Flash flooding: Echos of old disasters

• WITH the recent heavy rain and flooding, many have started to blame us, and “CO2 emissions”.

Our sins have caused it.

This is a complete echo of the disasters which affected Europe as the medieval warm period, warmer than now, came to an end in the early 1300s.

Greenland, settled with dairy and sheep farms and named accordingly, grew much colder and iced over.

As Brian Fagan explores in his fascinating book The Little Ice Age a major shift in the patterns of the North Atlantic Oscillation brought catastrophic rains “which affected an enormous area of northern Europe…”.

Torrential rains destroyed farms and crops, villages were inundated and abandoned, hundreds of people and animals were killed or died of starvation.

”The deluge began in 1315. Across northern Europe sheets of rain spread in waves over sodden countryside. Freshly ploughed fields turned into lakes, city streets became quagmires, through all the summer the rains did not cease” wrote chroniclers, dykes were washed away, royal mansions inundated.

“There was such an inundation of waters that it seemed it was THE FLOOD” claimed a Salzburg chronicler.

Entire communities abandoned their villages and deserted meadows and farms, fleeing into the hillsides. Paupers even took to eating dead bodies and cattle. Pilgrims pleaded with God for aid and confessed their sins which had caused it.

As Fagan writes, the “settled warm and very dry summers in the late 1320s and 1330s were marked by a notable increase in storminess and wind strengths… the moist wild westerlies that had nourished Europe throughout the Medieval Warm Period turned rapidly on and off as the North Atlantic oscillated from one extreme to the other. The Little Ice Age had begun”.

Such history is little known or taught today. Quite a few noted scientists, ex-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Dr Nils Axel Morner, Professor Valentina Zharkova, and ex-Greenpeace Patrick Moore, among others, indeed say, as solar activity declines and as NASA has noted, with the magnetic north pole shifting towards Siberia, we are moving into a new period of coming cold. Currently Greenland has a large blocked low and growing ice, the jet stream is currently wildly distorted.

Like medieval humanity we blame ourselves for our “sins” or “emissions”. But as even the very political UN IPCC itself says climate is a non-linear chaotic system and longer-term forecasts are impossible. It could be we have seen nothing yet.

“Tackling climate change” will prove a rather more difficult task than making electric cars, heat pumps, and wind turbine farms; as indeed Texas and California have been finding.

ROGER PAYNE, NW3