Reading the papers!

UNDENIABLE GREEN COLOUR BLINDNESS!

A North Dorset Green Party Councillor, writing in this month’s excellent Blackmore Vale Magazine, notes that:

“This year, the reality of climate change surely became undeniable, with the relentless breaking of weather records, both here in the UK and across the world. Tragically several people were killed in the recent autumn storm to hit the UK, and farmland flooding will result in significant crop losses leading to shortages of some foods and naturally an increase in prices. The Met Office are warning of yet another storm about to hit the County. with very strong winds and a risk of further flooding because the heavy rain will fall on ground already saturated from the previous storms.”

Yet a Councillor colleague from Bridport (an area which receives only half as much rain as North Dorset, which can be saturated for six months a year) said, at a recent planning meeting that: he could not understand how approximately 55 acres of impermeable solar panels covering productive farmland, surrounded by the waterways of the Upper Stour catchment, could possibly affect surface runoff and flooding in the future!

Maybe the Bridport representative had not read all the expert papers and flood risk assessments contained in the Application planning file, or examined the government’s and Dorset Council’s own climate change predictions. They all clearly explain how surface runoff can be increased by acres of solar panels, and why climate change is already increasing the intensity of rainfall and the frequency of flooding – which, as the writer points out, is forecast to get very much worse.  

It’s said there are none so blind as those who will not see – except perhaps those who fail to read the papers before proposing resolutions at a planning meeting!  

Cook and McCuen