I hope I'm wrong

Am I being a bit premature worrying, as I gaze out on the clear blue skies and wonder where our April showers disappeared to? The forecast for the rest of the month is basically for the same weather we’ve had all month. What a change from the wettest winter on record, with horror stories of floods and inundations. But what is happening is exactly in line with what climate scientists have been predicting for years. Yes, we shouldn't conclude that the strange recent weather is caused by climate change, few climate change scientists want to be hung out to dry by making direct causal links like that. God knows, if we had a freak blizzard next week all their hard work would be discredited, and the nutter Trump camp would be the first to declaim the ‘hoaxers.’ Nevertheless, along with the Coronavirus map I think I will keep an eye on the Environment Agency’s river flow map, published each week, which is probably as good an indicator of whether mighty England faces a drought this year. The map illustrated below takes us up to the 14th April and shows that just over half of English rivers have a lower than normal flow of water. And this is spring, after a very wet winter. Just in case, I do hope that our marvellous ‘just in time’ government is figuring out how we’ll all regularly wash our hands when stand pipes appear on the streets. Of course I’m being a little alarmist here, although I’m not sure it’s the image of stand pipes or the likelihood of a hopeless government promising more stand pipes that worries me most.

Source: Environment Agency, 14th April 2020

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