FactCheck: the Thames Barrier

The background

As a storm surge warning threatens the East Coast of the UK, and the Thames Barrier closes to protect London, we are reminded of this remark in David Cameron's conference speech.

The root cause of this increase is supposedly climate change.

As icecaps melt, sea levels rise. And as temperatures rise, extreme weather events become more common. Both raise the risk of flooding in low-lying coastal areas, such as London.

The Thames Barrier was built to keep the storm surges out of the capital's streets. But is it being called into action more often?

The analysis

The doleful jeremiads of climate change scientists are so terrifying that it's tempting to disbelieve them. If the evidence supporting their claims are expressing in fractions of a degree centigrade and parts per million of CO2, it is easy for layman to dismiss them.

Hence the search for concrete, visible, even-your-grandmother-could-understand-it proof that climate change exists. And Cameron is using the Thames barrier as an example.

What better example could there be, than a miracle of modern engineering designed to protect that temple of capitalist society, the City of London, from the wrath of nature?

So, how many times has it actually closed since it was opened in 1982?

According to the Environment Agency, annual closure totals (as of October 29, and excluding yesterday) was:

The agency was not able to tell FactCheck how many closures the designers were expecting when they built the barrier. But it's clear that right from the start, it was running at more than one closure every six years.

Since then, the situation has often been worse than David Cameron says - a shocking 19 closures in 2003. But over the past decade (1997-2006) the average is pretty close to six closures a year.

The data is in line with what the majority of climate scientists say - that as global warming progresses, the number of extreme events (such as Thames Barrier closures) will tend to increase - though not in a straightforward way.

So there will still be years like 2006, where the barrier only shut once. That doesn't mean the situation is fixed.

FactCheck rating: 1.5

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Every time a FactCheck article is published we'll give it a rating from zero to five.

The lower end of the scale indicates that the claim in question largerly checks out, while the upper end of the scale suggests misrepresentation, exaggeration, a massaging of statistics and/or language.

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