By Paul Homewood
Booker runs with the North Devon AONB story this week:
Such a national treasure is the coast of North Devon that for 50 years it has been designated an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB); with the local authorities required to produce successive management plans to protect it.
But their latest version strikes a curious new note. "One of the most significant pressures on the environment of South West England," they now say, is "climate change", as "reflected in hotter and drier summers, warmer and wetter winters with more extreme weather and increased flood risk, compounded by sea level rise". If this rings a bell, it is that it precisely echoes claims long familiar from the Met Office.
But where is the evidence to support them? That meticulous analyst Paul Homewood, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, has checked each claim against graphs compiled from the Met Office's own historical data for south-west England.
On figures going back to nearly 1870, he shows that there has been no upward or downward change at all in the trend of summer or winter rainfall. Winters are not getting any wetter, or summers becoming drier.
Nor, Homewood says, do the data show an increase in flood risk or any other form of "extreme weather". As for the trend in sea level rise, the tidal gauge at Newlyn shows that this has remained remarkably consistent at 1.81 millimetres a year since 1915.
In other words, according to this analysis, there is no evidence whatever to support these claims. But, as Homewood observes, there has recently been one change to the environment of the North Devon AONB far more noticeable than any other. This has been the domination of the landscape by giant wind turbines, such as the 22 which rise 360ft over Fullabrook Down near Ilfracombe. But on this, needless to say, the plan says nothing critical at all.
My original post including all the graphs is here.
from Climate Change Skeptic Blogs via hj on Inoreader http://bit.ly/2MjORrI
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