Bishop Hill Accuracy and balance out of the window at the Institute of Civil Engineers
Jun 8, 2012 Climate: WG2 The Institution of Civil Engineers has just released a report on UK water security in the 21st century, a splendid opportunity to sound the global warming alarm bell if ever there was one (H/T Peter).
I bet you can't guess what they had to say about climate change.
You can? Well, alright, yes, you probably can.
Take this for example:
By the 2050s, summer river flows may reduce by 35% in the driest parts of England and by 15% for the wetter river basin regions in Scotland. This will put severe pressure on current abstractions of water.
A bit odd that one, since the IPCC has predicted increased precipitation for this part of the world. However, let's follow things through. The citation for this claim is to a report by Defra, the Climate Change Risk Assessment for the water sector. Here's the relevant paragraph:
A large number of national assessments and catchment studies indicate that winter river flows are likely to increase across the UK and summer flows are likely to decrease due to climate change (e.g. Christierson et al., 2011; Lopez et al., 2009; New et al., 2007; UKWIR, 2007; Wilby et al., 2006). However, there is a wide range of results and in the near term (2020s) and medium term (2050s) changes in average seasonal flows may be positive or negative and may also vary significantly across the UK. The CCRA analysis indicates that by the 2050s, summer river flows (characterised by the Q95 flow that is exceeded 95% of the time) may reduce by 35% (-7 to -54%) in the driest parts of England (Anglian river basin region) and by 15% (-2 to -25%) for wetter river basin regions in Scotland (Orkney and Shetland). However, it should be noted that it is difficult to project changes in precipitation (rainfall and snow).
It gives you a rather different impression, doesn't it?
Reader Comments (78)
J4R
"a subsidence crisis"
I hadn't considered that, but surely you'd have to eliminate rainfall as well?
I suspect that leaky distribution is the real reason the water companies don't want to install meters, as that would provide direct measurement of actual usage, whereas without them, they can just measure their output volume and call it consumption. We've had meters for over 20 years in the Isle of Wight, with the result that we use less and rarely get hosepipe bans. The only argument against them I can see is the exposure of water loss between supplier and consumer...
The main reason why river flows are decreasing and likely to continue to do so in future is that of increased abstraction to match the requirements of an increasing population.
It has everything to do with demand and nothing to do with supply (rainfall).
The American Society of Civil Engineers has also swallowed every PC hook it can find. Shameful.
Mike - they want people to use less to reduce the need for dealing with leaks or building new reservoirs, which are more expensive activities than the supply chain ones you mention. To my mind, the real problems are (localised) excessive demand caused by overpopulation (water supply on JIT, anyone?), and a chronic lack of investment in maintaining infrastructure. These are compounded by all our water suppliers being foreign owned and run to make money rather than provide a reliable service at a fair price.
This is the real point of water meters, to generate the same income for supplying less water, because this saves on leak fixing or reservoir building. It's a similar con to Huhne's great green reduction in fuel spend, we'll make ot so expensive you'll learn to use far less than you think you need.
The ICE has been in decline for some time now, the climate alarmism they portray now was in part brought about by continual desparation of the ICE to be taken seriously by the powers that be, having been sidelined for decades. They wanted the governments ear and so they chose to get on board with the groupthink.
At first it was truly disheartening to see engineers fall into this morass of wooly thinking, but when you see what most Civil engineers do these days perhaps not surprising. Some of the hard dicsipline has gone replaced by model based risk reduction driven approaches - I reckon so that the accountants who run these business can get a handle on it, also too much of the civils done in the uk is short term, concrete PFI crap and that approach affects much of what the official ICE line is. A once truly great and world leading organisation is now no more than a tepid NGO. A little like the Royal soc...
All the alarmists have are the rising CO2 trends, most notably those published by Mauna Loa.
All the rest is speculation, and so often that speculation is soaked in self-interest, buttressed by computer models of derisory competence, and weakened by observations from the recent or the distant past. It would seem that the sorry train of conformists to this rule now includes the Institute of Civil Engineers.
How badly we have been served by the leaders of such institutions! I am coming to think that describing them as 'Yes men' is the kindest thing you could say about them.
Chris M,
"hmmm ... civil engineering - dams, earthworks, watercourse diversions, canals, conduits. aqueducts, pipelaying, desalination plants - touting for business perhaps?"
Yes, that is the reason.
A professional body like Civil Engineers' collective or whatever it is they call themselves has only one duty over and above its primary mission of saving the world for everyone: to protect the interests of its members.
No professional body, be it of civil engineers or cunning climatologists, would ever put the interests of the world ahead of the interests of its members.
Those who disagree are completely ignorant of how political world operates.
Water Engineers: Aren't these the guys who engineer the collection of rainwater with sieves and then inform us all that there isn't enough water?
Water Engineers: Aren't these the guys who engineer the collection of rainwater with sieves and then inform us all that there isn't enough water?
John Shade Jun 8, 2012 at 3:35 PM |
"All the alarmists have are the rising CO2 trends, most notably those published by Mauna Loa."
Which mean nothing unless tacked onto ice core proxies producing (yep) a hockey stick.
For actual data from measurement over more than a century try;
http://www.biomind.de/realCO2/
Ice core proxies plus Mauna Loa measurementsModern day measurements tacked onto past proxies - where have we seen that before?
Bad edit - ignore last para!
I was wondering where those brilliant water use planners who (mis)handled the Australian river dam system had gotten off to.....
Jeremy Harvey @ 10:34 AM
Yes, thanks, my mistake.
As an example of the differences in attitude to dealing with ageing infrastructure between the UK and a French village.
The French village in which I live owns and operates the water supply. Late last year we had a couple of water pipes burst. They were patched round in a matter of hours.
Since these pipes were were the ones put in place when the village first got piped water and the number of houses has increased in the last few years, the villagers were asked if we were prepared to pay an extra €10 on our water bills this year for the replacement of all the old pipe work.
That work has been carried out during the last month, there is still a little road resurfacing to finish and the longest anyone was without water was 2 hours.
Now compare that to the UK and weep.
It seems quite clear that the renewables/sustainability meme is embraced by the incumbent president, judging by his inaugural speech.
http://www.ice.org.uk/getattachment/20ae2a3a-9158-4f40-accd-3f42577f8b03/Presidential-Address-2011.aspx
The stance clearly plays political dividends-
“ICE has a key role to play in addressing the twin challenges of infrastructure and of carbon and climate change. ICE has made significant contributions to the Infrastructure Cost Review and to the work of the Low Carbon Construction Innovation and Growth (IGT) Team. The Government will continue to work with ICE on major issues where the civil engineering community has a vital role in promoting growth and the transition to a low carbon future.”
Rt Hon Vince Cable MP
Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills
About the Institution of Civil Engineers, Sparcarusisfree (8.15am yesterday) has it slightly wrong. Step 1 is actually What is the best way to get money for civil engineering so that we can increase the numbers and pay of our members, not to mention our influence? Answer: Tell the government what that they should build more cicil engineering infrastructure including windfarms preferably offshore etc etc.
sHX (4.07pm yesterday), however, has it entirely right.
Goeffry Simkins (11.47am yesterday) points to the Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management. This is, indeed a worse case than the Institution of Civil Engineers. I joined in the early ‘60s when it was the Institution of Water Engineers and it has mutated three times and is now a green pressure group. There seems to be no way of protesting.
About the water companies, I think richard verney (10.48 am yesterday) is right about privatization but partly mistaken about later develpments...
I joined the industry in 1962. In 1965 I joined a local government water board and was immediately put on to substantial new work without prior experience or any supervision. It was expected that I would just muddle through - and I did. In due course these works included a brand new waterworks and everybody seemed pleased enough when it actually worked.. I then left, covered in glory, and the board became part of one of the new river basin sized water utilities which Mrs Thatcher then had Nick Ridley privatize. Some 25 years after I finished the waterworks I got myself shown around. Quite an experience - two things were obvious: (1) The company made their people work a lot harder than was normal in my day in the board, which surely means that the public get better value, and (2) staff were professionals, educated to deal with the various issues thaI I had just had to mudlle through. Again the public evidently get better value.
richard then correctly identifies government mistakes, but probably the wrong ones. OffWat,does not allow excess profit. However, things have moved on since privatization. The population of the South East has indeed now increased and there is ample water in other parts. However, there has been no legislation to encourage (maybe even allow) transfers of untreated water from one company to another to meet the new needs.
And there is another glaring omission. Water companies do not create water: they only gather it, treat it and deliver it to their consumers. It comes to their intakes and pumps free. This, of course, leads to waste and improper allocation. It should cost more when and where it is scarce, like everything else.
HuhneToTheSlammer (12.17pm yesterday) has it wrong. The calculations that are done balance the cost of the lost water with the cost of repairs. When the cost of repairs exceeds the cost of the water lost through repairs, why should he want the companies to spend money doing disruptive street works to save small expenditures on pumping and infrastructure?
The exchange between Oswald Thake (12.51pm yesterday) and DaveS( (at 1.22pm) nicely captures what happened. Thames wanted to build a new reservoir near Abingdon to enable it to avoid future supply restrictions but society said no. So, undoubtedly society will suffer. Only the people of Abingdon will gain.
Surely, the idea that you only repair something if it costs less than the harm done by the thing which needs repairing is a simplistic argument. There are many occasions in life where you might have to spend more than you want in order to improve a situation which is adding to a particular problem, and to prevent worse problems in the future. Not sure if it is right analogy- but the decision to buy a new car rather than go on repairing the old one comes to mind.
Parts of the UK need more water, one of the reasons is there is less water available is because the pipes leak -so mend the (adjective) pipes then. Or move to France (see Ivan 8.55pm)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isambard_Kingdom_Brunel
Why Civil Engineers love Climate Change
They get to build bigger things
Big Green Buildings Big Egos witha hard hat and Hi Vis vest
Hydro electric dams
Concrete bases for for wind turbine and solar panels
High speed rail links
Eco houses
Houses in Wales on stilts
Nuclear power stations
Finally the Daddy The Severn Estuary Tidal Barrage ( The British Hoover Dam )
Want to build it good want to build it great then build it big
Like the film set from a futuristic Sci fi movie
We love it we love them
looks great unfortunatley bit of a waste of money (Our Money)
Ps they rather give the game away in the 1st paragraph
"with the uncertainty about Climate Change ...."
They mean they dont know
It is not just the Institution of Civil Engineers that has succumbed to the CAGW scam, the Institution of Engineering Technology (the old electrical and manufacturing institutions merged) also now regurgitates the BBC/Government/IPCC/Met Office global warming mantra. That's why I resigned from it.
Separately there are various complaints about 'Nimby-ism' particularly regarding the Abingdon resevoir proposal. I think such complaints miss the point. People I speak to no longer trust Government or big corporations, so tend to resist their proposals on the Hutber Law basis that "Improvement means deterioration". There is simply too much top down managerialism and corporatism, and frankly lying, from "them" (government, corporations and institutions like the IPCC or ICE); people expect to be treated like serfs and trampled on and misled. So they resist - anything.
Money and politics trumps real science once more - duh.
The unseen hand of the EU works these glove puppets, they only mouth what their masters decree and the EU decrees that; man made global warming is real, is alive and you will toe the line - the RS gets it - it's where advocation and 'fragrant grease' is at.
Science, it doesn't matter to these lads, they've got their snouts stuck in the trough - who cares about the science - [real scientists are honest and poor] just who is gonna pay the mortgage and buy the Merc?
Mechanical Engineers build weapons, Civil Engineers build targets.
On a more practical note, this thread has come to an interesting conclusion: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/06/07/mdgnn-limits-on-the-co2-greenhouse-effect/#comment-26461
At TOA, radiative cooling, thermal IR photons escaping to space before recombination, leads to zero emissivity DOWN. This means the climate models are fundamentally incorrect. Back to the drawing board. The ICE cannot come to its conclusions on the basis of wildly incorrect science.
The comments above are quite correct - there is a major problem with activists pushing the agenda and trying to force humanity back into the stone age.
An important response is to stand up and make your voice heard. How many commenters here are going to send an email or letter to their MP, or the ICE, or both, and make it clear that we KNOW there is no 'shortage of water' (and never can be, because it goes around in an infinite loop)? Ask WHY there is a policy of using less water, and NOT a policy of storing more water.
There needs to be a groundswell of opinion about this. And if half the people who commented above would just send a short e-mail pointing out their disagreement to the people handing out this rubbish we would be well on the way to starting one up...
PS The body responsible for representing us to the water authorities is the Consumer Council for Water. They also need a sharp e-mail....
As a Civil Engineer working in northern Canada, I may be able to add some context to what this story may be saying. As designers we must design to accommodate reasonable expectation of future risk in whatever we design.
While we do not know with a certainty what will happen in the future, what we design must take into account the best knowlege of the day at the time that we complete the design. The ICE report references http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Document.aspx?Document=CCRAfortheWaterSector.pdf, and that document notes the potential up to 35% reduced flow in summer and increase winter precipitation both. So, as a Civil Engineer in Britain, one may have to design for both lower water availability in summer, and greater flows in winter than current situations.
Now, neither or both may in fact actually occur, but when infrastructure design is to last 100 or more years, as things like dams for instance are expected to do, one must be appropriately conservative with the design assumptions.
Utilizing the best available scientific data in design does NOT mean that you agree with the politics of those who may be preparing the literature or the solutions they may be proposing. It just means that you believe that the information presented is the best that you have available currently in addressing future projections.
I would have expected a competent engineer to not miss the bleeding obvious i.e. summer river flows in England are highly-managed by water companies. Despite the rain persisting down for weeks, the river in my village has a summer river flow reduced almost zero, because of Thames Water extracting so much via bore holes. It's man-made change alright, but it's certainly not climate change.
Northern Star mentions the Defra CC Risk Assessment.
An Engineer will refer to that and firstly look for a statement of quality and scope. The introductory pages of the document hint at those and they are insufficient for design purposes.
Reading further into that document reveals uncertain statements ... lots of things which may occur ... even without climate change.
Statements such as "There is an urgent need to consider how to continue to maintain public water supply without causing environmental damage as demands for water potentially increase in a changing climate." leave open territory as to what constitutes "environmental damage" and again waves hands in the air with "demands for water potentially increase in a changing climate."
Such things may be sufficient basis for policy and propaganda, but they provide no basis for the scale of "climate change".
There is nowhere to sink an Engineer's teeth. They may as well be writing about the threat of rampaging herds of Unicorn.
And there are Unicorns from p60ff. It's mostly to do with models.
@simpleseekeraftertruth
"If the leakage is into the water table from which it was extracted, then it is not lost although the processing cost is."
Actually, it's NOT lost, even if the leakage is into a river which swiftly carries it out to sea. It doesn't get destroyed, and it will be back again as rain shortly.
It really needs drumming into people's heads that water itself can NEVER be lost, run short or be 'wasted'. Water just goes round in a cycle for ever. What can be wasted or run short is the infrastructure. When a leak happens it is the pumping infrastructure which is being wasted, not the water. When there is no water in the pipes this is because we are short on storage infrastructure - not because water has somehow magically become 'short'.
I am trying to run a one-person campaign to push this concept. If anyone has any good ideas about how I can push it harder, I'd be glad to hear them!
@ richard verney:
..Now these companies do not wish to spend the money investing in the reservoirs (and possibly dams) that are needed to properly manage water supply and ensure that all home owners can enjoy uninterupted supply. They have spent the profits of the past 20 or so years, and now want to force the tax payer to pay for the investment required. Hence the issue of reports claiming it is all a consequence of Global Warming and matters will get worse.
The government should not be fooled by this but since the Government supports AGW, it is difficult for it to claim that this is all nonsense. More importantly, the tax payer should not be hoodwinked.
A campaign is needed to expose this nonsense for what it is....
It's actually worse than that.
The water companies WANT to build the reservoirs. That had them all, funded, in their 10-year plans. It was the government who stopped each one, at inquiry time. The reason seemed to be that government policy stated that we would use 20% less water, so there was no need to build reservoirs.
I tried to start a writing campaign with the DECC and the Water Council, and was simply rejected with the statement that 'of course water is a scarce resource'...
The ICE does not represent all the views of civil engineers. I set up a new Civil Engineering Consultancy myself last year. The ICE can act like a gentleman's club / lobby for major consultants and contractors. In deed it pushes policies which work against small and micro consultants in the UK.
More reservoirs is the way forward. Reducing water consumption will not happen unless everyone is metered and pays the real cost!