Climate Science breakthrough - water flows uphill!

From Sky News:

Just Stop Oil vow to keep causing disruption - and have this message for people who are affected...

Morgan Trowland, a 39-year-old civil engineer, said the demonstration was helping to "reach the social tipping point we so urgently need" on climate change.

And when asked about those who had been disrupted, he added they should "have a thought and empathy" for the 33 million people displaced by floodwater in Pakistan caused by melting ice caps this year.

Wow. I assumed that the floods were due to monsoon rain being a bit heavier this year because of La Niña. This falls as relief rain in the Himalayas, cascades down the Indus and Ganges/Bramaputra basins and then swells these rivers and inundates low lying areas in Pakistan and north east India/Bangaldesh respectively.

(Was the amount of water involved unusual? Nope. Were more people affected than previously? Quite possibly yes, because of higher populations and piss poor urban/land use planning. Most of these so-called natural disasters are usually down to poor planning/land use. As a 'civil engineer' he ought to know this stuff.)

But nope, apparently it was a couple of extra millimetres of sea level from melted icecaps that flowed inland and slightly uphill wot dunnit!

"New flood insurance scheme to increase household bills"

From the BBC:

Homeowners living in high flood-risk areas of the UK should now be able to save hundreds of pounds on their insurance premiums.

A new scheme called Flood Re has been designed to cut bills for those whose homes are in danger of flooding. Up to now, thousands of householders have been paying large additional premiums to make sure their homes and possessions are protected. About 350,000 homes could benefit - although thousands will be excluded.

The cost will ultimately fall on ordinary policy-holders, who will pay an extra £10.50 on their premiums on average.

Daily Mail on super tip top form.

Via Henry Noneofyourbiz on FB from a Daily Mail article about floods in parts of London:

Yesterday, the water was seen overflowing in Charing Cross where the average property costs £4.7million, Kew where homes cost about £1m, in Putney where the average home is worth £693,000 and in Greenwich where the average three bedroom house costs around £1.6m.

I live half way up a very steep hill on which the average home "is worth" £600,000, so I should be OK…

Tories apply common sense to a funding issue...

… but only for the little people in 'the regions':

HOMEOWNERS* living in flood-hit areas could be forced to pay higher council tax adding insult to injury to thousands of homes devastated this winter by rising waters…

Environment Secretary Liz Truss said Somerset, where local authorities have been able to increase taxes 1.25 per cent to bolster defences, is a "very good" model" in evidence to MPs.

In total, six authorities are allowed to bump up council tax by 1.25 per cent above the cap of two per cent in 2016-17. But now it looks as though the scheme could be rolled out further.

When asked by MPs, Ms Truss said: "I think if you look at the structure for the Somerset Rivers Authority that now has the shadow precept so they are raising that funding locally and I think there's also a role for that as well. I think the Somerset Rivers Authority is a very good model."

… But Labour peer Lord Clark of Windermere said: "Flood defences are primarily a national responsibility and the Government shouldn't just pass the buck on to local authorities and in turn to local taxpayers."

Obviously, if it were a question of flood defences for London and the Home Counties, the Tories would probably see it as a "national responsibility", but there you go.

* Tenants pay Council Tax too, you know?

Great diagonal comparison.

Via HPC Surivors, from MSN:

In April, the UK government will enforce a new fee on all home insurance customers that will require them to subsidise the insurance bills of people who continue to live in flood-risk areas.

Perhaps the most frustrating part of the new levy — which functions like a tax on home insurance sales — is that poorer people, or those who choose to live in more modest houses on drier land, will subsidise the insurance for the largest mansions in the riskiest areas near lakes and rivers.

That's typical Homey fare. On the one hand, they want subsidies for homes in flood-risk areas, but on the other hand, they want "somebody else" to pay for it. And they back up their arguments with a diagonal comparison.

You are only supposed to change one variable! For example, a fair or relevant comparison would be: "those who choose to live in modest houses on drier land will subsidise the insurance for the modest homes in the riskiest areas near lakes and rivers"

But MSN then redeems itself:

On its face [sic], this sounds completely bonkers. People should be incentivised to move out of flood zones, not given insurance protection to stay there.

Agreed.

Short List

Rivers called "Don".

Any advance on two: one in southern Russia and one in Aberdeenshire?

Via the comments: there's another one in South Yorkshire and another one in Ontario.

Fun Online Polls: Floods & Dry January

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

What is the better way of minimising flood damage?

Scrap subsidies for upland deforestation and allow rivers to meander - 58%
Keep the subsidies, straighten rivers and keep dredging them - 42%

The correct answer is obviously 'both' i.e. upstream we should stop subsidising deforestation and allow rivers to meander (and reintroduce beavers); and downstream we should do more dredging, remembering always that dredging and straightening just shift the problem elsewhere (see Jubilee River and Wraysbury). In other words, if you increase the flow capacity of a river at any point (by dredging, widening or straightening), then you have to make sure that the flow capacity everywhere further downstream is at least as great.

But faced with the deliberately stark choice (basically George Monbiot vs agricultural landowners), the first option is the better one.
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This week's Fun Online Poll.

How will you respond to the new drinking guidelines?

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Fun Online Polls: SLOPOTY & how to minimise flood damage

The results to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Sports Lack Of Personality Of The Year Award

Andy Murray - 40%
Tyson Fury - 16%
Lewis Hamilton - 10%
Mo Farah - 7%
Greg Rutherford - 6%
Lizzie Armitstead - 6%
Jessica Ennis-Hill - 5%
Chris Froome - 4%
Kevin Sinfield - 4%
Max Whitlock - 4%

Strange.

Andy Murray ticked nearly all the boxes - not having any noticeable personality or having won or done anything notable this year. The only ones he failed on were we've all actually heard of him and know he plays tennis.

Runner-up Tyson Fury on the other hand, ticked none, having a cool name, taking part in an inherently controversial sport, having strong opinions, however repugnant, and actually having won something notable this year and then being promptly stripped of his title for some obscure reason.

Just goes to show.
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I have no strong opinion on how to minimise flood damage and those who do take an interest have strongly diverging views:

In the green corner, George Monbiot:

Just as remarkable is the collective lack of interest in what happens when rain hits the ground. The government boasts that “we are spending £3.2 billion in flood management and defences over the course of this parliament – half a billion pounds more than in the previous parliament.” Yet almost all the money devoted to freshwater flood relief is being spent at the bottom of river catchments. This means waiting until the wall of water arrives before seeking to contain it; a perfect formula for disappointment.

A rational policy would aim to prevent the flood from gathering in the first place. It would address the problem, literally and metaphorically, upstream. A study in mid-Wales suggests that rainwater’s infiltration rate into the soil is 67 times higher under trees than under sheep pasture. Rain that percolates into the soil is released more slowly than rain that flashes over the surface. But Cumbria’s hills are almost entirely treeless, and taxpayers, through the subsidy regime, pay farmers to keep them that way.

Rivers that have been dredged and canalised to protect farmland rush the water instead into the nearest town. Engineering works of this kind were removed a few years ago from the River Liza in Ennerdale. It was allowed to braid, meander and accumulate logs and stones. When the last great storm hit Cumbria, in 2009, the Liza remained clear and fordable the following day, while other rivers roared into furious spate. The Liza’s obstructions held the water back, filtered it and released it slowly. Had all the rivers of Cumbria been rewilded in this way, there might have been no floods, then or now.

So trees and rewilding good; dredging pointless.

Speaking on behalf of Britian's agricultural landowners (three-quarters of the land by area, one or two percent by value):

Amid all the devastation and recrimination over the floods in Cumbria hardly anybody mentions one factor that may not be the sole cause, but certainly hasn’t helped. That is the almost complete cessation of dredging of our rivers since we were required to accept the European Water Framework Directive (EWF) into UK law in 2000...

It was obvious to people, who depended on the land for their living that failing to keep the rivers clear of sand and gravel would cause them to burst their banks and destroy in a few hours fertility that had taken generations to create, wash away their houses, and drown their livestock… all this changed with the creation of the Environment Agency in 1997 and when we adopted the European Water Framework Directive in 2000. No longer were the authorities charged with a duty to prevent flooding. Instead, the emphasis shifted, in an astonishing reversal of policy, to a primary obligation to achieve ‘good ecological status’ for our national rivers. This is defined as being as close as possible to ‘undisturbed natural conditions.

… they all have the same aim, entirely consonant [sic] with EU policy, to return rivers to their ‘natural healthy’ state, reversing any ‘straightening and modifying’ which was done in ‘a misguided attempt to get water off the land quicker’. They only think it ‘misguided’ because fast flowing water contained within its banks can scour out its bed and maybe wash out some rare crayfish or freshwater mussel, and that conflicts with their (and the EU’s) ideal of a ‘natural’ river.

So dredging good; trees (for which there are no subsidies) and rewilding bad.

The only thing that everybody seems to agree on is that we shouldn't allow building on flood plains, obviously, but that doesn't help people in long established towns.

I know I did a Fun Online Poll on this last year, but let's narrow it down a bit to those two contrasting points of view without an 'other' option.

(I'm always happy to blame the EU when things go wrong, but the EU is also to blame for the subsidies for clearing trees so that's a worst-of-both-worlds as per usual.)

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Short List

Parts of Great Britain likely to be hit by flooding and which sound similar, if you say them in the local language.

Flooding update

A comment relayed on wattsupwiththat postulates another reason the severity of this year's and last year's floods in Somerset and once again, the finger points at the EA and their absurd plan to "rewild" the levels. To those still convinced of the blamelessness of the EA, their policy map must be somewhat of a disappointment.

"Insurers urged to process flood insurance misselling claims quickly"

From the BBC:

The prime minister is urging the insurance industry to deal with future claims arising from misselling of flood insurance as quickly as possible.

Mr Cameron's official spokesman said the insurance industry should do its best to maximise help to flood-hit victims by rejecting all claims under the original policies on the basis of some obscure small print or other as quickly as possible, followed by a "speedy" processing of all the misselling claims which will be submitted after the resulting shit storm.

He declined to say whether the sector should be offering "premium holidays" to those whose claims for flood damage will initially be rejected.

"I've heard Cornwall's nice," added the Prime Minister.

It is hoped that flood victims will have received their compensation payments for missold insurance by 2018 at the latest.

Fun Online Polls: The cause of the floods & The Four Day Week

The responses to last week's Fun Online Poll were as follows:

Who or what is to blame for the floods in England? Multiple answers allowed.

EU and Greenie nonsense - 94 votes
Not dredging rivers - 88 votes
Barbara Young (former EA chief) - 66 votes
Building on flood plains - 62 votes
Chris Smith (current EA chief) - 56 votes
Deforestation in uplands - 35 votes
Labour under-investment - 31 votes
Wrong type of rain - 27 votes
Gay marriage - 18 votes
Savage Tory cuts - 11 votes
Climate Change - 10 votes
Other, please specify - 15 votes

So now we know. Rather alarming that more people think gay marriage might be the cause than "Climate Change", which appears to the new name for "weather".

A few people mentioned "water", "the weather" and "the wettest January for 250 years" as possible other explanations, but those were covered by "Wrong type of rain" or "Climate Change"
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This week's Fun Online Poll is a something we chat about at work occasionally:

"If your employer offered you a four-day week for the same pay, which day would you take off?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

More on flooding

The Telegraph publishes a piece from the horse's mouth.

Meanwhile others think it's all a deep laid plot by the EU. Pity Ishtar Dingir doesn't know that the Somerset Levels are meant to flood. Perhaps he should talk to Julian Temperley.

Anecdotally, my brother, also a farmer in Somerset, reports that the EA have been doing some river clearance, but along the Parrett upstream of the levels. As a result, when his bit of the river floods, the floods disappear in hours, where it used to take days. He also reports seeing water cascading over the tops of the banks of the Parrett, draining back onto the levels the water that the EA is spending so much of our money pumping into it.

Fun Online Polls: Who or what is to blame for the floods in England?

As prompted by AK Haart, we're all experts now and can play The Blame Game in this week's Fun Online Poll.

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

Sticking with the general theme, here's Sinkhole Of The Week, which is fifteen foot deep, according to The Daily Mail and fifteen metres deep according to the BBC, go figure:

"While you were out...

... we attempted to access your property in order to help with flood defences but turned back when we realised that to do so would amount to trespass."

From The Evening Standard:

George Monbiot shoots from the hip again

and misses.

In an article entitled "Dredging rivers won't stop floods. It will make them worse", George is surprised to find the Environment agency agreeing with him. They have released a paper on dredging. In it they cleverly state that dredging is carried out "to improve navigation, by increasing depths and straightening channels or "to improve land drainage, particularly by creating artificial channels". So despite the fact that they state that "Dredging is the process of removing silt from the bottom and sides of the river channel", clearing silt from riverbeds and returning them to their original depth, the activity in which they have a twenty year backlog is obviously not dredging.

So, cheered by this unexpected help in his campaign that started with trying to get rid of sheep and seemingly unaware that the whole paper appears to be designed simply to justify the EA's inactivity in dredging over the last twenty years, George launches forth,

"A river's capacity is tiny by comparison to the catchment from which it draws its water. You can increase the flow of a river by dredging, but that is likely to cause faster and more dangerous floods downstream when the water hits the nearest urban bridge (something the residents of towns like Taunton and Bridgwater should be worried about). If you cut it off from its floodplain by turning it into a deep trench, you might raise its capacity from, say, 2% of the water moving through the catchment to 4%. You will have solved nothing while creating a host of new problems."

George, please look at a map of Somerset. Taunton is upstream of the floods. No-one is talking about dredging the Tone upstream of Taunton. The Parrett at Bridgwater is tidal, so at low tide, there is always going to be huge spare capacity in its channel. The burghers of Taunton and Bridgwater can sleep safe in their beds.

Next he posts a litany of excuses by the EA to do nothing:

"1. Massive expense. Once you have started dredging, "it must be repeated after every extreme flood, as the river silts up again".

2. More dangerous rivers: "Removing river bank vegetation such as trees and shrubs decreases bank stability and increases erosion and siltation."

3. The destabilisation of bridges, weirs, culverts and river walls, whose foundations are undermined by deepening the channel: "If the river channels are dredged and structures are not realigned, 'Pinch Points' at structures would occur. This would increase the risk of flooding at the structure." That means more expense and more danger.

4. Destruction of the natural world: "Removing gravel from river beds by dredging leads to the loss of spawning grounds for fish, and can cause loss of some species. Removing river bank soils disturbs the habitat of river bank fauna such as otters and water voles."

1. Dredging started in the C18th. The EA isn't being asked to start dredging, it's being asked to continue dredging. All the rivers draining the Somerset Levels run in man-made channels. No-one is talking about widening them or deepening them. All the residents of the levels want is for the twenty year accumulation of silt to be removed from them.

2. How did the (man-made) banks cope before there were trees growing on them?

3. See point 1.

4. No-one is talking about removing gravel from river beds.

George then goes on to both hit and miss the point in one sentence:

"More trees and bogs in the uplands – reconnecting rivers with their floodplains in places where it is safe to flood (and paying farmers to store water on their fields while the danger passes)"

The first is a good idea, the second is how the Somerset Levels already work, and have worked for centuries. The problem is not that the Levels have flooded: they do that most years and it's how the problem of having more water entering the levels than can drain out is solved. George and the Environment Agency are pointing out that you can't stop the flooding in Somerset by dredging the rivers. This is true, but no-one is asking to stop the flooding, what they want is for the flooding to be less extreme and not to last so long. They want the water to be able to flow more quickly to the sea, like it did in the past, when the man-made rivers and drains of the Levels were properly maintained.

"Looking back into the mists of time"

From the BBC:

... Bridgwater and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell-Grainger dismissed the claims that the rain would have overwhelmed the river system even if it had been dredged as "pathetic".

"It is an absolutely ridiculous excuse," he said. "This never flooded to this level ever in living memory, and we've got people who have been here for a long time. If you look back into the mists of time you don't have this."

Let's have a look back into the mists of Wiki:

The Somerset Levels.. is a sparsely populated coastal plain and wetland area of central Somerset, South West England, running south from the Mendip Hills to the Blackdown Hills...

The Somerset Levels consist of marine clay "levels" along the coast, and inland (often peat-based) "moors"; agriculturally, about 70 percent is used as grassland and the rest is arable...

One explanation for the county of Somerset's name is that, in prehistory, because of winter flooding people restricted their use of the Levels to the summer, leading to a derivation from Sumorsaete, meaning land of the summer people...

People have been draining the area since before the Domesday Book. In the Middle Ages, the monasteries of Glastonbury, Athelney and Muchelney were responsible for much of the drainage.

The artificial Huntspill River was constructed during the Second World War as a reservoir, although it also serves as a drainage channel. The Sowy River between the River Parrett and King's Sedgemoor Drain was completed in 1972; water levels are managed by the Levels internal drainage boards.

Do MPs not even do the most cursory background reading about the area they are supposed to be representing?

"Farmers urged by WWF to do more to prevent flooding"

From the BBC:

Farmers getting public grants should be forced to capture water on their land to prevent floods downstream, environmentalists have said.

Green group WWF said farmers should get subsidies only if they agreed to create small floods on their own land to avoid wider flooding in towns and villages.

The average family pays £400 a year in grants to farmers. Farmers' leaders rejected the idea but said they would support incentives to farmers to prevent flooding.

WWF is already working with eight farmers on the young River Nar in Norfolk in an experimental project to restore upstream rivers to their original state.

Rivers have been squeezed into straight, fast-flowing channels over hundreds of years to hurry rainwater off fields. But that has contributed to flooding of prime agricultural land downstream. Fast-flowing rivers also carry silt which causes rivers to clog up.

The greedy so-and-so's!

They want compensation to compensate them for no longer getting subsidies for causing flooding on other people's land.

As ever LVT will sort this out. Farmland subsidies are negative LVT and so ought to be abolished anyway.

I observe that assessing the value of farmland is a lot trickier than assessing location values in developed, urban areas, but we could just reinstate Agricultural Rates to all non-forestry land at a token figure of about £20 per acre per year, regardless of whether the annual value is £10 or £100, and see what happens.

The point being, that farmers/landowners will stop farming the least productive bits of land, they can plant trees on these instead to do a bit of tax-free forestry, and if the land won't even support that, they can leave it as flood plain or allow other enthusiasts/landowners further downstream to reinstate 'natural' woodland.

The good news is that the bits which the farmers will stop using first are precisely the least productive bits - i.e. the least accessible bits (steeper slopes) and the most-likely-to-flood bits (right next to streams and rivers) and those are the best areas to reforest (helps soak up rainwater) or leave au naturel (flood barrier).

As a quid pro quo, we could apply the same tax exemptions which forestry gets to actual farming. Forestry incurs by and large no CGT, IHT, income or corporation tax on profits and is VAT-zero rated - and gets relatively little in the way of grants.

We might as well go further and exempt farmers and forestry businesses from Business Rates on their outbuildings or from having to deduct PAYE from their workers' wages (fair's fair).

Job done. Whether £20 per acre is the right amount, we will have to wait and see, the optimum cut-off amount might well be higher than that.

Gloriously Irreverent Headline Of The Day

The Soaraway Sun's headline(s) above the story about Cornish people worrying about getting their feet wet:

Land's End of world as we know it
Ooh Arr-pocalypse* Now... Cornish tsunami fears

* The headline in the paper version was "Ooh Arr-mageddon", which I thought was better.

UPDATE: Mark in Mayenne submits "Ooh arr-mageddon my feet wet" and wins this round.

Giant Sinkhole Of The Week

From the BBC, the Great Western Canal, Halberton, Devon.