God's judgment

The claims that this summer's unseasonal weather are the result of global warming continue. Whether you believe that global warming is the result of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas emissions, like the majority, or of permissive attitudes to gay relationships, like the Bishop of Carlisle, you are supposed to believe that the recent floods are nature or God's judgment on our wicked ways.

Contrary to earlier claims, the Met. Office have started to whisper that this weather is not, in fact, the result of global warming, but is more likely caused by the impacts of a La Niña weather system. If so, it also gives the lie to the claims that this weather was -unpredictable-. It wasn't, it was just -unpredicted- by the "experts" to whom the government and the media listen.

Let's be clear. No one who knew anything about anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory should ever have been claiming that heavy summer rainfall was the result of AGW. Below is a graph produced by the Governments' UK Climate Impacts Programme (UKCIP) in cooperation with DEFRA, the Met. Office's Hadley Centre, and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, showing predicted changes in precipitation under two climate-change scenarios (Top row = Low emissions, Bottom row = High emissions). It is missing one vital piece of information, which is what each column portrays. The three columns for each block (Winter and Summer) are predictions for how the precipitation will have changed, respectively (left to right) by the 2020s, 2050s and 2080s. As you can see, even under low-emissions scenarios, by the 2020s, summer precipitation is expected to have fallen by upto 20% in most of England, including most of the flood-hit areas. Heavy rainfall that delivers in the space of a few days an amount of rain equal to the total rainfall in an average summer is -ABSOLUTELY INCONSISTENT- with this, however much pundits might like to claim airily that the models predict more extremes.

If you want to look at this in more detail, you can download UKCIP's scenarios work from their website. The stuff on precipitation is in Section 4.3 (p.28) of their Technical Report, and more maps like the above, for a wider range of scenarios and seasons, are shown from pp.33-36.

And one last thought. Is God wrong, or is it just his representatives that are idiots? Presumably the latter. But is it really possible to believe in a God who chooses such numpties to be his mouthpieces on Earth? Once people discover that our Bishops' generalizations were crass on so many levels, should this not undermine the little remaining credibility of our spiritual leaders and the faith that they espouse? Christopher Hitchens is right. It is kind of the Church of England to go out of its way to prove his point for him.