Aletho News

The climate scaremongers: Were the Pakistan floods due to climate change?

By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | September 23, 2022

ACCORDING to the BBC’s Environment Correspondent, Matt McGrath, Pakistan’s catastrophic floods last month were ‘likely made worse by global warming’. 

This claim originated from the World Weather Attribution group, who regularly publish such claims every time there is some bad weather. They base their conclusions on computer models, not on real world data. If they had looked at the actual data, they might have come to different conclusions.

According to the Pakistan Meteorological Department, most of the excess rain in August arrived on 18th/19th and 25th/26th. In fact 41 per cent of the month’s rainfall fell on these four days:

Pakistan Meteorological Department

The cause of this heavy rain was two tropical storms, which had crossed from the Bay of Bengal – BOB 06 and BOB 07. (In the Indian Ocean they are categorised as a ‘depression’ and ‘deep depression’. in Atlantic storm terminology, these would be called a tropical depression and a tropical storm respectively).

Both storms followed identical routes west from Bengal, tracking over Rajasthan before hitting the province of Sindh, the region worst affected by flooding:

http://www.pmd.gov.pk/cdpc/home.htm

Unusually, these storms did not dissipate after landfall in Bengal so wreaked havoc for days afterwards. Pakistan, needless to say, is not immune to tropical cyclones. But for two storms to hit in the space of a week, at the same location, and during the wettest month of the year is an extremely rare combination of meteorological events.

Pakistan was already experiencing a wetter than normal monsoon, courtesy of La Nina, but those two storms pushed the rainfall into record territory, the wettest August since 1961.

There is no evidence that tropical cyclones are getting more frequent or intense in the Indian Ocean, so consequently there is also no evidence that last month’s rainfall had anything to do with climate change.

What is significant, though, is the chart of annual rainfall in Pakistan, published in the State of the Pakistan Climate 2021:

http://www.pmd.gov.pk/cdpc/home.htm

Annual rainfall was clearly much less during the 1960s and 70s, the direct result of global cooling at the time. Those years of drought were a disaster for Pakistan, and the country has welcomed the increase in rainfall since, just as they do across the border in India. The wetter, the better!

It is also significant that the seven-year moving average has barely changed since the 1980s, fluctuating up and down, but with no obvious long-term trend. If global warming was really bringing more extreme rainfall, we should expect to see evidence of this in the annual figures.

You will of course hear none of this from the BBC or the climate attribution industry, which was established to promote the climate change agenda, and which routinely publishes patently unsupportable claims.

Steve Koonin, President Obama’s climate scientist, puts it best: ‘Practitioners argue that event attribution studies are the best climate science can do in terms of connecting weather to changes in climate. But as a physical scientist, I’m appalled that such studies are given credence, much less media coverage. A hallmark of science is that conclusions get tested against observations. But that’s virtually impossible for weather attribution studies. It’s like a spiritual adviser who claims her influence helped you win the lottery – after you’ve already won it.’ 

Of course, like most of climate science, the climate attribution industry has little to do with science, and everything to do with money.

The Arctic ice scam

FOR years the ‘experts’ have been telling us that the Arctic would soon be ice-free in summer.

Al Gore notoriously warned us in 2009 that ‘there is a 75 per cent chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during the summer months, could be completely ice-free within five to seven years.’

He was, of course, just a politician. But a whole host of supposed Arctic scientists were all busy issuing similar warnings at the time. In 2007, for instance, Professor Wieslaw Maslowski told us that northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just five to six years. In December that year, Jay Zwally of Nasa agreed, giving the ice till 2012. A year later, in 2008, Professor David Barber went one step further, saying the ice would all be gone that very summer.

For sheer persistence in getting it wrong, however, the prize must go to Peter Wadhams, Professor and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at the University of Cambridge:

•       In 2012, he predicted that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2015/16.

•       In 2014, he thought it might last till 2020.

•       In 2016, he confidently predicted the Arctic would be ice-free that summer (though curiously he now defined ‘ice-free’ as less than 1 million square kilometers).

All these pronouncements were designed for political propaganda purposes, not for scientific reasons, and were widely propagated by the gullible media.

For instance in an article in the Independent in June 2016 (complete with photos of a cute polar bear on a melting piece of ice) Wadhams confidently asserted: ‘My prediction remains that the Arctic ice may well disappear, that is, have an area of less than one million square kilometres for September of this year. Even if the ice doesn’t completely disappear, it is very likely that this will be a record low year. I think there’s a reasonable chance it could get down to a million this year and if it doesn’t do it this year, it will do it next year.’

Unfortunately for Professor Wadhams, the sea ice has not been melting away as ordained. On the contrary, it has been remarkably resilient. Arctic sea ice has just reached its minimum extent this week, just as it always does in September, and the provisional data shows that there is still 4.7million sq km of the stuff.

As can be seen from the chart below, this year and last had the largest extents since 2013 and 2014, and there is considerably more ice around this year than in 2007 and 2008.

https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/data-and-image-archive

There was a climate shift in the Arctic in 2007, when warm Atlantic waters entered the Arctic basin and ocean currents pushed a lot of the thicker multi-year ice out through the Fram Strait, which lies between Greenland and Svalbard, into the open Atlantic Ocean, where unsurprisingly it melted. Since 2007, much of the ice has consequently been thinner, new ice, which naturally tends to melt in summer.

Climate scientists with an agenda to peddle jumped on the bandwagon and predicted that the ice would just carry on melting. However, they ignored the lesson of history. The Atlantic Ocean regularly goes through such cyclical events, with cold and warm phases lasting about 50 to 60 years. The cycle is called the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or AMO, and it is known to have been occurring for at least the last 1,000 years.

In the 1970s, climate scientists were extremely concerned about the increase in sea ice in the Arctic, which occurred during the cold phase of the AMO. The leading climatologist of his day, H H Lamb, wrote in 1982: ‘A greatly increased flow of the cold East Greenland Current has in several years (especially 1968 and 1969, but also 1965, 1975 and 1979) brought more Arctic sea ice to the coasts of Iceland than for 50 years. In April-May 1968 and 1969, the island was half surrounded by ice, as had not occurred since 1888.’

Satellite monitoring of Arctic sea ice began in 1979, at the depth of the cold period. The climate mafia always use this period as the baseline, pretending it was the ‘norm’. That way they can attempt to fool the public that the warming in the Arctic and loss of ice since then is due to man-made global warming.

What is astonishing is that these buffoons are still in a job and living off the taxpayer. In any other field of science, to be so consistently wrong for so long would have quickly led to a well-earned oblivion.

September 24, 2022 - Posted by aletho | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular