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No rise in temps or rainfall in Bangladesh for 100 years, despite alarmists pointing to it as ‘canary in the coalmine’

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 28, 2022

The country of Bangladesh is mostly a floodplain. Over 80% of the territory is classified as such, while 75% of the land is less than 10 metres above sea level. Heavy monsoons and widespread flooding are common. In an average year, 18% of the landmass is inundated, a figure that rose to 75% in 1988. What better place for western guilt-trippers to highlight and claim that all the natural tribulations are down to humans changing the climate? And what better ‘poster child’ for grant-hungry activists and local politicians to highlight when demanding large amounts of ‘compensation’ from developed nations to assuage the sins of industrialisation?

Earlier this year, Bangladesh was hit by the regular monsoon rains and flooding. Sky News reported that “experts say that climate change is increasing the frequency, ferocity and unpredictability of floods in Bangladesh”. Needless to say, the BBC made the same point, adding that “experts say that climate change is increasing the likelihood of events like this happening around the world”.

Presumably, when they talk about climate change, Sky and the BBC are worried about flooding being caused by rising temperatures and increased rainfall. It might therefore be considered curious that these climate changes do not seem to have affected Bangladesh.

According to figures compiled for the World Bank, the average temperature in Bangladesh is the same today as it was 100 years ago. There are the usual cyclical changes, but global warming is not much in evidence around the Bay of Bengal.

Let’s try rainfall.

Again according to the World Bank, we see little change in the overall trend going back 100 years. If anything, rainfall has slightly decreased, and there‘s certainly nothing unusual in the recent past. The graph shows that rainfall can vary widely between years. Severe monsoons in the past have caused enormous damage and heavy loss of life. Six catastrophic floods were recorded in the 19th century and 18 in the 20th. These days, hundreds of people can die in the flooding; in the past the figures could run into hundreds of thousands.

In a recent article in Climate Home News, it was said that Bangladeshis were dealing with wave after wave of climate chaos. The article “sponsored” by the international ngo Helvetas told its Western audience that one of the impacts of these disasters is “forced migration”. Of course, this plays into another common climate scare, suggesting, without any discernible evidence, that huge numbers of people will become ‘climate refugees’ in the future, mostly from tropical areas, and inevitably seeking to move northwards to ‘safety’.

Making Bangladesh a poster country for Western Armageddonites spreading the pseudoscientific notion that humans are causing the climate to radically change, does the country few favours. It is sited in many geographically fragile areas, and is prone to tropical cyclones. But over 160 million people are sustained by good agriculture, increased manufacturing development, and economic growth of around 6% per annum.

As countries become more prosperous, they can become more resilient in the face of what nature has always thrown at them. This appears to have happened in the case of Bangladesh, where the number of fatalities from flooding has significantly declined over the last 50 years. Surely, this is the good news story that should be spread in mainstream media, and probably would be if the climate change narrative was not embedded in every part of the discourse.

As we have reported throughout the year, it has been a disastrous period for climate alarmists preaching their gospel of doom to inflict a controlling Net Zero political agenda across the world. Global warming ran out of steam years ago, and no amount of ‘adjusting’ of surface temperature databases can hide that fact. Weather events are cyclical, and attributing any one event to human activity is model-driven junk science. Summer Arctic sea ice stopped declining over a decade ago, but David Attenborough still says it could all be gone by 2035. Polar bears, penguins and coral – all doing nicely thank you. More prosperous and healthier societies are learning to protect themselves against the ravages of Mother Nature. Small increases in carbon dioxide, otherwise known as plant food, continue to green up the planet, leading to higher food yields, reduced famine and healthier eco systems.

December 28, 2022 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | 1 Comment

Protests Erupt in Bangladesh as Government Raises Fuel Prices While Seeking IMF Loans

Samizdat – 07.08.2022

Bangladesh has approached the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a multibillion-dollar loan, making it the third South Asian country – after Sri Lanka and Pakistan – to have sought financial help from the multi-lateral lender in the past two months.

Sporadic protests erupted in several of Bangladesh’s cities on Saturday in response to a significant rise in oil and gas prices. After the price rise, public transport fares also rocketed up to 35 percent. Several organizations related to transportation have suspended their operations for 24 hours and declared their sales would resume on Monday.

The Bangladesh Tank-Lorry Owners’ Association and the Petrol Pump Owners’ Association staged a 24-hr strike on Sunday. They stopped collecting fuel from the Padma, Meghna, and Jamuna depots – major oil repositories for the country in the Khulna division.

“The strike started at 8am and will continue until 8am on Monday,” Md Farhad Hossain, an official of Bangladesh Tank-Lorry Owners’

The association has been demanding 7.5 percent commission on the present fuel price.

The Sheikh Hasina government on Friday raised the diesel price by 34 Taka ($0.36) to 114 Taka ($1.20) per liter, and the octane price by 46 Taka (0.49 USD) to 135 Taka ($1.42) per liter.

Protesters alleged that instead of lowering fuel prices as the rest of the world was, the government had raised costs to “appease the IMF”, which “is unacceptable and anti-people.”

“We urge the government to return fuel prices to their previous rates immediately,” said Bangladesh Jatri Kalyan Samity, a group working for the welfare of commuters, in a statement.

Bangladesh is reportedly seeking $4.5Bln in loans from the IMF as the country’s forex reserves plummeted below $40Bln.

On 3 August, the US-led lender said it would work with Dhaka to design an IMF-supported reform program that would be required for the loan.

“As part of the policy response, Bangladesh’s request for a Resilience and Sustainability Trust and an accompanying IMF-supported program will provide safeguards in the event of further deterioration of external conditions,” the Fund added.

Bangladesh reported a fall in export earnings because of dwindling consumer demand in the west. European Union registered a 3 percent fall in consumer demand this week.

Bangladesh’s appeal to the IMF comes as Sri Lanka and Pakistan have also been negotiating financial aid. The economic slowdown and inflation has also hit these south Asian economies.

August 7, 2022 Posted by | Economics, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

Imran Khan hits out at West for treating Pakistanis like ‘slaves’

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in Moscow, February 24, 2022 © Mikhail Klimentyev / Sputnik
RT | March 7, 2022

Prime Minister Imran Khan lashed out at foreign diplomats who pressured Pakistan to join a UN resolution condemning Russia over its military attack on Ukraine, accusing the envoys of treating Pakistan like “slaves.”

At a rally on Sunday, Khan shot back at a March 1 letter from diplomats representing 22 missions, including countries in the European Union along with Japan, Switzerland, Canada, the UK, and Australia, which called on Pakistan to drop its neutrality and join them in condemning Moscow.

“What do you think of us? Are we your slaves… that whatever you say, we will do?” questioned Khan, before asking EU ambassadors whether they wrote “such a letter to India,” which also remains neutral.

Khan claimed that Pakistan had suffered for previously supporting NATO’s military action in Afghanistan and declared, “We are friends with Russia, and we are also friends with America; we are friends with China and with Europe; we are not in any camp.”

Pakistan, along with 34 other countries, abstained from voting on the UN’s resolution condemning Russian “aggression against Ukraine” last week. Pakistan’s neighbors India, Bangladesh, China, Iran, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan also abstained.

Khan met with Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on February 24, the day Moscow launched its military operation in Ukraine, to discuss bilateral ties and regional issues.

Moscow maintains that the attack was launched with the purpose of “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine, and that it was the only possible option left to protect the people of eastern Ukraine following years of a grueling blockade that claimed thousands of lives. Kiev insists the invasion was unprovoked, saying it had no plans to retake the breakaway Donetsk and Lugansk republics by force.

March 6, 2022 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Kerry Lunges Into India With Anti-BRI Agenda Bringing Green Suicide for All

By Matthew Ehret | Strategic Culture Foundation | April 9, 2021

As the China-Russian-Iran alliance continues to gain new momentum spreading win-win cooperation and development across Asia, Africa and the World, the dying unipolar system run by detached militarists, financiers and technocrats is doubling down on its weird mix of 1) a “scorched earth” offensive threat to “dissuade” China and Russia from continuing on their current trajectory and 2) a “positive” green game on which nations are invited to tie their destinies as an alternative to China’s BRI.

Everyone reading this should already be aware of the “scorched earth” Full Spectrum dominance policy targeting Russia and China.

However, what is less appreciated even among the most geopolitically savvy anti-imperialists today is what sort of “positive” green game is being deployed to subvert the $3 trillion Belt and Road Initiative which has already won over 136 participating nations and which geopolicians understand to be a mortal threat to their desired world order.

A U.S.-Led Alternative to the BRI

According to Biden’s own remarks during his March 26 call to Boris Johnson, the USA must create “an infrastructure plan to rival the Belt and Road Initiative.”

This agenda was amplified by John Kerry’s foray to India, Bangladesh and the UAE from April 1-11 where the Presidential Climate Envoy has been deployed to set the stage for the April 22-23 International Leaders Summit on Climate to be hosted by Joe Biden.

Now, in principle, a U.S.-version of the BRI is not intrinsically a bad idea.

However, this idea could only function in the real world IF the USA were to give up its unipolar imperial ambitions and return to the anti-imperial constitutional traditions which once animated its greatest leaders like Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, FDR and JFK. Under influence of the technocrats managing the current Biden presidency in post-color revolution USA, that option is about as far from reality as one can imagine.

On the other hand, were the USA to stick with the Great Reset Agenda which is attempting to undo the industrial revolution under the cover of “reducing global emissions” to zero by 2050 as the Paris Accords proclaim, then any idea of a viable U.S.-led BRI doppelganger is pre-doomed to fail by its own internal self-contradictions.

What is the main self-contradiction of this “development agenda”?

The nations of the earth need to develop. They have objectively verifiable and measurable constraints to their ability to support their populations based on limits to agriculture, industry, energy, education and transportation. Decades of unchallenged Anglo-American dominance has only exacerbated these problems to the acute degrees we find today.

That’s why they are embracing China’s Belt and Road so enthusiastically.

Unlike the World Bank and IMF practices over the past 70 years, China is extending financing to all participating nations based on conditionality-free, low interest practices that create long term, genuine development, and full spectrum economies in every nation it touches. This is how China has met its goals of wiping out extreme poverty at home in a relative blink of an eye.

Despite the countless billions of dollars of loans extended to the poorest nations of the world since the earliest days of the Cold War, poverty, war, insecurity, terrorism and debt slavery have become more rampant today than ever before. The recent March 23 Hunger Hotspots Report issued by the World Food Program and FAO outlined hundreds of millions of people suffering acute food insecurity around the world with Syria, the Congo, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Venezuela, Haiti and South Sudan toping the list. U.S.-led imperial intrigue, financial loans, speculative warfare and humanitarian “aid” to all of these countries should not be seen as coincidental to their currently dismal situation.

China, on the other hand, is ensuring that these nations acquire genuine development, great megaprojects, interconnectivity via roads, ports and rail as well as local industrial production and engineering expertise via trade schools and on-the-ground training under Chinese experts. Investments into all forms of energy required to build megaprojects is on the table without any green conditionalities as we find being imposed by western technocrats.

Kerry’s Green Delusion Exposed in India

Compare this with John Kerry’s demands that India and Bangladesh embrace de-carbonization strategies in the build up to the April 22-23 climate conference and the latter COP26 summit in December. The delusional foundations of Kerry’s thinking were eloquently exposed by Chandrashekhar Dasgupta, a leading member of Modi’s Council on Climate Change who told the Hindustan Ties on March 30:

“First, it would require us to immediately scrap all existing coal-based power plants and factories, or alternatively, retrofit them with carbon-capture and storage technology. This would entail astronomical costs at a time when the economy is already reeling from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Dasgupta called out the hypocrisy and imperial agenda’s underlying this apparently altruistic green agenda saying:

“It would necessitate an immediate switch-over to imported, existing clean energy technologies at a huge cost, denying our own industry the time required for indigenization or development of affordable indigenous technologies. Let us not forget that the U.S. lodged a complaint against us at the WTO when we took some modest measures to promote domestic manufacture of solar cells and modules… we need to examine the trade-related implications of surrendering our principled position on ‘common and differentiated responsibilities.’ The European Union is set to impose levies on carbon-intensive imports, even from developing countries. It would be naive to think that the countries calling on India to adopt a 2050 net-zero target are motivated purely by altruistic concerns unrelated to commercial interests.”

OSOWOG Revived

Despite the fact that a “Green BRI doppelganger” has been on the books since 2018 when the OSOWOG Plan was unveiled as a World Bank-financed/British Commonwealth-run initiative, the plan was generally acknowledged to be an unworkable green boondoggle and fell out of interest for quite some time. However, a flurry of renewed media propaganda over the past few months has attempted to drive this green zombie back into the zeitgeist as witnessed by Forbes’ recent promotional coverage of the plan. The authors of the Forbes fluff piece stated:

“The idea behind OSOWOG is that the sun never sets. An inter-continental grid can be instrumental in harnessing the sun’s energy (and all other forms of renewable energy) by optimally leveraging the differences in time zones, seasons, resources, and prices between countries and regions. This is particularly helpful for decarbonising countries which have limited avenues of harnessing renewable energy and heavily reliant on fossil fuels.”

The plan’s outline is broken up into three phases which is somewhat reminiscent of the famous “underpants gnome plot” from South Park.

The World Bank-connected authors describe how in phase one, solar panels will be spread across South Asia, Southwest Asia and the Middle East with India serving as the driving force. Completely skipping over how phase one could realistically happen, the technicians describe phase two which sees North Africa swiftly covered in solar panels (see: Desertec part deux) and as if by magic, both regions would be connected via green grids. In the final third phase, this new green energy hub cutting across the Eurasian Heartland from Africa through Asia, would then be extended to the entire globe.

When all of this is somehow finished by 2050, the world as a whole would be forever relieved of its dependence on dirty energy sources like oil, natural gas and nuclear as we collectively are steered into a new age of clean zero-growth, sustainable mediocrity under a technocratic elite managing the levers of consumption and production under a post-nation state world order.

Three basic questions might arise at this point:

1) How would such large-scale green megaprojects be funded by western nations who are sitting on top of a multi-quadrillion dollar derivatives bubble of speculative capital ready to blow out into a hyperinflationary collapse that will make Weimar 1923 look like a cake walk?

Answer: It can’t.

2) Even if green solar grids could be constructed across the heartland cutting across (and disrupting) the East-West New Silk Road, how could such forms of green energy- long known for its unreliability, high costs and low-quality energy output be capable of meeting the needs of the people of the world wracked by generations of poverty and underdevelopment?

Answer: It can’t.

3) So why would any nation go along with this sort of plan when viable alternatives like the Belt and Road Initiative and broader Multipolar Alliance already exist with olive branches open to all?

Answer: If they are not suicidal, then they won’t.

This last answer obviously creates a bit of an uncomfortable ambiguity since the thesis that “nations are not suicidal” is rather indefensible at this moment in time.

Suicidal Ideation as a Bad Foreign Policy Paradigm

Based upon their words and actions, any onlooker endowed with a basic IQ level would have to come to the conclusion that many nations have demonstrated a high degree of suicidal behavior in recent years. From pumping trillions of dollars into zombie, to shutting down entire economies in response to viruses with relatively low fatality rates, to encircling Russia and China with belligerent military postures, to pouring flames onto the fires of radical jihadi terrorist and neo-Nazi groups, to shutting down the foundations of industrial energy needs requisite to support existing population levels, to burning food for bioethanol- there is very little western governments have done in recent years which gives any strong indication that the desire to survive is strong.

The fact that many of those suicidal nations are concentrated in the Trans-Atlantic City of London-dominated zone of influence and have seen their nationalist leaders fall under assassins bullets many decades ago in order for supranational “deep state” operations to infuse themselves into positions of control should be kept firmly in mind. This fact helps remind us that we are not dealing with conventional “sovereign nation states” as some commentators make the foolish habit of doing, but rather we are dealing with a supranational financier oligarchy utilizing its influence across bureaucratic, media, military industrial, academic, and corporate lines of control.

Whether or not India, or any other nation among NATO (and newly emerging Pacific NATO Quad) has the moral fitness to survive will depend on how fast they realize that their genuine interests are not located in green grids or military confrontation with Russia and China but rather in dropping zero sum thinking in order to work with the Multipolar Alliance as collaborators.

April 10, 2021 Posted by | Economics, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Indian diplomacy faces tropical summer in Male

By M K Bhadrakumar | Indian Punchline | February 8, 2018

Writing in the Guardian newspaper, J. J. Robinson, the well-known journalist and author of Maldives: Islamic Republic, Tropical Autocracy, reflected as follows:

  • Ultimately the ongoing telenovela of Maldivian political intrigue is a distraction from the real crisis – the illegitimacy of the judiciary. Handpicked by Gayoom during his rule and illegally given life tenure under the new constitution in 2010, the judges have been at the centre of most of the Maldives’ recent ills; at least 50% of the 200-odd judges and magistrates have less than seventh-grade education, while a quarter had actual criminal records, including convictions for sexual misconduct, embezzlement, violence and disruption of public harmony.
  • Resoundingly discredited by groups such as the International Committee of Jurists and the UN’s special rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers, the institution demands wholesale reform, and likely the presence of foreign judges on the bench. However excited the opposition at their recent good fortune, current events are far from a triumph of judicial independence.

The Maldives President Abdulla Yameen hit the nail on the head when he disclosed on Tuesday that the Chief Justice of Supreme Court Abdulla Saeed was bribed to give such a ruling on February 1, by ordering the release of a clutch of politicians viscerally opposed to the regime and reinstating 12 erstwhile lawmakers (which would have made the ruling Progressive Party of Maldives forfeit majority support in the parliament.) Yameen didn’t say who bribed Saeed but he referred to a plot to overthrow him and vowed to get to the bottom of it.

One can only hope that Yameen doesn’t mention India in a fit of rancor. He has an alibi if he wants to put India on the mat, since Chief Justice Abdulla Saeed  (who is in police custody) had paid an extended official visit to New Delhi in late October, soon after the visit by former president Mohamed Nasheed to India in end-August. By the way, while in Delhi, Nasheed addressed a panel at Brookings India to present his case for regime change in Maldives, openly soliciting Indian support. Like icing on the cake, subsequently, the US ambassador in Colombo Arun Kashyap (who is accredited to Male) also dropped by for consultations over the situation in Maldives with the then Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar.

Nasheed himself is based in Colombo. But why would Sri Lankan government encourage Nasheed to overthrow Yameen? To my mind, all this looks like a replay of the botched-up attempt by the CIA to eliminate Turkish President Recep Erdogan in July 2015. The US state department statement on Tuesday, here, betrays a sense of fury and despair that Yameen survived.

India should distance itself from the tragic happenings in Maldives. Importantly, we should nip in the bud any misperceptions arising of being party even remotely to an American plot to overthrow the leadership of a friendly neighboring country. Therefore, we should reach out to Yameen quickly, decisively and demonstrably. After all, he had sent his foreign minister as special envoy to Delhi only recently (soon after Nasheed, Saeed and Kashyap’s visit) in an extraordinary diplomatic gesture to convey to PM Modi that ‘India first’ has been, still is and will forever be the cornerstone of Male’s foreign policy priorities. See the reports on the special envoy’s talks with the Indian leadership on January 11 in New Delhi — here, here and here.)

A hot summer lies ahead for Indian diplomacy since elections are due in the Maldives and Yameen will pull out all the stops to consolidate his position. Delhi’s approach should be ditto what the UPA government took when Sheikh Hasina got re-elected as prime minister in January 2014 in Bangladesh – the boycott of the main opposition party Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the abysmally low voter turnout (22%) notwithstanding. We had rejected Washington’s entreaties to join its campaign to arm-twist Hasina and get a ‘pro-American’ leadership installed in Dhaka.

But the heart of the matter is that times have changed during the past three years. The Indian establishment seemed to think that what was good for Uncle Sam was ditto what India should work for and that all that crap about ‘strategic autonomy’ had become archaic. Basically, bureaucrats had a field day setting their own agenda in the absence of assertive political leadership.

We should never have entertained Kashyap and Brookings India (franchise of a notorious American think tank of Cold War vintage with links to the US intelligence) should never have sponsored activities directed against India’s friendly neighbors. We do not realize that India’s small neighbors take us very seriously and read meanings and motives into our behavior.

February 8, 2018 Posted by | Aletho News | , , , , | Leave a comment

BBC Peddle Fake Claims About India Monsoon

image

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0938tj7/victoria-derbyshire-01092017
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | September 2, 2017

Just when you thought the BBC could not get any worse.

Standing in for Victoria Derbyshire on her current affairs programme yesterday morning, Matthew Price ran a report on the heavy floods this summer in Nepal and Bangladesh.

After telling us this had been one of the heaviest monsoons on record, he went on to interview Mark Pierce, Save the Children’s Director in Bangladesh, and Francis Markus of the International Red Cross in Nepal. (About 32 minutes in).

It did not take long for him to blame climate change for the floods.

He first directly asked Pierce :

“In a place like Bangladesh, do people start to say things are getting worse, it is something to do with climate change?”

Pierce unsurprisingly agreed, and said that even farmers could see climate change everyday, and see their land either flooded every year or facing drought.

Price then asked a similar question of Markus:

“In Nepal, do people at the sharp end relate this to climate change?”

In reply, Markus talks of immense changes in climate, and states “All the farmers in Nepal are kind of noticing that yields are less and less from year to year”, and goes on to tell us there has been nothing but nothing but droughts and floods in recent years.

Well, as you will all know by now, the UN Food and Agricultural Organisation publish data which tells us exactly what is going on.

First, Bangladesh.

We can see that both yields and production of cereals has been steadily rising since the 1980s. Also, the prevalence of undernourishment has halved since the 1990s, despite a large increase in population:

chart.jpeg

chart.jpeg-1

http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#country/16

And we find exactly the same story in Nepal:

chart.jpeg-3

chart.jpeg-2

http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#country/149

Clearly neither the Red Cross nor the Save The Children representatives were telling us the truth, which does not surprise me. Meanwhile the naive BBC presenter has been so indoctrinated by global warming propaganda, that he never even thought for a second that he was being lied to.

As for “one of the heaviest monsoons on record”, this year’s has so far been perfectly normal, with 3% less rain than normal.

image

http://hydro.imd.gov.in/hydrometweb/(S(stqraz451440dcbecbun0x55))/PdfPageImage.aspx?imgUrl=PRODUCTS\Rainfall_Graphs\Monsoon\Monsoon_BARGRAPH_CUMULATIVE_RAINFALL_COUNTRY_INDIA_c.JPG&landingpage=landing

As for the East and North East, where the rainfall has been heaviest, rainfall is bang on average:

image

http://hydro.imd.gov.in/hydrometweb/(S(stqraz451440dcbecbun0x55))/PdfPageImage.aspx?imgUrl=PRODUCTS\Rainfall_Graphs\Monsoon\Monsoon_BARGRAPH_CUMULATIVE_RAINFALL_REGION_CODE_EAST%20AND%20NORTH%20EAST%20INDIA_c.JPG&landingpage=landing

And what about the longer trends, and claims of floods and droughts?

Well, the whole history of Indian monsoons is one of recurrent floods and droughts.

aismr1871-2016-Sep-30-2016

http://www.tropmet.res.in/~kolli/MOL/Monsoon/Historical/air.html

Drought conditions were particularly prevalent between 1900 and 1920, and again in the 1960s to 1980s, when the world was cooling down.

Conversely, the worst of the flooding took place in the late 19thC and 1940s and 50s.

Drought conditions prevailed in 2015 and 2016, but this was because of strong El Nino conditions. Indian scientists are well aware of this connection, which has nothing to do with global warming.

In short, the whole story reported by the BBC is a pack of lies. Indian monsoons are not becoming more extreme. If anything, the opposite is true.

Even Madhav Khandekar, IPCC lead author on extreme weather, accepts that there is nothing unusual about recent flooding in India. In a 2014 paper, he concluded that:

The floods and unfortunate deaths of several dozen people in the Kashmir region of India in September 2014 reignited the debate about increasing human emissions of carbon dioxide and their putative linkage to extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and heat waves. What is missing from many of the media reports and scientific publications on this subject is critical analysis of past weather extremes to determine if there has been an increase in recent years.

In this brief report, past floods and droughts in the Indian monsoon are examined carefully and it is shown that such events have occurred throughout the excellent 200-year-long summer monsoon rainfall dataset. It is further documented that such floods and droughts are caused by natural variability of regional and global climate, and not by human carbon dioxide emissions.

https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/11/12/indias-monsoon-floods-nothing-new-not-caused-by-climate-change/

In fact, if Price had bothered to check with the BBC Delhi correspondent, he would have discovered that the heavier the monsoon rainfall is , the better it is for India’s economy and many other things:

image

They are finally here, the monsoons, India’s most important weather phenomenon.

After days of speculation about the date, the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) announced on Wednesday that the monsoons had arrived in Kerala. India receives 80% of its annual rainfall during the monsoon season, which runs between June and September.

The monsoon will gradually spread across India by 15 July, bringing cheer, hope, insects, relief from the heat, better farm output, GDP growth and lower inflation.

The arrival of the monsoons is like finding a river after crossing a desert. This year, a deluge is predicted. Weather forecasters expect at least 5-6% more rainfall than usual. This will affect things ranging from bank interest to the fortunes of the fertiliser industry. It will also alleviate the drinking water crisis in many parts by replenishing ground water.

But the joy doesn’t last long.

The hot summer gives way to complaints of “It’s not the heat it’s the humidity”. Meanwhile insects and mosquitoes multiply, bringing diseases in their wake.

As the Indian farmer sows a new crop, the city folk face water-logging that makes it difficult to get out. Sometimes it rains so much, especially in the financial nerve centre of Mumbai, that the city is flooded.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-36476535

Full Article

September 3, 2017 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | 5 Comments

Israel behind murders of Bangladesh bloggers, minister suggests

Press TV – June 7, 2016

Bangladesh’s home minister says Israel is spearheading an “international conspiracy” behind the serial killings of secular intellectuals and religious minorities in the Asian country.

Asaduzzaman Khan said on Monday that there was evidence of an “international conspiracy” against the Muslim-majority country, which backs the Palestinian cause and has no diplomatic ties with Tel Aviv.

“Bangladesh has become the target of an international conspiracy. And a foreign intelligence agency has joined the conspiracy,” Khan said.

He touched upon a meeting between an opposition politician and an Israeli intelligence agent as evidence of the Israeli involvement in the murders.

“You must have noticed that an Israeli intelligence agent had a meeting with a politician, it does not need to be verified further, all [Bangladeshis] know about it.”

Opposition MP Aslam Chowdhury was recently arrested and accused of sedition after his photographs with Israeli politician Mendi Safadi in India were published.

Chowdhury has denied the meeting and said he was on a business trip to India.

Reacting to Khan’s remarks, Emmanuel Nahshon, a spokesman of the Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs, described the accusation as “utter drivel.”

Serial murders

Khan’s remarks came on the same day that police found the dead body of Ananda Gopal Ganguly, 70-year-old Hindu priest, near his home in a village of western Jhenidah District.

According to police, the victim had his head nearly severed from his body.

A day earlier, a senior police officer’s wife, Mahmuda Aktar, had also been stabbed and shot dead in front of her six-year-old son in the city of Chittagong.

Also on Sunday, Sunil Gomes, a Christian grocer, was hacked to death in the village of Bonpara in an attack claimed by the Daesh terrorist group.

Police say more than 40 people have been killed since January 2015 in the spate of killings.

Most of the attacks against the secular bloggers, academics and members of religious minorities, including Shia Muslims, Hindus and Christians, were claimed by Daesh or al-Qaeda-linked groups.

However, Dhaka has disputed the claims and blamed opposition parties or local militant groups for the killings.

Israel is believed to be among the staunch supporters of the Takfiri outfits operating against the government in Syria over the past five years.

June 7, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, False Flag Terrorism | , , , , | Leave a comment

‘UK trains armies on its own human rights blacklist’

Press TV – May 23, 2016

The British government is providing military training to the majority of nations it has blacklisted for human rights violations, a new report reveals.

In a report published on Sunday, the Independent revealed that 16 of the 30 countries on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO)’s “human rights priority” watchlist are receiving military support from the UK despite being accused by London itself of issues ranging from internal repression to the use of sexual violence in armed conflicts.

According to the UK Ministry of Defense, since 2014, British armed forces have provided “either security or armed forces personnel” to the military forces of Saudi Arabia , Bahrain, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Burundi, China, Colombia, Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

Britain is a major provider of weapons and equipment such as cluster bombs and fighter jets to Saudi Arabia in its year-long military aggression against Yemen that has killed nearly 9,400 people, among them over 2,230 children.

Since the conflict began in March 2015, the British government has licensed the sale of nearly $4 billion worth of weaponry to the Saudi kingdom.

British commandos also train Bahraini soldiers in using sniper rifles, despite allegations that the Persian Gulf monarchy uses such specialist forces to suppress a years-long pro-democracy uprising in the country.

Bahraini forces visited the Infantry Battle School in Wales last week, accompanied by troops from Nigeria, the Defense Ministry said.

Nigeria’s top military generals are accused by Amnesty International of committing war crimes by causing the deaths of 8,000 people through murder, starvation, suffocation and torture during security operations against the Boko Haram Takfiri terrorists, according to the report.

Andrew Smith, with the Campaign Against Arms Trade, said Britain should not be “colluding” with countries known for being “some of the most authoritarian states in the world.”

May 23, 2016 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

They Are Still Killing Trade Union Leaders

Global Capital’s Death Squads and Night-Riders

By DAVID MACARAY | CounterPunch | April 18, 2012

Make no mistake.  We had some ugly anti-labor mischief of our own during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where union organizers, political radicals, suspected anarchists and Bolsheviks were blackballed, beaten, imprisoned, deported, murdered, and state-executed—all in the name of “law and order.”  But while many of these men (and women, too….they deported Emma Goldman to Russia) were clearly railroaded, at least the high-profile figures were given the semblance of a jury trial.

Question:  So what happens these days in developing countries when a prominent, charismatic union activist—with the courage to stand up to sinister, government-supported business groups who have, on more than one occasion, already threatened his life—attempts to get the country’s underpaid, under-benefited workers to join a labor union?  Answer:  They kill him.

It was reported Monday, April 9, that the body of Aminul Islam, the charismatic and widely respected union leader of Bangladesh’s garment industry, had been found (on Friday, April 6) dumped along side a road in Ghatail, a town approximately 60 miles northwest of Dhaka, Bangladesh’s capital.  Not only had Islam been murdered, local police reported that the corpse bore evidence of “severe” torture.

Since 2006, Aminul Islam had been a major thorn in the side of the garment bosses, as he fought for higher wages, safer working conditions, and increased employee dignity.  Many Bangladeshis work 12-14 hour days, make as little as 21-cents per hour, and don’t even get regular breaks.  With a reported $19 billion in overseas sales in 2011, Bangladesh is the world’s second-largest apparel exporter.  The stakes are enormously high.  With an estimated 5,000 factories cranking out fabric night and day, the textile industry is single-handedly keeping Bangladesh’s economy afloat. Which is why they were so frightened of Aminul Islam.

Most recently, Islam had been trying to organize workers at factories owned by a company called the Shanta Group.  According to shipping records, Shanta produces garments for many well-known American companies, including Tommy Hilfiger, Nike, and Ralph Lauren.  Because Islam’s activism was acknowledged to have been largely responsible for worker uprisings and demonstrations in 2010—demonstrations that nearly crippled the industry—business groups weren’t going to stand idly by and watch him convince Shanta’s 8,000 workers to join the union.  They weren’t going to allow it.  So they killed him.

Mind you, these atrocities aren’t happening only in faraway Bangladesh; they are happening in our own hemisphere as well—in Central and South America.  In fact, the place where they have occurred the most—and continue to occur with chilling regularity—is Colombia.  According to the Solidarity Center (the labor federation’s international arm, headquarted in Washington D.C.), nearly 4,000 Colombian trade unionists have been murdered over the last 20 years.  Indeed, more trade unionists are killed in Colombia each year than in the rest of the world combined.

The United States supports the government of Colombia.  We support this anti-labor government that gives lip service to initiating programs designed to stop the violence, but who, in truth, has done little to prevent death squads and night-riders from tooling around the country murdering trade unionists.

And that’s where the arrangement now stands.  Our clothing is made by workers whose factory conditions are deplorable; our produce is harvested by pickers whose field conditions are deplorable; and our government supports regimes whose human rights records are a joke.  The U.S. has more than 800 military bases strewn around the word, we spend more money on defense than the rest of the world combined, and Barack Obama is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.  That’s a very weird trifecta.

DAVID MACARAY, an LA playwright and author (“It’s Never Been Easy:  Essays on Modern Labor”), was a former union rep.   He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, forthcoming from AK Press.  He can be reached at dmacaray@earthlink.net

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April 18, 2012 Posted by | Economics, Solidarity and Activism, Subjugation - Torture, Timeless or most popular | , , , , | Comments Off on They Are Still Killing Trade Union Leaders