Taken from today’s Daily Telegraph letters to the editor:
Sir – One of the least helpful aspects of the response to our current heavy rainfall and flooding is the unscrupulous attempt by certain politicians and activists to force these phenomena into a simplistic global-warming template. This could hardly be further from the truth.Firstly, global warming models predict wetter winters and hotter, drier summers.
Secondly, since the 1920s, we have known that this month’s particular weather pattern is associated with special conditions in the Pacific, called La Niña, in which ocean waters are colder than normal.
Through complex mechanisms, as yet little understood, this produces a flex in our northern hemisphere jet stream – a fast high-level wind – which drags deep depressions across the British Isles.
Thirdly, ill-judged land management over the last 60 years – since the serious flooding of the late-1940s – has guaranteed an increase in damaging floods, climate change or no climate change.
We have consistently reduced the ability of both urban and rural landscapes to act as a “sponge”, while building poorly constructed housing on flood plains. By glib recourse to “global warming” explanations, we let politicians and planners off the hook while forgetting that Britain has a fundamentally wet climate.
Philip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography, University of London, Gravesend, Kent
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Posted by ybfblogger 
Today is the 38th anniversary of the guilty plea of leaving the scene of a crime by Senator Ted Kennedy. He was also sentenced to two month in prison, alas suspended. The verdict followed the death of Mary Jo Kopechne, a passenger in Senator Kennedy’s car, after Kennedy plummeted over a bridge at Chappaquiddick into a creek. 
