By Paul Homewood
It’s been protecting London from costly and potentially deadly flooding since 1984.
But as the Thames Barrier celebrates its 40th anniversary, scientists have warned that the £535 million structure – opened by Queen Elizabeth II on May 8, 1984 – might not provide an adequate flood defence until 2070 as planned.
Repeated closures of its 10 steel-clad gates due to wild weather from climate change will add wear and tear, prompting the need for a replacement much sooner than previously thought.
Richard Tol, a professor of economics at the University of Sussex, said using the Thames Barrier until 2070 could be ‘risky’.
‘It will need to be replaced at one point – a major infrastructure project,’ he told MailOnline.
When it opened back in 1984, the Thames Barrier was built to last until 2030.
But in 2009, the Environment Agency, which operates the Thames Barrier, decided that the structure could carry on protecting London until 2070.
However, the gates are only designed to close a maximum of 50 times per year, and experts say the number of annual closures will exceed this figure in the near future as weather becomes wilder.
According to Hannah Cloke, professor of hydrology at the University of Reading, this means a replacement barrier will need to be sorted out ‘quite soon’.
‘We’re walking into a future where we know we’ve got more rainfall coming,’ she told the Financial Times.
‘It’s definitely not looking the same as it was when the Thames Barrier was designed and built.
‘If we do need to close the Thames Barrier more than we thought we did, then it’s going to have a shorter lifespan.’
The fact that EA extended its life from 2030 to 2070 rather destroys Hannah Cloke’s arguments, even if 2070 may now be overoptimistic now.
It is not clear whether Richard Tol believes the wild weather nonsense too, but I would be disappointed if he does, because he usually separates the facts from the hype.
So let’s now deal with Hannah Cloke’s wild weather claims.
Fortunately we have rainfall data from the Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford back to 1853, which tells us exactly what has been going on in the Thames Valley.
Annual rainfall has not become more extreme, and neither has monthly rainfall:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/stationdata/oxforddata.txt
And daily rainfall has been much more extreme in the past:
https://climexp.knmi.nl/gdcnprcp.cgi?id=someone@somewhere&WMO=UK000056225&STATION=OXFORD&extraargs=
The article makes a big play about the winter of 2013/14:
But the history of the Thames Valley is littered with such events:
https://www.ecad.eu/utils/showindices.php?3v3vbv04mjqj76v3ctg57smrmt
As for sea level rise, Dr Jonathan Paul, who also believes the wild weather nonsense, still assumes that seas will rise by a meter by 2100:
The data says otherwise:
https://www.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=170-081
But that does not stop the Mail quoting the loony from the Green Party:
The barrier will of course need to be replaced sooner or later. and given the inability of our bureaucracy to get any major infrastructure built on time and in budget, the sooner we start the better.
But the Mail is doing its readers a gross disservice by blaming it all on climate change.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Paul Homewood
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.