The media is at it once again, claiming that “global warming” is causing an increase in child marriages. Reuters is claiming that “more parents trade girls for cows as war and climate change hit east Africa.”
According to Reuters: “Child marriage is increasing in parts of war-torn South Sudan and drought-hit Kenya as parents swap their daughters for cows and goats to survive, campaigners said on Wednesday.”
The June 27th Thomson Reuters Foundation article by Beh Lih Yi continued: “Long-running wars and climate change are now leading factors too, activists said, highlighting a rise in marriage among girls under the age of 18 in South Sudan to 52 percent from 40 percent in 2010, according to United Nations data.”
But the new best-selling book, “The Politically incorrect Guide to Climate Change,” debunks this alleged “child bride” recycled climate nonsense.
Book excerpt: ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change,’ By Marc Morano
(Also see: ‘Global warming’ causes war claims — debunked – ‘Warm periods are more peaceful than cold ones’ – Bonus Chapter #2 for Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change – Bonus Chapter #2 from The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change)
Statistician Bjorn Lomborg has dismissed claims that children are in danger of child marriages because of “global warming: “Consider the recent assertion by Unicef’s Bangladesh head of mission that climate change leads to an increase in child marriages. . . . In Bangladesh, nearly 75% of women between the ages of 20 and 49 reported that they were married before they turned 18, giving the country the second-highest rate of child marriage in the world.
As the Unicef head tells it, climate change has been a major cause, as warmer weather has worsened the flooding, pushing people to the cities, leading to more child marriages. This entire string of logic is wrong. The frequency of extreme floods in Bangladesh has increased, it’s true, but studies show their magnitude and duration have in fact decreased. And Bangladesh is far better at adapting today than it was a generation ago. . . . Given the weak links between warming, flooding, urbanization and the contrary link between urbanization and child marriage, climate policies would be the least effective in addressing the problem.”
★★★★★
Not Like a Yo-Yo Schoolboy
In 1933, Syrians banned the yo-yo because they thought it caused drought. A January 23, 1933, headline in the Barrier Miner read, “Yo-Yo banned in Syria. Blamed for Drought by Muslims.” As the article reported, “The Muslim chiefs at Damascus have attributed the wrath of the heavens to the recent introduction of the yo-yo. . . . The chiefs interviewed the Prime Minister and exposed the evil influence of yo-yos, so they were immediately banned. Today the police paraded the streets and confiscated the yo-yos from everyone they saw playing with them.” Today, global warming activists blame Syrian drought on man-made global warming.
In 2013, PBS’s Bill Moyers claimed, “Climate change in Syria helped spark the civil war there. Which country is next?”
#
The scientific reality of droughts (page 204)
“Globally, and I quote from a recent paper in Nature, there has been little change in drought in the past 60 years…. Drought has, and here I quote the IPCC, ‘for the most part, become shorter, less frequent, and cover a smaller portion of the U. S. over the last century,’”74 noted Roger Pielke Jr. in 2014 Congressional testimony. “U.S. Midwestern drought has decreased in past 50+ years? That is not skepticism; that’s according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
In 2017 the federal government released yet another key piece of scientific data that counters the man-made global warming narrative. The federal U.S. Drought Monitor report revealed that droughts in the United States were at record lows.
“Drought in the U.S. fell to a record low this week, with just 6.1% of the lower 48 states currently experiencing such dry conditions, federal officials announced Thursday. That’s the lowest percentage in the 17-year history of the weekly U.S. Drought Monitor report,” USA Today reported on April 27.76 The National Academy of Sciences’ review of its draft 2017 “Climate Science Special Report” revealed that “analysis of global and continental-scale trends indicates that drought severity and other statistics have actually declined.”
A 2015 study published in the journal Science Advances found that droughts in the past two thousand years were both more severe and longer lasting than modern-day droughts.80 “A new atlas shows droughts of the past were worse than those today—and they cannot have been caused by man-made CO2. Despite the claims of ‘unprecedented’ droughts, the worst droughts in Europe and the US were a thousand years ago,” noted Australian climate analyst Jo Nova of the new investigation.
A 2016 study published in the International Journal of Climatology found, “For most of the CONUS [Continental U.S.] drought frequency appears to have decreased during the 1901 through 2014 period.” Much more severe California droughts occurred in times of lower and thus allegedly safe CO2 levels. According to the data, some droughts lasted for over two centuries.
A 2016 study published in Journal of Climate found that “climate change” had made California drought “less likely.” According to the abstract of the article, “The results thus indicate the net effect of climate change has made agricultural drought less likely, and that the current severe impacts of drought on California’s agriculture has not been substantially caused by long-term climate changes.”
Climatologist Dr. David Legates of the University of Delaware testified to the U.S. Senate in 2014, “My overall conclusion is that droughts in the United States are more frequent and more intense during colder periods. Thus, the historical record does not warrant a claim that global warming is likely to negatively impact agricultural activities.”
#
★★★★★
New Lyrics to an Old Tune
In the 1970s and 1980s, extreme weather used to be blamed on “global cooling.” According to a 1981 Chicago Tribune article, “Climatologists now blame recurring droughts and floods on a global cooling trend that could trigger massive tragedies for mankind.”
In 1974, NOAA linked extreme weather events to a cooling Earth: “Many climatologists have associated this drought and other recent weather anomalies with a global cooling trend and changes in atmospheric circulation which, if prolonged, pose serious threats to major food producing regions of the world.” A 1975 Newsweek article titled “The Cooling World” explained how extreme weather was being caused by colder temperatures. The piece claimed that cooling “causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes. . . . ”
★★★★★
Thirst-Quenching
Climate activists had declared California to be in a permanent drought, “probably forever.” But California’s statewide drought literally disappeared in 2017, as the state added more than 350 billion gallons of rain to their reservoirs as the rainy season ranked highest in 122 years of record keeping.
A 2014 analysis of the California drought found, “Researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years—compared to the mere 3-year duration of the current dry spell. The two most severe mega-droughts make the Dust Bowl of the 1930s look tame: a 240-year-long drought that started in 850 and, 50 years after the conclusion of that one, another that stretched at least 180 years.”
California’s recent record drought also fails the man-made global warming attribution test. U.S. government scientists have admitted that recent droughts hyped by the media and climate campaigners are not due to climate change. “This is not a climate change drought,” said Robert Hoerling, a NOAA research meteorologist, who served as the lead author of the U.S. Climate Change Science Plan Synthesis and Assessment Report. Hoerling was referring to a 2011 Texas drought. “The good news is that this isn’t global warming. This is not the new normal in terms of drought.”
★★★★★
New Lyrics to an Old Tune
Before global warming caused drought—global cooling caused drought. In 1974, the NOAA Magazine published an article by Patrick Hughes warning that the global cooling trend was going to increase droughts around the world. “Some climatologists think that if the current cooling trend continues, drought will occur more frequently in India—indeed, through much of Asia, the world’ s hungriest continent,” Hughes wrote.
In 1976, the New York Times featured climatologists who “believe that the earth’s climate has moved into a cooling cycle, which means highly erratic weather for decades to come.” According to the Times, “The weather seems to have gone berserk lately. The tennis courts at Wimbledon in England have not been as parched since the 1920’s. The same is true for croplands in northern France, the Soviet Union, Minnesota and the Dakotas. It’s so dry, brush fires have started several weeks early in California, and water is being rationed.”
#
Related Links:
MIT Climate Scientist on ‘global warming’: ‘Ordinary people realize that this is a phony issue’
Order Your Book Copy Now! ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change’ By Marc Morano
