Topic: Heavy rain just smashed my young veg plants to pieces!

[Crystalmoon]

 :'( we just had a torrential downpour that sounded like hail stones it was hitting so hard. It has literally smashed my young veg plants to pieces, deep dark bruising to the leaves, some stems actually snapped. These are the ones in raised beds with strong net covers that do stop some of the impact of the rain - they are in my back garden that is quite sheltered. I dread to think what has just happened at my allotment to all the soft fruits that were due to be harvested very soon  :-\ I expect they will be on the wet clay by now. I can't go to the allotment to save anything as I can't risk a slip with my arthritis or I may end up totally unable to walk. So I guess I will just have to accept that all will probably be ruined. I am seriously starting to wonder if this mad weather is the global warming we have been warned about....food prices will surely go sky high if farmer's are also losing crops. Sigh xJane

[grannyjanny]

Calabrese is £6kg in the local Co op. I don't think it's that expensive when buying organic.

[Digeroo]

It is so disheartening to loose plants.  I become very attacked to mine and hate to see them dieing.  Lets hope things are not too bad down at the lottie.

I was talking to a farmer yesterday and even if the wheat crops have time to dry getting the huge combines onto soggy soil will be very difficult.  Meanwhile elsewhere they are having heatwaves.   

[grannyjanny]

I think it's a good job we don't eat bread then Digeroo ;D.

[strawberry1]

This weather was forecast by piers corbyn and I got a forecast from him on 16th june from Weatheraction. He is an astrophysicist and has a `whacky` style which I am now used to. We are at the very beginning of a mini ice age and tbh this is just the start. Lots more bad stuff to come this month. His forecasting is for the long range trend and up to 45 days ahead, he says to watch the met forecast and multiply the effects depending on the R number, which is dependent on solar action. We haven just had a big flare and are heading to R4 and soon to R5 which is the maximun. These numbers are repeated again this coming month

Yes, re food produce. The astute among us will be stocking up for winter, wheat prices are increasing dramatically and you all know what has happened to potatoes. I did a trial sub of one month last november and I changed our holiday plans accordingly. He was proved right and I saved money so I then took a sub for the whole year

I know I am off topic re veg but the heavy rain is just part of the picture

[Crystalmoon]

Wow Strawberry, that sounds very worrying  :-\ I remember reading about solar flares & the terrible affect they have on our climate many years ago...& of course these will be intensified by global warming as the Earth has less protection from them.
Is it really going to be worth our time & effort trying to grow our own during a mini ice age  ???
I will have to look up Weatheraction xJane

[Gordonmull]

This weather was also forecast by the Met office.

I've had a quick check out of this guy on the net. I just find it hard to believe that all of science is wrong and one guy is right. Even if he is, why isn't everyone else using his methods?

I can't see any reliable peer-reviewed journal entries popping up, written by him. It also appears that he didn't actually quailify as an astrophysicist, just "trained" as one in 1979(!) at Queen Mary College. In fact he only has a BSc physics. I'd love to say I'm a chemist and an environmental scientist but I dropped out of my chemistry degree. So I can't, QED.

Given that all records indicate that the planet is warming (irrefutable) how can we be about to enter an ice age? Let's not go down the american lakes switching off the gulf stream route please. If that was going to happen, osmosis wouldn't work and we'd therefore have no plants.

Sorry, but I am hard on charlatans and this guy seems to fit the bill very nicely.

Personally, I find the Met office to be as accurate as I can reasonably expect, living in the horse latitudes, where the weather is naturally unpredictable. Yeah, they get the long range wrong frequently, as I would expect, but are usually on the button for the next two days.

Remember that with weather forecasting there is a little "confirmation bias" that can creep in. We see a forecast that's good and we get hit by a right stinker of a storm. The met office was wrong. How could they do this to us? We remember.

They predict a sunny day. It's sunny. Great! We forget the prediction, nothing emotional happened to connect the prediction to our enjoyment of the day. (and no, I don't work for the met office  ;D )

Edit - I've just checked out the subscription fees. Strawberry, you've paid this idiot £225 for a years forecasts  :o

Check out here. Not well written but might put you off.
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Piers_Corbyn

[Digeroo]

When I was at school winters were getting colder.  The next ice age was predicted.  Now we have global warming. Last year was exceptionally dry, this year is exceptionally wet.   I have to say I take it all with a pinch of salt.

I predict next year will be different.  You heard it first here folks. ;D

[chriscross1966]

One problem is peoole confusing weather with climate... Climate happens to large landmasses (Europe is on the small size to have a climate, but Siberia/Asia and Africa are big enough) or large bodies of water (The North Atlantic is big enough, the North Sea isn't) or big bits of ice...weather is the ignorable on a big scale effect of climatic zones rubbing against each other... similarly on a longer scale, continental drift of large things like India form small things like the Himalayas... this isn't to say that when seen from the human scale the effects of the big slow things aren't quite big and fast,.... In Britain, not only do we get weather cos of the abutment of three climates (North Atlantic, Siberia/Asia and Arctic) but we have some decent sized weather blenders thrown in for good effect (North Sea, Gulf Stream, Europe)  that can all cause radical stirring of the climate edges.... result is that when the climates start shifting (as they are now, for whatever reason) our weather gets extremes, and non-predictable ones at that... one posited result of global warming might be a rapid descent into an ice-age for instance.... reason being that as far as we can tell dumping fresh water into the the Atlantic near Greenland would kill the Gulf Stream that keeps northern Europe free of permanent ice.... last time it happened was the start of the last ice age....as far as anyone can tell (and there are no competing sane hypothesis that I've ever heard) the giant glacial lake that entirely covered the area of the great lakes and then some broke its ice dam at the Atlantic side and dropped itself into the sea near Greenland.... the last Ice Age started so fast that it was as if someone flicks a switch in the plant life in the northern hemisphere, it goes from warmer than it is now  to proper ice age faster than they can tell from the ice cores (you can tell what's alive in any given year from the pollen grains, they go up each summer and are washed out by the winter each year....) currently the resolution on the ices cores is two years, give or take a year..... so the last ice age took between one and three years to start and it was caused by a what at the time was a gradual warming event.... the current gradual warming event is melting the northern ice sheet and dropping fresh water into the seas off Greenland.....

The only time the UK is involved with Climate is when we're under ice......

[chriscross1966]

and breathe...... :D

[Nigel B]

.....................SNIP......... Let's not go down the american lakes switching off the gulf stream route please. If that was going to happen, osmosis wouldn't work and we'd therefore have no plants.

.............. SNIP...........

Sorry Gordon, but I don't 'get' the correlation between the two. Can you explain please?

[Pescador]

I think I'd rather trust a Labrador to not eat a sausage on the floor, (or even believe a Daily Express headline), than trust a  Weatheraction
forecast.

[Robert_Brenchley]

The gulf stream is driven largely by a cold countercurrent along the sea bed made up of meltwater from the Arctic ice. Unfortunately it does seem to be possible for it to fail, as the amount of ice decreases. If so, we'll end up with a climate similar to that of British Columbia.

[chriscross1966]

The gulf stream is driven largely by a cold countercurrent along the sea bed made up of meltwater from the Arctic ice. Unfortunately it does seem to be possible for it to fail, as the amount of ice decreases. If so, we'll end up with a climate similar to that of British Columbia.

Ahh... almost correct not driven by meltwater though, as freshwater isn't as dense as salty... it's driven by the salt water from the med (which is very salty) having its heat stripped out by the wind and generaly nastiness of the area and that causes it to sink... if somethign dumps a load of freshwater in there it doesn't sink any more as it isn't as salty, thus turning the pump off at source so to speak

I thoroughly recommend this book http://www.amazon.co.uk/Mapping-Deep-Extraordinary-Story-Science/dp/0953522717 on the subject.
Very well written but it keeps the science front and centre whilst humanising it a bit..

chrisc

[Gordonmull]

Sorry Gordon, but I don't 'get' the correlation between the two. Can you explain please?

Diffusion.

Areas of high concentration migrate to areas of low concentration.

The connection with plants is that the osmotic pressure that drives turgidity in a plant is based on diffusion across a membrane. The point I was trying to make was that if diffusion didn't happen, we couldn't have plants.

I could quite easily be wrong but i can't see how a relatively small amount of fresh water entering the ocean could have such a dramatic effect when diffusion is brought into consideration.

The thing about salt water is that it doesn't share freshwater's property of being most dense at 4 deg C. While salt water actually increases in density in below 4C, fresh water starts to become less dense. This is a driver behind the gulf stream, giving the water enough density to sink and pull the conveyor along. In a cold freshwater system the water at the bottom will be 4C unless the lake, or whatever, freezes solid. The cooler (below 4C) water will be at the top, because it is less dense than the water at 4C. This is why ice floats, why fresh water freezes from the top down. Obviously in the poles the water's going to be a bit chilly on the surface.

The American Lakes theory postulates that the influx of fresh water will dilute the seawater in the arctic to such a degree that the cold water won't sink due lack of salinity, thus switching off the current. But...areas of high concentration will migrate to areas of low concentration, so I'm not entirely convinced.

There is also the other side of the pump. The Gulf of Mexico. Without the inlflux of cool water from the poles, the effects of evaporation are going cause a concentration of salts in the water in this region. Again, think about diffusion of a more concentrated part of a solution to a less concentrated part of a solution.

All in all, I think the American Lakes theory is a bit wooly, bordering on Discovery Channel, but I'm open to correction.