The misery continues. After the battering we endured from storms and gales over Christmas, the New Year promises merely more of the same for as far as the eye can see. Is extreme weather something we are now going to have to accept as a fact of life? And are we properly equipped to deal with it?
For many people Christmas 2013 will be one they won’t want to remember. The gale force winds, the heavy rain and the flooding made the holiday a nightmare rather than a time of good cheer. The transport system was hit at one of the busiest times of year, with trains cancelled and severe problems on the roads. Over 150,000 homes, mostly in the south of England, lost their power supplies as high winds brought down cables and many families had to wait for days before their lights and heating came back on. Flood damage to homes merely in the period just before Christmas is estimated to have cost up to £50 million.
Now things are set to get even worse. The combination of high spring tides, heavy rain and strong winds is causing havoc especially in the south west, and the Environment Agency has issued an unprecedented 21 severe flood warnings (meaning they constitute a threat to life) as well around 400 lesser warnings. People are being advised to pack a bag in case they need to abandon their homes in a hurry. The risks threaten us through the weekend and beyond.
How well have those in charge of keeping our services going responded to the extreme weather? Not very well, according to many. David Cameron got an earful from residents when we went down to Kent at the height of the disruption immediately after Christmas. His environment secretary, Owen Paterson, accused the power companies of not being prepared, despite the repeated warnings that severe weather was on its way. And Tim Yeo, the chairman of the House of Commons Energy Select Committee, is to haul the heads of the electricity networks before MPs to explain why they were so slow in getting power supplies restored. Some have admitted that it was because too many of their staff were on holiday themselves.
If the storms had been a sudden one-off, then perhaps our lack of preparedness would have been understandable. But they weren’t. We have been warned for several years now to expect extreme weather conditions to become much more frequent as a result of climate change. This has certainly been true for the UK. 2012 was Britain’s wettest year since records began while 2013 produced both the coldest March in fifty years and the longest heatwave since 2006. And we were not alone in suffering extreme weather conditions last year: countries around the world endured them too.
That is not to say that our current suffering is caused by climate change. No one can be sure of the cause of any single specific case of extreme weather. But we do know that climate change makes such events more likely. Professor Piers Forster, one of the authors of a major report on the issues published last September by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says: “We expect storms such as these to become more intense with climate change. (...)We can say with some confidence that the severity of storms will increase because of the warming oceans.” What happens is that rising sea temperatures create more evaporation which means there is extra moisture in the atmosphere and more energy in weather systems.
Britain faces especially unpredictable weather conditions because of our closeness to parts of the world that are changing rapidly, especially the Arctic. Another author of the IPCC report, Professor Corinne Le Quere, says: “The Arctic is melting so fast that it changes the weather patterns in ways that we haven’t experienced.”
It’s far too early to know what the cost of the current severe weather will be, but the Environment Agency estimated that the cost to the economy of flooding alone was £12bn in 2012.
So should we be spending more to try to offset the effects of the more extreme weather we must now expect? The government has already spent an additional £120m on new flood risk management schemes but at the same time, as part of broader cuts in public spending, it is tightening the budget of the Environment Agency, with 1,500 jobs due to go. Some of these may well be directly linked to the system of flood defences, although the agency claims it will protect frontline services. Similarly, Network Rail has applied to the rail regulator for more funding to make the rail network more resilient to the effects of extreme weather caused by climate change, effects such as landslips that undermine the tracks. Such funding, though, ultimately has to be paid for by passengers, and this week’s 3% hike in fares is already causing widespread anger among commuters.
The truth is that the costs involved in comprehensively trying to protect ourselves from the extreme weather we must now expect would be prodigious. To find the money other things would have to be sacrificed. Are we prepared to face up to that or should we just get used to the fact that we are going to have to endure suffering and misery coming at us out of the skies in increasingly sudden, intense and unpredictable ways?
What’s your view?
- Did you suffer hardship from the bad weather conditions over Christmas and, if so, how well did the authorities respond in getting your life back to normal?
- Do you accept the argument that the increased frequency of extreme weather conditions is due to climate change and, if so, do you think we should be doing more to prevent global warming getting worse?
- Do you think the government is spending enough to protect us from the effects of extreme weather? What specific priorities do you think the government should focus on?
- And would you be prepared to accept tax increases or cuts to other areas of public spending in order to spend more on protecting ourselves from the weather?
Let us know your views.
Image courtesy: Getty
