Aletho News

The climate scaremongers: Shoddy dams to blame for Libyan floods, not global warming

By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | September 22, 2023

I sometimes think there is a competition among the MSM to see who can publish the most absurd climate change stories.

Last week Sky News’s Tom Clarke, who calls himself ‘Science and Technology Editor’, claimed that climate change had ‘set the stage’ for the Libyan floods, and that the disaster highlighted the ‘injustice of climate change’ which affects poorer countries most.

The floods and resulting deaths had nothing at all to do with climate change, and were instead caused by the collapse of two dams built by a Yugoslav company in the 1970s and which had had no maintenance for the last 20 years. It was a tragedy waiting to happen.

Clarke failed to provide any evidence that the heavy rainfall which triggered the dam failures was in any way unprecedented or made worse by climate change. But facts don’t seem to matter any more to Sky News.

A quick check of the history books would have told Clarke that much worse floods have occurred in North Africa in the past. The Great Tunisian Flood in 1969, for instance, was on a completely different level. The death toll was 540, and nine out of 13 provinces were affected, as well as parts of neighbouring Algeria. Fifteen inches of rain, five times the annual amount, fell on the Tunisian city of Gabès in just 24 hours and intermittent heavy rain continued for 38 days.

Four years later, two more major floods hit Tunisia, killing more than 100. The first, in March, led to a major rescue effort by the US Sixth Fleet. The New York Times reported:

‘The Government has not yet fully assessed the extent of the damage to crops, livestock and property, but it is estimated that there have been 86 killed, plus 33 missing, 53,000 people left without shelter and 6,000 houses destroyed or damaged. About 10,000 cattle have been lost.’

British Pathé films of the 1969 and 1973 floods can be viewed here and here. 

It is utterly shameful for Tom Clarke to ignore the fact that catastrophic floods have always occurred in North Africa, abandon any pretence at objective analysis, and instead promote his own warped political agenda.

The harsh reality is that poor countries are always impacted more by natural disasters. That is why we should allow them to develop their economies in order to make them more resilient. Blocking their access to cheap fossil fuel energy will make matters worse, not better.

The Telegraph’s Gates-funded nonsense

The Telegraph went one better publishing an even more ridiculous article last week with the headline ‘The world has experienced its hottest ever three-month period – what comes next?’ 

Neither of the co-authors appears to have any expertise in climate matters. Harriet Barber is described by the Telegraph as specialising in human rights, violence against women and the refugee crisis, while Verity Bowman’s LinkedIn page says she is a ‘Foreign news reporter for the Telegraph’.

The article droned on about droughts, wildfires, typhoons and floods, as if they never used to happen in the past. The commenters, who evidently understand these matters better than the young writers, almost to a man pointed out the absurdities in the article and left no doubt what they thought of it!

It turns out that the article was ‘partly’ funded by Bill Gates’s Global Health Security initiative, as the link at the bottom of the page confirms. 

According to that link:

The area of global health security is broad and includes topics such as:

•    Covid 19 and other pandemic threats

•    the spread of other communicable diseases like Ebola and Zika as well as a wide range of rare diseases

•    the dramatic impact of ‘non-communicable diseases’ including obesity, heart disease and diabetes

•    the rise antibiotic resistance and new superbugs

•    the growing threat of bio-terrorism

•    social and political instability sown by war and natural disasters including climate change

In short, the Telegraph has prostituted itself for Bill Gates’s millions.

Although it insists that ‘this support comes without strings and The Telegraph retains full editorial control over all the content published’, there is no way the paper would have published such ill-researched, manifestly fake news in the past when it could still rightly lay claim to being a serious newspaper.

What extreme weather looked like 70 years ago

Why are the media so desperate to push the UN’s climate agenda?

Nearly all press and TV coverage obediently parrots the same tired lies emanating from the UN and the rest of the manmade climate change establishment. The above Telegraph piece, for instance, quoted UN secretary general António Guterres’s latest alarmist pronouncement: ‘Climate breakdown has begun’.

There is never any attempt at balance, nor any challenge to such absurd statements. And this is in spite of the fact that both history and the actual data show that extreme weather was every bit as bad in the past.

For example, let’s go back 70 years. January 31, 1953, is a night that will long be remembered in the folklore of Britain and the Low Countries. It was the occasion of the Great North Sea Flood, when a wall of water surged from the North Sea, over-topping sea defences and leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake. 

The storm sank the Stranraer to Larne ferry Princess Victoria before heading around the north of Scotland and into the North Sea. It claimed more than 500 lives on the east coast of Britain, plus maybe 2,000 in the Low Countries. It was the worst natural disaster to hit Britain in living memory.

A few months later, Queen Elizabeth’s coronation took place in the middle of what was called the worst June weather of the century. Three weeks later, more stormy weather brought severe flooding in Britain.

Further afield, major flooding occurred at various times of the year in several parts of the US, including Oregon, California, Louisiana, Iowa and Montana. Japan was badly hit by two devastating floods, each killing more than 700 people.

While some parts of the US were inundated in 1953, others were in the middle of exceptional droughts. From 1950 to 1957, for instance, Texas experienced the most severe drought in recorded history. Most of the Midwest and Great Plains were similarly affected.

1953 was a devastating year for typhoons in the Western Pacific, with seven ‘super typhoons’ claiming at least 430 lives. It was also one of the deadliest years for tornadoes in the US, killing 519. There were five F5 tornadoes during 1953, the third highest total on record for these most powerful of all tornadoes. Meanwhile, wildfires in the US burned 9,976,000 acres, four times this year’s total so far. You can see more details here.

In those days weather disasters occurred with little or no media coverage – unlike today when we are bombarded with 24/7 footage. There was nothing special about 1953 either. You could go back to pretty much any year in the last 100 and find a similar tale of disaster, death and destruction. There is no evidence that our weather nowadays is any worse than it used to be.

Which brings us back to the question of why are the media trying so hard to cover this up?

September 21, 2023 Posted by aletho | Corruption, Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Global Health Security | Leave a comment