‘Experts’ caused Dales floods

This is going to get me into trouble again but I have a confession to make: I am a member of the Flat Earth Society. Not a fully paid up member, perhaps, but a supporter never-the-less. I know this because I have been branded as such on the BBC.

Radio Four was interviewing a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) a world-wide group of so-called “experts” who met in Stockholm to decree that they were 95 per cent sure that “global warming” was man-made.

Anyone who didn’t believe this must be a member of the aforesaid FES (the Flat Earth Society) he said, despite the fact that, in the following interview, a top Australian scientist called Bob Carter who leads another group of experts, described the IPCC’s finding as “poppycock”.

Now I am not a scientist but I have been writing about so-called “experts” since 1960, when as a cub reporter I exposed that our birds of prey were being killed off by so-called “harmless” pesticides in seed dressings on cereal crops.

The experts had done the tests which proved that the dressings did not poison the song birds which ate the cereals. They did not notice that these poisons built up in the livers of the seed eaters – and were fatal to the birds of prey that ate the song birds.

Many, many stories later, about 15 year ago, I was being told by other experts that the world was getting colder so fast that, sometime this century, we would be facing a new ice age. The Yorkshire Dales would be back under the ice sheets that retreated some 15,000 years ago, they said.

How we got from there to global warming I can’t quite fathom but I should explain why I am not quite a fully-paid up flat earther: I do believe in what I call “climate change,” and do think we are slowly getting warmer (very slowly, in fact) but I believe this is a perfectly natural phenomenon caused by the orbit of the Sun as it travel through space.

The Romans were growing grapes in York 2,000 years ago. Yet in Elizabethan times, they were able to roast oxen on the ice of the frozen River Thames: there are engravings recording the fact. In other words, our climate has suffered ups and downs for much of recorded history.

For most of that time, however, we were without “experts” who made a living out of forecasting doom and gloom: Cassandra had a go, so did various Oracles, but they were believed – or disbelieved – on religious grounds rather than “scientific” ones (should I mention that a court of law has described “warmist” theories as being akin to a religion)?

So what has all this to do with the Yorkshire Dales, now that we are fairly sure that we won’t be buried under a billion tons of glacier next week? And why should I be so sceptical about the forecasts of these highly paid experts? The answer to that is that we are already suffering from some past experts’ follies ... and this winter, it could get worse.

Back in the 1950s, experts at the late and little lamented Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, (better known simply as the Min. of Ag) decided that we should produce more food in the Dales and to do that we needed more agricultural land. So they set about draining thousands of acres of upland peat bog.

They ignored the fact that it takes hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years, for slow growing peat to form, mainly because it is always saturated in cold, highly acid water. So they began to plough striped drainage channels known as “grips” into this fragile environment to let that water loose.

And, boy, did they succeed. Came winter snow and heavy rains and within a few years these channels became mini-canyons, the delicate peat ripped apart by roaring torrents and dumped into our rivers and streams, doing unrecorded damage to aquatic life.

Some grips are now so deep that they can swallow a tractor.

And if our climate is changing for whatever reason, the biggest threat to hundreds – perhaps thousands – of unfortunate residents of the Yorkshire Dales is flooding. Every winter, huge areas of Airedale and other valleys are inundated because the experts of the Min. of Ag. destroyed the peat sponges that held back the rain and the snow melt and fed the excess water into our becks drip by drip.

Add to this the folly of so-called planning “experts” who allowed mass housing development on flood plains, not just here but throughout the land, and you come to the fact that anyone lucky enough to live on a hill will have to pay an extra levy on his or her house insurance to subsidise those poor beggars liable to flooding.

Without that Government organised subsidy, those unfortunates would be unable to get insurance at all, making their homes and businesses virtually unsaleable.

When I have written about climate change in the past – pointing out that the UK produces only two per cent of the world’s greenhouse gasses – I have been regularly excoriated as a “denialist” grouped with the lunatics and the fascists who deny that the Holocaust took place.

But I believe we should be spending money on better flood defences rather than ineffective wind farms and solar panels covering hundreds of acres.

In other words, when I listen to the most fashionable theories that that latest bunch of experts have come up with, I am quite happy in my membership of the Flat Earth Society.

One day, perhaps, some expert might – just might - persuade me to change. But how would I know if he would change his mind a week later?

* Please note, the views in this column are John’s alone and do not represent the views of the Craven Herald