http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/flooding/10655005/The-flooding-of-the-Somerset-Levels-was-deliberately-engineered.html

The flooding of the Somerset Levels was deliberately engineered

The shocking truth is that these floods were not a natural disaster, but the result of deliberate policy

By Christopher Booker

I fear the front-page story in The Telegraph – revealing that the worst of the flood damage could have been prevented – didn’t tell the half of it. Nor did another newspaper’s “exclusive” on the story, reported here last week, that the Met Office had forecast in November that the three months between December and February would be drier than usual.

Devastating evidence has now come to light not just that the floods covering 65 square miles of the Somerset Levels could have been prevented, but that they were deliberately engineered by Labour ministers in 2009, regardless of the property and human rights of the thousands of people whose homes and livelihoods would be affected. Furthermore, that wildly misleading Met Office forecast in November led the Environment Agency to take a step that has made the flooding infinitely more disastrous than it need have been.

The “smoking guns” begin with a policy decision announced in 2005 by Labour’s “floods minister” Elliot Morley, later to be jailed for fraudulently claiming more than £30,000 on his MP’s expenses. Under the heading “Saving wetland habitats: more money for key sites”, Morley directed that, to comply with the EU’s habitats directive and a part-EU-funded study involving the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, the WWF and the Environment Agency, flooding in Somerset should be artificially promoted, because “wildlife will benefit from increased water levels”. The 13 local drainage boards, responsible for keeping the Levels properly managed, were all to be co-opted into implementing this policy.

The Environment Agency had already stopped proper dredging of the River Parrett, which provides the main channel draining floodwater on the Levels to the sea, because of the exorbitant cost of disposing of silt under EU waste regulations. And Morley had vetoed a proposal to build a new pumping station at Dunball, at the end of the massive Kings Sedgemoor Drain, which would have allowed much more effective, 24-hour pumping of flood water into the mouth of the Parrett estuary,

In 2008, an Environment Agency policy document on the “Parrett Catchment Area” admitted that it was “still not completely clear” how much the deliberate increase in flooding would breach “the property rights and Human Rights” of those whose homes and businesses would be damaged. Yet in 2009, the government gave £8 million to “restore” – ie, increase flooding on – 10 Somerset “floodplains”, including the purchase of a large area of farmland at Southlake Moor next to Burrowbridge on the Parrett, which had been drained since the 13th century. It was to be handed over to Natural England to “store” water as habitat for birds when, as the Met Office was already predicting, climate change would bring drier winters.

This was where November’s forecast came in, because it led the Environment Agency deliberately to flood Southlake Moor in the expectation of a dry winter. When those December and January rains poured down, this large expanse of water-sodden ground blocked the draining to the already horribly silted-up Parrett of a very much larger area of farmland to the east. This was made even worse by the lack of that Dunball pumping station, vetoed by Morley, at the sea end of the Kings Sedgemoor Drain.

Thus came about the disaster that has filled our television screens for weeks. The hydrology of this vast area had been sabotaged by the Labour government’s deliberate, EU-compliant policy, directed by the Environment Agency. Only thanks to the intervention of the current Environment Secretary, Owen Paterson, are huge Dutch pumps at Dunball now belatedly pouring seven million tons of water a day into the sea – with dredging of the Parrett due to begin as soon as is practicable.

Much of this story has been painstakingly uncovered by my co-author Richard North, who has published links to all the relevant official documents on his EU Referendum blog. As he says, “not only can we now see just how this flooding was deliberately engineered. It was done in blatant disregard for the rights of all those who live and work there. The evidence is now so strong that they should seriously consider suing the Government for compensation for the damage they have suffered, which could well amount to hundreds of millions of pounds.”

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BBC flogs dead horse

One could only utter a hollow laugh at the desperation of the BBC last week, in programme after programme, to put over its fond belief that our wettest winter for 84 years is all due to man-made climate change.

Today wheeled on the jailbird Chris Huhne to sell the message, impartially balanced by a chap saying much the same from the engineering firm CH2M Hill, which Evan Davis coyly failed to explain makes a fortune from renewable energy.

Newsnight had Prof Kevin Anderson from that hotbed of climate zealotry, the University of East Anglia, to tell us that despite global temperatures having remained pretty flat for 17 years, by 2100 they will somehow have leapt up by a staggering 6C.

When Panorama, in a programme called Britain Underwater, peddled a similar message – with the aid of such climate sages as the journalists George Monbiot and Sir Simon Jenkins – one wearily recalled a Panorama of November 14 2000 with exactly the same title, blaming floods in Yorkshire on global warming (on that occasion, with the aid of John Prescott).

Yet how strange that the BBC never quotes the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which it normally cites as gospel, saying that “there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale”.

In other words, whatever the BBC’s propagandists may try to tell us, not even the IPCC believes it.

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After reading this PLEASE research Agenda 21.