ANDREW WOODCOCK, WEATHER WATCHER, PLUMPTON: I’ve been compiling the Cumbria Weather Report since 1998. December 2010 was the coldest and snowiest on record and people thought it was the shape of things to come.

Last December was the mildest and wettest ever recorded. So you wouldn’t dare predict what’s going to happen in future. It seems to be swinging from one extreme to the other.

The El Nino weather system in the Pacific is probably the biggest factor. It has put a lot more water and warmth into the atmosphere and strong west winds have prevented colder northern and eastern winds from reaching us.

It’s a long way from here, but the world’s climate systems are all interlinked. Climate change will have made a bad situation worse.

At a local level there’s not a lot we can do to prevent it. There needs to be better forecasting, better flood defences, planting more trees, dredging rivers and not building on flood plains.

And we can hope the storms were an exceptional event that won’t happen again for 60 years. But they said that in 2005.


Helen Davison DR HELEN DAVISON, SUSTAINABLE CARLISLE: This winter’s El Nino is the key reason we've been getting so many storms this winter. But the level and severity of the storms are being driven by our warming climate, which may also strengthen future El Ninos. And evidence is irrefutable that human activity is the key cause of our climate warming.

To prevent these extreme weather events from getting worse we need to dramatically reduce our carbon emissions. And we need to act now.

It’s a real opportunity to change our society and lives for the better. Making buildings more energy efficient and switching to renewables will reduce fuel bills and provide long-term energy security. Walking, cycling and eating more locally produced food will improve our health. And politicians must commit to supporting and financing these measures, creating jobs and making green choices the easiest and cheapest for us all.

The climate change we’ve already caused makes us more prone to damaging storms and floods so real investment is needed in reducing the flood risks in communities, with upstream measures as well as appropriate flood defences.


Douglas Chalmers DOUGLAS CHALMERS, DIRECTOR OF FRIENDS OF THE LAKE DISTRICT: It is hard to believe that some people still won’t concede that our climate has changed. We are now in a situation where we must accept that we have to live with floods.

The volume of water we get in violent outbursts has demonstrated building defences to cope with a “one in so many years flood” is no guarantee.

Governments should resource the research and then the application of that research into climate change mitigation. That can be done on a global level, but in Cumbria at the moment our local communities have an urgent need to increase the resilience of our landscapes, properties and infrastructure to withstand extreme rainfall events.

If we can’t reduce the volume of water, we must manage it. Land and river management, sound research and listening to local experience can all contribute to solutions in any one catchment.

Many solutions are being offered, but each locality will need a tailored approach to their particular problem, linked to others both up and downstream. It will take both soft and hard engineering.


Stephen Gibbs DR STEPHEN GIBBS, CARLISLE FLOODS RESIDENTS’ AND BUSINESSES’ ACTION GROUP: There are three storms raging across the country at the moment – the weather, the economic storm and the political storm.

We are a rock off the west coast of what is called the Atlantic Ocean, and storms are going to happen. But we haven’t invested in our infrastructure properly. If a road breaks in another country it would be back together in a couple of days. Yet you can’t get to Glasgow or Edinburgh because there are weeks and weeks of engineering works.

The Environment Agency isn’t being allowed to work as an independent institution because it’s being used as another arm of the Government.

The Government leads with an iron grip, which isn’t leadership but autocracy. It wants to pull all the different institutions together to march in step – and when everyone is marching in step, the bridge vibrates.

Building more walls isn’t the answer. There’s such an intelligent community in Cumbria and I think they want to look at the bigger economic and politcal picture – not to try to solve everything with a sticking plaster.