The Problem With ‘Extreme Weather’
Each year, the 23-degree tilt of the planet we live on causes seasons to change as it orbits the Sun. We also know that on top of this regime, heat is moderated, and sometimes intensified by particular weather systems, to create ‘heatwaves’.
For most of history, people had no explanation for either seasonal change or differences between a season from one year to the next, or even one week to the next. Now we do have explanations for such things, yet some people are still surprised to discover each year that we in Britain, at roughly 53 degrees latitude, occasionally experience weather that some find uncomfortable.
Even more remarkably, and despite these explanations, some people think that warmer temperatures are a harbinger of doom. They are ‘extreme weather events’, such voices claim, and they are ‘getting more frequent and intense’, and soon they will rip society from its foundations – just you watch. But what is ‘extreme weather’, and is it really capable of destroying civilisation?
The New Scientist proclaimed that “Europe’s heatwave is the hottest and most humid ever” and “temperatures in western and central Europe would have been virtually impossible 50 years ago”. The claim, of course, originated in the widely-debunked climate propaganda outfit, World Weather Attribution (WWA), which responds to weather events by being the first scientists to ‘estimate’ the contribution of anthropogenic global warming to such events. The problem is that “attribution” is not science, new or otherwise. It’s just games with computer simulations that codify their authors’ ideological presuppositions. Its purpose is to keep the climate narrative alive, with heatwaves supplying the never-ending plot with episodes, like some weird soap opera.
In contrast to such green hyperbole, meanwhile, meteorologists in both social and news media explained that the heatwave over Europe was caused by jet streams forming an ‘omega pattern’ (after the Greek letter), which blocked wind bringing hot air from the south, thereby creating a ‘heat dome’. But that explanation wasn’t enough for some, who needed more drama.
Following the outbreak of a wildfire in Derbyshire, arch-Blobber Ben Judah took to X to ask: “Where is the Labour politician seizing this to explain this is climate change and this is why we are doing Net Zero?”
Perhaps some Labour politicians have now realised that such real-time ‘attribution’ claims are not science, and that anyone with a memory of, say, the 10-week heatwave of 1976, will see through such bullshit. Thus, such manifestly premature and unscientific claims are very likely to backfire.
As Paul Homewood shows on these pages, claims about the ‘hottest ever’ are very easily challenged, and thus raise more questions about those that raise them than about what’s happening to the weather. But not all Labour politicians are alive to reality. One Labour MP, Chris Hinchliff in the House of Commons, stated that:
If we fail to prevent climate change getting worse, we face an existential threat to the British way of life. As our weather becomes more extreme, we face the threat of repeated crop failures and the heat-related deaths of thousands of livestock. And with our country built for a climate that no longer exists, the impacts of storms and heatwaves on our roads, hospitals, schools and pylons will finish off the efforts of the previous Tory administration to wreck most of our national infrastructure.
We could list many ways in which the “British way of life” has changed. But the notion that it is weather that has caused the transformation of high streets, political rights and freedoms, communities, industries, business, shops, customs and traditions, modes of speech, and so on, seems unlikely to be top of many lists, in my view.
At the least, it is not so much weather which is forcing us to change our lifestyles as it is policymakers demanding changes in our diets to save us from bad weather. The self-defeating claim is that we must fundamentally change our way of life to stop climate change changing the British way of life. The Government is advising farmers to stop growing beef and start growing lentils, according to the Telegraph. Perhaps the Labour MP confuses effect for cause.
But suppose it is true that British summers are becoming warmer. So what? Is this really going to destroy civilisation beyond what the obviously bonkers plans of ideologues will achieve? How? The claim that heatwaves represent a growing danger to anything other than comfort lacks a corresponding basis in fact. Heatwaves in the era before refrigeration, when people were much poorer, were indeed fatal. But a century on, now that we have piped water, abundant food, and fridges in every home, the main causes of heat-related illness and mortality have been eliminated.
This speaks also to the absence of evidence underpinning Hinchliff’s daft claim. Britain, its infrastructure, and its homes were not built around a climate. It’s true that the design of British buildings reflects a damper, cooler environment, compared to central European architecture, for instance.
But it is the heating source that has changed – and which is being restricted by policy – much more than the weather. British homes were designed to be heated by fire, and to draw air into and around the fireplace. But more importantly than that, the greater issue for the inhabitants of British dwellings a century ago was build quality and maintenance.
In the 1930s, massive programmes of slum-clearances moved nearly 4% of the population out of poor accommodation. WWII stalled the progress, yet the problem of slums – old and new – persisted well until the 1980s. There was no golden era in which Britain’s climate, its houses and their occupants’ bodies existed in thermodynamic harmony.
The point here being that the categories that dominate alarmists’ statements are simply false. ‘Extreme weather’ and ‘resilience’ in the form of homes and infrastructure are taken for granted as objectively-grounded concepts. But they manifestly are not.
What is forgotten amid all the hype is that humans are a tropical species. The safest range of temperatures for a human is between 25 and 35 degrees centigrade. These are temperatures that in Britain count as ‘extreme weather’ and produce headlines about ‘heatwaves’.
But below an average of 27 degrees ambient temperature, humans need heating, clothing and shelter. A naked human’s prolonged exposure to temperature below 15 degrees quickly becomes fatal. At five degrees, a human will be dead within three hours.
So what we call ‘extreme weather’ in Britain is in fact the opposite; the dangerous extreme occurs practically every day other than in the months that occasionally produce heatwaves. For nine months of the year, from September through to May, we have extreme, deadly weather conditions every single day. Yet we survive without Met Office alerts.
That is why we see vastly more deaths from exposure to environmental cold than to heat. And that’s one reason why the notion of Britain’s homes and infrastructure having been built around some kind of optimum which ‘no longer exists’ is completely bogus. It is wrong to look at the weather – it was the shortcomings of homes that used to be fatal. And that would include the price of energy and the way we treat older people.
In the 1950s, prolonged exposure to cold – rather than clinical hypothermia as such – contributed to rates of excess winter mortality in excess of 100,000 in England and Wales. Over the decades – some might say the era of global warming – this hit a low in 2014 at just 20,000. But aren’t there excess summer deaths also?
That is the claim that comes up each summer – see this piece about last year’s heatwave hysteria, for example. Yes, there are sometimes, but not always, increases of mortality during heatwaves. Those deaths are typically extremely frail people dying a few days earlier than they otherwise would. These are people who struggle to sustain adequate levels of hydration, to move or adjust their circumstances for their own comfort, whose bodies’ capacities to self-regulate are deteriorating and who may have experienced a loss of sleep quality due to discomfort.
Paul Homewood, again, has noted however, that official sources of data have attempted to obfuscate and minimise excess winter deaths, while overstating excess heatwave deaths, which barely register – clearly in order to sustain a political narrative, and to quash the fact that the summer months remain far less fatal than winter, spring and autumn.
This apparently raises the question of air conditioning, and why we’ve not followed America’s embrace of the technology. Some claim that because Britain is now ‘hotter’, the case for it is made. I think this is false, not because I am against air conditioning, but because frequency, trends and averages are not instructive.
Older people and people who are ill deserve air conditioning, whether or not they are at death’s door, and no matter whether there are more or fewer heatwaves. Trends, averages and probabilistic forecasting are no guide to action, because any year since 1976 could have seen such a heatwave. And so 1976 (at the latest) establishes the minimum specification that any decision needs to understand. There may well be multiple more heatwave days in the 2020s than in previous decades, but it is the outlier 1976 that should inform our preparations.
Forecasts and predictions will mislead us. This is true of all policy relating to weather. Prognostications are what emerge from crystal balls at fairgrounds; preparing for the future requires understanding what is possible.
A summer with a 10-week long heatwave, a summer with no rain, a summer in which it rains every day, and so on. Policies and contingencies designed around trends and averages will miss both winters like 1963, and summers like 1976, which precede the putative era of global warming, but which can still occur, despite any changes in probability.
And this returns to the question of what ‘extreme weather’ really is. What we call a ‘heatwave’ is a mild spring morning for the majority of humanity. The idea that either our existences or our ‘way of life’ is vulnerable to an occasional degree or so of warmer weather is absurd. We survived both the winter of 1963 and the summer of 1976 without civilisation collapsing. And though those years’ seasons brought problems, they are survivable and manageable, either by technical or adaptive means.
The possibility of drought requires us to build more water storage and desalination capacity. The possibility of rain requires us to build more containment and management infrastructure. The possibility of cold requires us to make energy for heating available 24/7/365. And so on. These are merely engineering parameters, which ought already to be accommodated for.
Neither ‘climate change’ nor ‘extreme weather’ alters any of these parameters. The green policy agenda requires us to believe that being less able to respond to weather makes us less vulnerable to its putative extremes. That’s reckless and insane, and that really will have predictable outcomes.
source dailysceptic.org