Thursday 18 August 2022

The English Rain Dance

In some cultures, if there's not enough rain, they do ritual dances and so on, I doubt very much that they work. Apart from attracting tourists.

The English appear to have stumbled across the secret - if a drought threatens, the water suppliers announce hose-pipe bans, and hey presto, within a couple of days we don't need them any more. We've seen this happen often enough in our lifetimes.

Clearly, it will take months for aquifers, rivers and reservoirs to get back to normal, and I do not know whether or when the farmers will have had enough rain to harvest their crops, bearing in mind they have to dry out a bit first, but I'm glad to see the back of the heatwaves.

8 comments:

Lola said...

In 1976 we had the same sort of 'heat wave' Then we were not in thrall to the Alarmists (and some of us are not today). Inn 1976 we just thought we were being extra lucky and enjoying a lot of nice, hot sunny days.

I still do

Bayard said...

L, the "hosepipe ban" ritual didn't work in 1976 and the government had to proceed to the next stage, appointing a Minister for Drought. It was good that so terrible a solution was not needed this year.

Poor Alarmists, there has been no appreciable warming since the millennium. Guess where the vast majority of the "hockey stick" graphs stop. Global temperatures for the last ten years appear to be a closely guarded secret.

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, I was abroad with relatives most of that summer. It starting raining a day after I got back to England.

B, well remembered! Back in the day we had to take the Rain Dance to the next level and make a sacrifice of some minister who was in the job for about a day and half before becoming superfluous.

Again, whether temps are going up or down is not central to the fact that the "33 degree GHE" is completely made up pseudo-science.

Bayard said...

"Again, whether temps are going up or down is not central to the fact that the "33 degree GHE" is completely made up pseudo-science."

Well not really, the GHE exists, but not in the form that the alarmists claim. If you think of clouds as the roof of the "greenhouse" then it is easy to calculate how much warmer they keep the hard surface underneath them. Even real greenhouses don't exhibit the GHE of the alarmists, which is why you can make them out of polythene.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, true, the entire difference on earth or Venus is explained by cloud cover and altitude, similarly, the lack thereof on Mars by lack of clouds.

Bayard said...

I was arguing with a True Believer on another blog and they maintained that there was a 6C GHE on Mars. I couldn't be arsed to check it up, because you can't even trust NASA these days.

Mark Wadsworth said...

B, the widely touted figure is 5 deg GHE on Mars.

This is a total handwave estimate, the normal Effective Temp calculation is fine for planets with thicker atmospheres where warmth is distributed fairly evenly over the whole planet (Earth, Venus). It is not so good for Mars or Moon with thin or no atmosphere where temps vary wildly between day and night, or between equator and poles. There is no real 'average temperature' to use as a reference point.

Even if 5 deg is correct (it might well be, nobody knows), Mars has six times as much CO2 as Earth does H2O vapour and CO2 put together. So that doth not in any way reconcile with alleged 33 deg on Earth.

Bayard said...

"Even if 5 deg is correct (it might well be, nobody knows), Mars has six times as much CO2 as Earth does H2O vapour and CO2 put together. So that doth not in any way reconcile with alleged 33 deg on Earth."

As I pointed out. Mars has only 1% of the atmosphere of Earth, but that 1% is 95% CO2, compared to Earth that has 100% of the atmosphere, of which 0.04% is CO2, i.e. Mars has 24 times more CO2 in its atmosphere than Earth.

Water off a duck's back, I am afraid.