Jul 01 2007
Global warming - British wetting
The much advertised long hot dry summers of global warming have clearly not arrived??as forecast??this year in the UK. I cannot remember such a wet and cold June as the one we have just experienced.
It was good to hear the BBC tackling this subject this morning. Although there was the usual genuflection against drivers, they acknowledged that opinion is now moving on from how to stop the carbon outputs, to how to adapt to the likely consequences of global warming. Three cheers for that, as anyone who thinks China and India are about to stop their growth??in carbon dioxide outputs??is foolish.
The two things we need to do in the Uk are concerned with water. We are short of water because we have not increased supplies in reservoirs to match the rapid growth in population and the natural wish of people as they grow richer to use more water - more expensive plants to care for when it is dry, more cars to wash,more showers to use.We should get on with putting in more reservoir and borehole capacity quickly.
We should also turn our attention to better flood defences, especially to the east of London where we are building on a large scale in?? low lying areas subject to floods. The Environment Agency needs to be shaken up so it starts to take the need seriously to clear water courses, improve storm drains, and find ways to channel surface water when we do get heavy rains. The scenes this week around the country are a disgrace and show what a failure the EA is in this crucial area.
John Redwood has been the Member of Parliament for Wokingham since 1987. First attending Kent College, Canterbury, he graduated from Magdalen College...
Well said. There is more and more evidence linking solar activity, cosmic rays and cloud formation now coming to the fore with suggestions that things might well become cooler in the relatively near future (Svensmark, Avery, Singer and others). The role of CO2 is probably secondary to these and carbon footprints etc., are a diversion. As you rightly point out, we need to improve our water supply infrastructure and look towards flood defences but, and this is a big but, we must be aware that flood plains serve a purpose. If we build defences to allow construction on a flood plain we may well transfer the flood elsewhere.
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