Island Untied – It Happened Today, February 3, 2017

Happy Birthday Vendsyssel-Thy Island. Formerly part of the Jutland peninsula, it achieved geographic independence thanks to a flood on February 3, 1825 that washed away its connection to the mainland. Yes folks, it is more extreme weather. How dare it?

A fair question. Evidently Vendsyssel-Thy, or the storm, didn’t know that only with man-made emissions of CO2 rising fast have we had fires, floods, windstorms and all that jazz. The Danes are still trying to cope even though it’s their second-largest island after Zealand (no, it’s nothing to do with New Zealand, named for a Dutch province with the equally boring name of "Sea Land"). It wasn’t thought of as one place before it got cut off and old habits die hard. But I digress.

The point here is that it actually was an island before about 1200, when some sort of weather event created a sand "tombolo". (I didn’t know either but I Googled and it’s an Italian word for a sandbar or sandspit that links an island to the mainland at which point the island becomes a "tied island".)

What does it all mean? Arguably not much. Except in this regard: Every time a storm does something dramatic today, and with so many more people living in coastal areas storms tend to have a more dramatic impact, a bunch of people who should know better start running around flapping their hands and saying it’s global warming or "climate change" and TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It). But it’s not.

It’s just more weather. Some is good, much is bad. But it’s been happening for a long long time and will probably keep doing so.