Can we find a better way of naming these storms?

The key benefit of naming storms would seem to be to provide a reference point where regions experience one catastrophe after another.  We can no longer speak of the “Carlisle floods”, since there have been many.  Nor, now, can we simply refer to them by year – there may have been just one in 2007, 2009 and 2012.  But we may well see three in 2015, and several more in January and February of 2016.  So at least by naming the storms responsible for each episode, we have a point of reference for each one.

The trouble is that in true British fashion, the Met Office has opted for the most banal and uncontroversial names they could find.  Yes, I know that the public were invited to send names in.  But it will have been the Met Office PR department that chose the names that were finally allocated.  So what we have ended up with are a series of storms named after everyone’s favourite uncles and aunts – Desmond, Eve and Frank being the most recent.

These soft, cuddly names appear to directly contradict the chaos and damage caused by the storms themselves.  And I cannot believe that the British public lacked the creativity to capture this.  We can be sure, for example, that someone at the Home Office (or perhaps UKIP HQ) will have attempted to link weather to terror by suggesting names like “Atlantic Storm Osama” in an attempt to imply the potential for death, destruction and disruption.  Far more of us will have undoubtedly suggested naming storms after our favourite villains – “Storm Voldemort” or “Deluge Davros”, perhaps – in an attempt to convey the seriousness of these weather events.

There may be copyright issues that prevent the use of fictional bad guys for naming storms.  And there is a deeper reason for not doing so.  The storms that are currently devastating large tracts of Northern England are not a manifestation of evil impacting us from outside.  They are events entirely of our own making.  These storms are a manifestation of climate change – so-called 1 in 100 year events that have been occurring every couple of weeks (and breaking records each time) cannot be viewed as anything but.  We were warned decades ago that global warming would disrupt the jet stream, push more water vapour into the atmosphere, and produce more violent storms – exactly like the weather events we have witnessed for the best part of ten years now – if it walks like, quacks like, and looks like a bird of the genus Anas, it probably is.

However, blaming climate change is a cop out, since the destruction wrought upon the people of Cumbria, Lancashire and Yorkshire (and several less publicised areas of Scotland and Wales) is more a consequence of human action (and inaction) in response to the threat of climate change than to the new climate conditions.  Perhaps least obviously, the abject failure of government land and housing policy has meant that most new housing in the last thirty years has been built on flood plains with the inevitable consequence that further investment in flood defences has been needed.  But, of course, for thirty years, governments have failed to invest in appropriate defences that take climate change into account – there is no point building defences just a few inches higher than the last flood when scientists are warning us of a need to build our defences several metres higher – anything less is just pouring good money after bad.  Not that the current government has been pouring money into flood defences.  Rather, for the past five years they have deliberately cut back on funding for flood defences – a false economy that may well cost the treasury another £1.5 billion (which will presumably be clawed back through cuts to benefits and social care).

Agricultural policy has also played a part in the deluge.  A deliberate policy of cutting down the trees and burning the peat bogs in the upland river catchment areas has dramatically lowered their capacity for storing water upstream.  The result is that when storms like Desmond, Eve and Frank deposit (what we used to think of as) a month’s worth of rain in a single night onto our hillsides, almost all of that water runs directly into the streams that run into the rivers.  Rivers that government policy has caused to have been straightened and dredged, so that all of this additional water runs into the flood defences downstream with vastly greater force.

So I have an alternative suggestion for naming storms in future – one that I am sure most ordinary people will embrace, but that the Met Office would never dare adopt: instead of using our favourite aunts and uncles, let us name our storms after the politicians who failed to plan for them!  It would, after all, be more accurate to say that “Kendal has been ravaged by “Deluge Davey” or that “the business district of Leeds has been demolished by Cyclone Osborne”.  And, of course, many of the poorest and most vulnerable among us will justifiably tremble at the imminent arrival of “Atlantic Storm Duncan Smith”!