Lost in the flood
Posted on Tuesday 24 July, 2007
Filed Under Society
The current UK floods may or may not be a direct result of climate change. It’s always impossible to attribute any given ‘extreme weather event’ – as politicians euphemistically dub flooding and the like – directly to global warming.
Certainly, there are precedents. In a single day in July 1955, a full 12 inches of rain fell on parts of Dorset, three times the downpour seen last Friday.
But what does seem clear is that climate change will increase dramatically the incidence of extreme weather events, both in the UK and across the planet.
As we witnessed in New Orleans, the poor are usually the worst hit. Of the estimated 500,000 or so people without power or water as a result of the recent deluge, most of them will be working class people, and a good chunk of them won’t have insurance.
Action is clearly required. Yet the political complacency of the mainstream parties is astonishing, given that nothing less than the future of the earth itself could be at stake.
Public opinion dictates that New Labour, the Tories and the Lib-Dems talk a good game on green issues. Yet none of them propose convincing policies to tackle the environmental crisis. And no, having a chauffeur ferry your briefcase behind your pushbike doesn’t count.
Blair in particular was often capable of one minute arguing passionately that climate change is the most important issue facing the planet, and the next calling for three new runways in the south of England, so that air travel can double over the next two decades.
If the current inundations increase the pressure for meaningful action, or even simply kick-start some serious debate, they will have served some purpose. It’s just a pity that such a high price in human misery has to be paid to ensure something is done, when the need to do something has been persuasively argued by so many for so long.
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26 Responses to “Lost in the flood”
These are “60 Year Floods” if not even less frequent. The last like this were I believe in 1947. The question for the executive is always “do we spend gazillions today for a 100 year risk” or take it on the nose when it happens, which is rare.
This is of course very hard to explain to those who are inundated in Oxfordshire. Heaven forfend.
making people in urban areas tear up their tarmacced front gardens would have a huge effect on flood risk.
Which party will try that?
Is the rest of the country really flooding?
It seems a bit odd from West Cumbria. Here I am, about 20 miles west of the wettest place in Britain and it’s been beautiful sunshine for the last couple of weeks.
I’m surprised we haven’t been overwhelmed with tourists/refugees.
One storm doesn’t make a summer or prove a theory – not that I know either way but I always wait until I see ostensible Marxists, who are experts in the area, sign-up to any ‘non-political’ idea before I start considering it. I’m in no position to know myself but I remember the Millennium Bug.
But what needs to be nailed is the ‘Act of God’ line that Cameron, and doubtless Labour, trotted out about the current floods. It’s not an ‘Act of God’ that killed many in the Pakistani earthquakes – it’s the flimsy houses they live in, the lack of medical care afterwards and nor is it an Act of God’ in Worcs/Glos or the same that wiped out so many in the Asian Tsunami.
And talking of Piers Corbyn, he told me a couple of weeks ago that there was no such thing as global warming – something like it was all a scam by the West to use Carbon trading to prevent or control the economic development of China, Africa etc – and ‘carbon is just a cog in the wheel, not a cause of anything’
And he certainly doesn’t dress like a multi-millionaire – well possibly an early Howard Hughes.
Piers has been reading the sunspots for years. What I can never get my head round is the leap from “our CO2 emissions didn’t start it all” to “our CO2 emissions don’t matter”. Maybe you should ask Piers for a guest blog post?
This raised a smile:
I always wait until I see ostensible Marxists, who are experts in the area, sign-up to any ‘non-political’ idea before I start considering it. I’m in no position to know myself but I remember the Millennium Bug.
I’ve been an ostensible Marxist since about 1980, and I was convinced the Millennium Bug was very bad news indeed. I’m still not sure how we got off that lightly. I blogged about this the other day, as it happens.
I thought it was a good joke, so I’m going to repeat it:
Tony Blair can quite justifiably say, ‘Apres moi, la deluge.’.
The comments by the experts on your post about the Millennium Bug seem to be saying, that nothing went wrong because we fixed it all beforehand. Of course, without a control, that doesn’t even pretend to be a scientific view.
I recall the large amounts that my public sector employer spent on such consultants and my unsuccessful attempt at suggesting (in 1999) ‘can we not just fool one machine into thinking that it was already 2000 and check whether we are throwing all this money down the drain’. I did read that somewhere like Mongolia did nothing and had no failures.
The above is a good example of why maybe types like me shouldn’t commentate on things we don’t know enough about. Possibly apocryphal stories about Mongolia are no substitute for scientific rigour.
But there is justification for non-experts to raise such issues. Just as there was no such thing as an independent view on the Millennium Bug – just that of interested parties (how much money can I make as an IT consultant, how much danger would there be to their profit if things did go wrong, etc) – so no absolute reliance can be placed on the views of ‘independent’ experts on global warming. They will speak as their class interests dictate and hence my waiting for the pronouncements of SWP weathermen or USFI scientists and the like.
Sue – yes, I liked it.
The comments by the experts on your post about the Millennium Bug
Eh? For anyone who hasn’t followed the link, the post Punchie is referring to is a humorous magazine column from 2000. There aren’t any comments by experts; there’s a bit of a lead-in by me, saying why I took Y2K seriously, and a link to the specific expert I was sending up. (This, incidentally, was someone who’d staked his career on Y2K – he moved out to New Mexico so as to miss the inevitable riots, etc – and consequently looked very silly on the 2nd of January 2000. Which is more or less what my column said, only with more gags.)
there was no such thing as an independent view on the Millennium Bug – just that of interested parties (how much money can I make as an IT consultant
This is nonsense, and not even consistently materialist nonsense. I took the Millennium Bug seriously because I’d had several years’ experience as a computer programmer: the work I’d done, the code I’d produced and the relations of production I’d experienced told me it was going to be bad news. I believe that a large part of the reason the effects of Y2K were so small is that a lot of people did a lot of work beforehand. And if those people managed to get a good rate for the job, good luck to them.
It’s kind of tiresome having facts just ignored on this blog (and elsewhere). People – Tim, Modernity etc will just lie and be brazen when caught doing.
At best Phil is just being mistaken in his comments. If you’re interested read the ‘Gargle’ comments on his linked post. If it’s a seen up it’s written in a very straight manner indeed. I’m sure I précis it pretty well.
And as for ‘this is nonsense’, we have Phil pretty much making my case for the ‘no independent view’ line.
But I just can’t be bothered. It’s all small beer. I was trying very politely just to debate about whether we can believe experts be it Climate Change or the Millennium Bug. I’m afraid many of the users of this blog are beyond polite discussion – maybe I am as well. I bail out of this discussion.
And it would be just polite to refer to people by the name they use as it also helps them pick up when people mention their name.
‘send up’ not ‘seen up’
yeah yeah, Southie, but as a professional engineer myself, i do have to defend the idea that whether technology actually works or not is outwith ideology.
I personally supervised the Y2K assessment and implementation for a small manufacturing company I worked for at the time. It was a great deal of effort over almost two years, in which I had to extensivly audit all the kit in the factory, and write to every supplier and every customer, and we had to upgrade the firmware in several of the machines in the factory, or they would have fallen over when Y2K came. Even the task of identifying which kit had embedded processors and who was responsible for the firmware (working back up the chain of supply) was a huge task in itself.
Italy did allegedly spend a lot less on Y2K than Britain did, or rather more accurately the Italian government made very little direct investment, but this is misleading, because nearly all computers in Italy would have been running Windows or Unix, and their IT departments would have patched to the latest versions, and therefore they would have benefited from effort preformed in for example the USA. Also all Italian subsidiaries of German, French, US or UK companies would have followed the procedures of their parents, as will all Italain companies who had customers outside Italy (almost all of them) so the apparent nonchalance of the Italians was masking the technological interdependence.
What Southie is arguing is that there is no such thing as professional engineering expertise and competance. On the contrary, our society is built upon the professional competence and rigour of engineers who face the very hard judgement that what we design and make has to actually work in the real world.
As opposed to being a PR consultant … …
Where is someone from Spiked Online when you need them?
At best Phil is just being mistaken in his comments. If you’re interested read the ‘Gargle’ comments on his linked post.
I wrote that column, and I can assure you that Ed Gargle is a fictional character. I know, because I made him up. His comments are based on some comments by the non-fictional Ed Yourdon, which I specifically mention in the lead-in to the column. But, of course, my column doesn’t endorse Yourdon – it makes fun of him.
as for ‘this is nonsense’, we have Phil pretty much making my case for the ‘no independent view’ line.
Speaking as a historical materialist, I don’t believe there is any such thing as an independent view – I certainly don’t believe that knowledge of the sacred texts confers wisdom above that of the common herd, which seems to be where the comment about “SWP weathermen or USFI scientists” is heading. I believe that my view of the Y2K problem was grounded ultimately in my experience as a worker – as one of those who did the work in the first place, and were under pressure to cut corners and do poor-quality work.
I was going to respond to Southpawpunch but I’m still in shock at discovering I went to the same comp in Stockport as him. Unbelievable.
Owen wrote:
I was going to respond to Southpawpunch but I’m still in shock at discovering I went to the same comp in Stockport as him. Unbelievable.
you’ve put your finger on it: unbelievable.
My bet is that SouthPawPunch is a made up character, a non-person, a fiction, a creation of some wit, whose only half there.
My suspicions were confirmed when I found this web site, http://southpawpunchisafuckingwanker.blogspot.com/
it is clear that SSP is a parody and meant to derail otherwise informed discussions, he/she/it are best ignored, the joke has lost its novelty
the idea of a PR consultant lecturing the working-class on politics and socialism is absurd, the “socialism” of Jemima or Tarquin is not what is required!
My mistake, Southpawpunch has corrected me – he only attended a meeting there. He was in fact privately educated. I know, I’m shocked as well.
Which Stockport comp was that Owen? Was it one of the incredibly well to do ones – like the one where I did eight weeks teaching practice once? Even the non-exam classes in it were wittier, less remedial and more startingly middle class than those at the GS in Bolton where I also tried out.
And yes we’re all shocked about South Paw Punch. That’s very unusual that is.
(Marple Hall)
The current level of flooding in the UK is something a bit more statistically improbable than a record downpour, or even a 50 year statistical variation. The 1947 flood levels have already been exceeded. Those floods represented several months worth of frozen precipitation, melting at once over frozen ground, so the comparison isn’t entirely valid.
May-July rainfall is an all-time record: 387.6mm of rain have already fallen across England and Wales, making it the wettest May to July since records began in 1766.
Since May, serious flooding has occurred in areas hundreds of miles apart, such as Northern Ireland, Glasgow, Hull, Sheffield, West Midlands, Gloucester and Oxford. Indicating that this is also a more widespread event than previous flooding.
I tend to support the view that there is an “anthropogenic global warming” fingerprint in this and other examples of extreme weather phenomena, such as the extreme heat in European Russia in May, the Balkans in June-July, the record warm spring and northern hemisphere winters, all of which have occurred within an overall global warming trend since the 70′s.
The studies of solar effects suggest the sun has not been a significant factor in global warming since the late 60′s and Nir Shaviv’s hypothesis on the influence of galactic cosmic rays (GCR’s) on climate remains unproven.
It’s probably not productive to engage in “socialist” debates on climate science, anymore than having specifically “socialist” debates on evolution or nuclear physics.
Anyone who wants to learn about the theory behing Global warming would be better of spending some time looking at:-
http://www.aip.org/history/climate/
For topical articles and debates:-
http://www.realclimate.org and follow the recommended links
However, I have noticed a strong tendency for “denialists” to disproportionately be members of the far-right with an agenda supportive of oil company and mining interests, particularly in the US and Australia. Any discussion of Global Warming in the Press or on the internet seems to attract these people, who usually parrot the same arguments ad nauseam. They will probably launch a major spamming attack on this site as a result of this post!
A useful collection of arguments to refute them is contained at
http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/
It’s quite evident that contrary to the slurs of the far right, the socialist left does not have a unified position on this, as the following report on the NUT’s conference shows:-
http://www.isg-fi.org.uk/spip.php?article500
Bob Crow has agreed to sponsor on conference on Climate Change for the Autumn, so look out for details.
Meanwhile, evidence that the poor are often hit hardest by extreme weather and it could be worse: -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ0eZiarvEE
Alex Nichols wrote:
However, I have noticed a strong tendency for “denialists” to disproportionately be members of the far-right with an agenda supportive of oil company and mining interests, particularly in the US and Australia.
that seems to be the case, but once the evidence of global climate change becomes overwhelming then the agenda will shift
if companies widely accept the problem of global climate change then oppositionists, such as Southpawpunch. will simply flip over and probably say “ahh, comrades, climate change is really some secret capitalist agenda, and I don’t believe it, even if riverbanks burst, half of Africa become vacant and burnt, I won’t, I won’t believe! so there”
instead socialists should be thinking creatively how best to improve the lot of people in the developing world, as remedies for climate change are employed, how best to limit mass pollution and cancer generating chemicals, how best to improve the lot of the working classes
As practice, I will return and comment when my views are being completely misrepresented.
I don’t know if Global Warming exisits. If I had to guess I would say it does and action needs to be taken – but I don’t know and I’m sure other commentators here don’t either.
Of course socialists would also be aware that capitalists will take any opportunity to fleece us – such as Ryanair with their dubious Carbon Offsets charge, etc, etc.
Modernity, – you will be aware that I exposed you for blatantly lying about what I said over at Shiraz Socialist recently. Now you are trying to put nonsensical words into my mouth in relation to a supposed future. Please have some decency and desist.
And not that it matters either way but I come from a pretty middle middle class family – you know all that from a previous reply, anyway – and the lot of many PR (and other) consultants is unlimited hours. Look at PR Week for the average income of a PR consultant – maybe 35/40K? The UK has a service economy and the PR world is full of unpaid interns and no notice temps.
I’m all too real – it’s you with your inaccurate and baseless remarks that deserves to be fiction.
If I am at all stupid it is in bothering to reply. I won’t rebut Modernity further so I suggest any further comments of his are looked at very sceptically
Southie. You say:
“I don’t know if Global Warming exisits. If I had to guess I would say it does and action needs to be taken – but I don’t know and I’m sure other commentators here don’t either.”
No one is expecting you as a lay person to specifically follow the scientific arguments. However, you do not need to be a scientist specialising in the field to recognise that there is an established scientific consensus, and the man-made contribution towards global warming has acheived the status of being a mature and established scientific theory.
For you to give credence to the scepticism argument is the same sort of Lysenkoism that the former-RCP have warmed over.
Is it not the case that the current floods have provided many ‘ordinary’ working people with indoor swimming pools? Should we not then celebrate this egalitarian advance?
as Andy pointed out there is a consensus in the scientific community that there is an issue of climate change
now that should have been obvious to anyone in Britain after 1987 (this might jog your memory, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/16/newsid_2533000/2533219.stm)
there have been plenty of other examples since then, now of course if you wish to be excessively cantankerous you could speculate on the causes:
1) cyclical 2) manmade 3) one-off
but what you can’t do, is dismiss the empirical evidence, melting ice caps, bare mountain ranges, etc
now for people who consider themselves to be the “leading section of the working class” it is a bit bleeding thick, to ignore all the evidence
of course, there are professional contrarians, such as the cranks from the ex-RCP, but other people should avoid these purely antagonistic positions simply because they cannot 1) reason for themselves 2) digests some of the scientific evidence 3) be bothered to think it through
some people are drawn inextricably to oppositionist views as a reflex, because they define themselves in opposition to those they hate, in this case
“if capitalists say global warming is happening, then the loony oppositionist will say it is, without thinking it thru”,
equally “if capitalists say climate change is happening and we must deal with it, then the loony oppositionist might well say ‘no, anything the capitalists say I must oppose’, etc”
so there’s a choice for adults,
1) look at the evidence dispassionately and as objectively as possible, then make up your mind
2) or make up your mind first , and then think up reasons for believing such irrational nonsense
well, southpawpunch, which do you want to do??
here’s something from the running-dogs at the Met Office, see http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/
Here’s a good article by Mark Lynas in the ‘News Statesman’ on this topic:-
What’s really going on here
by Mark Lynas
New Statesman
Published 26 July 2007
Mark Lynas is a climate change writer and activist, author of the acclaimed book ‘High Tide’ and fortnightly columnist for the New Statesman
http://www.newstatesman.com/200707260025
note the troll frenzy precipitated (oooh a pun!)
Andy Newman “…to give credence to the scepticism argument is the same sort of Lysenkoism that the former-RCP have warmed over”
Of course Martin Durkin, the producer of the “Great Global Warming Swindle” is a former RCP’er. I’ve been wondering for some time whether he’s related to Tom Durkin, the well known building industry militant from Brent, who was a leading member of the CPGB. Anyone know?
btw I noticed that this week’s Socialist Worker’s main contribution on the Floods was a cartoon by Tim. That followed Chris Harman’s article in Socialist Review, which recognised that Global Warming was occuring, but said that it couldn’t be prioritised as an issue. Could there be a link there?
Talking about sitting on the fence in a lifejacket.
Some topical links on flooding and other Global warming issues are at:-
New Scientist 30 July 2007
Extreme weather brings flood chaos round the world
http://environment.newscientist.com/article/dn12385-extreme-weather-brings-flood-chaos-round-the-world.html
New Scientist 25 July 2007
Huge sea level rises are coming – unless we act now
James Hansen
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/mg19526141.600-huge-sea-level-rises-are-coming–unless-we-act-now.html
How Can We Avert Dangerous Climate Change?
James Hansen
http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/canweavert.pdf