Blighty to become old-time Inundation Nation

*sigh*

...So now I guess we have to sit back and wait for some green activist to email Vulture Central explaining that the piece is shortsighted and irresposible as *any* weather that departs from the norm is caused by the scourge of global warming rather than by any natural cycle, coupled of course with the customary demand for a re write.

Floods?

CCTV cameras installed around all the vulnerable areas should nip this one in the bud.

@AC: just let those green activists know that if they're worried about global warming then they should leave their fridge doors open. If only everyone could do this, especially the Chinese because there's an awful lot of them, then we could solve global warming at a stroke. Oh yes, and their freezer doors as well, just to make sure.

Drought since 1960?

Flooding used to be much worse - as evidenced by high water marks in places around the UK. Take Guildford for example : St. Nicolas' Church, about 5' above road level, 1968. There are hundreds of other "high water markings" on buildings around Britain. "Beyond living memory" ? It's a good job our predecessors knew a thing or two about how to record information for long-term use (no database, no backups, not even on paper records in the vaults of the council).

Mwhahahahaha

I don't give a hoot, I live on a hill and have a food & water stockpile capable of sustatining me, my other half and the dog for 3 months, the rest of you can die and float around for a bit (don't forget to pay your council tax though)

Well

Well if they don't like wet feet and have to wear wellies all the time , they can always migrate to drier more pleasant climates and then you would have to worry about neither just like our ancient ancestors did not so long ago in 1788 !

@heystoopid

If it's not floods, it's sun-caused skin cancer. We're all doomed I tell you!

"same priority as terrorism"

So we're just awaiting the introduction of Sea-Sea-TV now then?

"We are now having to learn to live with levels of flooding" .. makes sense to me

"We are now having to learn to live with levels of flooding that are beyond most people’s living memory, something that most of us have forgotten how to do."

....or switched off when our grandparents told us stories of how they survived, unless they forgot to....

I think the sentence makes some sense.

Geography 101

It's not drainage or lack of that is the problem, it is the time taken to get the water from rain into the river (lead time). Normally this is slowed by some areas being grass, some areas being trees etc. rain slowed down at differing rates in different places. It's called interception.

If the water isn't slowed down across the catchment area it hits the river too quickly and causes swell which floods.

Water flowing into the river hits resistance by soil particles, rock (throughflow) or the blades of grass, leaves (surface flow / run off), slowing it down. Change that to a near frictionless pipe like our drains or a smooth tarmac road and there is no delay for the water.

A rivers natural way of coping is to flood the flood plain. Which as humans are stupid is now where we all have lovely towns.

It's not rocket science, It's GCSE geography. it is stupid builders and town planners over generations not understanding basic geography which we now have to live with, no amount of money can change these basic facts. It will just pass off the problem further down the rivers course to the next hapless individuals.

Most of which can be blamed on out of town shopping areas, supermarkets (anything with a massive carpark) and government legislation not banning farmers from turning over land to housing or not making it illegal to use green sites over brown sites for new housing.

Best start forresting all those upland areas where a river starts, only way to really impact on a rivers catchment area. Oh wait no we concrete them for windfarms now.

Gotta love stupidity.

Of course London is flooding for a different reason, it is on an aquifer, which means the mendip hills, cotswold hills etc all drain into the basin underneath London. Which as all industry has moved out leaves nothing to use that water. So it fills up, I believe londons deepest cellars already vanished underwater and of course the lowest tube stations need pumps 24/7.

Think on that next time thames declares a hose pipe ban.

Re: Mwhahahahaha

I live in Sheffield, which is built on lots of hills. You know, the city that flooded last summer?

Ironically, it was Hillsborough which flooded quite badly. So, in conclusion: Hills don't stop flooding.

PS: this icon is more appropriate than I think most people realise.

hilltop deployable biodiversity payload flotation module

But where would they find enough gopher wood?

Is "climate" or "average weather" a myth?

Chaos theorists have suggested that there is no stable long-term average weather; that the weather, being a chaotic phenomenon, is therefore subject to arbitrarily wide swings "on average", both long- and short-term. (I'm too lazy to go dig out the exact reference.)

In a word, there is no "climate".

Seems to me that this makes flood planning rather more difficult.

Next week, icebergs in the Bay of Bengal and tropical jellyfish in the North Sea.

Chaos and stochastics...

Hmpf...

<insert long rant about difference between climate and weather>

Conclusion:

Weather has short correlation time fluctuates fast and can (in fact) be modelled as a purely stochastic process on a suitable timescale (decades and slower)

Climate on the other hand varies slowly on the timescale of >>decades. It is the average of the fast fluctuations that we call weather.

So yes, we can define something as a climate and yes, the weather has something to do with it but can widely deviate from this "average". Think of Gaussian distributions.

Penguin 'cause they can swim!