Why after all these tragic floods that affect people on here personally and seem to hit forum members emotionally, do we usually have 2 threads down – “where should I fly away to for a couple of days break?” What will it take to change behaviour?

Bit late to the party, but agree with this.

Reminds me of the story on the BBC the other day about a French ski resort helicoptering in snow because it all melted. My irony meter was almost off the scale.

On the housebuilding front, if I was building a new house in a flood risk area I’d just build it up off the ground – maybe a couple of metres up with a storage area underneath. Expensive maybe, but worth it if it doesn’t get ruined by floodwater at increasingly frequent intervals in the decades to come.

Correlation isn’t causation? Unless you’ve missed something out you’ve implied they’ve built some flood mitigation measures, they’ve been overwhelmed, implies they weren’t anywhere near big enough to mittigate against this weather but doesn’t make them at fault?

Apologies, I failed to clarify that they have been struggling at the sight of ‘bad’ weather over the winter, long before these last two storms.

I am sure that once the whole thing is tarmacked, the sites new sewerage system will be more than able to meet the demand in conjunction with the lake.

You raise a good point though. Maybe these sites should start considering the ability to mitigate against extreme conditions that are becoming more likely due to climate change, rather than making conditions worse for others. Especially in flood prone areas.

I dunno, maybe for budget airlines to stop with cheap flights, maybe for people to earn less money so they don’t have disposable income for holidays,

All sorted in 2021 when the transition arrangements end, we’re  barely going to afford to feed ourselves due to points based immigration.

if I was building a new house in a flood risk area I’d just build it up off the ground – maybe a couple of metres up with a storage area underneath. Expensive maybe, but worth it if it doesn’t get ruined by floodwater at increasingly frequent intervals in the decades to come.

But most people don’t build their own houses. It would hopefully be the case that new house building in flood effected areas has stopped / will stop. We don’t live in the Irrawaddy Delta I’m pretty sure a large percentage of the UK landmass isn’t underwater just now. In recent decades developers have built in flood effected areas not because preferred or necessary but because the land is cheap – the houses they build aren’t sold at a discount to the customers though.

But if you built houses obviously equipped to withstand flooding nobody would buy them. Nobody would buy a property on the expectation it will flood. Even if your carpets survive anything parked outside won’t and people generally want to be able to come and go from their own home. Even with free porn people can’t wait to get off a cruise ship just now – anywheres a prison if you can’t get out 🙂

Some new build in Willington, Derbyshire seem to have avoided the flooding – maybe 100 metres from the Trent on a good day, pics seem to show the road to the estate underwater but they seem to have raised the houses up

While there’s some environmental points well made already, I’d also like to call out anyone with 3 or more kids (and anyone with kids and since separated and living apart from their kid’s other parent) who is complaining about the building of new housing.

All the good bits of land are already taken. I work in the Thames basin, Thames Water are incredibly hot on the drainage run off from any new or extended development. While on an individual scale this may be farting into a hurricane, there’s a long term goal that they are, to their credit, working towards.

On the housebuilding front, if I was building a new house in a flood risk area I’d just build it up off the ground – maybe a couple of metres up with a storage area underneath. Expensive maybe,

concrete boat

Im always reminded of this when these come up ….. cost more than my house by a long way just to get to ground level.

I’d also like to call out anyone with 3 or more kids (and anyone with kids and since separated and living apart from their kid’s other parent) who is complaining about the building of new housing.

But not calling out people without kids, or kids that have moved on, but love having the status symbol and feeling of self satisfaction that you get form a 5 bedroom house, with double garage, and gardens front and rear… maybe a lovely crescent shaped drive… second home in Cornwall…

You’ve got a very short memory (or have a very strong definition of proper winter kit).
2017/2018 winter was the “beast from the east”, even in the sub-tropical south east it was minus double digits.
Winter 18/19…….. I

They were very short term events around here – how long did the Beast from the East actually last? All winter, or just a few weeks?

Well if any of those affected vote Tory, well they bloody deserve it. Bad news for the others that the country is basically held ransom to continual stupidity.

Revealed: how Tory cuts are wrecking UK flood defences

“Many of Britain’s flood defences are being abandoned or maintained to minimal levels because of government cuts that could leave almost twice as many households at “significant risk” within 20 years, according to a leaked document submitted to ministers.”

“Councils had suffered budget cuts of more than 40% since 2010, leaving them with little or no option but to reduce or withhold funding to drainage boards, other organisations and landowners who managed river levels, the document suggests.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/02/tory-cuts-wrecking-uk-flood-defences

Typical Tory bullshit of “saving” money today by borrowing it from the future.

For those flooded it’s pretty horrific but the actual number of properties flooded is very small. It was interesting hearing from a woman (in Calderdale I think) who took 8 months to get back in after their first flood, after the recent floods she was expecting a couple of days as the work done after the last flood meant the house just needed a clean and not all the plaster replacing.

As for all the cuts, would have happened who ever is in charge, the biggest problem is they don’t know where the next floods will be.

Anyway nothing will change whilst were shipping sand from the UK to the Middle East to cover horse racing venues, with that sort of environmental idiocy going on meaningful change is a long way off.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-lancashire-51561649/lancashire-firm-sells-sand-to-desert-country-turkmenistan

This is a map you’re going to want to pay attention to. Of our 400 or so river gauges around 25% have broken an all time record in the last decade – the red dots are those that have broken a record just this winter alone. Says it all really #ClimateChange #ClimateEmergency pic.twitter.com/tRFmepSBpU

— John Curtin (@johncurtinEA) February 24, 2020

An alternative view to that tweet is someone justifying their job and salary. Everybody, well, nearly everybody loves to make themselves indispensable 😉

On the climate change front. And right from the get go here, I’m not denying that climate changes or is changing dramatically to the changes we’ve been witnessing since we started observing and recording climate changes from day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, decade to decade, century to century.. just on that last one, so we can’t go millennia to millennia because we haven’t been observing and recording the same exact data for that long. So, my questions for the oracles are:
Where’s it changing from?
What was the old normal?
How many years worth of data was used to establish the normal?
How do we deduce that change is dramatic enough to hashtag it as climate change/emergency?

I have more questions, but let’s get these sourced first as they may well address the other queries I have.

A couple of points earlier alluded to both jet stream and solar cycles as being very likely candidates to be climate influencers. How long have we been observing and recording these to ascertain how they may be affecting any dramatic changes. How does one be affected by the other? How are we able to influence the jet stream? Increased air travel? Fossil fuel burning? Clear felling swathes of North American forest on a daily basis to make wood pellets to ship to the UK so we can fill up Drax and charge up our electric vehicles?

As I said, I’m open to all sides of the argument/discussion but it does seem to me sometimes that not enough information is present to form a reliable indicator as to what, why and how do we deal with change. The

The mistake you may be making is believing that your questioning carries the same weight as the global scientific community who assert that it is a true measurable condition.

don’t take this personally, my opinion that it is absolutely happening and driven by man’s actions carries the same value – virtually nil.

Clearly it’s measurable. We have specified units of measure for atmospheric pressure, temperature, precipitation and wind velocity to name a few of the most important ones.

Admittedly, my e perience of business forecast modelling was circa 30 years ago, however, the basic premise was historical data, or rather, verifiable and relevant historical data and the more that was available, the better the guess and the better the trend analysis. In a cosmological scale of things, we have **** all verifiable historical data, so the normal has to be established somewhere. Where that’s established will affect the changes quite significantly.

Regarding who’s to blame has the 2008 Pitt report been mentioned?

Flood defence spending has been shown to be a long term cost saver

After the report flood defence spending was increased & the government accepted all recomendations as the report mentioned but then the Tories got in & austerity came along & the Tories slashed it all

https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/wiki/Pitt_Review_Lessons_learned_from_the_2007_floods

(1)Where’s it changing from?
(2)What was the old normal?
(3)How many years worth of data was used to establish the normal?
(4)How do we deduce that change is dramatic enough to hashtag it as climate change/emergency?

Have you heard of the hockey stick graph? Its a reconstruction of average temperatures over recent (gologically speaking) earths history. It’ goes back about 1000 years or so, but some researchers have pushed back the graph further. It shows a remarkably stable period of temperatures before the onset of the industrial revolution and a rapid uptick in temperatures since the industrial revolution. The long period of stable temperatures during which our modern society came about, our agriculture matured and cities developed is probably worthy of considering as a norm.

https://skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm

Slackalice – ice cores back to c.200,000 yrs, stratigraphy, going back c5bn years. How’s that?

Obviously the rock stuff is ‘lower resolution’ but the ice cores are very accurate.

Typical Tory bullshit of “saving” money today by borrowing it from the future.

they believe their own climate change denial and are betting against the consensus.

slackalice

What was the old normal?

it doesn’t really matter. In fact even if the last 1000 years was a total outlier, that doesn’t matter either, because it’s still pretty much the climate we need. Normal doesn’t come into it.

The question isn’t if what’s coming down the pipe towards us is normal or abnormal, it’s the effect it will have. If it did turn out to be normal, that won’t unflood Bangladesh, or unfail harvests.

(4)How do we deduce that change is dramatic enough to hashtag it as climate change/emergency?

From what we know of earth systems the response of ecosystems, and physical systems like oceans, the cryosphere and the atmosphere will be profound to a rapid increase in temperatures (and in the case of ecosystems to increase in CO2 ). These changes will eventually involve (but are not limited too) an increase in sea level which will affect low level land close to the current ocean – including many cities of course, but also agricultural land. Current crop growing areas may not be able to support crop growing in future..the people reliant on growing those crops will need to move or find something else to do – this is a source of political instablity. There are more consequences too…increased heatwaves some parts of the planet becoming effectively uninhabitable without aircon, different rainfall distributions again altering political stabilities.

Are these emergencies – thats a subjective assessment…something like a conger eel population than may be able to expand its territory into the New York underground system as it becomes submerged may not think so, but people who can’t take the train to work may well do so. Someone will ultimately need to pick up the tab for relocating populations or building the stuff that keeps the water out, or we could just stop throwing out CO2 into the atmosphere so that the higher end impacts don’t materialise..remembering of course that we (and our immediate ancesteros) have already committed us to some lower end impacts – which will have to be paid for.

The sooner we reduce the amount we are kicking out – the cheaper and easier it becomes for us and future generations – thats where the “emergency” bit comes from (although its not really a sciency expression). The more we put off emissions reductions the harder and more expensive the systems changes will be to stop the higher end impacts occurring

slackalice – maybe have a look here?

https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

And also:

https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php

This BBC program gives a good summary of why the focus has shifted to tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere and net zero

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000fgcn

Awesome, I do like this place! Thank you for your responses people, I shall read and digest appropriately.

I must confess, I was wondering what level and type of response I’d get, so Once again, thank you for responding to my questions without prejudice.

I haven’t read the whole thread so maybe this sort of thing has been mentioned, but years ago when there were floods in the south of England (Chichester) the initial response was along the lines of “act of God” but if I remember correctly the people actually deemed responsible were the people (EA?) who messed around with the waterways higher up in the hills and pointed the “floodwater paths” down towards peoples properties.

Slackalice …. if MOOCS are your thing the freebie Exeter uni one is quite good for someone genuinely interested in this

https://lifesciences.exeter.ac.uk/research/ess/mooc/

Every flood has conspiracy theories about someone opening dams or sluices to flood location x to save location y. Current stories on Faceache in South Wales blaming the recent Taff floods on DwrCymru opening the dams in the Beacons.

but years ago when there were floods in the south of England (Chichester) the initial response was along the lines of “act of God” but if I remember correctly the people actually deemed responsible were the people (EA?) who messed around with the waterways higher up in the hills and pointed the “floodwater paths” down towards peoples properties.

I’ve heard most of them but this is the best to date. River Lavant is a groundwater fed winterbourne. It literally comes out of the ground in East Dean. There are no hills or ‘waterways’.