By Paul Homewood
It is behind the FT paywall, but they have just reported this claim by Ed Hawkins:
England has experienced its wettest 18 months since records began in 1836, leaving farmers struggling to plant crops in waterlogged fields and transport networks disrupted by flooding. Climate change has exacerbated weather events around the world, creating warmer and wetter conditions in some parts, and drier and hotter conditions in others, after last year was the hottest on record globally and second warmest for the UK. While the UK had always had “very variable amounts of rain”, said Ed Hawkins, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, there had been a “large increase in the amount of rain that falls on the island, particularly in the wintertime, but also in the autumn and spring”. “This is a consequence of our warming world,” Hawkins said. “As the world continues to warm in the future we would expect to see more rain falling on these islands.”
You might find it strange that Hawkins has cherry picked an 18th month period, ending February! It is called data mining – repeated analysis of data until you get the answer you want. In this case, a warmer world means more moisture means more rain.
In theory this is true, but the extra amounts of rain we are talking about are tiny – about 5% in terms of the warming trend in the last 100 years, barely noticeable in the overall view of things.
But let’s see whether Hawkins’ 18 month claim stands up under scrutiny.
We know that 2023 was the 6th wettest on record in England, far from the record set in 1872. And there does not appear to be any obvious evidence of long term trends, merely periods of wetter and drier than average scattered throughout the record.
This pattern becomes much clearer when we look at the two-year totals. Far from the wettest proclaimed by Hawkins, 2022/23 were only the 26th wettest. And we can see clearly wetter interludes in the 1980s/80s, 1910s/20s, and early 2000s.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Rainfall/date/England.txt
We also know that the winter just finished was only 6th wettest in England, and that no month in the last two years has been anywhere a record rainfall month.
For a theory to be validated, it needs to pass all tests, not just a cherry picked one. And the data clearly does not support the theory. On the contrary, what the data shows is the wide range of natural variability.
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March 17, 2024 at 09:57AM
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