Britain is heading for drought - and it is an entirely man-made disaster
Philip Johnston
THE TELEGRAPH
Tue, July 4, 2023
An aerial view of low water levels at Woodhead Reservoir which is operated by United Utilities
Last month was the hottest June on record, we are told, which comes as a surprise to those of us in the South East who shivered in unusually keen easterly winds for the first week or so.
In fact it was not the hottest June ever, in England at least. The Met Office records go back to 1884, but the Hadley Centre’s Central England Temperature (CET) series, which predates them, made June 1846 hotter with a mean temperature of 18.2C, more than one degree celsius above last month.
The Junes of 1676, 1762, 1798, 1826 and 1976 were all nearly as hot or hotter in the CET rankings. Apart from possibly 1976, none could be attributed to carbon emissions caused by industrialisation.
Warm Junes have been rare over the past 100 years and yet they have recently become more common, which is why meteorologists say global warming is to blame. A few hot months scattered across the centuries are just the vagaries of the weather; a succession suggests a changing climate.
Indeed, this summer might be particularly warm because sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic and around the British Isles are unusually high. Last month was also dominated by high pressure, with long spells of settled, dry weather.
Of course, these could be anomalies, not trends, but the Met Office inevitably detected the “fingerprint of climate change” in the June figures. To most of us, a hotter, sunnier and drier June is a pleasant early summer surprise; to the weather boffins, it is the harbinger of impending calamity.
“Alongside natural variability, the background warming of the Earth’s atmosphere due to human-induced climate change has driven up the possibility of reaching record high temperatures,” the Met Office said. It also pointed out that the UK’s 10 warmest years since 1884 have happened in the last two decades.
The response of the politicians to this trend is hubristic. They hope to turn down the global thermostat by cutting back on carbon emissions and heading hell-for-leather towards net zero. Taking people with them, however, is proving hard, despite the gloom-mongering. Resistance to the hair-shirt approach and eye-watering expense necessary to cut emissions even by a fraction is growing.
But there is another approach, or rather a complementary one, which is to prepare for the consequences of climate change. Foremost among these is drought. Amid the hoo-ha about the economic difficulties facing the privatised water companies, the most important issue is how to underpin the resilience of supply. Rainfall in June was only 68 per cent of the annual average and this is a pattern of recent years.
Even if it rains for weeks on end, it is seemingly never enough to replenish reservoirs and fill up the aquifers. Things are not too bad at the moment. As of June 20, total reservoir stocks in England were 83 per cent of capacity, though some areas, notably and unusually the South West, are below that. Hosepipe bans are in force already in Devon, Cornwall, Sussex and Kent and more will follow.
The National Drought Group, which met last week to review the position, said that by 2050 England will need four billion additional litres of water per day to meet demand. “Action on water resilience must be taken now to determine how these significant needs will be met,” the group‘s report concluded.
So what is happening? The Government published a Plan for Water in April which had a lot to say about regulating water quality, tackling sewage and removing plastics, but not much about supply.
It called for £1.6 billion extra to be spent on new infrastructure, but this is for the water companies to provide and, as we know, they are facing financial pressures, even bankruptcy. There is now talk of renationalisation, at least of Thames Water, but how would that help if governments continue to ignore the needs of the industry because they are spending so much on health and welfare?
After all, the reason water was privatised was to attract new investment because the state was not doing it itself and the system was falling apart.
Water is something that all politicians think will eventually drop out of the sky in Britain so they don’t really need to worry about supply. They believe nature will provide, forgetting that the areas with the biggest – and growing – populations are far drier than many people appreciate.
Rainfall levels in London and the Home Counties are among the lowest in Europe. In some years, the annual total in Essex is below that of Jerusalem. So, where are the desalination plants? There is one in east London. Opened in 2010, It was supposed to provide up to 150 million litres of drinking water each day – enough for 900,000 Londoners – but has only operated on three occasions at two-thirds of its planned capacity. We need half a dozen more working properly.
Where are the new storage facilities? Attempts to construct a new super-reservoir near Abingdon, first proposed in 2006, have foundered amid planning hold-ups, and arguments about design and the extraction of water from the Thames. Others are planned over the next 15 years, but where is the money to come from to build them?
One answer is to transfer water from areas where it is plentiful to the South East where it is most needed. This is hardly a new idea. The Chinese built a water grid 2,000 years ago and the Romans constructed a 30-mile aqueduct just to supply the people of Nimes with water for their ornamental fountains.
We’ve done it here, too. North Wales reservoirs were built to supply the Victorian boom cities of Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. A water grid using pipelines and canals to link the Severn and the Thames has always been scorned as too expensive and impractical, even though the engineering is perfectly possible. A feasibility study commissioned by three water companies says an interconnector transferring up to 500 million litres a day during drought events can be completed by 2033. This could be expanded eventually to include other waterways.
The importance of ensuring water is available is obvious and a grid would be a lot cheaper than HS2. But if the water companies are going bust, who is going to build it?
Tue, July 4, 2023
An aerial view of low water levels at Woodhead Reservoir which is operated by United Utilities
Last month was the hottest June on record, we are told, which comes as a surprise to those of us in the South East who shivered in unusually keen easterly winds for the first week or so.
In fact it was not the hottest June ever, in England at least. The Met Office records go back to 1884, but the Hadley Centre’s Central England Temperature (CET) series, which predates them, made June 1846 hotter with a mean temperature of 18.2C, more than one degree celsius above last month.
The Junes of 1676, 1762, 1798, 1826 and 1976 were all nearly as hot or hotter in the CET rankings. Apart from possibly 1976, none could be attributed to carbon emissions caused by industrialisation.
Warm Junes have been rare over the past 100 years and yet they have recently become more common, which is why meteorologists say global warming is to blame. A few hot months scattered across the centuries are just the vagaries of the weather; a succession suggests a changing climate.
Indeed, this summer might be particularly warm because sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic and around the British Isles are unusually high. Last month was also dominated by high pressure, with long spells of settled, dry weather.
Of course, these could be anomalies, not trends, but the Met Office inevitably detected the “fingerprint of climate change” in the June figures. To most of us, a hotter, sunnier and drier June is a pleasant early summer surprise; to the weather boffins, it is the harbinger of impending calamity.
“Alongside natural variability, the background warming of the Earth’s atmosphere due to human-induced climate change has driven up the possibility of reaching record high temperatures,” the Met Office said. It also pointed out that the UK’s 10 warmest years since 1884 have happened in the last two decades.
The response of the politicians to this trend is hubristic. They hope to turn down the global thermostat by cutting back on carbon emissions and heading hell-for-leather towards net zero. Taking people with them, however, is proving hard, despite the gloom-mongering. Resistance to the hair-shirt approach and eye-watering expense necessary to cut emissions even by a fraction is growing.
But there is another approach, or rather a complementary one, which is to prepare for the consequences of climate change. Foremost among these is drought. Amid the hoo-ha about the economic difficulties facing the privatised water companies, the most important issue is how to underpin the resilience of supply. Rainfall in June was only 68 per cent of the annual average and this is a pattern of recent years.
Even if it rains for weeks on end, it is seemingly never enough to replenish reservoirs and fill up the aquifers. Things are not too bad at the moment. As of June 20, total reservoir stocks in England were 83 per cent of capacity, though some areas, notably and unusually the South West, are below that. Hosepipe bans are in force already in Devon, Cornwall, Sussex and Kent and more will follow.
The National Drought Group, which met last week to review the position, said that by 2050 England will need four billion additional litres of water per day to meet demand. “Action on water resilience must be taken now to determine how these significant needs will be met,” the group‘s report concluded.
So what is happening? The Government published a Plan for Water in April which had a lot to say about regulating water quality, tackling sewage and removing plastics, but not much about supply.
It called for £1.6 billion extra to be spent on new infrastructure, but this is for the water companies to provide and, as we know, they are facing financial pressures, even bankruptcy. There is now talk of renationalisation, at least of Thames Water, but how would that help if governments continue to ignore the needs of the industry because they are spending so much on health and welfare?
After all, the reason water was privatised was to attract new investment because the state was not doing it itself and the system was falling apart.
Water is something that all politicians think will eventually drop out of the sky in Britain so they don’t really need to worry about supply. They believe nature will provide, forgetting that the areas with the biggest – and growing – populations are far drier than many people appreciate.
Rainfall levels in London and the Home Counties are among the lowest in Europe. In some years, the annual total in Essex is below that of Jerusalem. So, where are the desalination plants? There is one in east London. Opened in 2010, It was supposed to provide up to 150 million litres of drinking water each day – enough for 900,000 Londoners – but has only operated on three occasions at two-thirds of its planned capacity. We need half a dozen more working properly.
Where are the new storage facilities? Attempts to construct a new super-reservoir near Abingdon, first proposed in 2006, have foundered amid planning hold-ups, and arguments about design and the extraction of water from the Thames. Others are planned over the next 15 years, but where is the money to come from to build them?
One answer is to transfer water from areas where it is plentiful to the South East where it is most needed. This is hardly a new idea. The Chinese built a water grid 2,000 years ago and the Romans constructed a 30-mile aqueduct just to supply the people of Nimes with water for their ornamental fountains.
We’ve done it here, too. North Wales reservoirs were built to supply the Victorian boom cities of Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham. A water grid using pipelines and canals to link the Severn and the Thames has always been scorned as too expensive and impractical, even though the engineering is perfectly possible. A feasibility study commissioned by three water companies says an interconnector transferring up to 500 million litres a day during drought events can be completed by 2033. This could be expanded eventually to include other waterways.
The importance of ensuring water is available is obvious and a grid would be a lot cheaper than HS2. But if the water companies are going bust, who is going to build it?
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