).
>
>> The head of the UK Environment
>> Agency certainly has previous form on exaggerating climate change for
>> whatever purpose (to the extent that the scientists who were
>> misrepresented went public with their criticisms, which as noted in the
>> resent "Alarmism ad absurdam" thread is extraordinarily rare).
>
> He was wrong once so he's always wrong? Logical fallacy there.
She, actually.
Of course I am not making the absurd claim that anyone who ever made a
mistake is always going to be wrong in that future - that would rule out
any chance of any of us ever getting anything right. But past form is
certainly something I take into account when listening to people's
views, and I think it is entirely natural and reasonable to do so, every
bit as much with the alarmists as with the septics.
James
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