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26 Nov 03 - 02:30 PM (#1061433) Subject: BS: UK drought announcement From: Arnie With their usual finely-tuned sense of timing the UK Environment Agency announce a drought on what has to be the wettest day of the year. It has been raining solidly in SE England last night and most of today. Everywhere is flooded. So on this morning's radio we are told that the EA have announced a hosepipe ban!!! Why didn't they think of this in the summer when everyone was washing their cars, using lawn sprinklers and topping up swimming pools? OK, this year was pretty dry, but overall we are a pretty wet island - why don't we do more to conserve the water before it runs off into the sea? Maybe one or two reservoirs might help? These can even be underground if the neighbours object. Not exactly rocket science.... |
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26 Nov 03 - 03:08 PM (#1061470) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Mr Red Not that global warming has anything to do with it. Or our profligacy with water. Or the concrete and runn-off. Or draining the marshes. Or the infernal combustion engine. Of course it rains a lot - but in fits and bursts. We are wedded to our environment - natural or man-made - and it is a marriage made in hell. |
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26 Nov 03 - 05:21 PM (#1061555) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: vectis We have a drought, only just enough to go round in the best of summers and the government want us to build 40,000 more homes in the region. It doesn't make sense does it? |
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26 Nov 03 - 05:25 PM (#1061559) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Liz the Squeak Ah, so that explains why my pond is overflowing, the damp patch in the cellar is looking ominously puddle-like and there's been a small Amazon flowing down the road. All that lovely water just flowing into what used to be a water meadow, and is now an expensive and fairly new housing estate...... LTS |
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26 Nov 03 - 05:48 PM (#1061583) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Richard Bridge And in Lower Stoke we wait in trepidation for the drains to fill, closely followed by my garage, and another round of trying to convince insurers to take my inflated premium... |
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26 Nov 03 - 07:05 PM (#1061637) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Folkiedave And when I go to Spain to the parts where it rains once every three years they have plenty of water.......????? Dave www.collectorsfolk.co.uk |
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26 Nov 03 - 07:11 PM (#1061645) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Folkiedave And wasn't there a comment somewhere between 1945 and 1951 (about the UK) only a Labour Government in an island surrounded by water and built on coal could organise a shortage of both!!! Dave www.collectorsfolk.co.uk |
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26 Nov 03 - 07:36 PM (#1061666) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Herga Kitty They said on the radio this morning that we could save quite a lot of water by turning the taps off when we brush our teeth. Kitty |
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27 Nov 03 - 04:09 AM (#1061843) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Hrothgar There are droughts and ther are DROUGHTS. Come out here and talk to people who haven't planted a crop for four years. |
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27 Nov 03 - 05:29 AM (#1061872) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Dave Bryant Since the decline of many of the small manufacturing and engineering industries in Central London, the water level in the natural artesian basin (which once powered tha fountains in Trafalgar Square) has risen alarmingly. A large amount of energy is used to pump out the tube system and other subterranean installations - and the situation is getting worse. Ironically Thames Water and the EA have shown no interest in using this vast underground reservoire because they say that the water contains too many impurities. A private survey, however showed that the cost is comparable with recycling sewerage and waste water (which is done at the moment) and that many of the minerals which would be removed would have a considerable commercial value. EA have even refused licenses for several proposed private ventures to drill the necessary bore holes. |
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27 Nov 03 - 07:25 AM (#1061915) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: jonm Historically, a large proportion of Britain's rainfall has soaked into the earth, thus reducing the likelihood of flooding and replenishing groundwater supplies (long term storage which feeds well and springs and acts as a balance between winter and summer water levels). As we continue to pave over vast tracts for housing, highways etc. this water enters the drainage system instead, which has to be designed to take the expected influx. It will not, of course, be designed to accommodate the additional influx from new development after the drainage was designed, so if you build a new housing estate upstream, this increases the likelihood of flooding downstream! Reservoir storage will do little to ameliorate the falling groundwater levels, but at least then the rainfall will not be "lost", although in order to accommodate major storms, the reserve capacity of any new reservoirs will need to be significant. Due to the quantity of impervious paved area, rainfall now enters the drainage system much more immediately. As regards flooding, it has been traditional to measure flooding in terms of the level reached by the water, not by the volume of floodwater, which is of course the true measure. So in places like Bewdley, where significant new development alongside the river has taken place both upstream and in the town, the channel width for floodwater has been reduced, the volume of water must then rise to a higher level and the town receives flood levels the Environment Agency believes should only be experienced once every 200 years twice in five months! Note that this is not a harbinger of climatic change and global warming, merely a mis-assessment of the nature of the problem which has been prevalent for 100 years or so. Anyone still awake? Jonm was a highways and drainage design engineer in a former existence. The treatment is progressing well. |
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27 Nov 03 - 08:34 AM (#1061954) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Steve Parkes And they still want to build on flood plains! Do you know, when I was a child in the 50s, we were always being told to conserve water. "Never wash your hands under a running tap" was one of the slogans. Being quite bright, and beginning to suspect that adults didn't always know what they were talking about, I very quickly proved to myself that you can was your hands under a slowly running tap and not use enough water to wash them in the conventional way. Put thie plug in, run the tap just enough to wet/rinse your hands, wash them, rinse them and see how much water is in the sink: if it's a normal-sized handbasin, about one-and-a-half to two inches, not enough to get one hand under. It's easy to reduce your water usage if you use your brain. Try personal hygeine 1950s-style: take a bath (better, a shower) once a week and wash thoroughly with sinkful of water the rest of the time. You're allowed to sit in the bath to wash your feet; a bowl is handy for this (after you've done the easy bits). Steve |
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27 Nov 03 - 09:51 AM (#1061994) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Dave Bryant At the "Remembering Fred" do on Saturday, several people mentioned Fred's attitude to bathing - when I once offered him the freedom of the bathroom he told me "I don't hold with baths - reckons they weakens you". One of the speakers, however put this in context when he quoted Fred as saying, "You values water when you have to carry it". I know that when I'm on my little boat, or in the caravan, I can make 5 gallons of water last a long time. Mind you, when I was camping in a small tent, just a single gallon had to last. If any ladies want to help me save water, I'll always go along with "Save water - bath with a friend !". |
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28 Nov 03 - 05:59 AM (#1062419) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Seaking Arnie - I've been away for a few days and missed the EA report. Is it a national or regional hosepipe ban? I always thought that it was the individual Water Authorities who imposed hosepipe/sprinkler restrictions, presumably they work together on this ? Anyway, I live in Felixstowe, Can I wash my car this weekend ? |
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28 Nov 03 - 08:51 AM (#1062511) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Steve Parkes Yes, but not necessarily at home ... |
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28 Nov 03 - 01:32 PM (#1062654) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: McGrath of Harlow A drought co-existing with a flood - all part of the paradoxical nature of this whole bsuiness of climate change. For example current thinking is that it's quite likely that one side effect of overall global warming will be to bring about an Ice Age in the British Isles, because the Gulf Stream getting buggered up. (Thank you very much George Bush...) |
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28 Nov 03 - 01:54 PM (#1062662) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Ebbie Has anyone else read Whitley Strieber's book: 'The Coming Global Superstorm'? I'm rereading it. |
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29 Nov 03 - 10:04 AM (#1062772) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: GUEST,noddy Only dirty people wash. Thats why I never do!!!!!!! |
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29 Nov 03 - 02:29 PM (#1062872) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Liz the Squeak There is another way of course.... ever seen the way cats do it? LTS |
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30 Nov 03 - 11:30 AM (#1063199) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: GUEST Seaking - I think the drought announcement is an EA warning of what's around the corner if we don't conserve water stocks now. I don't believe there's a statutory ban on hosepipes yet but you may wish to check with your local water authority before washing the car in case someone shops you! |
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01 Dec 03 - 04:36 AM (#1063503) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Dave Bryant Liz - in that case, the next time you're washing yourself, I'll be happy to do the places which you can't reach. |
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01 Dec 03 - 07:22 AM (#1063556) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Teribus Interesting article in todays "Daily Telegraph" Some excerpts: "When The Skeptical Environmentalist was published two years ago, it caused no end of trouble. Bjorn Lomborg was a statistician who was fed up with the flaky numbers that support so many of those doom-and-gloom forecasts, so he set out to try to establish the facts. His conclusions were a bitter disappointment to those who have made careers out of spooking us with tales of impending disaster. He found that, on the whole, things are getting better. On all objective measures of health, prosperity, access to valuable technology, levels of pollution and general well-being, the proportion of the global population that is benefitting has never been higher. We are not, he decided, heading for hell in a handcart. Fittingly for a statistician, his book made strenuous efforts to track down source material. It contains nearly 3,000 footnotes, and made Lomborg public enemy No 1 among the environmental fascists. It is probably too much to hope that Adapt or Die* will have the same seismic impact on these sensitive souls, but it represents a long-overdue and concerted attack on the Kyoto Protocol, that far-away agreement whose true costs are only now starting to appear over the economic horizon. Kyoto was John Prescott's first international boondoggle following his elevation to the dizzy height of Deputy Prime Minister, and he had a lovely time. He returned home having committed Britain to swingeing cuts in the level of emissions of carbon dioxide. And why not? After all, under New Labour at Year Zero, anything was possible, and 2010 must have seemed an impossibly long time away. Well, it isn't now, and it's starting to dawn on tired old Labour that hitting those targets is going to be both expensive and painful. Adapt or Die argues, with almost as many source footnotes as Lomborg, that it's also pointless. A telling chapter from Martin Agerup (a Danish economist rather than a Swedish statistician) asks whether Kyoto is a good idea, and by now you won't be surprised by the answer. The Kyoto meeting came about because of worries that human activity was raising the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide lets ultraviolet radiation through, but traps infrared - the so-called greenhouse effect. Ergo, more of it, thanks to our profligacy with fossil fuels, must mean global warming. The consequences will be dire, and it's all our fault. This is a potent argument for the hair-shirt brigade who secretly hope for tsunami, pestilence and mass starvation to sweep us all away, as a kind of retribution for our decadent squandering of the Earth's bounty. Such feelings underpin the directionless protests against globalisation, and the Kyoto protocol was one response from bemused governments. Unfortunately, the science doesn't support the doomsters' thesis. Agerup points out that it's hard enough to forecast the weather a week ahead, let alone a decade hence; he then picks apart the stats on which Kyoto is based, and finds it "amazing that such sloppy practices are used as an input to a modelling exercise that involves the use of supercomputers and costs millions of euros.'' He further points out that "there is no empirical evidence that hurricanes and storms are increasing in frequency or intensity" and concludes that it's not even clear from the science whether more CO2 in the atmosphere will mean a warmer or colder planet." |
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01 Dec 03 - 05:30 PM (#1063963) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Strupag Great Teribus, I knew all along that we were being blinkered by that "hair shirt" brigade. It's a fact that Water temperatures have risen and the fish are moving north and west to cooler and deeper water but that will be just due to the odd dolphin farting. Its also a fact that the glaziers are melting but that will be due to all these wild foxes that now roam and piss over them. And yes, even in mid winter, the Highlands of Scotland's reservoirs are at their lowest since they have been built but that will be due to these dirty Scots now watering their whisky. Aye it's a great world, the wonderful world of the Telegraph and their Swedish statisticians and Danish economists! |
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01 Dec 03 - 06:13 PM (#1064004) Subject: RE: BS: UK drought announced From: Ebbie Fish are being caught in Alaskan waters that have never been observed so far north. I suspect that Teribus is stocking the fish so that at the proper moment he can say with glee: Gotcha! There's no other logical reason. |