Philip Eden on the meaning of weather records

In the days when Peter Allen and Jane Garvey presented the breakfast programme on Radio Five Live I listened to it in preference to Radio 4's Today programme. The show was not all about Allen and Garvey: an important part of its chemistry was the people doing reports on sport, weather and travel.

The weather expert Philip Eden always came over as a strict school teacher with a wicked dry sense of humour. He brought order to the proceedings when the hilarity threatened to take over.

He is also a proper meteorologist and he makes an important point in the Sunday Telegraph today:

We should guard against those who argue from the particular to the general, suggesting that, for instance, because it was the wettest month on record at one site in Sheffield, we could then call it Britain's wettest month on record.

If events are too easily labelled as "a new record" or "unprecedented", then the people we pay to keep our infrastructure running have a ready-made excuse for failure, and those local councillors who allow developers to build on floodplains against expert advice are not held to account for their greed and incompetence: "It's never happened before so how could we be expected to plan for it?"

I'm not sure where local councillors' "greed" comes into it: I suspect their actions flow instead from pressure to meet central government targets. But the point Eden makes is a good one.