News Round-Up: Floods Not Caused by Man-Made Climate Change, UK Parents Arrested for Criticising Daughter’s School, and Men Still Part of US Women’s Sports
Every week, the editorial team of Freedom Research compiles a round-up of news that caught our eye, or what felt like under-reported aspects of news deserving more attention.
Over the past week, the following topics attracted our attention:
Study: huge floods cannot be linked to man-made climate change
UK: parents arrested for criticising daughter’s school in a WhatsApp group.
Female fencer disqualified for refusing to face a man.
Head of UK Climate Change Committee: frequent fliers should be taxed more highly
France: Police under investigations for 'violence' – yet they were the ones fleeing armed teens.
Study: huge floods cannot be linked to man-made climate change
Recent floods, such as those in Valencia, Spain, and across the UK last winter, have been linked to climate change and accompanied by warnings of being “unprecedented”, but a study by researchers at the University of Exeter says otherwise, The Telegraph reports.
The study examined palaeoflood records for the Lower Rhine in Germany and the Netherlands, the Upper Severn in the UK, and rivers around Valencia. By dating individual sand grains in floodplain sediments and analysing their size, the researchers were able to assess the frequency and scale of floods going back several thousand years.
In the Rhine, records over the past 8,000 years show at least 12 floods that are likely to have exceeded modern peaks.
The Severn analysis shows that floods in the last 72 years of monitoring are not exceptional compared to what can be seen in records going back 4,000 years. The largest flood in the Upper Severn occurred around 250 BCE and is estimated to have been 50% larger at its peak than the floods in the year 2000, which damaged 10,000 homes and led to new flood defences.
Professor Stephan Harrison from the university’s College of Life and Environmental Sciences said that while in recent years, floods around the world, including in Pakistan, Spain, and Germany, have killed thousands of people and caused enormous damage, they are not ‘unprecedented’ as is claimed. “In fact, floods we call unprecedented may be nowhere near the most extreme that have happened in the past,” Professor Harrison said.
Professor Harrison said climate change modelling was limited in what it could reveal about floods as it relied on records that dated back only as far as 120 years, whereas natural variability can only be established on a much longer timescale.
UK: parents arrested for criticising daughter’s school in a WhatsApp group.
The parents of a nine-year-old girl have said they were held at a police station for 11 hours because they complained about their daughter’s primary school in a WhatsApp group, The Guardian reports.
Maxie Allen and his partner, Rosalind Levine, said they were arrested and detained on suspicion of harassment, malicious communications, and causing a nuisance on school property. The couple said they had previously been banned from entering Cowley Hill primary school in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, after criticising the school’s headteacher and leadership in a parents’ WhatsApp group. Then six police officers turned up at their home on January 29. “When you watch the doorbell footage, you think, what are these six police officers doing? What is this operation? Is it a terror cell, is it a drug den they’re about to raid? No, it was two parents in a dispute with the school. I would like to know how [Hertfordshire police] made that decision, that that was the appropriate and necessary operation,” Allen commented.
The school said it had “sought advice from police” after a “high volume of direct correspondence and public social media posts” that they claimed had become upsetting for staff, parents and governors. Hertfordshire police said the arrests “were necessary to fully investigate the allegations as is routine in these types of matters”. “Following further investigations, officers deemed that no further action should be taken due to insufficient evidence,” they added.
Female fencer disqualified for refusing to face a man
A USA female fencer Stephanie Turner was disqualified from her tournament after taking a knee and refusing to compete against a man who calls himself a woman, The Daily Mail reports.
Turner was scheduled to face Redmond Sullivan at the Cherry Blossom tournament held at the University of Maryland. However, as the match was about to begin, Turner took a knee and removed her mask in a protest during the Division 1A Women's Foil event.
She was subsequently shown a black card which signifies that a player is immediately excluded from the competition and suspended for the remainder of it.
“I knew what I had to do because USA Fencing had not been listening to women's objections. I took a knee immediately at that point. Redmond [Sullivan] was under the impression that I was going to start fencing. So when I took the knee, I looked at the ref and I said: I'm sorry, I cannot do this. I am a woman, and this is a man, and this is a women's tournament. And I will not fence this individual,” Turner explained.
However, shortly afterwards, USA Fencing produced a statement in support of Sullivan and transgender participation in the sport. The statement read: “USA Fencing enacted our current transgender and non-binary athlete policy in 2023. The policy was designed to expand access to the sport of fencing and create inclusive, safe spaces. The policy is based on the principle that everyone should have the ability to participate in sports and was based upon the research available of the day. We understand that the conversation on equity and inclusion pertaining to transgender participation in sport is evolving. USA Fencing will always err on the side of inclusion, and we're committed to amending the policy as more relevant evidence-based research emerges, or as policy changes take effect in the wider Olympic and Paralympic movement.”
Head of UK Climate Change Committee: frequent fliers should be taxed more highly
Emma Pinchbeck, the new chief executive of the Climate Change Committee (CCC), said Net Zero meant flying should be considered a luxury, with airlines paying a price for the emissions they produce, The Telegraph reports. However, she said it would be unfair to price lower income families out of air travel altogether. Instead, the CCC wants frequent fliers to be taxed more highly than those who fly just once a year. This would discourage richer travellers from flying as much, while not punishing the poor. “What we have in our heads is the annual family holiday to somewhere sunny like Spain. Now I’ve got small children, so I completely understand the need for people to go away somewhere sunny every year. So we’ve tried to preserve that in our advice,” Pinchbeck said. “We’ve done some distribution impact analysis across wealthier and poorer households. Wealthier households tend to fly multiple times a year, so [would] carry more of the cost for this than poorer households. There [would be] a difference in the costs that accrue to the long haul flights, which tend to be taken by wealthier households,” she added.
The aim was to persuade those people taking multiple annual flights to cut down by maybe one flight, she said.
Pinchbeck was giving evidence to the House of Lords environment and climate change committee following last month’s publication of the CCC’s latest carbon budget, which advises ministers on what’s needed to reach the UK’s target of Net Zero emissions by 2050.
France: Police under investigations for 'violence' – yet they were the ones fleeing armed teens
A dramatic video out of a multicultural neighborhood of Seine-Saint-Denis in Paris shows police officers fleeing from a rampaging gang of 20 youths clad in black and armed with iron bars. While two youths are now being charged, the police are also in the hot seat and now facing an investigation by prosecutors, Remix News reports. The potential crime of the police? The officers allegedly fled away too quickly with their vehicles and almost hit some of the youths, which is why they are now being investigated for the charge of “violence with a weapon by public authority holders.”
The incident began when the officers attempted to confiscate motorcycles during a “rodeo.” These “rodeos” are common in diverse neighborhoods within European cities, which involve street races and youths doing high-risk tricks with their cars or motorcycles. While these incidents represent dangerous public disturbances, they also often result in tragedy, including the death of young children.
However, the police actions quickly escalated, and the video shows that approximately 20 of these youths were chasing the officers with iron bars and construction barriers. The youths then attacked two patrol cars.
Bodycam footage shows the officers losing control and maneuvering quickly away from the scene in their vehicles, however, Le Parisien reports the officers were “manoeuvering dangerously” to escape the hostile crowd. “One vehicle reversed into a crowd brandishing weapons, swerved left to avoid a pedestrian, then narrowly missed a scooter rider during a second evasive turn,” wrote the French newspaper. However, the investigation may not reveal any misconduct by the police, and some public authorities have already stated the officers did not violate any procedures.
Ultra rich people fly in private jets, so the tax proposal on flying more just squeezes the middle class not the rich. Classic bait and switch.