Is the flooding related to global warming?

[superstarheartbreaker]

thoughts please?

tallwiv - sacrifice the countryside to save the towns is the latest spin I heard.

Cui bono is a phrase that comes to mind. Who indeed will benefit from this policy? Was the intention to blame climate change to help someone force through a policy change on green belt land. Is it about property firms buying up cheap land? Who knows?

You may be on to something.

It does get very wearying when people who are concerned about pollution are branded as pitiful, gullible, lefty fools who believe everything they are told.

It's actually the people who come out with things like that who are gullible. They listen to people with no scientific background telling them that it is all a scam. That would amount to there being a huge conspiracy to falsify the evidence by the vast majority of climate scientists and every scientific organisation in the world.

I think that anyone in doubt about global warming should watch 'An inconvenient truth'.

The richest people in the world will lose money if people actually start to take action against climate change, eg by reducing their use of oil. Do you really think that those very rich and enormously powerful people are not financing all this rubbish about climate change being made-up?

Dromedary - they own the land the wind turbines will stand on. Its already happening. Worthless moorland and hillsides in Scotland and Wales and are suddenly like gold mines.

The huge subsidies from Govt and climate change levy and renewable obligations and EU emission trading scheme all raise energy prices and fund the wind turbine manufacturers and the owners of the turbines and the landowners who own the land they stand on. It is you that pays all that money they collect via your energy bill and your tax bill - without that money you pay these wind turbines would not exist. They are not economic without you being forced to buy the electricity from them and pay the taxes that subsidies them.

I wish people would wake up. There are a lot of very rich people getting even richer out of the climate change agenda.

Without a doubt it is.

I wish people would wake up. There are a lot of very rich people getting even richer out of the climate change agenda.

I would like to see some evidence to back that up. I don't think there are many wind farm billionaires are there? Like Dromedary says there is plenty of evidence that climate change denial is being financed by very rich people like the Koch bros.
www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/jun/28/climate-change-sceptic-willie-soon

www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute-exposed-internal-documents-unmask-heart-climate-denial-machine

Morebeta, that's hardly an argument - rich people get rich out of us on just about everything. As taxpayers we subsidise windfarms, banks, nuclear waste management, arms manufacturers; we pay for clearing up oil spills and will pick up a large chunk of the tab for dealing with the floods. And of course along the way the rich get richer - that's just the way the system is weighted; not really fair to single out windfarm subsidies...

The landowners that rent their land for wind turbines are raking in huge amounts each year from otherwise worthless land as are the energy firms that build and own them.

Do you know how much the electricity from renewables compared to a combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) over the lifetime of the facility?

The Department for Energy and Climate Change own figures for 2013 are:

CCGT £62/MWh

Onshore Wind £101/MWh

Offshore Wind £113 - 120/MWh

Solar PV £158/MWh

We are all being forced to buy this high cost electricity via the Renewables Obligation that forces your electricity supplier to buy it and pass the cost on to you.

Green energy is an economic disaster and makes poor people poorer but if you are part of the metropolitan elite on a big fat Govt salary or a wealthy landowner living off the slush of Govt subsidy and renting out your land to a wind farm you really don't care about people on low income struggling to pay their electric bill.

Saying that there is a vast problem with man made climate change and pollution isn't the same as saying that you approve whole heartedly of the government's current energy policy. That's quite absurd.

I agree Hester. That is a whole different discussion to whether the storms are causing climate change. Anyway if as nearly all the evidence suggests that burning fossil fuels is storing up problems for the future then we have to try and develop alternative ways of generating energy. The other thing is that oil and gas are finite resources. Wind and solar are not.

Well its burning carbon based fuel that kicks out CO2 - if you are worried about C02 the conclusion is stop burning fuel.

The two things are inescapably linked. It is adopting a Low Carbon future that has driven energy policy for the last 10 years. If you like paying twice as much for your energy then go ahead and buy wind power based electricity I will buy the cheaper stuff from a CCGT so you don't have to.

See this is the problem. If people want to talk about the problem, the deniers derail it. They have been banned from a couple of science forums (don't ask me their names as I can't remember) for that very reason.

Do remember that it is a CO2 emitting CCGT or god forbid a filthy old coal fired power station that is sitting in the background regulating its output second by second 'chasing the wind' to make sure the lights stay on when the wind drops.

Completely agree that it is an entirely different discussion; but now it's brough up. According to the http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/world.cfm numbers on World net electricity generation by energy source: in 2015 Non-hydro renewables will produce 1.5 trillion kilowatthours of electricity in a total of 23.3 kWh - so about 6%. That's forecast to go up to 8% by 2040.

My hunch is that an awful lot of peope are getting an awful lot richer out of coal and gas than out of windfarms or solar.The idea that the green lobby is making up climate change for financial gain is ludicrous to start with, but if you put it in perspective to the vast profits made from other sources ... well, it's still ludicrous. Of course, you could use these figures to make the point that with such small contributions renewables do hardly anything to change emissions, but that's depressing on a whole other level

Who are the deniers here?

The climate change lobby and the scientists that ignore the data that contradicts their thesis?.

Yep. The higher the temperature, the more water evaporates from the sea, into air that at higher temperatures can just plain hold more water. The more water evaporates, the denser the atmosphere. The denser the atmosphere, the harder a wind of a given speed will hit and the more energy a storm can hold. And of course the more water in the atmosphere, the more it rains and/or snows.

Water vapour is also a greenhouse gas, so there'll come a point where the warming becomes self-sustaining.

As for whether or not a given downpour causes flooding, that's down to landscape management on the uplands and river control measures as much as anything. More trees and hedges on the uplands (subsidies are currently being paid to rip 'em out, which needs to change pronto) makes the upland soil better able to absorb rainfall before runoff starts and more 'naturalistic' river control to rob storm surges of energy. Cuts have been in the wrong places on this one.

And I'll stop there before the building pressure of the political rant goes into the red...

I haven't seen any evidence that the scientific community have not taken every possibility into account. I have seen plenty evidence that those who oppose them will clutch at any straw to prove otherwise. For instance a scientist will consider the theory that global warming is caused by increased solar radiation and find there is no evidence to back that up. The so called "sceptics" will still keep telling everyone that it's the sun causing global warming long after it's been disproved. Anything but admit that CO2 emissions might be causing the problem. Their theories are continually debunked but they still keep spouting them.

KissesBreakingWaves,

Climate scientists know all about that theory too. This is a link to a site run by scientists, rather than say the denier site wattsupwiththat which isn't.

www.skepticalscience.com/water-vapor-greenhouse-gas.htm

My apologies KissesBreakingWave. I thought you were suggesting that more water vapour would decrease warming making the climate self regulating. Must be time for bed.

Morebeta - if we had all paid a bit more for our energy for the past 30 years, developing a wind and solar energy industry, we would not be in the mess we are in now. Do you really think your / our children, suffering horrendous weather conditions, the consequences of vast areas becoming uninhabitable due to drought (already starting to happen in Australia), lack of water and crops etc, will look back on our era and thank their lucky stars that we enjoyed cheap energy bills?

Morebeta - show us the data.

We cant even predict the weather accurately to the end of the month - how arrogant and deluded to think we can predict it to the end of the century?

No scientist working on any research that might undermine or question the climate change agenda gets any funding. Its as simple as that. Opposing theories never see the light of day. The scientific debate has been deliberately shut down. Nobody will ever see opposing theories and hence the entire process of scientific inquiry has been distorted. The Soviet Union used to do that. Scientists knew what theory would be acceptable and ignored, suppressed and didn't publish data and research that didn't 'fit'.

There is literally no possibility of getting any research funded that questions the climate change agenda and everybody in science knows it. People have careers to build and mortgages to pay and you cant blame them for toeing the party line.

The data is there for us all to see in the fossil record. We had ice ages, we had warm periods. It been going on for millions of years.

It will keep on going for millions more long after we have gone. Mankind is only about 50,000 years old. We are tiny jot in the history of our planet.

Morebeta,

First you confuse weather with climate and then you suggest that there is a huge conspiracy to falsify the huge amount of evidence that increased CO2 could make the earth far more inhospitable in the future. Can you really not see that if your theories need a huge conspiracy to back them up then it's time to rethink the theory?