From Lakeland 50 Years Ago, by Kenneth Shepherd (first published in 1989, so it's more like Lakeland over 80 years ago now...

It's a series of old photos with captions. The one for Seathwaite (the one in Borrowdale, that is, not the one in Dunnerdale) says:

"The tiny hamlet of Seathwaite, at the end of the road from Keswick to Borrowdale, is well-known as the wettest place in England. The average rainfall up to 1946 was 125.30 inches per year compared with 21.79 inches in London.

"On 2nd November 1898 nearly 5.25 inches of rain fell in 24 hours causing the river to flood and its course to divert. These same conditions occurred in 1942 and Edmondson's farm (shown in the photograph) was badly damaged."

It depends whose website you visit, but you can still find modern websites saying "The village of Seathwaite, Borrowdale, Cumbria which is the wettest inhabited place in England - having an annual rainfall of 124 inches."

Today, Greenwich averages 21.94" of rainfall per annum, though admittedly some other LOndon weather stations show very slightly more rainfall, but still, not a lot seems to have changed.

https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-village-of-seathwaite-borrowdale-cumbria-the-wettest-inhabited-place-41771023.html

So, not a lot has changed really.

"It depends whose website you visit, but you can still find modern websites saying "The village of Seathwaite, Borrowdale, Cumbria which is the wettest inhabited place in England - having an annual rainfall of 124 inches."

Sep 1, 2020 at 5:43 PM Mark Hodgson

Seathwaite may hold the English record as far as the Guinness Book of Records is concerned, but Climate Scientists get to decided the records that they will recognise.

The Met Office relies on its Weather Stations, and the inland ones tend to be located on RAF Bases. For some reason peculiar to the Royal Navy and RAF, neither have many bases with weather stations in higher altitude mountainous areas.

What causes unprecedented fires in California? Unprecedented incompetence.
The whole post simply confirms what country bumpkins have known for thousands of years

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/09/13/biden-on-the-west-coast-fires-climate-change-poses-an-imminent-existential-threat-to-our-way-of-life/

"Building wind turbines won’t fix failed forest management policies, except maybe in the forests which are clear felled to make way for new wind farms.

Fire safety is not rocket science. Fires can only exist where there is something to burn. If you get rid of the flammable stuff in places where fires might pose a threat to life or property, you end up with a substantially reduced fire risk and safer forests, regardless of what happens to the local or global climate."

Yeah, let's just rake up a few million hectares of undergrowth.

Ironically the only feasible way of thinning the amount of fuel by an effective amount is by controlled burning, which obviously is not possible everywhere, and the window of opportunity (not to mention manpower needed) when prescribed burning can be done safely is being made smaller by - you guessed it - climate change.

Cal Fire has increased its annual controlled burning goals and two years ago added 10 crews dedicated entirely to fuel-reduction work, said Assistant Deputy Director Daniel Berlant. Prescribed fire falls within the purview of the crews, each made up of about 13 people.

Part of the difficulty is that California’s climate provides only limited periods of time when crews can safely light fires to manage forest health. The conditions must be dry enough for vegetation to burn, but not dry enough to risk a runaway blaze. Climate change is making the calculus more difficult, as the state’s fire season has grown by an estimated 75 days in recent decades.

“The window to do prescribed burning has narrowed,” Berlant said.

Source

California’s historic drought stretched from 2012 to 2017. In the Sierra, it left 147 million dead trees, according to aerial surveys. Now fires are exploding through those Ponderosa pine forests, roaring across the tree tops, creating their own weather.

“When you have severe drought that causes die back of woody vegetation, it leaves a legacy on the landscape that persists for many years after the drought is over,” Keeley said.

Add to that, firefighters put out fires for 100 years in many areas across California and the West. Before the Gold Rush, those forests, particularly in the Sierra, burned every decade or two from lightning strikes, thinning out dead wood and brush.

Last month, California and the U.S. Forest Service signed an agreement to thin up to 1 million acres a year using logging and controlled burns. But that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars a year, and experts estimate there are up to 20 million acres that need to be treated to restore natural conditions.

[…]

Labor Day Weekend brought one of California’s hottest periods ever observed. Temperatures hit 121 degrees in Los Angeles County, and 112 in Livermore, 111 in Napa, 112 in Redding, and 117 in Paso Robles, all records. Three weeks earlier, another heat wave sent the mercury soaring to levels nearly as high, with 105 degrees on the coast in Santa Cruz. Extreme heat means drier vegetation, and more difficulty putting out fires.

[…]

Climate change from human activity nearly doubled the area that burned in forest fires in the American West between 1984 and 2015, according to a study in 2016 by scientists at Columbia University and the University of Idaho.

“No matter how hard we try, the fires are going to keep getting bigger, and the reason is really clear,” said Park Williams, a climate scientist at Columbia’s Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, at the time.

“Climate is really running the show.”

Mercury News Five reasons why this year is so bad.

Changing demographic factors have undoubtedly played a substantial role in community exposure and vulnerability —including the expansion of urban and suburban developments into the 'wildland-urban interface'. In many forested regions that historically experienced frequent, low-intensity fire, a century-long legacy of fire suppression has promoted the accumulation of fuels, likely contributing to the size and intensity of some fires. Nevertheless, the broad geographic extent of increased burned area in California and the western United States (U.S.)—across geographies and biomes, and even when limited to lightning-caused fires —suggests that demographic and forest management factors alone are insufficient to explain the magnitude of the observed increase in wildfire extent over the past half-century.

[…]

A key consequence of climate change-driven aridification is that vegetation throughout the state is becoming increasingly flammable, setting the stage for extreme burning conditions given an ignition source and otherwise conducive weather conditions. Climate change can thus be viewed as a wildfire 'threat multiplier' amplifying natural and human risk factors that are already prevalent throughout California.

Climate change is increasing the likelihood of extreme autumn wildfire conditions across California

- Article in Environmental Research Letters last month.

Five year drought, heat waves, longer fire season, temperatures up by 1C and precipitation down 30% since 1980, climate change does not start fires but it sure makes them worse.

Back on thread topic ....https://www.noaa.gov/news/northern-hemisphere-just-had-its-hottest-summer-on-record

Sep 14, 2020 at 9:28 PM Phil Clarke
Standard crap from arse coverers. Even the BBC is reining back.

Sep 14, 2020 at 9:29 PM Phil Clarke
Hockey Teamsters are not reliable sources.

Abstract

California has experienced devastating autumn wildfires in recent years. These autumn wildfires have coincided with extreme fire weather conditions during periods of strong offshore winds coincident with unusually dry vegetation enabled by anomalously warm conditions and late onset of autumn precipitation. In this study, we quantify observed changes in the occurrence and magnitude of meteorological factors that enable extreme autumn wildfires in California, and use climate model simulations to ascertain whether these changes are attributable to human-caused climate change. We show that state-wide increases in autumn temperature (~1 °C) and decreases in autumn precipitation (~30%) over the past four decades have contributed to increases in aggregate fire weather indices (+20%). As a result, the observed frequency of autumn days with extreme (95th percentile) fire weather—which we show are preferentially associated with extreme autumn wildfires—has more than doubled in California since the early 1980s. We further find an increase in the climate model-estimated probability of these extreme autumn conditions since ~1950, including a long-term trend toward increased same-season co-occurrence of extreme fire weather conditions in northern and southern California. Our climate model analyses suggest that continued climate change will further amplify the number of days with extreme fire weather by the end of this century, though a pathway consistent with the UN Paris commitments would substantially curb that increase. Given the acute societal impacts of extreme autumn wildfires in recent years, our findings have critical relevance for ongoing efforts to manage wildfire risks in California and other regions.

Follow the money.

Actual predictions based on past evidence:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/10/15/noaa-winter-outlook-forecasts-cooler-north-warmer-south-with-ongoing-la-nina/

Anything that occurs will be blamed on CO2

From William Dalrymple's "The Anarchy - The Relentless Rise of the East India Company", p 215:

"The monsoon of 1768 brought only the lightest of rains to north-east India. Then the following summer, 1769, no rain fell at all. Instead, the intense heat continued unabated, the rivers dwindled, the tanks dried, and the pukhurs - the fish ponds at the centre of every Bengali village - turned first to sticky mud, then to dry earth, then to dust.

"The Company officials dotted around rural Bengal watched the deepening drought with concern, realising the effect it would have on their revenues; the rice lands had 'so harden'd for want of water that the ryotts [farmers] have found difficulty in ploughing and preparing it for the next crop' wrote one, and the fields of rice, 'parched by the heat of the sun are become like fields of straw'.

There then follows a lengthy footnote, which includes this:

"Bengal's prosperity was vulnerable and ecologically it was undergoing major changes. The flow of the rivers was moving eastward and cultivation was spreading eastward too. While the west of Bengal was drying out, which made it desperately vulnerable to famine if the rains failed, the east was flourishing. It escaped the 1769-70 famine, although...flooding was to devastate it later."

I think we can safely assume how this would be reported if these events were reported today.

From Ann Lingard's "The Fresh and the Salt - the Story of the Solway"

Page 110:

Some time between August 1301 and April 1304 there was a mighty storm and the port and part of the hamlet of Skinburness was washed away....As you drive east from Skinburness towards Newton Arlosh, for some of the way the road runs between the marsh and a high grassy bank, the medieval sea dyke, built to protect against further inundation

Page 137:

...the Solway Moss to the north east of Gretna now barely exists, partly because of peat-harvesting and partly due to a massive 'bog-burst' in November 1771. Back then, after 'three days' rain of unusual violence', the skin of the bog was unable to hold more water and ruptured. Thomas Pennant visited it a year later and head the story: 'About three hundred acres of the moss were thus discharged, and above four hundred of land covered; the houses either overthrown or filled to their roofs; and the hedges overwhelmed...

Page 175:

It was the Solway's wild waves that eventually finished off the port [of Parton] and the export business. In February 1796 a tremendous storm thrashed the west coast of Britain, and Parton's port was totally destroyed, its sandstone quay swept away, the bay's sandbanks and shingle shifted and redistributed.

If any of those events happened now, I'm pretty confident they'd be described as unparalleled and attributed to "the climate crisis", despite the fact that the most recent of those 3 events occurred 230 years ago, before man-made GHGs were really beginning to rise at all.

Mark H: You are surely right that any such storm today would get "the treatment" by the media.
Those quotes reminded me of a reference to an historic storm when there was all the trouble in the Somerset Levels. Daniel Defoe wrote an account:
"On the evening of 26th November 1703, a cyclone from the north Atlantic hammered into southern Britain at over seventy miles an hour, claiming the lives of over 8,000 people. Eyewitnesses reported seeing cows left stranded in the branches of trees and windmills ablaze from the friction of their whirling sails."
Over 300 years ago the population must have been a fraction of today's so that loss of life is probably equivalent to 70 - 80,000 now.....

A genuine unprecedented weather event in modern times affected the Nazca Lines area of Peru when in 2014 flooding and mudslides occurred. The Nazca Lines occur on a windless and arid plateau and were constructed sometime between 500BC and 500AD. The lines themselves were created by removing pebbles covered in dark desert varnish to expose unmarked soil beneath which contains light-coloured lime. What is remarkable when looking at aerial photographs is that the lines cut across drainage (= waddles) but occasionally the stream courses have removed the lines. The majority of temporary stream courses are therefore older than the lines and little or no water has flowed along them. In contrast, water has flowed down some of the main water courses after the lines were constructed and removed small parts of the lines.
The Lines suffered little damage in 2014 (after their 1500+ year old drought) although the transAmerica Highway did. This has not prevented various people expressing concern that unprecedented climate change will destroy this protected area.

Interestingly, the Lines suffered most damage in 2014 after a Greenpeace demonstration.

Correction. Flooding occurred at Nazca in 2007. The Greenpiece demo took place in 2014. Most of the drainage occurred before perhaps 2500 years ago, but whether during the earlier Holocene or even earlier during a glacial episode is not known, but definitely occurred during a wetter climatic episode. The I wanted to use a relatively new technique to date when the sediment in the waddies was last moved. The Peruvian government was not interested. The age of the Lines is still not better defined.

This isn't a note of extreme weather events in the past, but is a bit of fun of the compare and contrast variety. It seems to demonstrate that when we have a run of cool, wet summers, suddenly that's what we can expect for the foreseeable future, because of climate change. But when it turns hot and dry in the summer, oh hang on, that's what we can expect and it's because of climate change.

First up Fiona Harvey in the Guardian on 8th August 2012:

The shape of British summers to come?
It's been a dull, damp few months and some scientists think we need to get used to it. Melting ice in Greenland could be bringing permanent changes to our climate

For scientists at the Met Office's world-renowned Hadley research centre in Exeter, the question was not just how fast Greenland was melting, but something much trickier. They have been crunching through years of data from dozens of satellites, trying to establish whether the conditions in the Arctic circle are related to the record-breaking washout of a summer in the UK.

The news could be disconcerting for fans of the British summer. Because when it comes to global warming, we can forget the jolly predictions of Jeremy Clarkson and his ilk of a Mediterranean climate in which we lounge among the olive groves of Yorkshire sipping a fine Scottish champagne. The truth is likely to be much duller, and much nastier – and we have already had a taste of it. "We will see lots more floods, droughts, such as we've had this year in the UK," says Peter Stott, leader of the climate change monitoring and attribution team at the Met Office. "Climate change is not a nice slow progression where the global climate warms by a few degrees. It means a much greater variability, far more extremes of weather."

A series of unusually wet and cold summers has afflicted the UK for several years. Remember the devastating floods of 2007, when some areas received double their normal rainfall for June? Or the predictions of a "barbecue summer" in 2009 that backfired badly on the Met Office as the (correctly anticipated) high temperatures were accompanied by heavy clouds and rainstorms? The impression that many Britons have had that summer weather has been getting worse in recent years is borne out by the data – five out of the last six years (2007-2012), have shown below-average sunshine from June to August, and in some cases well below average. All have had above-average rainfall – in some cases more than 50% above the long-term average. "It is not just a perception – we have had a run of relatively poor summers," says Stott.

This year has been the worst so far. April was the wettest on record, and so was the period from April to June. The sun was missing too – June was the second dullest recorded. Hopes that August might bring more settled weather were dashed when the first few days brought floods as far apart as Scotland and Somerset, forcing scores of people from their homes. The unseasonally wet and miserable summer may have failed to dampen the Olympic spirit but it has brought misery to thousands....

...For the British Isles, the melting Arctic could hold the key to whether the weather is changing under human impacts. Recent poor summers have been strongly linked by scientists to a change in the usual position of the jet stream, a weather system that normally lies in high latitudes during the northern hemisphere summer.

Earlier this year, two US scientists published a paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, suggesting that the meandering of the jet stream could be linked to the reduction in sea ice. Edward Hanna, reader in climate science at the University of Sheffield, who is taking part in similar research, explains: "The last six summers since 2007, while often rather cool and wet over the UK, have brought Greenland unusually high air pressure, mild southerly winds, record-breaking temperatures and melting of the land ice." The link, he believes, is that Arctic sea-ice losses and the release of heat over the Arctic Ocean have tended to weaken the jet stream and make it more meandering. This has brought more low pressures over Britain, less stable conditions, more cloud cover and rain-bearing weather systems from the Atlantic.

This year, the jet stream moved much more than usual, passing south of the UK. It also persisted in this position for an unusually long time. If this pushing of the jet stream southward is indeed linked to less sea ice over the Arctic circle, as Hanna suspects, then the signs are that we will see many more of these wet summers in future....

Followed by the BBC on 3rd February 2020:

Dry, hot summers could become 'common' in Scotland

Scotland should prepare for more dry, hot summers with temperatures of about 30C, according to researchers.

They say that unless CO2 emissions are cut "very drastically" across the world, record-breaking summers such as 2018 could become "quite common".

That summer was unusually hot, with a near record high of 31.9C recorded at Bishopton in Renfrewshire.

Academics say the country should plan how to deal with more frequent high temperatures caused by climate change.

The report by researchers from Edinburgh and Oxford universities and Met Office staff analyses UK climate projections.

They suggest there is a substantial increase in the likelihood of temperatures reaching 2018's levels between now and 2050....

...Human influences had made the heatwave more likely, they added, saying that their findings indicated the need to start sustainable long-term planning now to deal with heatwaves in Scotland.

Well, it's one or the other - cool and wet or hot and dry, but whatever it is, it's our fault and they predicted it and it's entirely consistent with whatever they think.

From Andrew Roberts' "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples", p43:

...life was tough in Australia, large parts of which had suffered an extraordinary drought ever since the mid-1890s. Kimberley in Western Australia recorded the worst drought for sixteen years, and 1901 was the driest year on record for Victoria too, with major bush fires, falling wheat yields and consequential rising bankruptcies....

And p45:

Although the early years of nationhood were hard on the Aborigines of Victoria, they were hardly easy for any Australians in a land that was then being blighted by almost freak weather conditions.

From Andrew Roberts' "A History of the English-Speaking Peoples", p282:

Speaking of the USA during the 1930s "dust bowl" years:

Within the country, huge population shifts were evident in the [1940] census. Never before in American history had more than three states shown an overall loss in population between censuses, yet in 1940 this was the case in the drought-stricken Great Plains states of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma. A great exodus from the Dust Bowl, reaching all the way from Canada down to Texas, was evident. In all, 587 counties in Montana, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas lost a total of 835,978 people, which corresponded to 229 people moving out every day for a decade.

Were they climate refugees?

From "Empress Dowager Cixi" by Jung Chang, p124:

"For three years...between 1867 and1878, nearly half the Chinese provinces and up to 200 million people were hit by floods, drought and swarms of locusts - the biggest succession of natural calamities in more than 200 years and one of the worst in recorded Chinese history. Millions died of famine and disease, especially typhus."

P140: "In...1888, when the country was struck by floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters...".

Imagine what the Guardian and the BBC would make of it if those things happened today. Climate chaos! It's all our fault! Net zero now!

Oops, typo - that should have read "between 1876 and 1878". Sorry.