European Floods and Fake Science
I wrote a post a couple of weeks ago targeting the BBC for biased reporting on energy and climate issues. It was never published because in writing it I realised that the the problem did not necessarily lie with the BBC but with the climate science fraternity. Another alarmist article appeared in Blowout last week covered by the BBC with the headline “Climate change has shifted the timing of European floods” accompanied by a picture of an Alpine village being swept away. The article in question (Blöschl et al [1] published in Science) does not contain any actual data on European floods. The ten year average of peak annual river flow is used instead which is a meaningless proxy for actual flooding. The authors fail to make an empirical connection between trends in peak annual flow and trends in actual flooding which is a basic scientific error.
The FT also picked up this story citing implications for hydroelectric power and insurers which may well be used as an excuse to raise premiums, yet again. The scientific article in question was published in Science and I decided to have a closer look.
The BBC headline:
In different parts of Europe, rivers are flooding earlier or later because of rising temperatures, say scientists.
And Blöschl et al say in the abstract:
Warmer temperatures have led to earlier spring snowmelt floods throughout northeastern Europe; delayed winter storms associated with polar warming have led to later winter floods around the North Sea and some sectors of the Mediterranean coast
Polar Warming
Let us begin by taking a look at “polar warming” at the N Pole. We don’t have climate records for the N Pole and so I will use instead 32 high latitude climate stations from either side of the Arctic Circle in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia (Figures 1 and 2), as reported in Record Arctic Warmth – in 1937.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
