Under Water

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A large part of the British Isles is – apparently under water – just as a large part of the US is snowed in. The up side of too much rain is that you don’t have to shovel the rain our of your driveway so that you can get to work. The bad side of too much rain is that you can’t shovel it out of your driveway…

Anyway, I ran across this article in the Spectator (which I used to read on-line a lot before they re-did their site and put the best stuff behind a pay-wall…) about the massive flooding in one particular area. Blame it on the EU, apparently. And super-greenie environmentalists.

8 thoughts on “Under Water”

  1. It’s basically the reverse of the California experience. A bait fish in the Sacramento Delta was declared more important than the 500 million dollar agriculture of the Central Valley.

    Victor Davis Hanson, who lives in the Valley, explains.

    Yet there are really two droughts — nature’s, and its man-made twin. In the early 1980s, when the state was not much more than half its current population, an affluent coastal corridor convinced itself that nirvana was possible, given the coastal world-class universities, the new dot.com riches of the Silicon Valley, the year-round temperate weather, and the booming entertainment, tourism and wine industries.

    Apparently, Pacific corridor residents from San Diego to Berkeley had acquired the affluence not to worry so much about the old Neanderthal concerns like keeping up freeways and airports — and their parents’ brilliantly designed system of canals, reservoirs and dams that had turned their state from a natural desert into a man-made paradise.

  2. One of the All Creatures Great and Small books contains a vivid description of the winter of 1947, which was longer and colder than normal, which caused great hardship. Many farms were cut off for weeks. Animals died because veterinarians could not get through the unusually deep snow. Merely shoveling out a garage and driveway could become impossible.

  3. All journalists exaggerate. According to a meteorologist whom I’ve found reliable, it’s not “the wettest January on record” but, for England and Wales, the wettest since 1948. Records began a couple of centuries before then. And the weather has been pretty good in Aberdeenshire, apparently. When the sou’westerlies blow, it’s best to be east of the mountains.

  7. I do beg your pardon. I unaccountably forgot to identify “When the sou’westerlies blow, it’s best to be east of the mountains” as an ancient Chinese proverb.

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