I am sitting in my house,today, with all the furniture on the ground floor still up on breeze blocks following a flash flood a week ago. The water still remains in my garden and all the surrounding fields and the shape of the river still can not be seen. My rugs are draped over garden furniture but stand no chance of drying as every day since the flood it has rained heavily for at least part of the day.
So when not reading or posting on euroga I am thinking about how I can stop it happening again. Most of the plans I have can not be started until the water descends. During the flood one feels and is so helpless and you realise you can’t fight nature, you have to find a way of working with it.
You will note I write " how I can stop it happening again"
There is no guarantee that net zero whatever that IMO impossible dream will really work. We won’t know until several years after it has been achieved around the world and no one knows when that will be as the goalposts are constantly changing because politicians fear that the people will fall out of love with them, because of the change of life they will need to undertake.
The bigger problem for those in my situation or worse still having their homes burnt down by wildfires etc is that at the International or National level, there is no plan “B”.
All of us who have suffered from natural phenomena know it will happen again unless we do something. When it will happen again we don’t know but there will probably be less time between this one and the next than between this one and the time before. We have learnt this over the years.
For people like myself climate change is real but endless International meetings about net zero or computer modelling by people who have perhaps never suffered a catastrophic natural event, are just a waste of time and money.
gallois wrote:
For people like myself climate change is real but endless International meetings about net zero or computer modelling by people who have perhaps never suffered a catastrophic natural event, are just a waste of time and money.
I am really sorry about your situation at home. Hopefully water level will go down soon.
I agree that net zero as a target is extremely damaging, lots of reasons above in this thread.
gallois wrote:
For people like myself climate change is real but endless International meetings about net zero or computer modelling by people who have perhaps never suffered a catastrophic natural event, are just a waste of time and money.
Climate change IS real, nobody but some knuckle dragging die hards dispute that.
But so much the more, we need reliable and serious predictions, not populistic horror visions very often created by people outside the actual scientific communities but also, sadly, by scientists who have decided to sell their services to the highest bidder.
If this is the last few days you had floods, that situation was pretty interesting meteorologically speaking. France was basically under some fronts which could not move on due to two low pressure areas creating what is called a “Gegenstromlage” in German. When this happens, you get two low pressure areas blocking off the progress of fronts while taking air around the Alps from the East. The consequence is usually very heavy snow/rain in Switzerland and a blockage of fronts west and north of it. The actual situation is not exactly rare, nor is it new. What was different in this one was that there was a basically stationary front which kept over France for a considerable time, creating quite massive rain. This weathersituation has done that before, i.e. Germany has had heavy flooding from similar situations several times during my tenure here, while the most of precipitation will fall on the southern rim of the Alps but occasionally it can cause blocked fronts over northern central Europe.
Obviously the question will be, was this particular situation the result of climate change? The answer to that is not easy though it is very probably in the affirmative. Climate has changed and will change for ever, so “new to us” phenomenon (even though this is not exactly one) will present themselves in due course. It is quite a welcome situation for climate activists however, who will loose no time telling us that it’s nature punishing evil deeds, not unlike in the dark ages where “gods” were blamed for natural disasters and people were told it was their fault to have displeased them. Where I am sitting, I will be very curious to read about the current weather situation and many more and learn what the particularity was, if any. Here, snow in March most of the time is created by such situations and i have vivid memory of heavy snow fall in this time of the year over the last 40 odd years. So the difference may well be that due to a slightly higher temperature, today these things fall as rain whereas 10-20 years ago they would have been snow.
From the short range model side of things, the last several days are a “good” example how models are supposed to work. The situation was well predicted, known well in advance so proper warnings were created in a timely manner. From what I’ve seen today, most figures achieved last night are pretty much right in the middle of the ensemble ballpark we discussed yesterday and the previous days. Which is to be expected. The warnings which went out did orient themselves on higher potentials than those actually realized, which means to me that they were on the cautious side but fully appropriate. Having seen that the models knew how to handle this situation and delivered faily good results, shows however that this is not a new situation but one the models have already been able to simulate satisfactorily before.
Of course we can go bouncing off walls and blowing up Tesla plants as a reaction, my own would be to learn what we can and to counteract as appropriate. Those things however require rational thinking and learning, not panic. The latter only helps extremists and politicians while not achieving much or even creating counter movements. And that is the last thing we need.
Myself, I am not a modellist and I know just about enough about those we have to use them professionally. But I know people who program those things and they are some of the absolute top brains in the met society. In order to improve their models, they discuss and question them all the time, which is why they DO get improvements. The discussion about it keeps them alive.
Where I live, every year I expect the river, which is often bone dry in summer, to rise, to enter the garden and often the garage, but not the house. Thanks to flood defences I have put in place it is not the river that floods the garden but what we call a source, a sort of underground lake, which following days of heavy rain, fills and rises through the limestone layer which covers most of this area.
The last time we had water in the house was 21 years ago during what was known as a tempest. Last week the water rose at 32 cm an hour whereas normally it rises at between 4cm and 10cm per hour. I have a culvert running past the house which flows under the road and into a field on the opposite side of the road. When the water rises it usually reaches a height where that field becomes a flood plane.
This time round the rise was so fast its sheer force would not allow it to flow under the road, instead it flowed back passing over the flood defences and eventually flooding the house. The strange thing about this type of flood is that water descends and goes back into the river very quickly whereas normally it takes a few days to descend. This case followed one night of rain which one would have thought was no danger whereas the normal rise is over a period of rain over several days.
Whilst normally a flood is followed by a beautiful sunny day. After the tempest Dec 27th one could watch the rugs dry outside by the steam rising from them and they dry in the day. This time sadly, has been followed by rain every day interspersed with a little sun and the fields have filled with water again with the river still high.
I am explaining all this to try to show how different things can get and how nature changes. I have tried to explain the differences to others including environmental experts but you realise when you talk to them that they haven’t a clue what it is really like. And worse they look at me as if I don’t know what I’m talking about, because they have a fixed idea of what a flood is and what causes it. But it is not always the same.
Stopping natural phenomena is not possible, and when meteorologists have used their models to tell me that it’s probably going to rain for the next three days does nothing for the stress levels🙂
If these computer modellers took more time to listen to people who suffer from natures nasty side and feed into their computers actual data they might well find a way to help people work with nature and save people and insurers loads of money and heartache.
I realise that better weather prediction is a good thing but sticking stuff into a computer and saying we should all change our way of life to get to this nirvana called net zero is a fool’s game. Work with nature and do stuff that we can see works. Otherwise it’s like Life Assurance you pay in for 70years only for your family to find that the company you have been paying into is bankrupt when they make a claim.
gallois wrote:
If these computer modellers took more time to listen to people who suffer from natures nasty side and feed into their computers actual data they might well find a way to help people work with nature and save people and insurers loads of money and heartache.
I got an additional spanner to throw into those works.
Models take observations as part of their inputs. Manual observations such as Synops, which define not only how much cloud but also the type and pretty detailed descriptions of what is going on. Now guess what: Synops are on the way out because weather services want to save money and automatize them. What the sensors see though is a dog’s breakfast or worse, it can be outright wrong. Result: Gabage in. We know the rest.
Oh, btw, Auto Metars are the same. While wind, qnh, temp/due point e.t.c. are very reliable, clouds, vis, are not. Not by a long run.
gallois wrote:
I realise that better weather prediction is a good thing but sticking stuff into a computer and saying we should all change our way of life to get to this nirvana called net zero is a fool’s game. Work with nature and do stuff that we can see works. Otherwise it’s like Life Assurance you pay in for 70years only for your family to find that the company you have been paying into is bankrupt when they make a claim.
Very true. That statement should be framed.
I am all for better short range models as they really do help save lifes and avoid damages as we can use them to warn people what’s coming. More often than not, those warnings may be overcautios, but better safe than sorry. And yea, we have come a VERY long way since 20 years ago. But they are still that. Models. The only game changer I know in recent years really were the computing power to do ensemble forecasts.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
From the short range model side of things, the last several days are a “good” example how models are supposed to work.
Yes, the real issue of debate is with regards to climate models as well as their anthropogenetic component (human-impact?), not weather models which are indeed wonderfully accurate up to one week ahead.
Mooney_Driver wrote:
Climate change IS real
The climate has always changed. 10000 years ago the land for my house was under 2-3 km of ice 
People lack perspective. Human kind has already completely changed the face of the earth. We have killed off and still are killing other species of animals better than any previous natural extinction event. We are still destroying whole ecosystems and all the fauna in them like nothing else in the history of mother earth. We are more like a disease, a rat infection of biblical proportions , multiplying and eating every other larger organism out of their habitats until they are no more. Except from the few other organisms we like to eat ourselves (cows and cabbage and stuff ) Already by 2020 the anthropogenic mass was larger than all other biologic mass combined, and it doubles every 20 years.
All that means nothing. What means anything is a few intangible degrees of “global warming”. Global warming, a concept not a single person on the globe has the brain power to fully understand ever. It’s not even a science. It’s filled with charlatans and others profiting off doomsday prophecies. We don’t even know if “global warming” is good or bad for anyone.
But, let’s say we fix global warming, then what? What’s the end goal? To continue multiplying until we eventually starve to death? This will eventually happen in not so distant future. But it will not happen until we have killed all other life. Everything except cockroaches and flies.
I don’t think anyone disputes that the climate is changing long-term. What a lot of people don’t accept is that the warming we see is man-made.
But if you don’t adopt the “man-made” line, you don’t get research money i.e. no bread on the table at home. Same with most externally funded research really.
LeSving wrote:
The climate has always changed.
It saves typing to omit the “antropogenic” bit, but that’s implied.
