How same-sex marriage causes floods

UKIP councillor David Silvester recently caused controversy when he said the recent serious floods in the UK were the direct result of the legalisation of gay marriage, resulting in his suspension from the party. It is easy to assume that his comments are the result or prejudice, bigotry, idiocy, blind hatred, suppressed yearnings or a failure to understand weather, logic or the fact that we live in a universe where the laws of physics aren’t something you can make up to suit your views. However, it’s important to remember that,

however outrageous the claim or however much fun it is to mock them, to be a true scientist it should be assessed rationally and objectively.

And, as alarming as it may seem for every right-minded Guardian reader out there, despite the fact that this very blog has previously said there are no scientific reasons to oppose it, it turns out there are actually scientific arguments to support the claim that same-sex marriage does indeed lead to floods.

The cause of floods is well understood by and large, but it can be summed up as an above-average amount of water turning up in a place that is not able to cope with it via containment, drainage etc. This can happen very quickly, meaning water enters an area faster than the ground itself can drain it away, and thus we get flash floods.

Floods can occur when a river “bursts its banks” or in coastal regions from the sea, if conditions are right. Typically when we think of floods, we think excessive rainfall. And this is where the problem lies.

There are several types of rain, depending on the process by which it occurs. Orographic or “relief” rain is when landmasses like mountains cause moist warm air to rise over them, cooling it in the process and causing the moisture to rain out. Frontal rain is similar, but instead of the mountain there’s a body of colder, denser air that warm wet air is forced to rise over, causing rain as it does so. There’s also convective rain, which is arguably the easiest to comprehend, where direct sunlight causes bodies of water to evaporate and rise into the air, where they rain out again.

The UK has been dealing with all of these types of rain for millennia (and complaining about them for almost exactly as long). However, the legalisation of same-sex marriage has thrown the delicate balance out of whack, with devastating results.

Logically, same-sex marriage leads to an increase in the number of weddings. Weddings invariably involve a large number of people congregating in one place, which leads to a lot of body heat and warming, and this heat enters the atmosphere, increasing the air temperature and producing more warm fronts. People also cry a lot at weddings. This is likely to be even more pronounced at same-sex weddings, with the added element of recently achieved equality making the events even more poignant. Tears are basically water, which quickly evaporate, thus adding to the water content of the atmosphere. Weddings also typically involve a lot of alcohol, which makes people colder, meaning they’re more likely to turn on heating systems when they arrive home, releasing more heat and CO2 into the atmosphere.

All of this leads to an increase in rainfall. But these are only the direct consequences of same-sex marriages; they can have an even greater effect indirectly.

It would be difficult to deny that a lot of people don’t like homosexuals for no logical reason. For proof of this, you can probably just read some of the inevitable comments below this article. But gay people do tend to make chunks of the population unreasonably angry. Increased rainfall is a likely consequence of the amount of steam shooting from the ears of people like Councillor Silvester and Lord Tebbit whenever homosexuals have their rights recognised by the majority of people. Such a sudden influx of infuriated water-vapour into the air can only have negative consequences in a chaotic climate like the UK’s.

This is often accompanied by a surge in angry comments/blogposts/online rants, generating heat via servers and computers. There is also an increase in newspaper space given over to those opposed to same-sex marriage complaining about their rights being eroded or them being censored with no self-awareness at all. All this newspaper comes from trees, and cutting down trees increases the risk of flooding.

These are just some of the ways that same-sex marriage can result in dangerous flooding. No doubt there are many more that are easily as probable as the ones discussed above (i.e. not even slightly). The main problem seems to stem from people becoming explicitly angry about the fact that two people of the same gender can get married in a way that doesn’t affect the rest of the population at all, and then blaming them for a series of devastating natural occurrences.

Our best defence may be to divert their attentions elsewhere, e.g. by writing ridiculous blogposts that look like they support their views but in fact just openly mock them.