Drought anywhere? Appalling… and our fault. Rain anywhere? Appalling… and our fault. So Heatmap lets us in on the latest: “Vermont Reveals the New Dangers of Summer Rain”. What? That things get wet? No, see, “climate change is supercharging the risks from your typical unnamed rainstorm.” Not something bad enough to get a name. Just rain. Specifically, some rain there in July “was the sort of no-name summer storm that has long been a feature of the region but is now intensifying due to rising temperatures.” Oh really? Do you have data showing more rain, not just in various cherry-picked locales but as a sustained trend over large parts of the globe? Because if so you should share it with the IPCC, which doesn’t see anything of the sort despite being paid to see it.

And if like Tony Heller you spent a bit of time in the archives, you’d find all kinds of stories of extreme weather as far back as there were newspapers.

Oddly, in Britain it has also been raining. No really. The famously damp chilly island nation from which my father kept a weather map pinned to his study wall because it showed no clouds that day, which he suspected was a unique occurrence.

Now you may think Britain was baking, roasting and scorching, based on some overheated news reporting. But the Yorkshire Evening Post recently noted that “UK weather: Met Office say July 2023 was ‘one of the wettest on record’ as Brits endure wash-out summer”.

As Flanders and Swann sang, “August cold and dank and wet/ Brings more rain than any yet”. Just like always.

The YEP also dared speak the truth about cold weather, adding that:

“Downpours and strong winds are making it feel more like autumn than summer in the UK at the moment – here’s when things should improve…”

As in the sun will come out and it will get warmer.

Here we make our habitual point that none of the alarmists who claim to know what the weather will be like in 2050 to a fraction of a degree (including the bit where Theddlethorpe in Lincolnshire will be underwater and thus must not be used to store nuclear waste – and in case you’re not from there, it’s right by Saltfleetby All Saints) foresaw this wet summer in Britain. Nor can they explain it except with ad hoc theoretical kluges. But they can sure predict trends.

Speaking of trends, that YEP story also said that:

“The year 1988 holds the record for the UK’s wettest ever July, with an average of 150.5mm of rain, followed by 2009 (145.5mm), 1939 (143.5mm), 1936 (142.6mm), 1888 (142.2mm) and now 2023.”

See the pattern? Right. There isn’t one. Except that Britain often has rainy weather, sometimes very rainy. Nothing there would surprise William Shakespeare, or Egbert of Wessex, other than that people thought they’d done it, or their governments did.

Incidentally the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society recently confirmed our own claim about increasing damage from flooding. They made the usual ritual obeisance to the climate-change gods, aka their funders, of course: “Climate change is projected to increase the frequency, severity and variability of all types of flooding.” But then they said it’s stupid to keep building on floodplains, and have the government bail people out who don’t even have insurance. (Apparently this problem of lousy urban planning around drainage is even worse in China, and if climate change causes Communism it’s the first we’ve heard of it.)

P.S. In case you care, Theddlethorpe is quite near the place where to the amusement of generations of schoolchildren back when history was a “thing”, Bad King John famously “lost the crown jewels in the Wash” not because he misjudged the tides in “The Wash estuary” just north of King’s Lynn as was long thought but “as a result of a freakishly large and powerful tide.” So apparently they had floods in 1216 as well. Perhaps from all the carbon or methane his horses emitted.