Photos of UK Flooding
Michael Tobis
Michael Tobis, editor-in-chief of Planet3.0 and site cofounder, has always been interested in the interface between science and public policy. He holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences where he developed a 3-D ocean model on a custom computing platform. He has been involved in sustainability conversations on the internet since 1992, has been a web software developer since 2000, and has been posting sustainability articles on the web since 2007.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/02/10/27-staggering-aerial-shots-showing-britain-under-water_n_4761032.html?utm_hp_ref=tw&just_reloaded=1
Can you post this?
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2014/feb/12/atlantic-storms-uk-satellite-weather-animation
If not, please take a look.
Business as usual meanwhile. (Wasn't 2007 worse? Bavaria 2013? Amur river 2013? Colorado 2013, etc. etc. and don't forget Pakistan...) Nothing to see, move on.
Let's hope, people don't get used to it too easily, moving into real catastrophe on shifting baselines. Like, no Roman noted the collapse of the Roman empire.
This includes some more information about origins in Far East:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np3rDWxg1I8#t=61
U.K. Probes Whether Strange, Wet Winter part of a Changing Climate in Scientific American.
Here's some more context: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-26172688
Don't like the anomaly graph on its own though as the rainfall varies so much across the months.
The CEH (mentioned in the report) are a good source for reports and publications on flooding in the UK:
http://www.ceh.ac.uk/
The quotes linked from here are generally difficult to find in the media (certainly in whole and partly without less expert contradiction):
http://www.sciencemediacentre.org/storms-flooding/
Thanks for a links. There's a basic communication problem here that will continue for some while - right up until we start getting p values that allow people in the Met Office and elsewhere to say "oh yeah - NOW these events are climate change related." The BBC video is great - up to the point where they say the Met Office 'don't know' if current events are climate related. Julia Slingo has done all she can: these are the sorts of extremes we can expect to increase over time, etc (how on Earth Nigel Lawson concludes that's `absurd'... anyhow, let's ignore him.) But then if the message that comes out the BBC mouthpiece is `scientists don't know'...? Not good and not true.
There's the `loading the dice' metaphor... but that still leaves the basic problem: until there's enough robust evidence, `don't know if this event is connected' is the only statistically valid response, but clearly we can't wait until that changes to communicate what's happening. Which makes me wonder if there isn't a better way to respond? Who do we think has got this right?
Statistics are commonly misused; there are reasons for certain statistics in engineering that don't translate exactly to science.
The statistics of risk are far more appropriate to decision-making under uncertainty, than the statistics of P-values, which are about releasing a product or procedure into daily life.
I've always found the attribution question to be misframed. The whole business is much better construed as risk management than as detection.
This sort-of amused me (also discussed in the second half of this BBC report too, the first half of which talks about the link between US and UK weather): Bank of England governer (Canadian) Mark Carney talking about the cost of the floods, but -
I've got this crazy idea: rather than needing stuff to be destroyed before we have an excuse to invest, why don't we.... invest... before....? Nononono, obviously talking nonsense.
But I like Carney's implication that the follow-up neatly balances the economic damage. Maybe that'll apply to all climate damage: it'll end up being economically neutral as all destruction will be cancelled by the rebuild. Awesome.
Yes, of course, in the end nothing costs anything, because every dollar spent is a dollar earned. I am sympathetic to this argument.
Therefore we need some other measure than money about which prospective path to follow, because everything costs the same amount in the net.
Not sure if it came across, but I was trying to be bitterly sarcastic. My point was, there are easy ways to invest in the things we need to build and we don't need to wait for them to be destroyed first. Yes, my income is your spending, but we have more control over the investment levers than that and can insert more income/spending into the system if we want.
The immediate economic damage might cancel out. Plus, it might abate unemployment.
But what about financial damage, i.e. virtual currency that just exists in books. There might be huge losses to bubble up later. The 10 million mansion with boat moorage at the Thames isn't just damaged - cleanup and new furniture would be a measly 100000. No, problem is, it can't be sold anymore or loans raised on it for any decent amount. Suddenly nobody wants my Thames mansion anymore.
Pingback: England’s worst winter weather in at least 248 years – A Few Things Ill Considered
Yesterday evening I read a bit in David R. Montgomery's Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations:
And today Monbiot offers two of his detail photos of the UK flood:
It seems the poor Brits (or any of Homo S Sapiens?) haven't learned much since the collapse of the Roman (and many another) civilization...
And now from a different perspective:
Plumes of silt from estuaries in England and Wales captured in a satellite image on 16 February
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/picture/2014/feb/20/uk-floods-silt-plumes-sea-big-picture
Thanks Martin for highlighting these.