Climate Cultist Despairs: 'How Many Deep North Atlantic Depressions Must Be Named By The Met Office In Order To Convince Climate Deniers That The Non-Existent Climate Crisis Is Real?'

The BBC frets in a similar vein, though this time they are more cautious about linking perfectly normal British winter weather to an imagined ‘climate crisis’:

It has been a particularly stormy autumn and winter so far.

Since August, we have had at least one named storm a month affecting the UK. December brought three and there have already been three in January: Henk, Isha and Jocelyn.

Jocelyn is the 10th named storm of the season and comes hot on the heels of Isha, which killed at least two people.

In a typical UK autumn/winter, there would be six or seven named storms - getting to the letters F or G.

The current storm season has brought the most named storms since 2015/16, the season the Met Office started naming storms. That season we got up to the letter K, with Katie the 11th and final storm.

OMG, we’re up to K already and winter isn’t over yet! Is climate change responsible for us galloping headlong through the named storm alphabet? Mr Barlow certainly thinks so. The BBC is more circumspect on this occasion, almost balanced even (pass the smelling salts), though I’m sure it has more overtly suggested there is a link in the past:

Why has it been so stormy this year?

The main driver for storms is a powerful jet stream - fast moving winds high in the atmosphere - which meanders west to east across the Atlantic. 

Areas of low pressure and storm systems develop on the movement of the jet stream and are directed to the UK.

The jet stream itself is influenced by the temperature contrast between the Pole and mid-latitudes.  Over the last few weeks, very cold Arctic air has spread across the United States, leading to a big temperature difference, allowing a powerful jet stream to generate storms.

We can also look at the bigger global picture.

• How Storms Isha and Jocelyn get their names

• Scottish trains to halt as Storm Jocelyn sweeps UK

Suzanne Gray, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Reading, says: "The number of storms that impact us each year can be influenced by meteorological phenomena occurring elsewhere across the globe such as the current El Niño event in the tropical Pacific region."

El Niño is associated with warmer-than-average sea surface temperatures in the Pacific that can affect weather across the world.

It is thought El Niño tends to bring wetter and windier weather in autumn and the start of winter to the UK, before a period of colder than average weather.

Interestingly, the last El Niño period was 2014 to 2016, the last time we had so many autumn and winter storms in the UK.

What about climate change?

We know climate change is making our weather more extreme so that when it rains, that rain tends to be heavier with a greater chance of flooding.

It is more difficult to link storms to climate change because "there are several different influences that are likely to be affected by climate change", says Professor Gray.

She says: "There is some evidence though that storms with strong winds (windstorms) will become slightly more frequent in the future in north-west Europe and also become more clustered, so that we experience several storms one after the other".

But all the usual suspects will continue to bleat about a mythical ‘climate emergency’ every time it gets a bit hot, a bit wet or a bit windy, even when it gets a bit cold. They can’t help themselves, poor loves. It’s like a bad case of diarrhoea and vomiting which won’t go away and gets triggered every time the weather is bad, or very nice. Only very bland, totally unremarkable weather conditions seem to calm their hysterical convulsive reactions - and we don’t get much of that here in the UK. The weather changes, rapidly, often hugely from day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year - which is why the Net Zero zealots picked just one year to convince politicians of the need to waive through the ridiculous, absurd, unscientific, legally binding decarbonisation targets which are destroying the nation as we speak.