Heavy Rains Flood U.K., Ireland

(AP)  Updated at 4:09 p.m. EST

Raging floods engulfed northern England's picturesque Lake District on Friday following the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in Britain, killing a police officer and trapping dozens in their swamped homes.

Military helicopters winched dozens of people to safety and emergency workers in bright orange inflatable boats rescued scores more after an unprecedented deluge.

British soldiers conducted house-to-house searches for those trapped by floods as deep as 8 feet (2.5 metres). Troops also dropped down on lines from Royal Air Force helicopters, breaking through rooftops to pluck people to safety.

Constable Bill Barker, 44, died as he joined rescue attempts, swept into the surging waters when a major bridge collapsed. Emergency services said more than 200 people were rescued in the hardest-hit town, Cockermouth and about 1,000 homes were flooded.

"It has devastated the town," said Michael Dunn, manager of the Bitter End pub in Cockermouth. "There is a lot of properties in Main Street, private shops, that have had their windows smashed in by the force of the water and by debris in the water.

"There were cars floating down the street. It will be a long time before Cockermouth recovers from this."

The rain stopped and floodwaters began to ease early Friday, giving rescuers a chance to reach trapped people by boat. Debris swirled around the boats as they pulled people to safety.

Tony Walker, whose house faces Cockermouth's main street, told BBC radio that he was on the top floor and the water on the ground floor was chest high.

"I've had better mornings," Walker said. "I've been here all night and I've run out of water now, so I'm thinking of making a break for it, really. The water is still pretty deep, it's going down, but at this rate it's going to be hours before it's clear."


Forecasters said the rainfall was unprecedented. The Environment Agency recorded 12.3 inches of rain in 24 hours in one spot - one of the wettest days ever recorded in England.

"It looks like a very historical event," said Julian Mayes, a forecaster with MeteoGroup UK.

Environment Secretary Hilary Benn told the BBC that flood defences were meant to withstand a one-in-100-years flood - but could not cope with the volume of water.

"What we dealt with last night was probably more like one-in-a-1,000, so even the very best defenses, if you have such quantities of rain in such a short space of time, can be over-topped," Benn said.

In a message to local officials, Queen Elizabeth II said she was "deeply concerned and saddened by the dreadful flooding across Britain." British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Barker "was a very heroic, very brave man."

Britain's Met Office said a record 12.3 inches (314.4 millimeter) of rain fell in 24 hours in the area — the heaviest rainfall ever recorded in the U.K.

Cockermouth, a market town 330 miles (530 kilometres) northwest of London, lies at the junction of the Cocker and Derwent rivers and is known as the birthplace of poet William Wordsworth. The flood was "of biblical proportions," local House of Commons lawmaker Tony Cunningham said.

Heavy rain and gales also brought widespread flooding to Ireland, as more than 3 feet (1 metre) of water shut down the centre of the country's second-largest city, Cork, and more than a dozen towns and villages. The Irish army was used to rescue the stranded from waist-deep floodwaters and a helicopter winched to safety a County Galway family of five, including the 87-year-old grandmother.

Floods caused transport chaos along Ireland's western coast. At the Lake Hotel, on the shores of the fabled Killarney Lakes in County Kerry, about 170 guests at the Victorian period building were evacuated by tractor, as staff carried period furniture upstairs.

Irish weather forecasting service Met Eireann said parts of southern and western Ireland suffered their most intense and sustained rainfall in 30 years.

[91786]

In case you believe the heavy rains were caused by global warming, the earth has been cooling since 1997. Also, rain is caused by cooling, not warming. Probably the heaviest rains on record in that area would be found @ 1300AD when the climate suddenly began cooling which was the beginning of the Little Ice Age, after a 400 period of warmer weather 900AD-1300AD. Our temperature changes are the Earth getting back to normal for awhile.

[debinok1]

Excerpt from Investors Business Daily:

In an article titled, "Climatologists Baffled By Global Warming Time-Out," author Gerald Traufetter leads off with the observation: "Climatologists are baffled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years." They better figure it out, Der Spiegel warns, because "billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations."

We are told in sad tones that "not much is happening with global warming at the moment" and that "it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year." But how can it be that the earth isn't following all those computer models? Is the earth goddess Gaia herself a climate change "denier"?

The article gloomily notes that a few weeks ago Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research pointed out that the earth had in fact only warmed 0.07 degree Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degree Celsius predicted by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

An even more inconvenient truth, according to the British experts, is that when their figures are adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Nino and La Nina, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degree Celsius. No, that's not a typo.

As if that weren't enough, it seems hackers broke into the computer network run by the Hadley Climate Research Unit, removing 61 megabytes of e-mails and data.

While we don't condone theft, the hacked data and e-mails have spilled onto the Web and reveal something startling: The scientists at Hadley, one of the world's leading climate change study centers, aren't scientifically objective at all.

[91786]

Now we finally have the Truth: Hackers broke into the servers at Britian's climate research center and leaked years worth of e-mail messages onto the Web, including one with a mysterious reference to a plan to "hide the decline" in data about temperatures.

University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (commonly called Hadley CRU), which has acknowledged the leak of 61MB of confidential data.

The leaked data is a "smoking gun," evidence of collusion among climatologists and manipulation of data to support the widely held view that climate change is caused by the actions of mankind. The files were released on a Russian web server by a poster calling himself "FOIA."

Phil Jones, the head of the Hadley CRU, confirmed that the leaked data is real. "It was a hacker. We were aware of this about three or four days ago," he told the magazine, noting that the center has yet to contact the police about the data breach. When asked about the controversial "hide the decline" comment from an e-mail he wrote in 1999. He told the magazine that there was no intention to mislead, but he had "no idea" what he meant by those words. "That was an e-mail from ten years ago. Can you remember the exact context of what you wrote ten years ago?" he said.

The Telegraph newspaper in London just posted some of the more scathing excerpts from these emails, which points to manipulation of evidence and private doubts about the reality of global warming.

One e-mail from the hacked files clearly describes how to squeeze dissenting scientists from the peer review process:
"I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board?What do others think?"

[91786]

More on the Global Warming Scientists FRAUD: 1079 emails and 72 documents disclosed No one could write that many in 4 days and the scientist in charge admits of the data theft. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be ?the greatest in modern science?. These emails were exchanged globally over years by the most prominent scientists pushing Global Warming Theory. Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.

Manipulation of evidence:
I?ve just completed Mike?s trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith?s to hide the decline.
Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:
The fact is that we can?t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can?t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
Suppression of evidence:
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
Keith will do likewise. He?s not in at the moment ? minor family crisis.
Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don?t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:
Next time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I?ll be tempted to beat the crap out of him. Very tempted.
Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):
Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back?I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to ?contain? the putative ?MWP?, even if we don?t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back?.
Stopping Peer-Review of their findings:
This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the ?peer-reviewed literature?. Obviously, they found a solution to that?take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering ?Climate Research? as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board?What do others think??
?I will be emailing the journal to tell them I?m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.??It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I?ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !?

[gilmomuff]

Well, maybe HAARP is helping Global warming a bit ?

If you have followed HAARP for the least 30 odd years,
you probably know that they have fooled around quite a
bit with the weather, and could -hopefully- drop an
earthquake or a bit of rain directly on yourt area code
but they may have maybe overdone it a tiny bit in the UK ?

Errors do happen, yes ?

Who know, heu ? Haarp knows !

[erasmus111]

"Bitter End pub in Cockermouth" ???

They have the strangest names.

[Empire-George]

by BeckieBest November 20, 2009 8:55 AM EST
Global warming will bring more freak weather patterns like this causing trillions in damages.
________________

Hey Re-Re.....flooding has been occuring long before Gore decided to ack like God and pretend he could stop the planet's climate from changing, by having you drive a Prius.

It's too cold = global warming, flooding=global warming, beckie is a partisan hack=global warming, need more taxes=global warming, freezing, chilly, cold = global warming.....too cold, call it "climate change"

[bill0bob]

Anyone who denies the fact that the mean global temperature has been increasing over tha past several years, and that this is definitely increased further by the cr@ppola human beings have been putting into the atmosphere is an imbecile.

Empire-George has sided with the imbeciles.

[Empire-George]

Hackers break into servers of a major British climate change research facility and purportedly uncover e-mails urging scientists to 'hide the decline' of temperatures, manipulate data and silence skeptics.

[Wookiee-1138]

A place called Cockermouth certainly deserves to be preserved.

[BeckieBest]

Global warming will bring more freak weather patterns like this causing trillions in damages.