Thursday 10 January 2013

Weird Weather

As 2012 has drawn to a close there has been a lot of discussion in the media about the extreme weather we have seen.
 
The weather in this country has always been unpredictable.  Extreme weather events are certainly not unheard of, but this year has been a year of particularly extreme rainfall - and not on just one occasion.
 
 
This is a picture of my garden after the most recent downpour, shortly before Christmas. My garden never flooded before this year - for starters we live on a hill and our soil is quite sandy and normally drains really well. But this year the ground was so saturated  and the rain so intense that it just couldn't drain away fast enough.
 
And back in the summer the downpour was even heavier, and my garden even more of a pond. Water was bubbling up in the road from drains that were unable to cope, and the river, backed up by a high tide burst its banks and flooded the town.
 
 
This is the footpath through the marshes a few days after the rain had stopped. The saddest thing to hear were the cries of the terns, their nests and chicks washed away. Although one brave man from the RSPB swam out with inflatable rafts for them and some were saved.
 
They say that extreme weather events like this will become more common as global temperatures increase. This is certainly the case in the world in which Danni, my heroine in Red Rock, lives. Britain has become a colder, wetter place.
 
I fear that the world I imagined when I was writing her story may soon become a reality for us all!

11 comments:

  1. It's a tricky and contentious theme Kate. Everything I've read so far indicates genuine climate change and we're seeing it happen before our eyes. However, it doesn't appear to be driven by human activity and previous climate change in history / pre-history has been far more violent. I reckon it's just standard procedure, and we're unfortunately having to live through it and the useless summers it will bring...

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    1. We cannot deny that climate change is happening, but I do believe that there is a significant anthropogenic effect, even if we are only exacerbating an existing trend. Interesting times. :-)

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  2. I am often gob smacked by those who choose to deny the correlation between human (in)activity and the very real evidence of global warming.

    Does that mean that I'm unwilling to admit that ice-core samples or sedimentary earth core samples show signs of natural climatic changes without the influence of man made greenhouse gasses? Of course not. But then again there are also some serious paleontological evidence for natural disasters which have contributed to such drastic climate changes.

    It would be reckless to make assumptions on nature following its course based on a planet which is certainly showing some serious signs of being significantly warmer than it has been in recorded human history. If it is a cycle that would happen naturally in time, then we have done a great deal to expedite such a cycle. It would however appear that the general climatology community agrees that there is an irrefutable link between human activity and global warming.

    Ray

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    1. Hello Ray, thank you for commenting.

      I am inclined to agree with you on this. I do believe our species has a lot to answer for.

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  3. You have a lovely pond in your backyard. Oh wait...
    Meanwhile we were seventy degrees yesterday. In JANUARY.

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    1. If it gets any deeper I'll be stocking it with fish :-)

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  4. I know what you are saying Kate, our garden has been water logged for weeks. Driving through Somerset last month we saw swans swimming in a field.

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    1. Swans swimming in a field - what a fantastic image :-)

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  5. It terrifies me and is one of the reasons I bought my house on the top of the highest point in Bristol.

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  6. I think people confuse climate change with weather. Weather is what we get day-to-day or month-to-month. Climate deals with trends over years or decades or more. Because we've had some mild winters in the past 20-30 years some people think climate change won't happen. Maybe it won't, but it would be a dangerous experiment to wait and see if the predictions are wrong.

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