Climate Binge

 This Flood Was Unpredictable, Hence It Does Not Exist

In Any Important Sense Of The Term

Breitbart has a wonderful post about having found - at long last - a single scientist with the nerve to speak the truth.

Read it if you wish. I am only interested in small differences in the meaning of various statements.

Former NASA Scientist: Global Warming is Nonsense
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/04/26/Former-NASA-Scientist-Global-Warming-is-Nonsense

[...]

Professor Woodcock dismissed evidence for global warming, such as the floods that deluged large parts of Britain this winter, as "anecdotal" and therefore meaningless in science.

 "Events can happen with frequencies on all time scales in the physics of a chaotic system such as the weather. Any point on lowland can flood up to a certain level on all time scales from one month to millions of years and it’s completely unpredictable beyond around five days." ...

The phenomena are completely unpredictable in the sense that we cannot formulate an exact set of causes to accurately predict an exact effect.
However, insurance companies actuaries routinely predict floods, having computed the probabilities that any point P on lowland L may flood in a time period relevant to the insurance company.

So also governments which must fund for flooding disasters, may also predict the likelihood of such floodings.

So most definitely the insurance industry is predicting, and to a certain extent the government also. Thus, the notion that such a flood is "completely unpredictable" is a strange statement. We may not have one single point in time for a flood, but we most assuredly know the probabilities over time of a flood occurring.

I believe that is what we mean when we say that a "hundred year flood happened": it was a flood of a size such as statistically occurs once every hundred years.

Even Breitbart should be able to understand what was going on in this story.

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