Floods in England

For John, BLUF:  You mess with messing with Mother Nature and there will be consequences.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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As we know from the news, there has been terrible flooding in England this Winter.  I am sure most attribute it to the weather, which flows from this continent to the United Kingdom and then on over Europe.  One assumes it is then recycled somewhere over Asia and then flows back over us.  At any rate, things seem to be worse this year and it is attributable to Global Warming/Climate Change.

Mr Richard Fernandez, of the blog Belmont Club, takes on this issue.  He narrows it down to British Environment Agency and their failure to continue past practices, practices their Masters have deemed unfriendly to the environment, an environment which appears to not include humans.

The floods were apparently not only inevitable, but foreseeable.  The chief problem to preventing them lay in a policy which maintained that active flood control was bad.  Nature treats humans as part of the natural world but environmentalists treat nature as part of the political world.  Many a misunderstanding arises therefrom.  Alas the rains and the seasons refuse to read Labor Party and Green Left manifestos and the results are often inconvenient.  And so the floods came.

My only addition would be to note that if Government is going to return some area to its "pristine" state, some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago, it ought to notify and relocate the people impacted and then not sigh in public about the forecastable results.

The Environment Agency is a Non-Departmental Public Body, in other words, a QUANGO.  The idea is to have an agency such as the Environment Agency at arms length from the responsible Government Minister (here it would be the Cabinet Secretary).  The nearest US example might be the Federal Reserve, responsible for keeping the US economy ticking along.  The Fed is as close to a perpetual motion machine as we are likely to see in our lifetimes.

So, this British flooding is unlikely related to Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change. Hat tip to the Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff