he nation’s reception of their new Premier Gordon Brown.Meanwhile the newspapers were red hot with speculation as to whether the recent spell of extreme weather in Britain constituted another twist to the continuing Climate Change saga. In support of this the usual tired faces of the so called experts appeared on the nation’s TV screens trouping out the same ill informed banalities that could be paraphrased in a few short sentences.
Here is the scene:
Evidence: Several days of unsettled summer weather bring extensive flooding to numerous parts of the British Isles, and in particular the city of Sheffield which was especially badly hit.
Experts verdict: Climate Change with increasing temperatures will bring added moisture to cloud systems and scenes of this nature will be repeated more and more.
Quote: From Bob Spicer of Open University: "Events we have seen are typical of things we can expect more of. Storms associated with a warm atmosphere mean downpours."
Fact: These floods came at a time when the temperatures around Britain were actually a good deal lower than the monthly average. In fact the storms arose, as outlined elsewhere on this page simply because a twisting mass of warmer air from the tropics collided with much colder air from the north setting off a huge downpour. This set in motion a swirling weather pattern that went round and round the British Isles, dumping lots of rain in a relatively short period.
In fact an almost duplicate set of circumstances occurred in Spain just over a month ago, and In Greece barely three weeks ago. In each case warm winds from the tropics had blown up from the deserts of Africa, only to collide with much cooler winds coming down from the North. The point of their meeting resulted in huge downpours and was simply a meeting of two weather systems.
So there we have it! No Global warming! No Climate Change! Just swirling weather systems of very different temperatures.
To their credit the Times of London pointed out that these events were not without precedent and that other instances, over a hundred years ago - well before Climate Change hysteria, showed similar episodes of extreme weather.
Another voice of reason came from Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at the University of London. Dismissing these recent episodes as evidence of climate change, as ‘simplistic nonsense’ he pointed out that: "Britain’s weather is a constant battleground between competing air masses. This week the jet stream had dragged in deep Atlantic depressions, releasing huge downpours."
Greek heatwave.
In Greece meanwhile and numerous other Balkan countries it was the still ongoing heatwave that was the protagonist. For the second day running temperatures in the Greek capital Athens topped 45 degrees centigrade, and elsewhere temperatures of 47 were recorded. But as outlined in previous posts , the origin of this extreme heat was not a sudden cloud of carbon dioxide but blazing winds from the tropics that made their way across the deserts of North Africa.
South African Snow Falls.
South Africa is not generally associated with snow, but heavy snow falls were reported in all parts of the country and especially Johannesburg, where snow fell for the first time in many years. As delighted children played with snow balls others speculated over the freak conditions and what they could mean. Snow in South Africa. I mean this just had to be Climate Change? Right?
Wrong?
As the map below quite clearly illustrates the cause of this dramatic cold spell of weather in South Africa is simply the result of winds emanating from the vicinity of the Antarctic continent, where temperatures are known to be cooling down.
Once again there was really no big mystery when one could see things as they are.
