By Paul Homewood
The media really has lost its collective mind over so-called “Storm Bert”.
Even the normally level-headed Eamonn Holmes on GB News:
He made a comment about COP29, noting that people still don’t seem to have made the link between climate change and extreme weather.
Then the naive reporter in Pontypridd described the floods as “unprecedented”, (where on Earth do they get these useless reporters from?). He then went on to mention that the waters were 5mm deep when the river broke its banks – yes, you heard that right, 5mm, a whole 2 inches! And, by the time he got there, he said, the emergency shelters set up had already been closed because they were not needed.
We then had a soppy weathergirl on, explaining how these storms are getting wetter because of global warming.
Probably the silliest comment of all was that storms like Bert and the 1987 storm were becoming more frequent! Are they seriously conflating Bert, which had winds of about 40 mph at most away from exposed coasts, with the Great Storm of 1987?
Meanwhile, the BBC before and after photos showed how a riverside park in Cardiff was “engulfed in water”. A closer look at those goal posts, however, confirmed that the aforesaid floods were no more than an ankle deep puddle.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/ckg7w7xzrj3t?page=3
Unsurprisingly the facts tell a completely different story – that Bert was no more than the sort of weather we get every year, something most of the commenters seem to have realised, even if the presenters did not.
According to the BBC, the worst affected area was S Wales and SW England, with rainfall totals of around 160 to 170mm of rain over the two days of the storm. This led to the usual “month’s worth of rain” nonsense.
However these amounts were all in upland areas in S Wales and Dartmoor, where rainfall is typically much heavier. White Barrow, for instance, is at an altitude of 486m.
But taking the region of SW England & S Wales as a whole, rainfall on Saturday totalled 29.66mm, with another 17.42mm the next day.
The KNMI chart below only goes to March 2022, but it is crystal clear that a daily total of 29mm is not in any way exceptional. In all, there have been 40 days with 29mm or more since 1931. The wettest day was in 1969, when 57.9mm fell, and the graph clearly gives the lie to the Met Office’s assertion that storms are carrying more rainfall now.
Most storms, of course, don’t drop all their rain neatly in a single calendar day. The 2-day total from Bert was 47mm, an amount often exceeded in the past.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/data/daily/HadSWEP_daily_totals.txt
Far from the rainfall being extraordinary, the flooding was undoubtedly exacerbated by the melting of the heavy snow which fell a few days earlier. Given that snow is supposedly a thing of the past, these sort of floods should be less of a problem in future. I wonder why the Met Office forgot to mention that?
There is an interesting comparison with November 1931, when 50.5mm fell on the 3rd in the region. This is the monthly report:
.
Totals of 244mm in the Brecons, nearly all within 36 hours, were considerable higher than the 174mm that fell last weekend.
The flooding was serious, with Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite joining together.
As well as the South West, the North West was also severely hit, suggesting a much bigger storm footprint.
Silly Names
More than once, I came across comments in the media about Storm Dennis, which hit the same area of Wales in 2020. The message was clear – these storms must be getting more frequent.
I think this sums up exactly why the Met Office started naming storms. They wanted storms to remain in the public memory, in order to perpetuate the myth.
And what better way than to give every one a name.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Paul Homewood
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