Stormbringer

In the Atlantic, depressions become tropical storms and rush towards the Caribbean and the southern United States. Homeowners batten down their properties, hide in the cellar and hope, guiltily, that the devastating forces of nature pass them by and take their neighbour instead. Island communities are devastated and thousands can lose their living, if not their actual lives in a single night of howling, hurricane-force winds and thousands of tonnes of rain cascading from angry skies, for no reason whatsoever. Weather, like islam, doesn't care how many it kills.

According to Wikipedia, Hurricane Katrina was the eleventh named storm and fifth hurricane of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season. It was the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Over 1200 people lost their lives and over $100bn of property damage was caused. Meanwhile, in Britain, we’ve had it tough. In 1883 the Eyemouth Disaster killed 189 fishermen. In 1953, severe winds and a high spring tide killed 300 in the North Sea flood. In 1987 Michael Fish narrowly avoided forecasting a hurricane with the subsequent loss of lots and lots of old trees and 22 people. And in 2013/14 the cessation of dredging and a bit of heavy rain submerged the Somerset Levels. I don’t recall anybody dying as a result.

But now the Met Office want to start naming UK-bound storms ‘...in an attempt to improve awareness of major weather threats’. Perhaps the Met Office hasn’t noticed our national preoccupation with the weather... And our almost universal shrug of indifference when it finally hits. Yes there’s the odd YouTuber who posts pictures of bollock-sized hailstones or a family of ducklings happily paddling along a flooded gutter, but in the main we tend to just put on a coat or stay indoors.

But no longer is this level of ‘meh’ acceptable. Derrick Ryall, head of the public weather service at the Met Office, said: "We have seen how naming storms elsewhere in the world raises awareness of severe weather before it strikes.” Yes, indeed, Derrick (you really spell it that way, like a lifting device?) in places where storms cause devastation and death on a regular basis, it’s a bloody good idea but in Britain where most of the housing stock has steadfastly refused to be blown down, year after year, all you are doing is feeding the increasing propensity of Brits to seek compensation for imagined losses. We do have insurance, you know?

Further, another Met Office spokesman said: "There is no system at the moment for naming storms. It is random and you can get the same storm being given different names by different forecasters. This is what leads to confusion in the media and the public and why we are piloting an official system." Who was confused? Weather forecasts come at us a hundred times a day and all we need to know is, is it going to be windy/wet/dry/hot where I am? Naming it? Haven’t you learned how inhospitable we are to even desperately needy refugees? The idea that we are going to adopt a fucking bit of wind and give it a personality by naming it is a tad fanciful to say the least.

There's a mo-storm coming...

And anyway, this is Britain. If we named a storm John we’d be called racist Anglophiles. Lloyd would be pandering to the Welsh, Gordon would be howled down by the gays north of the border and Patrick would risk raising the ire of Ireland. If we opted for girls’ names we’d end up with wet ones like Cissy or Petunia. But give it a few years and that problem will go away. In the coming UK Caliphate every storm will be called mohammed.

Stormy Weather

England. It’s lovely. We have all of history, climate and culture on our side. If ever there really were a chosen race it was the people who maintained this island kingdom free of invasion for a thousand years. Blessed with a taciturn exterior but fiercely loyal to our friends and our flag, England and its people are, or were, the very best of the world. Oft derided as a mongrel nation we had the enviable character of a stoic with a secret; only the English could truly know the English. We not only showed the world how to behave, we walked our walk; even the lowliest English-born bore the heart of a champion in their chest. Cannon fodder maybe, but with a sense of patriotism unsurpassed.

I grew up with rainy Sunday afternoons watching Kenneth Moore shoot down the Luftwaffe, cheering on Noel Coward as he defied the U-Boats and identifying with Richard Attenborough as the plucky everyman, digging tunnels to return to Blighty and to the fray. I also grew up with fierce-bright long summer holidays, roaming the fields and building straw-bale forts, lolling in hedgerow dens chewing sugarbeet and barley ears. And then there were the deep, cold, hoar-frost winters; how we survived without central heating, fleeces and Gore-Tex© is a mystery as deep as why the country voted Labour in 1974.

But of course we know exactly why we elected the government that ended with unburied bodies and undisposed rubbish; Europe. Or, more specifically, what we then called The Common Market. Yes, the referendum was badly handled, but the instincts of the British Left, as piss-poor as they were in government, were still with the working man back then and they knew, if they would not say it openly, that there was far more at stake than trade. They knew – as today they ALL know – that at the heart of the European Projekt is the total obliteration of the nation state and today it is the majority will of the political classes to complete that erasure.

In pursuit of ‘harmonisation’ – becoming mediocre through diversity - the face of this green and pleasant land is defaced with political windmills which boldly demonstrate the impunity with which local democracy is overruled. The little man who wields the vote has no further say after he has cast it in favour of the party which promised the earth but instead continues to deliver us, piece by piece into the ravenous jaws of the Euro-juggernaut. In our history we believe at least that we would not have stood for it. Now it’s by no means certain we have that shared identity and will to remain unshackled.

The captain of HMS Beagle wouldn't have been the kind of man to succumb to Europe’s demanding embrace. Vice-Admiral Robert Fitzroy was made of sterner stuff. Naval hero, one-time Governor of New Zealand and founder, in 1854, of the Meteorological Office, he was one of that happy breed of men who existed a century before the state broadcasting corporation  became the mouthpiece of a softer establishment in thrall to the destructive experiment of socialism. This week we learned that the Met Office is to lose the contract to supply the BBC with weather forecasts.

Whether or not you believe in the advance of Cultural Marxism, this severing of connections between one national institution and another is surely yet another example of the progressive dismantling, the fracturing of a sense of identity; who else but the UK Met Office should be supplying weather information services to the nation in which it is based? But there are many precedents; much of UK services and infrastructure is in foreign hands, foreign control. Bought and sold we can no longer tell where Britain ends and the rest of the world begins. EU-Mission accomplished.

"I think we may be in for a bit of rain, dear..."

Come the referendum we genuinely will not know what we are voting for, but right now we should be demanding the reinstatement of the contract. The success of D-Day and Operation Neptune relied on the support of Meteorological Office and as a former ‘Met-Man’ myself I have more than a passing association with its worth. But casting all that aside, the Met Office should be kept on for one reason and one reason alone... who else will have the sheer brass neck to optimistically promise this sceptred isle of many shining facets the sheer fantasy of a bloody barbecue summer!

Meteoro-lol-ogy

I don’t rely on weather forecasts and I rarely watch them. As a former meteorologist in the good old Andrew* I can read a synoptic chart at a glance, make my own mind up for the day ahead and take an umbrella if appropriate. Also, it really doesn’t matter a great deal unless I’m going out paragliding because whatever the wide-area forecast, the micro-meteorology of a particular hill site may be quite different from the general pattern. Otherwise I am quite sanguine about the fact that however disappointing the weather, I can’t do anything to change it, so I may as well just take what comes.

Friends (yes I do have a couple) often wonder that I can be so blasé but it’s simple, really. And anyway, why make rocket science out of a fairly straightforward process? Here’s how you put a daily forecast together:

Step 1: Look out of the window. Really, always look out of the window. Whatever it’s doing right now, that’s where your forecast starts.

Step2: Check out the latest surface analysis (that weather chart thingy) and see what’s on the way – a front will likely bring cloud and rain and change the airmass. So all you do is work out when it’s going to get here and describe the progression of change for your forecast period.

Step 3: Reduce the information down to Wind + Weather + Visibility and there you go. (Check out the Shipping Forecast – that’s all they give you – WWV – region by region.)

Step 4: Remember you’re only the messenger, not the Messiah – whatever the weather, you didn’t make it happen, you're not a naughty boy and it ain’t your fault!

I’ve always felt sorry for poor old Michael Fish after ‘that hurricane’. The poor fella was doing his best and by and large the forecast was pretty accurate. The difference between a Violent Storm (64-73 mph) and a Hurricane (74+ mph) is technically only one mile per hour but that single steadfast proclamation "Don't worry," has stayed with him for twenty-five years and might have destroyed a lesser man. Talk about defining a man by his mistakes...

But was that the point at which we no longer took at face value the forecasts from our formerly revered Met Office? In recent years ‘barbecue summers’ have turned to crap, an expected ‘mild winter’ became the coldest on record for fifty years and last year, the wettest since records began, started with a hosepipe ban. (Oh and we’re supposedly in the middle of a heat wave right now. Meh.)

All of which preamble gets me to the pointlessness of the Met Office’s climate change huddle this week. Lots of hand-wringing about something they can’t change. If they’re not careful they’re in danger of looking like a right bunch of Cnuts. Nobody has ever managed to accurately forecast the weather more than two weeks ahead, let alone months or years and the entire Climate Change Industry can’t even agree on what has actually happened in the past.

But the Met Office is missing a trick. From my Met Man days I know that nobody actually listens to the forecasts properly anyway, even if their lives may depend on it. Predict rain in the morning and by ten o’clock you’ll get complaints about the deluge they weren’t expecting until tea time. Forecast a wet Saturday afternoon and come Monday you’re practically guaranteed to have an angry Squadron Commander ranting that you personally ruined his garden party.

Nobody minded about the destructive tornado.

They were still laughing at Michael Fish's pullover!

So, if they’re not going to even remember what you forecast and you’ll get blamed for it being the wrong sort of hail, even if you called it exactly right, you may as well make your performances memorable for something else. I suggest TV Weatherfolk acquire other skills such as juggling, stand-up comedy, wearing ridiculous outfits or swimsuit modelling. So when they’re taking the piss because you dropped all the balls, or a nipple popped out, at least they’re not impugning your ability to guess the weather.

(*Andrew = Royal Navy)

Terror in the snow!

The Met office has downgraded its predictions for climate change. I wonder if big government will take heed and downgrade their plans to bankrupt us by tilting at this particular windmill? I doubt it, but lest I not survive this fearful wintry onslaught I leave you with what may be my last words on Earth. 

Battsby’s Diary. The final entry? 

So, here I am, hunkered down, snug as a bugger in a rug. But that can’t last. The snowflakes gently batter at my fortress perimeter and cloak the earth in deadly white. Deadly? Oh yes. For as long as I have fuel and food I am fortunate, yet it will only last for so long. Then I will surely starve. 

The doom-mongers foresaw this great disaster. Global warming/cooling climate change seasonal variation is upon us. I haven’t seen snow like this for years a year and I don’t know how we will cope. There’s always the telly, I suppose. And the Internet. For while they survive and there is power, there is also hope. 

It has been snowing for three weeks days hours now and I am feeling the stirrings of mania. In my crazed state I cannot trust myself. I could do anything. I may light a log fire shortly... and maybe take a warming cup, a hot toddy. Perhaps I could rustle up some lunch? I could also finish reading my book. So much to do, so little time. This is hell. 

What to do, what to do? The blizzard continues its remorseless onslaught and the blanket of blanc lies fully three two metres feet centimetres on the ground. What gods have we angered? What have we done to offend Gaia so? And what is that noise? A strange ringing in my head. I dimly remember such a noise... 

The horror!

Right, well, that was Jim on the phone. He called from his refuge and seeks my assistance post-haste. I have written down his location and must attend. This is an emergency and my needs must come second to helping my fellow man. Jim informs me he is at a place known as The King’s Head and that it is my round. 

I must go out now... I may be some time.