The number of very hot days have soared in the past 15 years, a new study in the journal Nature Climate Change reports. Based on observations, the authors conclude that “the term pause, as applied to the recent evolution of global annual mean temperatures, is ill-chosen and even misleading in the context of climate change.”
As Climate Progress has repeatedly reported, mean surface temperatures have slowed only a little in recent years, the factors causing that are well understood, and when they reverse,warming will accelerate. But the authors of this new study reject the term “pause” entirely:
… it is land-based changes in extreme temperatures, particularly those in hot extremes in inhabited areas, that have the most relevance for impacts. It seems only justifiable to discuss a possible pause in the Earth’s temperature increase if this term applies to a general behaviour of the climate system, and thus also to temperature extremes.
However, we show that analyses based on observational data reveal no pause in the evolution of hot extremes over land since 1997.
What matters most to humans directly is not average temperatures, but hot extremes, such as the monster 2003 heat wave that killed more than 30,000 Europeans or the off-the-charts 2010 Russian heat wave that caused an excess of some 50,000 deaths and led the country toban grain exports for over a year after their crops shriveled.
The Nature authors underscore this point in their conclusion:
Furthermore, the available evidence suggests that the most ‘extreme’ extremes show the greatest change. This is particularly relevant for climate change impacts, as changes in the warmest temperature extremes over land are of the most relevance to human health, agriculture, ecosystems and infrastructure.
This finding matches recent research from NASA (see here and video below). Similarly, the World Meteorological Organization said Tuesday that in March they “will publish a major report showing the likelihood of extreme heatwaves is increased 500% [with climate change].”
What do the Nature authors mean by “extreme extremes”? They first look at the “annual number of days with daily maximum temperature above the 90th percentile” in a given location averaged over the base period of 1979-2010. That is, what is the average number of annual extreme warm days in a region during that 32-year period? Call that reference number of days for a given location ExDref. The authors then calculate the total land area in a given year that exceeds ExDref by 50 extreme warm days (ExD50) or by 30 days (ExD30) or by 10 days ExD10). They also look at two different, relatively different data sets, ERA-Interim and HadEX2 datasets. And they look at two different slightly reference periods.
And all that means their figures are quite complicated. But here’s the key one, which is worth understanding:
Time series of the ratio of land area affected by exceedances of 10, 30 and 50 extreme warm days per year relative to 1979–2010 average (ExD10, ExD30 and ExD50) in ERA-Interim (E-Int). The respective tendencies over the time period 1997–2012 are overlaid on the time series (trend lines) and displayed in the left panel of the inset plot. The corresponding values over 1997–2010 for HadEX2 are provided in the right panel of the inset plot. The grey dashed line indicates a ratio of 1. The grey dotted line indicates a ratio of 2 (that is, a doubling of the affected area compared with the reference period).
This is a stunning result. During the so-called hiatus, the amount of land that saw more than 50 extreme warm days above the long-term average increased multi-fold. This is rapid climate change, and if it continues it is a very worrisome trend. Certainly the threat from extreme heat is one of the greatest we face due to human-caused climate change (see our11/13 post, “Deaths From Heat Waves May Increase Ten Times By Mid-Century”).
Finally, back in 2012, NASA examined its global temperature data set and found a similar result — a rapid growth in the land area experiencing “extremely hot” summers.
Earth’s Northern Hemisphere over the past 30 years has seen more “hot” (orange), “very hot” (red) and “extremely hot” (brown) summers, compared to a base period defined in this study from 1951 to 1980. This visualization shows how the area experiencing “extremely hot” summers grows from nearly nonexistent during the base period to cover 12 percent of land in the Northern Hemisphere by 2011. Watch for the 2011 heat waves in Texas, Oklahoma and Mexico, or the 2010 heat waves the Middle East, Western Asia and Eastern Europe. Credit: NASA
China, faced with ever-worsening pollution in its major cities—a recent report deemed Beijing "barely suitable for living"—is doing what so many industrializing nations have done before it: banishing its titanic smog spewers to poor or rural areas so everyone else can breathe easier. But China isn't just relegating its dirty coal-fired power plants to the outskirts of society; for years, it's been building 16 unprecedentedly massive, brand new "coal bases" in rural parts of the country. There, they won't stifle China's megacities; they'll churn out enough pollution to help smother the entire world.
The biggest of those bases, the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base, spans nearly 400 square miles, about the size of LA. It's already operational, and seemingly always expanding. It's operated by Shenhua, one of the biggest coal companies in the world. China hopes to uses these coal bases not just to host some of the world's largest coal-fired power plants, but to use super-energy intensive technology to convert the coal into a fuel called syngas and use it to make plastics and other materials.
Syngas is healthier to breathe when burned than typical coal—but as Motherboard has noted before, synthesizing the stuff emits nearly twice the carbon pollution. That's why when Inside Climate News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative environmental outfit, traveled to China to investigate the operation, they, and a number of climate experts concluded it would "doom the climate."
Conceived in 2003, Shenhua said it broke ground in 2008 on the 386-square-mile coal base. That's an area about three-quarters the size of Los Angeles that's being covered bit by bit over a period of some 17 years with coal mines, power plants, power lines, pipelines, roads, rail tracks and all manner of chemical processing plants with their towers, smokestacks and tanks ... The project is so huge that engineers used the world's largest crane to set in place the unit that's to serve as the heart of the plant, a 2,155-ton Fischer-Tropsch synthesis reactor that's as high as a 17-story building.
Greenpeace has documented the carnage caused by the project in the region, charging that the coal plants are "triggering severe water crises in the country’s arid Northwest. This huge amount of water will be used for the water-intensive coal extraction, forcing deterioration of arid grassland and forcing herders to seek alternative livelihoods." In fact, the only limit on many of these coal plants that activists see is water itself—if they dry out the local water supplies, they won't be able to use it to extract coal.
Image: Greenpeace
It's projected to finally be finished by the end of the decade, when it will produce a jaw-dropping 30,000 MW of power, sucking down 100 million tons of coal every year in the process. And it's just one of over a dozen such sprawling operations.
As such, Ningdong does a fairly good job of epitomizing China's grave threat to the global climate system. A recent paper in Nature Climate Change noted that if all of the coal-to-gas plants get built, they'd produce 21 billion tons of CO2 alone. The Washington Post's Brad Plumer puts that in context: "The entire nation of China produced 7.7 billion tons of carbon-dioxide in 2011." Put simply, China's on a path to produce an unholy amount of carbon pollution.
Writing in Rolling Stone, Bill McKibben estimated that, based on climatologists' forecasts, humans worldwide can can only safely burn some 365 gigatons (or billions of tons) of carbon before we seriously the global climate system. Using those estimates, Kelly notes that even if China where to burn just 10 billion tons of carbon each year, that would put it "on track to consume the world's remaining 349 billion tons by 2050." After that, the table is set for runaway, or catastrophic, global warming.
China's giant coal bases, then, may very well be the largest looming threat to a stable global climate.
Those who know me know I'm a skier first and foremost. I did my full season in 1987-88 in Leysin, Switzerland. Even then there were issues with reducing amounts of snow and when I arrived on 28 December 1987 the village was clear, a few days later I climbed up to just below 7000 feet above sea level, in a shirt, even the highest peaks were snow free.
It wasn't until February that real snow arrived, a metre plus fall transformed the village and the mountains and the season was saved.
Climate Change should mean, taken as a whole, that snowfall increases as more moisture enters the atmosphere. But other effects can counterbalance this, particularly the change in atmospheric patterns due to increasing upper level temperatures. This is exactly what caused the two big cold plunges in the UK over the past three winters, and of course the Alaskan heatwave and Polar Vortexes in the rest of the USA this winter. It is also why we've had a spectacularly bad winter in the UK with a succession of Atlantic storms battering the south and west, crumbling our coastlines and drowning our farmland. This same weather pattern can lift temperatures over Europe's mountains, meaning the snow line is far higher than normal, stranding some of the lower ski villages in a pure green hell.
More here -
The End of Snow?
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Slopes were closed last month at Fichtelberg mountain in Oberwiesenthal, Germany.Jan Woitas/European Pressphoto Agency
OVER the next two weeks, hundreds of millions of people will watch Americans like Ted Ligety and Mikaela Shiffrin ski for gold on the downhill alpine course. Television crews will pan across epic vistas of the rugged Caucasus Mountains, draped with brilliant white ski slopes. What viewers might not see is the 16 million cubic feet of snow that was stored under insulated blankets last year to make sure those slopes remained white, or the hundreds of snow-making guns that have been running around the clock to keep them that way.
Officials canceled two Olympic test events last February in Sochi after several days of temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and a lack of snowfall had left ski trails bare and brown in spots. That situation led the climatologist Daniel Scott, a professor of global change and tourism at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, to analyze potential venues for future Winter Games. His thought was that with a rise in the average global temperature of more than 7 degrees Fahrenheit possible by 2100, there might not be that many snowy regions left in which to hold the Games. He concluded that of the 19 cities that have hosted the Winter Olympics, as few as 10 might be cold enough by midcentury to host them again. By 2100, that number shrinks to 6.
The planet has warmed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1800s, and as a result, snow is melting. In the last 47 years, a million square miles of spring snow cover has disappeared from the Northern Hemisphere. Europe has lost half of its Alpine glacial ice since the 1850s, and if climate change is not reined in, two-thirds of European ski resorts will be likely to close by 2100.
The same could happen in the United States, where in the Northeast, more than half of the 103 ski resorts may no longer be viable in 30 years because of warmer winters. As far for the Western part of the country, it will lose an estimated 25 to 100 percent of its snowpack by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions are not curtailed — reducing the snowpack in Park City, Utah, to zero and relegating skiing to the top quarter of Ajax Mountain in Aspen.
The facts are straightforward: The planet is getting hotter. Snow melts above 32 degrees Fahrenheit. The Alps are warming two to three times faster than the worldwide average, possibly because of global circulation patterns. Since 1970, the rate of winter warming per decade in the United States has been triple the rate of the previous 75 years, with the strongest trends in the Northern regions of the country. Nine of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 2000, and this winter is already looking to be one of the driest on record — with California at just 12 percent of its average snowpack in January, and the Pacific Northwest at around 50 percent.
To a skier, snowboarder or anyone who has spent time in the mountains, the idea of brown peaks in midwinter is surreal. Poets write of the grace and beauty by which snowflakes descend and transform a landscape. Powder hounds follow the 100-odd storms that track across the United States every winter, then drive for hours to float down a mountainside in the waist-deep “cold smoke” that the storms leave behind.
The snow I learned to ski on in northern Maine was more blue than white, and usually spewed from snow-making guns instead of the sky. I didn’t like skiing at first. It was cold. And uncomfortable.
Then, when I was 12, the mystical confluence of vectors that constitute a ski turn aligned, and I was hooked. I scrubbed toilets at my father’s boatyard on Mount Desert Island in high school so I could afford a ski pass and sold season passes in college at Mad River Glen in Vermont to get a free pass for myself. After graduating, I moved to Jackson Hole, Wyo., for the skiing. Four years later, Powder magazine hired me, and I’ve been an editor there ever since.
My bosses were generous enough to send me to five continents over the last 15 years, with skis in tow. I’ve skied the lightest snow on earth on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, where icy fronts spin off the Siberian plains and dump 10 feet of powder in a matter of days. In the high peaks of Bulgaria and Morocco, I slid through snow stained pink by grains of Saharan sand that the crystals formed around.
In Baja, Mexico, I skied a sliver of hardpack snow at 10,000 feet on Picacho del Diablo, sandwiched between the Sea of Cortez and the Pacific Ocean. A few years later, a crew of skiers and I journeyed to the whipsaw Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey to ski steep couloirs alongside caves where troglodytes lived thousands of years ago.
At every range I traveled to, I noticed a brotherhood among mountain folk: Say you’re headed into the hills, and the doors open. So it has been a surprise to see the winter sports community, as one of the first populations to witness effects of climate change in its own backyard, not reacting more vigorously and swiftly to reverse the fate we are writing for ourselves.
It’s easy to blame the big oil companies and the billions of dollars they spend on influencing the media and popular opinion. But the real reason is a lack of knowledge. I know, because I, too, was ignorant until I began researching the issue for a book on the future of snow.
I was floored by how much snow had already disappeared from the planet, not to mention how much was predicted to melt in my lifetime. The ski season in parts of British Columbia is four to five weeks shorter than it was 50 years ago, and in eastern Canada, the season is predicted to drop to less than two months by midcentury. At Lake Tahoe, spring now arrives two and a half weeks earlier, and some computer models predict that the Pacific Northwest will receive 40 to 70 percent less snow by 2050. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise — they grew 41 percent between 1990 and 2008 — then snowfall, winter and skiing will no longer exist as we know them by the end of the century.
The effect on the ski industry has already been significant. Between 1999 and 2010, low snowfall years cost the industry $1 billion and up to 27,000 jobs. Oregon took the biggest hit out West, with 31 percent fewer skier visits during low snow years. Next was Washington at 28 percent, Utah at 14 percent and Colorado at 7.7 percent.
The winter sports industry contributes $66 billion annually to the nation’s economy, and supports more than 960,000 jobs across 38 states, according to the Outdoor Industry Association. A surprisingly large sector of the United States economy appears to be teetering on the brink.
Much of these environmental data come from a 2012 report, “Climate Impacts on the Winter Tourism Economy in the United States,” by two University of New Hampshire researchers, Elizabeth Burakowski and Matthew Magnusson. The paper was commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council and a start-up advocacy group called Protect Our Winters. The professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones started that group, known as POW, in 2007 when he realized that many of the slopes he had once ridden no longer held snow. It has since become the leading voice for those fighting to save winter, largely because few others are doing anything about it.
The National Ski Area Association has reacted with relatively ineffective campaigns like Sustainable Slopes and the Climate Challenge, while policies at ski resorts range from aggressively green to indifferent. Somewhere in between lie the majority of American ski areas, which are struggling to make ends meet while pushing recycling, car-pooling, carbon offsets and awareness campaigns to show they care.
The truth is, it is too late for all of that. Greening the ski industry is commendable, but it isn’t nearly enough. Nothing besides a national policy shift on how we create and consume energy will keep our mountains white in the winter — and slow global warming to a safe level.
This is no longer a scientific debate. It is scientific fact. The greatest fear of most climate scientists is continued complacency that leads to a series of natural climatic feedbacks — like the melting of the methane-rich permafrost of Arctic Canada.
Artificial snow-making now helps to cover 88 percent of American ski resorts, and has become the stopgap measure to defend against the early effects of climate change. Snow-making requires a tremendous amount of electricity and water, though, so it’s unlikely that snow guns will be our savior. In the Alps, snow-making uses more water in the winter than the entire city of Vienna, about 500,000 gallons of water per acre. Ski areas like Vail, Keystone, Breckenridge and Arapahoe Basin seed clouds with silver iodide to make it snow, but that won’t help much when it gets warmer. When it does, whatever the clouds bring will fall as rain.
With several dry winters back to back, the ski industry is waking up. Last spring, 108 ski resorts, along with 40 major companies, signed the Climate Declaration, urging federal policy makers to take action on climate change. A few weeks later, President Obama announced his Climate Action Plan, stating, “Mountain communities worry about what smaller snowpacks will mean for tourism — and then, families at the bottom of the mountains wonder what it will mean for their drinking water.”
It was a big step forward for skiers and the country. And it led people to ask me, “Why save skiing when there are more pressing consequences of climate change to worry about?” The answer is, this is not about skiing. It is about snow, a vital component of earth’s climate system and water cycle. When it disappears, what follows is a dangerous chain reaction of catastrophes like forest fires, drought, mountain pine beetle infestation, degraded river habitat, loss of hydroelectric power, dried-up aquifers and shifting weather patterns. Not to mention that more than a billion people around the world — including about 70 million in the western United States — rely on snowmelt for their fresh water supply.
I remember watching my first Winter Olympics in 1980. We were on a family ski trip at Copper Mountain in Colorado, where my brother and I skied the first powder run of our lives. It was on a gentle slope just off one of the main trails. We wiggled down the hill in chaotic rapture then skied the run again and again. The snow was soft and the turns effortless. You don’t have to be a skier to feel nostalgia for those whitewashed days — or to see the writing on the wall.
The growthtards crack me up. We've been warning for YEARS that climate change will have all sorts of negative effects but the 'tards either didn't believe us or thought it would take so long that it would have no effect on them personally, so didn't matter.
In the last few months we've seen almost daily CC effects here in southern Britain. A few miles down the road from me the land has been flooded for over a month, with absolutely no end in sight. Our wonderful coastline has taken a huge battering and will never be quite the same again. Transport links south west of here have been shredded by a series of unprecedented Atlantic storms that have been triggered directly by upper atmosphere effects of warming over the Arctic. It seems that suddenly the countries fringeing the Arctic are now the front line, and we have a very interesting and disturbing few decades ahead.
And now it's beginning to affect food supplies - as we have been warning about this as well over the last few decades.
THIS IS WHAT CLIMATE CHANGE MEANS YOU IDIOTS!!
Severe floods 'threaten food security', say farmers and environmental groups
Government accused of failing to address effects of climate change on coastal and rural areas
Aerial view of the flooded village of Moorland in Somerset. Photograph: James Dadzitis/SWNS.com
Severe flooding threatens to undermine the country's food security, according to farmers and environmental groups, who today accuse the government of failing to address the effects of climate change on coastal and rural areas.
As gales swept southern and western parts of the UK, with already drenched counties bearing the brunt of the storms, it has emerged that parliament's select committee on the environment warned in a report last year that "the current model for allocating flood defence funding is biased towards protecting property, which means that funding is largely allocated to urban areas. Defra's [the Department of the Environment's] failure to protect rural areas poses a long-term risk to the security of UK food production, as a high proportion of the most valuable agricultural land is at risk of flooding."
"We need a response from government that recognises the importance for our long-term food security of safeguarding high-quality farmland," said Neil Sinden of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. "We need to view the countryside as more than a place for building, and value it for the food it provides."
Defra has estimated that 35,000 hectares of high-quality horticultural and arable land will be flooded at least once every three years by the 2020s. This could rise to around 130,000 hectares by the 2080s if there is no change to current flood defence provision.
Peter Kendall, chairman of the National Farmers Union, which has produced evidence showing that 58% of England's most productive farmland lies within a floodplain, said the floods were a wake-up call for a country that has "believed for too long that producing food wasn't a big issue".
"We are seeing more of these intense extreme weather events," Kendall said. "Climate change does now really challenge mankind's ability to feed itself."
He said much of the flooding was down to "almost a deliberate policy of neglect of the watercourses" that had seen the Environment Agency "putting birds first and people second", a reference to the agency's attempts to encourage more wetland areas in the UK to promote biodiversity.
His comments were the latest salvo fired at the agency's chairman, Lord Smith, who was defended robustly by wildlife charities. In a letter in the Observer, the heads of the RSPB, the Wildfowl and Wetland Trusts, the Wildlife Trusts and the Angling Trust, said: "Ultimately, it is governments that have set the policies that have hamstrung flood planning in some vulnerable areas: allowing homes to be built and failing to make both homes and farmland more resilient to floods. Cuts to the Environment Agency merely risk reducing it from a flood-management body to an emergency response service and making future floods even more damaging."
Whistleblowers within the agency told the Observer that frontline flood staff were being cut, despite Smith's pledges that reducing the agency's emergency response was a "red line" that could not be crossed.
"People need to be aware that some of the frontline staff are taking a big hit, particularly when we are facing some of the worst flooding ever seen in southern England," said one EA source. He said that, at the same time that frontline staff were being put onto 24/7 duty rotas, managers were being asked to cut staff by 13% across all regions. "This salami slicing approach is entirely wrong," he said.
"This government is steadily dismantling the nation's ability to tackle flooding and prepare for climate change," said Friends of the Earth's Guy Shrubsole.
An Environment Agency spokesman said: "The planned reductions in posts will not affect the Environment Agency's ability to respond to flooding incidents."
The government's response to the floods is threatening to damage the Tory brand in rural areas. Jeremy Browne, the Liberal Democrat MP for Taunton Deane, said that the Conservatives had left themselves open to criticism, having rebranded themselves as a "green" party, only to lose enthusiasm after a couple of years in office.
"People have good reason to believe that that was a fairly cynical exercise and that much of the party remains unconvinced of the need to have a coherent environmental policy," Browne said.
Somerset Levels - the real battle is getting the Government to pay
Oliver Tickell
9th February 2014
Populist urban growthtard media and politicians have chosen the Somerset Levels as their battle field for fighting the 'green' agenda. There is just one problem - the facts. On the Levels themselves, there is a remarkable consensus about the way forward - and the future is Green.
There is a Plan, there is a Vision - and the only real question is how to drive it forward.
It has all made for a fantastic media drama - the striking shots of the inundated Somerset Levels, whole villages under water, wild accusations of incompetence and skullduggery thrown at the Environment Agency, fierce swipes at the 'environment brigade' in general - accused of putting birds and flowers before people flooded out of their homes - claims of a fragile rural economy put at risk - and the ever louder cry of "Dredge, dredge, dredge!"
But where does this captivating narrative come from? It is, as The Ecologist has uncovered, a completely false narrative that has been worked up by Britain's constantly attention-seeking media, with the active connivance of populist politicians and commentators desperate to drive a right-wing anti-Green agenda - and for whom the Somerset floods provide the perfect battle field.
An astonishing agreement has been reached
The truth is that an astonishing consensus has been reached among all the principal parties with interests in the Levels: Somerset County Council, the Somerset District Councils, the National Farmers Union (NFU), the Somerset Consortium of Drainage Boards, the Farming and Wildlife Advisory Group (FWAG), Somerset Wildlife Trust, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), the official wildlife agency Natural England, and the Environment Agency.
The 'Vision 2030' document, agreed at the end of January and published yesterday by The Ecologist - its first airing in the entire British media - presents a forward looking and notably 'green' view of how the Somerset Levels and Moors should develop over the next 16 years.
"Extensively managed wet grassland dominates the scene", it says. "The floodplains are managed to accommodate winter flooding whilst reducing flood risk elsewhere." On the low-lying peat moors, "water levels have been adopted which conserve peat soils and avoid the loss of carbon to the atmosphere." A world class haven for wildlife
The area should become a "world-class haven for wildlife and water fowl. The Levels and Moors are regarded as one of the great natural spectacles in the UK and Europe with a mix of diverse and valuable habitats." "Previously fragmented habitats such as fen and flower-rich meadows have been re-connected and are widely distributed. In the north of the area over 1,600 ha are managed as reed-bed, open water and bog ... Each winter the wetlands attract large numbers of wintering wildfowl and waders regularly exceeding 130,000 birds. Wetland species such as Crane, Bittern and pollinator populations flourish." "Optimum use is being made of the agricultural potential of the Levels and Moors, particularly on the higher land, whilst unsustainable farming practices have been adapted or replaced to secure a robust, sustainable base to the local economy." A flourishing green economy
They are likewise agreed on the need for "a flourishing green economy for food and tourism" to take root. "New businesses, including those based on 'green tourism', have developed, meeting the needs of local people and visitors alike, while brands based on the area's special qualities are helping farmers to add value to the meat, milk and other goods and services that they produce."
An important part of this 'green economy' is tourism drawn by the Levels' internationally important archaeological and historic heritage, which is to be "protected from threats to its survival and is justly celebrated, providing a draw to visitors and a source of pride and identity to local communities."
Meanwhile farmers and landowners are to be "rewarded financially for the public benefits and ecosystem services they provide by their land management including flood risk management, coastal management, carbon storage and the natural environment." Why is the good news not reported?
That all parties have come together to agree on this view of the future, both progressive and pragmatic, is an astonishing 'good news story' amid the very real tales of human woe.
Perhaps it is for that very reason that the mainstream media have chosen to ignore it. It simply does not fit into their preferred confrontational and simplistic narratives of 'birds versus farmers', or 'floods versus people'.
It also completely undermines the battle cry of right wing media commentators who love to wax lyrical about and bungling, uncaring bureaucracies, sustained at massive taxpayer expense but delivering nothing.
Just the thing to justify further cuts in the budget of the Environment Agency, which is aleady to lose 1,700 of its employees, 10% of its head count, just as its services and expertise have never been more desperately needed. The cuts include 550 jobs lost among the very staff responsible for flood response and resilience.
More good sense
Another document that contains an remarkable amount of good sense is the 10-point plan released by the Somerset Consortium of Drainage Boards - one of the bodies signed up to Vision 2030:
Maximise the conveyance of the lowland rivers in Somerset and maintain them.
Construct a tidal exclusion sluice on the River Parrett as already exists on other rivers in Somerset.
All land and property owners in Somerset to contribute to the funding of flood risk management work within their catchments.
Increase soil infiltration and store more flood water in the upper catchments.
Reduce urban run-off.
Promote flood resilience and property level protection in the whole catchment.
Promote and assist the relocation of very flood vulnerable households out of the floodplain.
Acknowledge and provide assistance to land owners on moors identified as flood storage areas.
Provide assistance to farmers and others to adapt their businesses in areas used for flood storage.
Assist farms in flood storage moors to become resilient to flooding and provide assistance to relocate intensive farming activities out of the floodplain with assisted land swops.
Again, there is very little for anyone - even the most committed Green advocate - to disagree with in this document, which is entirely consistent with Vision 2030. There may be some slight scope for debate about the high priority given to dredging - but that's about all.
Now for the real debate - how to make it happen
The key thing now is to move the debate on from the dramatic and diverting but ultimately sterile mischaracterisation portrayed by mainstream media. There is a Plan, there is a Vision - and the only real question is how to drive it forward.
A large part of the money to pay for it - and there will be substantial costs - will have to come from the European Union's agri-environment funding.
A very successful scheme run by Natural England and its predecessors - which paid farmers on the within the Somerset Levels 'Environmentally Sensitive Area (ESA) premiums to maintain high water levels and restore traditional land management practices - has come to an end. It now needs to be replaced with a similar new scheme tailored specifically to the needs of both conservation and farming interests.
Restore funding to the Environment Agency
Meanwhile funding needs to be restored to the Environment Agency so that it cannot merely continue to do the job it was doing before, but expand and enhance its efforts to move beyond the narrow confines of the river channels - where right wing politicos would like the EA's job to begin and end.
Flood and water management must be, as the Somerset Drainage Boards argued, a catchment-wide effort involving not only dredging but sustainable urban drainage, reforestation in headwaters, and management and preservation of floodplains to accommodate floodwaters.
All this will need increases in funding, not the cuts that beleaguered Environment Secretary Owen Paterson is only too willing to impose. And this is the real political battle ahead - getting the Government to pay up.
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