Entries Tagged 'weather' ↓

Outside my house is a new yellow box full of grit.  Ironically there’s not been much call to use it yet, but hopefully this will make Belstead Avenue into less of a skating rink, which has been due to a change in policy to encourage grit bins.  I’ve also got the County Councillor to push for a grit bin in Brecon Close and I’m pushing for one in Maidenhall Green, outside the Stoke Green Baptist Church to cover the pavement.

If your street does not have the gritter visiting it, then get in touch with me about the grit bins.  We can’t rely on the greenhouse effect to clear our roads.  Unless we’re the Met Office.

Yesterday the Westminster Hour had Ben Gummer, who made his debut on that programme.  The details are here and the link to the programme itself is here (18 minutes in).  The first question is about the weather and it’s a bit of a shame that there was no questioning about why these winters seem to be happening ten years after it was being predicted that we’d see an effective end to snow in England due to global warming.

The worst thing about the global warming scare is not the bad predictions, after all the weather and climate are different and Britain will always have a hard to predict weather pattern.  And there is a widespread scientific conviction that there is warming due to human activity, so taking pot shots at the science is fun but it does make the warming-pragmatists look madder than the warming-true-believers, which is precisely the reverse of reality.

The real problem is that we are going to see a massive spike in heating costs, something that won’t affect most Labour or Tory MPs and will only marginally affect the sort of people who become constituency party chairmen or councillors (particularly in the almost exclusively public sector middle class Labour Party).  It is, however, going to lead to the needless death of pensioners.  It’s also going to lead to a slowing in economic growth, and so a stunting of living standards among the most vulnerable.

Like the BT fiasco at Suffolk County Council the worst policy mistakes are when there is a cross party consensus, particularly when there are interest groups in the mix, not when there is a jolly party knock about.

I understand that our County Councillor has funds allocated to her for her area, and that other County Councillors have managed to get grit bins installed in their areas.  If you are on a road that is unlikely to be gritted (follow the instructions here to see if this is the case for your road) then getting a grit bin can be a good idea.

Please email me on james@bridgeward.org.uk so that I can help you through the process.

Nothing seems to go right for our poor under-secretary of state for roads, trains and drains.  When news of his announcement as minister of railways was given the good Lord showed what He thought by smiting Ipswich station with lightening.  Now he’s on the hook for the lack of rock salt.

It seems that there was a phenomenally poor prediction and calculation of the rock salt needed. While I could get out Hayek and talk about how this failure is bound to happen, why not look at something less controversial, how rubbish the Met Office proved to be?

They are continually erring on the warm side of any medium term predictions and while this is merely annoying when they predict a “barbecue summer”, people are dying because of their poor predictions this month.  Piers Corbyn, left of Labour activist and brother of ultra left wing MP Jeremy Corbyn, says that he has predicted the cold snap with far greater accuracy far in advance.

His contention is that the Met Office didn’t just believe in global warming, they really, really believed it and were prepared to predict on the basis of it.  And that’s why people are dying on the roads and we don’t know whether we’ll have to ration gas through the cold snap.

This is not to say that global warming is nonsense.  As the BBC and the government (or did I repeat myself?) have been telling us for the last week the weather is not the same as the climate.  A pity the Met Office seems to have forgotten.

(Just to cheer you all up, Piers Corbyn reckons that the cold snap will prove more than a snap and despite a couple of warm spells go well into February.)

So our MP is put in charge of the roads and railways and within days Ipswich station is struck by lightening and the A14 is flooded and blocked by a crash.  Next we’ll be having plagues of frogs and locusts. Either the Almighty is displeased or Chris Mole is cursed with terrible luck.

Like many people who live in Bridge I was held up in the drama today.  For once I’m not going to moan about the railway company, who did the best they could under extraordinary circumstances – and if a chimney being struck by lightening is not extraordinary then I don’t what is.  In the end we were held up for one and a half hours – although the flow of information was constant and reassuring, and the staff pulled together. 

Ipswich station was also well run considering that it had been evacuated just twenty minutes before we got there, with even delay-repay forms being handed to us as we got out of the station.  It is a stark contrast to the times when much smaller incidents seem to have given the railway a nervous breakdown.

Anyway here are the stories from the BBC and the Evening Star.

Any way here are a couple of photos that have appeared on the BBC and in the Evening Star, if anyones got other pictures, particularly in Bridge, let me know on james@bridgeward.org.uk

For the first time in years we actually had some (albeit minor) flooding in our house although my wife was at home and had the presence of mind to get some newspapers to soak it up so no damage was done.  It seems that it was a problem with the drains which soon sorted itself out, but it does show that the idea floated by Phillip Smart, one of our non-resident Labour councillors that the existing flood barrier should be lowered to be “more pleasing” to the eye is madness.