By Paul Homewood
h/t Malcolm Bell
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0938tj7/victoria-derbyshire-01092017
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:
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#country/16
And we find exactly the same story in Nepal:
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.
As for the East and North East, where the rainfall has been heaviest, rainfall is bang on average:
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.
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.
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:
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
This is now my speculation – but I do not believe that Matthew Price dreamt up all of these leading questions and fake claims all on his own. He would have been fed with these by someone higher up.
Equally, Pierce and Markus would have been primed with this line of questioning beforehand. They would no doubt have been more than happy to take advantage, in order to further their anti-western agenda.
In short, the whole segment of the programme was used to push the BBC’s biased and dishonest alarmist agenda.
The tactics they have used are actually very familiar. Find some junk scientist, green lobbyist or politically motivated charity worker, encourage them to spout clearly fake claims, and then broadcast them as “fact”. In this way, if anybody challenges the BBC for making inaccurate statements, they simply turn around and say – “it was not us who said it”.
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