By Jo Nova
All that stuff about a 1 in 100 year flood, they have no idea
It turns out the worst flood on the Rhine was not in 2024 but in 1374. On the Severn, in England the worst year for “climate change” was 250 BC. Obviously neither of them were due to man-made oil and gas.
A thousand news headlines have said modern floods were unprecedented, or were 1 in 1000 year events, or were caused by “climate change” and they were all based on just 120 years of data (or less), and they were all wrong.
For some reason, even though climate change is the most important thing on Earth, hardly any researchers were looking for evidence of long term extreme flood events. When researchers finally studied the sediments left at many sites — they found evidence that many ancient floods were just as bad or even worse. At least 12 times, ancient peak river flows were bigger than anything we’ve seen in the instrumental record. (And they’re just the ancient floods we know about, imagine if we put more scientists looking into fluvial sediments?).
The only thing unprecedented about modern floods is the gall of scientists who ignore the last 8,000 years. They say that Storm Blah was 8.3 times more likely, and enhanced 42% by beefsteaks and Renaults. But all those attribution calculations assume that they know what “normal” flooding is.
If floods were worse 1,000, 2,000 or 4,000 years ago, nature is sometimes much meaner and nastier than most of us know. We could be hit with something terrible and be caught unprepared. But likewise, if we think these latest floods were due to coal-fired power plants, we might squander a civilization trying to stop floods with electrical Voodoo, which apparently we are.
Climate change is NOT the main cause of floods – and those today are ‘nowhere near’ the most extreme
— Daily Mail
Study author Professor Stephan Harrison at the University of Exeter said recent floods are not exceptional if we look further into the past.
‘In recent years, floods around the world – including in Pakistan, Spain and Germany – have killed thousands of people and caused enormous damage,’ he said.
‘Such floods are seen as “unprecedented” – but if you look back over the last few thousand years, that’s not the case.
‘In fact, floods we call unprecedented may be nowhere near the most extreme that have happened in the past.’
It’s definitely not a hockeystick
In the worst flood of the Upper Severn river around 250BC, fifty percent more water was flowing at the peak, than in the floods of the year 2000AD.
The more important question is why we spent so many trillions on pointless weather controlling talismans instead of hiring a few scientists to look at paleoclimate data. We could have saved so much money and suffering, and ended so much grift and graft.
Harrison et al looked at found that most of the worst floods were in the warmest era’s — like the Holocene optimum and the Roman warming times — which is what we’d expect. Warmer times evaporate more water off the oceans and into the sky. But the worst flood was in 1374 and was due to snow and ice melting, proving that no climate is perfect, and we really need to learn to predict it.
Harrison et al say the climate modelers of attribution and detection studies were wrong. And that this it is “the first time” anyone has put all these longer studies together. But all those sediments were there in 2010, just like they were there in 1990, but no one was studying them. That’s a scandal.
REFERENCE
Harrison, S., Macklin, M.G., Toonen, W.H.J. et al. Robust climate attribution of modern floods needs palaeoflood science. Climatic Change 178, 71 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-025-03904-9