There is something rather sad – desperate even – about the attempts by green zealots and journalists to blame the tragic monsoon floods in Pakistan on human-caused climate change. There is no scientific proof to back up this assertion, but to the alarmists it has a ‘ring of truth’ and can be conveniently fitted into the pre-ordained climate change and Net Zero political narrative.
Likewise, it sounds as if it might be true that one third of the country is under water. This claim first appears to have been made by a local government minister, and was subsequently repeated around the world media. In the U.S., the TV network NBC reported the statement as fact, noting that “experts” and local officials have drawn a direct line to human-made climate change – “countries with the lowest contributions to the global crisis are becoming increasingly vulnerable to its effects”, it helpfully added. Never one not to exploit an extreme weather event, the BBC also reported that the local climate minister had said that “one third of Pakistan had been completely submerged” by historic flooding. The summer rain was said to be the heaviest recorded in a decade “and is blamed by the Government on climate change”.
The BBC has been caught out with numerous climate change errors of late, and by adding the caveat “heaviest in a decade” seems to be getting a little more careful in how it promotes the catastrophe narrative. As David Craig noted last Friday in the Daily Sceptic, there have been four massive Pakistan floods – 1950, 1992, 1993 and 2010 – which killed more people than perished this year. The death toll this year is estimated at just over 1,000, and this compares with over 3,000 in 1993.
But one third of the land “completely submerged”? Citizen journalist Paul Homewood makes the obvious point – obvious, it might be noted, to those with a basic knowledge of geography – that on the face of it the claim is an “absurd one”. Much of Pakistan is mountainous or desert, and the satellite photo below shows the area flooded is nothing like a third.
Homewood also consulted the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which quoted a preliminary satellite mapping estimate that 75,000 sq kms appeared to have been affected by floodwater during August. Homewood notes that the total land mass of Pakistan is 881,000 sq kms, so the flooded area is about 8%.
It’s not hard to debunk this Pakistan under water story. It’s not that hard to debunk a lot of claims about bad weather claims being caused by humans. There is no scientific proof that backs any of the implausible suggestions. They are, however, useful to feed into a narrative that pushes the command-and-control Net Zero agenda. Mainstream writers are rarely in a position to push back against this broader narrative – reporting requirements are set by people well above their pay grades and they’re simply not ‘qualified’. In his thought-provoking new book on the BBC Is it true or did you hear it on the BBC?, David Sedgwick describes the basic problem when mainstream broadcasters like the BBC toe an official line that’s at odds with the truth. Sedgwick argues they must try to convince people not to trust their own senses or instincts but trust instead BBC correspondents and hand-picked experts.
He continues:
This entails, for example, convincing people there really is a ‘climate emergency’, even as those who preach this alarming message fly around the world in private jets between multiple homes. It means persuading that mankind truly is in the grip of a deadly pandemic even when reality proves stubbornly resistant. It means informing audiences that there are really 100 genders, that it’s not women who get pregnant, but ‘people’. As the BBC is obliged to invert reality in multiple ways on a daily basis, reputational damage thus becomes a real possibility. But that’s OK. As a result of its truth-bending behaviour, brand BBC might continue to plummet, but not among those who matter. Within circles of power and influence, the broadcaster’s stock remains as high as ever, higher.
In an upcoming article, I shall report on dramatic new scientific work that shows coral reefs are unaffected by gentle warming in the atmosphere. I shall argue that eco-scientists and journalists must have known that recent warming could never have been the cause of the damage and bleaching seen in the Great Barrier Reef. Yet the catastrophist narrative trying to connect it to global warming went unchallenged for over 20 years.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Nice picture about England in drought, with months of dry weather yet to come I feel like sharing.
Looking ahead, Autumn is coming in with a soaking – we had an inch of rain in an hour last night here in the west country, much to my garden’s joy. (But of course, such heavy rain can only be due to ‘climate change’…)
I’ve actually already been wondering when they’ll switch from The country’s becoming a desert due of climate change! to We’ll all drown in a new deluge due to climate change! There were two lengthy thunderstorms[*] in Reading since Sunday night which is really unsual. And one of my (Scotch Bonnet) chilis (will hopefully bloom next year) decidedly looks as if it would have preferred to have an umbrella.
[*] To make a climate scare story out of it: 40% of all tunderstorms in Reading in the last decade occured in the last 24 months. Due to climate change, extreme weather events are occuring ever more frequently. Climate collapse can only prevented by government cutting emissions much more radically than planned.
Factual background: 2 of all 5 thunderstorms I experienced in Reading in the last decade ocurred Sunday and Monday night.
I assume if they use a hosepipe to help pump water from the premises they won’t be hit with a £1,000 fine.
In school lessons many many moons ago, we used to be shown pictures like this, weather patterns in other countries, floods, droughts, etc, never told it was down to climate change, are all of the climate extremists too young to know this has always happened, and that modern industry has actually improved the lives of many in places like this, despite being unable to control the weather.
In new shocking footage, it is now reported that much of the world is now under water! Photographic evidence from space shows the planet is mainly blue…that’s the watery stuff. Shocking statistics reveal that well over two thirds of the Earth is under water. This must be down to climate change say alarmed climate alarmists. we’ve never known anything like it. Water is evil says person made from almost 60% of water. Floods have been happening since the beginning but every time there are floods, it is immediately said that it is down to climate change. Same with droughts, heatwaves, storms, rain and any other weather I haven’t mentioned. It’s weather. The climate does change but so does everything.
Nothing is stable, everything is changing all the time. I think that is what alarms the alarmists the most because we live in an unpredictable, changing world where nothing is sure and steady and stable on any front. All of us feel the impending storm coming yet we have no idea what its eventual shape will take. Children and youth growing up today are inundated with fear propaganda from an early age and encouraged to be climate warriors or diversity warriors or whatever it is and it is all geared as highly emotive stuff and less on the logical, rational side. Films with apocalyptic scenarios are common too. What I take from all of this is that there is no vision of the future other than doom and gloom. If you talk about another type of vision you are called a dreamer or fantasist.
So, this flooding of the Indus River valley is nothing new. It is normal if you have exceptional rains and no method of diverting these rains into reservoirs or other catchments. I imagine that many of the Pakistan hillsides are bare of trees – well, they are because I was there. Most trees are cut down for firewood. So that’s another cause of flooding. Plus it’s monsoon season. You’ve got dry baked earth and then massive rains and so you get floods. Any money sent to do something about this is immediately diverted into private pockets. It’s always the same. The poor people at most risk suffer, the world responds through various appeals, the politicians and others managing the money make it magically disappear and nothing is done. And repeat.
… and the solutions are? More government, more bureaucracy, more regulation. Funny how all the fixes are fitting of a socialist’s check list and wet dream. There are some state owed / run ideas I can get on board with, that’s what taxes are for, right? But they ain’t fooling anyone with their tree hugging environmental social equity climate grift (well they might be fooling some hence the big corps hoodwinking in their direction to curry favour with authoritarian ESGs).
I was Navigator on one of the last RAF VC10s to transit through Gan (Addu Atoll) in the Maldives in 1974. 0041mins South 73.10mins E. It was then documented as 6ft AMSL (above mean sea level). It’s still 6ft AMSL.
It’s absolutely persisting down here in Geordieland.
Must be climate change.
“I think that is what alarms the alarmists the most because we live in an unpredictable, changing world where nothing is sure and steady and stable on any front.”
Great observation from AethelredTheReadier above. The global elites who have driven climate alarmism for the last 30 odd years are subject to a similar fear, but of the unpredictability of mankind, and of the fragility of their station.
They are a group of people who need to believe, above anything, in their own agency. If they have achieved their position through it, they’ll fear that nothing is possible without it. If they have achieved their position through blind luck, they’ll still need to ascribe it to agency in order to avoid guilt and the terrifying understanding that luck is unreliable.
Hence they’re unable to conceive of how clockwork as intricate and complicated as civilisation can possibly keep ticking and turning without human intervention or direction. From their vantage point, the world has become exponentially smaller in the last century, and the need for global governance to ensure their own safety has become overwhelmingly important.
They might have a point as regards their own position. Civilisation is like a deep river, where the main mass of water in the middle is gentle and slow moving, yet the extreme fringes are subject to violent turbulence faced with any obstacle or change in direction. The tiny minority who control the vast majority of civilisation’s wealth and influence certainly sit on this fringe. In a sense they take a gamble, being the most privileged yet the first to be targeted in any upheaval or revolution, while at the same time having to deal with a usually unhappy quest to find motivation in an unchallenging environment. The smarter among them will be well aware of this.
What better – or more natural – way to impose global governance than to use the influencing factor they are most familiar with: fear of uncertainty? How better to provoke this fear than to invoke the threatening uncertainty of nature, reaching into religious dogma of the past to both present humanity as the source of nature’s threatening crisis and its only solution.
This process doesn’t even have to be conscious. We all, in our need to belong, have a drive to equalise our internal selves (our expectations, hopes, fears, self-esteem) to the external world. The tension between the two form a gradient which accounts for both our sense of motivation and our troubles. Those with disproportionate influence in terms of wealth or power have the ability to override this painful reconciliation, and modify the external world to suit their internal one (usually with bad consequences for the former, hence dictators and totalitarians).
The global elites comprise of those who control the majority of the world’s wealth (via governmental cronyism in places like Russia and China, or inheritance and corporate monopoly in the West) and those who sidle up to them, aligning their aims and beliefs in order to benefit from them – Klaus Schwab, and many of our politicians and celebrities being examples of the latter. They certainly don’t control civilisation, but the disproportionate influence they hold has become overwhelmingly evident in recent years – both indirectly in the obvious co-ordination of fear based messaging via the media and owned academia, and directly, as a quick flick through the WEF’s website demonstrating the insane and lethal degree of societal meddling these people feel they are entitled to carry out, can confirm.
Given the years and years of concerted and failed predictions that in a rational world would be greeted with scepticism, creeping Malthusianism in the media, the ability for adherents to the narrative to persecute dissent in place of compelling arguments, the ability of Climate Science ™ to leverage the spaces in measurement uncertainty to push endless, baseless doom scenarios while abandoning any pretence to the scientific method; to present every weather event as evidence of impending catastrophe, it appears climate panic is co-ordinated from the top down, and stems (at least in the main) not so much a fear of nature amongst the elites, but a more deep-seated fear of humanity.
Net Zero : Save The Planet Freeze A Granny
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ef31rXJ8aZ8
WE GOT A PROBLEM
Yellow Boards By The Road …. for the love of humanity … Al Gore & Obama having mansions next to the very oceans they said would be rising
Wednesday 7th September 3pm to 4pm
Yellow Boards
Junction B3034 Forest Road &
A330 Hatchett Lane
Ascot SL5 8QE
Stand in the Park Sundays 10.30am to 11.30am – make friends & keep sane
Wokingham
Howard Palmer Gardens Sturges Rd RG40 2HD
Bracknell
South Hill Park, Rear Lawn, RG12 7PA
Telegram http://t.me/astandintheparkbracknell
I look forward to the Pakistani Government’s announcement that they’re scrapping their nuclear weapons and their space programme and will instead be diverting the funding to build flood defences and other infrastructure to protect their citizens the next time they get a heavy monsoon.
The author, Chris Morrison, has been absolutely spot on in all his articles against the debacle that is Net Zero brought on by the ridiculous Climate Change argument. How one achieves the goal of getting all the people and then politicians to see the idiocy of the Net Zero policy will be very difficult and lengthy.
Chris Morrison and the Daily Sceptic are doing a fantastic job of putting the facts in front of us but it probably requires the coming austerity of high energy prices to kickstart the process.
I can also recommend the website ‘Notalotofpeopleknowthat’
Their banner headline sums it up perfectly:
“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. – J Robert Oppenheimer.