Rain, Hail and Floods

The difference between weather and climate

Before I say anything, I just want to underline the fact that I really want climate scientists, oceanographers, geologists and all the scientist around the world logging data about the climate, all of them. I really truly want them to be wrong.

I want the conspiracy nut bags who claim 50 years of scientific research from all over the world has just been made up to crush our freedom to be proven right.

Because, regardless of your beliefs or opinions, the evidence does appear to be building.

Now I accept it’s not a specialist skill, but I do think I understand the difference between weather and climate.

The other day we had hail at my house at an intensity I’ve previously only experienced in Australia. There was a thunderstorm rumbling around, very intense rain which suddenly turned into hail, the sound on our roof was frighteningly loud.

I remember hail storms from my childhood (which is 55-60 years ago for heaven’s sake) and the hail was small and stinging and made up of teeny tiny ice pips.

I have a very clear memory of cycling with my dad through a summer hail storm. I wanted to stop and hide under a tree because the hail stung my face. My dad was a big strong bloke, he wasn’t going to stop for a bit of hail, he flew bombers through flack over Bremerhaven for goodness sake. I carried on cycling.

The stuff that fell here last week wasn’t golf ball sized like I have seen in Australia, but it was bigger than a pea sized. Like a big pea, past its eat by date.

So that happened and it was unusual but I would still classify that as weather.

Maybe a bit more intense weather than these island see over an average 10 year period, but weather nonetheless.

But being my age has advantages. The floods we had here in 2007 were literally unprecedented. As in, nothing like that had been recorded in the past 400 years. Okay, I’m exaggerating the years, it’s only 365 years. The oldest continuous temperature record on the planet is held by the Central England Temperature Data Series, which began in 1659.

But that crazy heavy rain in 2007 wasn’t weather. I would argue that was very strongly related to climate change. In June 2007, we had over 250 mm of rain (nearly 10 inches) in a couple of hours one afternoon, and I repeat, in June, the summer.

This was a deluge I will never forget.

I was working in the beautiful city of Bath, 60 miles south of where I live, reading audiobooks for the BBC.

I was only ever allowed to record YAF (Young Adult Fiction) for the BBC. Silly voices, comedy accents that would be frowned upon today, but great fun. Proper actors read the classics and contemporary literature, and obviously Stephen Fry read the audiobook versions of Harry Potter in the same studio. Not at the same time as me. Goodness, Stephen would not like that.

So, there I was, in Bath, I’d finished reading ‘The War Diaries of Alistair Fury’

I walk out of the studio into bright sunshine and get into my Toyota Prius and start driving north on my usual route.

Then it starts to rain.

Proper, heavy summer rain like we have all experienced. Wipers on max, swish swish. The rain becomes more intense. Oh goodness me, the Prius wipers are not fast enough, it’s like there’s someone squirting a high pressure hose at the windshield. All the cars in front are moving slowly, there’s more and more water on the road.

I press on, hoping the Prius is okay wading through ever deeper puddles and gushing torrents crossing the road.

In a village somewhere between the M4 motorway and Stroud, all cars stop. Many houses by the road were clearly already flooded.

The cars in front of me start to turn around and head back the way they came. I followed suit. After lots of wiggles along country lanes that resembled small rivers, I got into Stroud. This is way off my normal route but so many roads were closed. As I climbed the hill out of Stroud, which I could see was really suffering from deluges of water pouring down streets, the traffic was stopped again.

A soaking wet police officer was directing traffic to one side of the road, I then saw a sight I still can’t really comprehend. We were on a road at the side of a steep valley, Stroud was built along these valleys in the early industrial era, using the power of water to run looms etcetera. A large tree, and I’m talking proper tree, not sapling or bush, a big mature tree stayed upright but gracefully slid down the hill in front of me. The police officer ran past me shouting for me to back up, whcih I did with enthusiasm. Then the whole road where he had been standing slid away as a muddy torrent tore the frail man made fabric of civilisation to shreds.

A journey that normally takes maybe an hour and a bit took 5 hours that day, I did eventually find a way there, but just be3fore I got home I was faced with another washed away road, this one barely a mile from our house.

Thankfully we live on a hill so weren’t affected but many thousands of people who live within 100 miles of us were. Crazy flooding, and here’s a clue.

When I was a kid, my Aunt and Uncle lived in an ancient, and I’m talking stone spiral staircase ancient, house right next to Tewkesbury Abbey in Gloucestershire, about 25 miles away from my house.

This beautiful church was built in 1092, near the river Severn, but on a higher bit of ground than the surrounding fields.

Tewkesbury floods all the time, why anyone built a town there a 1,000 years ago is a mystery, it’s always flooding.

But in 2007 those floods came right to the door of the Abbey and we have ancient records written on parchment and illustrated by monks.

The old house my Aunt and Uncle lived in was seriously submerged, my parents old house in Oxfordshire was under 3 feet of water. That had never happened in the 40 years they had lived there.

I say again, that’s climate, that’s really big shifts in long established weather patterns.

We’ve had plenty of floods this year in the UK, it has been spectacularly wet but nothing like 2007.

Sadly not the case for Austria, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Germany who have all been very heavily impacted this year by massive, record breaking rain and floods.

Romania 2 weeks ago

Germany last week

And now storm Helene ripping through Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia. Horrifying stories of terrible loss of life, sudden floods, deluges, landslides and staggering levels of destruction.

These aren’t stories on the news about floods, destruction and loss of life in Bangladesh or a country we can’t find on the map in southeast Asia.

This is in ‘Murica, the richest country on earth. Please let all the folks who are happily convinced that this is just weather, or a conspiracy to punish Trump supporters, or God’s will, or bloody anything but what is actually happening.

No matter how mad and delusional the people who deny the slap in the face evidence in front of us that burning billions of barrels of fossil fuel every day, year after year might just have a smidgen of an impact, I want their increasingly insane rejection to prove correct.