British newspaper demands it simply stop raining

[Hum]

LONDON (AP) ? Just. Stop. Raining.

That was the unusual plea published in an editorial in The Times of London on Saturday, a measure of Britons' growing frustration with months of miserable weather.

"Let us make our position crystal clear: We are against this weather," the venerable newspaper wrote in an unsigned opinion piece. "It must stop raining, and soon."

The U.K. is slogging through some of the wettest conditions in recent history. Nearly every day seems to bring showers, sprinkles, drizzles, or downpours. On Saturday alone, England's Environment Agency registered some 75 flood alerts and warnings across the country, including the west England county of Shropshire, where fire and rescue officials received an anguished phone call from a woman who found herself waist-deep in water overnight.

Area manager Martin Timmis said he was seeing flash floods almost every week as storms dumped more water on the already-saturated ground of a country not unused to wet weather.

"What's unprecedented is that this is becoming a regular occurrence," he said in a telephone interview. "The rain comes down and it's got nowhere to go."

The soggy scenario has been repeated around the U.K., with summer music festivals washed out, sporting events soaked, and spirits dampened by the non-stop precipitation. Earlier this month the MFEST music festival in the English city of Leeds ? where The Human League, Texas, Bob Geldof and Cher Lloyd were all booked to perform ? was canceled due to the foul weather.

This week the Hit Factory Live, scheduled to feature pop princess Kylie Minogue, was canceled after London's Hyde Park was turned into a mucky quagmire.

Last week torrential downpours forced organizers to turn fans away from qualifying rounds of the British Grand Prix in Silverstone. Rain also delayed play and forced the roof to close at Sunday's Wimbledon tennis final, which saw Andy Murray lose out to Roger Federer as disappointed fans camped out in the mud outside Centre Court.

Britain's Meteorological Office says the jet stream, the narrow band of fast-moving wind which flows west to east across the Atlantic, may be in part to blame for the run of foul weather. In a blog post the weather service explained that the jet stream generally resides north of Britain during the summer months, guiding unsettled weather systems away from the country. This year, however, the jet stream has been stubbornly stuck to the country's south, "guiding those systems straight to us" and leading to the wettest June on record.

In its editorial, The Times lamented that the country was full of discounted swimwear, unsold garden furniture, and unused barbecues. It even said that the country's potato harvest has been affected ? pushing up the price of chips ? or fries, to Americans.

"When the proverbial cheapness of chips comes under threat, The Times says enough is enough," the editorial said.

"The British climate is supposed to be unpredictable," it continued. "At the moment, it is anything but. If sustained sunshine is too much to ask for, most of us would settle for a little bit of fickle."

Met Office spokeswoman Sarah Holland was apologetic, saying in an email that while the weather was disappointing, "unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it."

Holland said that "some more pleasant conditions" were forecast over the next month, when the Olympic Games get underway, although there was little sign of that in London on Saturday, where the skies were a threatening whitish grey.

Holland added that Sunday "will be a much brighter and sunnier day than today," but then she added, "with only light showers at times."

source

[neufuse Veteran]

uh send that rain to the midwest and east coast of the USA.... we haven't had a good long rain in a month or longer depending where you are...

[Dotdot]

Its been a bit pants tbh, this should kind of be our summer time despite several external factors (global warming, the uk being in 30yr warming period, jet streams and weather patterns), and all we have had so far is rain, rain and oh yeh rain. Which would be fine after 7months of winter, if it wasnt for the fact that rain is our general default winter/autumn/spring day.

Those 4-6 weeks of actual sunny days we get we need for vitamin D or else we all turn grey and die.....

[Hum]

PA got a good all night rain Friday. :D

I went outside with a bar of soap ....

[Dotdot]

PA got a good all night rain Friday. :D

I went outside with a bar of soap ....

Outside temp of greater than 10c?

[torrentthief]

probably the chemtrails and haarp.

[McKay]

On the BBC it said because the Gulf Stream has shifted slightly, which means the UK is now getting the rubbish side, with all the moisture and rain, and the US is having the Heatwave.

[jakem1]

Those 4-6 weeks of actual sunny days we get we need for vitamin D or else we all turn grey and die.....

Don't forget rickets for those of you up north :laugh:

[simplezz]

It's been nice here. Sunny today and cool tonight. Perfect weather for me.

[Inklin]

This summer has been ridiculous even by UK standards. Except for the odd few warm days we have not even touched 30c this summer, our hottest day was a few weeks ago when it hit 29c, but again that was one day. The rest of the time it has been almost endless rain. This afternoon was like a Monsoon. I think most people are sick of it, we just want a proper summer because it'll be winter again before we know it!

[PsYcHoKiLLa]

Welcome to global warming, everything is happening exactly as we were warned it would.

The polar ice caps melt, that means there are millions of tons more water in the environment from the melted ice, anyone who studied weather at school knows it happens like this...

The sea is warmed by the sun, this causes steam/vapour which rises up above the oceans causing cloud formation, these clouds pass over to the land where they cool down and the water inside is dropped as rain, the rain flows (eventually) into the rivers, the rivers flow into the seas and the whole cycle begins again.

More water added into the cycle means more water flowing through the cycle means more rain and higher oceans.

This planet is controlled by cyclic behaviours like this. There has been an increase in the height of the oceans all over the world, lower island habitats are disappearing and yet the governments of the world continue to ignore the warnings and let the damage go on unabated.

That's what choosing greed and apathy does.

[Hum]

Outside temp of greater than 10c?

The temp started out in the high 70's F --- I imagine it dropped to around 65 F.

[mdtaUK]

I have enjoyed the summer so far, free from sweaty ball soup, feeling ill with the hot weather, and with the Olympics, all the cool weather will make life a little easier for the athletes surely?

[Ambroos]

probably the chemtrails and haarp.

:dontgetit:

[tiagosilva29]

I'd trade our Summer for yours. ****ing drought, man.

[spenser.d]

Last night was the first time it rained in Madison since memorial day so send some more of that here!

[Original Poster]

Its been a bit pants tbh, this should kind of be our summer time despite several external factors (global warming, the uk being in 30yr warming period, jet streams and weather patterns), and all we have had so far is rain, rain and oh yeh rain. Which would be fine after 7months of winter, if it wasnt for the fact that rain is our general default winter/autumn/spring day.

Those 4-6 weeks of actual sunny days we get we need for vitamin D or else we all turn grey and die.....

global warming does not exist !! (if you are meaning it in the its all our fault way)(

[Detection]

Never happy, whining about hosepipe bans, now we have some water again they don't want it

[bbfc_uk]

I am so sick of this weather. I admit that i'm usually the first to complain when its baking hot, but this is taking the ****.

I don't mind it being warm, especially when its blue skies and its not clammy, but when its really humid and wet, it's just unbearable! You have to put a raincoat on because it's raining (obviously) but it's still warm outside!

Please. Stop. Raining. That. Is. All.

[Detection]

Maybe I'm strange but I prefer wild / extreme weather, I would be in my element (pun intended) living somewhere with constant storms

So long as there was things in place to prevent damage to homes anyway, I'd get a bit sick of a waterlogged house

[Arachno 1D]

Welcome to global warming, everything is happening exactly as we were warned it would.

IPCC has got it all wrong, say boffins

By Lewis Page

Posted 10th July 2012 11:44 GMT

Americans sweltering in the recent record-breaking heatwave may not believe it - but it seems that our ancestors suffered through much hotter summers in times gone by, several of them within the last 2,000 years.

Phew, what a scorcher, Marcus. Let's get in the frigidarium

A new study measuring temperatures over the past two millennia has concluded that in fact the temperatures seen in the last decade are far from being the hottest in history.

A large team of scientists making a comprehensive study of data from tree rings say that in fact global temperatures have been on a falling trend for the past 2,000 years and they have often been noticeably higher than they are today - despite the absence of any significant amounts of human-released carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back then.

"We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Professor-Doktor Jan Esper of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universit?t Mainz, one of the scientists leading the study. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy."

They certainly are, as it is a central plank of climate policy worldwide that the current temperatures are the highest ever seen for many millennia, and that this results from rising levels of atmospheric CO₂ emitted by human activities such as industry, transport etc.

If it is the case that actually the climate has often been warmer without any significant CO₂ emissions having taken place - suggesting that CO₂ emissions simply aren't that important - the case for huge efforts to cut those emissions largely disappears.

Needless to say, prominent alarmist scientists and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have not taken this view, arguing instead that the well-documented Roman and medieval warm periods may have taken place but either weren't very warm or only happened in limited regions (though this latter idea has lately been seriously undermined by research in Antarctica).

In the IPCC view, the planet was cooler during Roman times and the medieval warm spell. Overall the temperature is headed up - perhaps wildly up, according to the famous/infamous "hockey stick" graph.

The new study indicates that that's quite wrong, with the current warming less serious than the Romans and others since have seen - and the overall trend actually down by a noticeable 0.3?C per millennium, which the scientists believe is probably down to gradual long-term shifts in the position of the Sun and the Earth's path around it.

"This figure we calculated may not seem particularly significant," says Esper. "However, it is also not negligible when compared to global warming, which up to now has been less than 1?C. Our results suggest that the large-scale climate reconstruction shown by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimate this long-term cooling trend over the past few millennia."

According to the scientists' new paper, published in hefty climate journal Nature Climate Change, the cooling effect of orbital shifting on the climate has been up to four times as powerful as anthropogenic (human-caused) warming pressures.

[Tom]

Seconded.

[Growled Member]

I thought it always rained in England.

[Hum]

It's raining here now -- praise Allah.

[ozgeek]

We been having a wet winter down here in Queensland. When I visited Townsville, it was pouring like crazy and this is in the middle of winter. Though I do know townsville and northern queensland is known for it's wet tropical weather. When we came home back to central Queensland last week, it was still raining until today when finally a sunny day but with it brough cold chills.