Australian Politics Forum

The great tide of 1953 led to the eventual implementation of the Thames Barrier. However, is this barrier enough in the face of global warming. There have been several floods in UK in recent years and they have yet to face the consequences of a combined great tide event with flooding inland from rain.

theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/07/great-tide-is-britain-equipped-cope-glbal-warming

Quote:

In the aftermath of the storm, which came to be known as “The Great Tide”, lavish measures, such as the £534m Thames Barrier, were implemented to protect London and its surrounding counties. We slept easier. The storm faded from the nation’s collective memory. Few Londoners today know that the capital was the site of a natural disaster of such magnitude. Seven decades on, however, government commissions, scientists, futurologists and people once considered wild-eyed scaremongers are converging on the view that floods of 1953 levels of severity are likely to become commonplace.

The global temperature has risen by 1C in the past century. Fourteen of the hottest years on record occurred in the past 15 years. And 2015 was the hottest since records began in 1880. Individual countries will feel the effects of the change in individual ways. Saudi Arabia will have to contend with stronger and more frequent heatwaves. Bangladesh risks being wiped off the map by rising sea levels. The sea that surrounds Britain is expected to rise by up to 50cm in the next century, a change that poses obvious risks for an island. But perhaps the biggest worry is that it will get a lot wetter.

This seems counterintuitive. Why, as the world grows warmer, would Britain grow wetter? As temperatures rise, ice caps melt and the amount of water vapour in the atmosphere increases, so too does the risk of “intense precipitation events”, the scientific jargon for heavy rain. The latest government figures state that the likelihood of floods in the UK has almost doubled in the last century.

We do not need to take their word for it. In 2007, flooding in Britain affected 55,000 homes and killed 13 people. In December 2015, floods caused by the amiably named storms Desmond and Eva caused £175m worth of damage to homes and businesses in Cumbria. The public bill for fixing the infrastructural wreckage – the broken bridges and ruptured roads – is currently estimated at £250m...

... Lord Krebs is a chairman within the Climate Change Committee (CCC), a group commissioned by the government to, in part, evaluate the environmental risks we now face. Krebs is so assured of the UK’s unpreparedness for disaster, that, in an interview on Radio 4 in December, he issued an urgent warning. “The biggest single risk from climate change for this country is the increased likelihood of flooding,” he said. “The government needs to rethink its whole strategy of managing flood risk. Our money should be going into flood protections and doing everything to protect the vulnerable land beneath sea level. There is so much of it.”

On 12 July, Krebs’s team will publish a crucial report – one that will surely struggle for attention thanks to the prospect of more immediate disasters – which outlines the most urgent risks that Britain faces from climate change. The risk assessment report draws upon three years of research and analysis, involving hundreds of academics and scientists. Some of the research seen by the Guardian puts the current cost of UK residential flood damage at £340m per year, a figure that will rise to £428m as the average global temperature rises by 2C, the limit that numerous world leaders agreed upon in December at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, held in Paris. The experts consulted by Krebs’s team claim that 180,000 more British homes will be at risk of flooding by 2050.

According to this research, around 20% of the total length of coastal defences in England, which protect around 2m homes at risk from sea flooding, could be vulnerable to failure if sea levels rise by just half a metre. A one-metre sea level rise around the British coast will place 2,000 square kilometres of the UK – an area roughly the size of Herefordshire – at risk of flooding during a storm surge. Even if “all worthwhile flood-defence schemes were to be built,” a spokeswoman for the CCC told me, “more people and properties [will be] exposed to high levels of flood risk by mid-century”.

Individuals and businesses are, increasingly, having to bear the cost. In some areas of Cumbria, after three major floods in a decade, insurance excesses now reach £25,000. The Association of British Insurers predicts that a major flooding event in London could have economic consequences comparable to the recession that followed the 2008 financial crisis.

For years the UK government has debated whether or not to replace the Trident nuclear programme. Its renewal will cost a minimum of £205bn. The most likely threat to the defence of the realm may not be a nuclear strike, however, but the waves that our deterrent lurks beneath. Following storms Desmond and Eva, the UK government pledged to spend a further £700m on flood defences, bringing the total to £3bn – 1/68th of the cost of Trident. Will it be enough? ...

Australian Politics Forum
http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl General Discussion >> Europe >> Thames Barrier: Is UK ready for the great tide? http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1467936307 Message started by Squire on Jul 8^th, 2016 at 10:05am