Don’t tolerate the nonsense
I’ve been reading about famine in East Africa – the Great Horn of Africa, after its well-proportioned resemblance to the rhino’s horn. The Horn (nowhere near Cape Horn, bottom of South America) includes names iconic for armed insurrection and starvation: Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, Uganda, Kenya, Mogadishu, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi.
East Africa is a fascinating study in its own right. The region has been subject to irregular cycles of feast and famine for thousands of years, so it’s rich with a theme much used by global warmers.
At any sign of a starving child someone can be relied upon to blame the situation on “climate change” and therefore on we wicked, wasteful westerners, never mind that not every drought causes a famine (not by a long shot) and corrupt or weak African politicians play a much stronger role in disastrous famines than climate does.
Anyone describing climate and consequent food security these days finds it necessary to refer to “climate change” and hence venture on to the IPCC tightrope strung up for global warming believers everywhere. When that happens, they quickly wobble and fall off; one just has to wait a bit.
So it proved in this research into famines in the Horn of Africa.
I came across a piece on the World Resources Institute posted last August. Overall, it’s a useful article, balanced and informative. But it makes a few now-common mistakes as the authors fall off the IPCC highwire.
I should say that earlier this year the UN downgraded the “famine” to an “emergency” following the expected short rainy season. Though a few are still starving and aid is still being provided, the longer rainy season is expected soon and things could be more or less back to normal later this year.
The article said:
It is notoriously difficult to determine if any one extreme event is the result of climate change. Studies that can prove this causality often require significant amounts of historical rainfall and temperature data and sophisticated modelling techniques that are hard to come by in many developing countries, including many in east Africa.
Many climate change modelling exercises provide clear future trends for temperature in east Africa. They predict that the region will get hotter as greenhouse gases increase. Historical data from the region also clearly demonstrate an upward trend for temperatures … [Emphasis added.]
Of course it’s difficult! The entire climate system is chaotic and unpredictable, as the IPCC says. No event has been shown to be caused by climate change. But that’s hardly notorious – it’s simply impossible!
The article claims models make predictions, however readers will know that the much-quoted computer models do no predicting whatsoever for the IPCC – they’re only allowed to provide “projections”. Not that the MSM reminds us of that too often – they report model output as “predictions” or “forecasts” because those are more alarming.
The report makes the confident claim that “the region will get hotter as greenhouse gases increase.” For justification, they claim the AR4 says so.
The AR4 says no such thing, of course. The models are not tasked with deciding the effect of rising GHGs. That is too important to be left to unpredictable models. All our satellites and computers and balloons and laboratories have proved incapable, over 50 years and more, of measuring the temperature sensitivity of the climate to increased amounts of carbon dioxide.
If we can’t measure it, it means we don’t know what it is, so how can we accurately instruct computer models to calculate it? We can’t.
Instead, the models are told what CO2 will do, from a human understanding of it, which is insecure, unskilful and labours under an agenda. The effect of rising atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and the other minor greenhouse gases being hard-wired into them, the models can only “predict” that the region will get hotter as temperatures go up.
Big deal.
When the article says temperature data for East Africa demonstrate an upward trend, it’s correct – except for the region which showed a cooling trend. They just forgot to mention it. And in many areas, since 1950, night-time temperatures have been rising at the same time as daytime temperatures were falling. Can you tell whether the region will warm or cool in future?
Once more: let’s stop accepting this palpable nonsense that climate change is responsible for anything.
Climate change means global warming. Global warming has not happened for about 15 years, unless you take a micrometer to the thermometer. And if you have to do that just to detect warming, then it’s hardly dangerous, is it?
Oh – if it didn’t happen, then it didn’t cause anything! No droughts, no wildfires, no floods, no storms. No ice melt.
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It’s models all the way down.
http://country-profiles.geog.ox.ac.uk/UNDP_reports/Ethiopia/Ethiopia.lowres.report.pdf
The prognosis is apparently “more droughts and more floods” everywhere, but how that works is puzzling to me. I’m not familiar with either metric for East Africa but my impression from media reports is that “more droughts” would be impossible because drought is already perpetual anyway, that’s just the order of life there.
Similarly, “more floods” is problematic in that region. I’m sure the locals would welcome “a flood” for a change. That would be be the best drought antidote surely ?
I may be way off here because I do recall watching a documentary about a guy whose job it was to coordinate the entire town to turn out when it rained to re-daub the mud plaster on a rather large mosque I think it was. Can’t remember though what part of Africa the town was in.
I believe that may have been Timbuktu, on the fringe of the Sahara.
Wikipedia reminds me it was Djenné, in Mali. Magnificent.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Djenne_Mosque_Dubois_1911.jpg
That’s just the north-east corner of the mosque?
Gary’s Timbuktu recollection was the mosque I was thinking of in the documentary I mentioned (DWTV on Central I think) but the Timbuktu mosque was nowhere near the size of that one in Djenné Mali.
The thing is, to build either edifice they had a ready water source at some stage to produce mud bricks and plaster and the one in Timbuktu gets rain for regular maintenance so rain isn’t a problem there and even in the Horn of Africa drought is a relatively localized phenomenon restricted to some but not all the Horn of Africa countries..
You mention Rwanda as being part of the Horn of Africa but if you watch other documentaries ‘Shake Hands with the Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire’ or ‘Gorillas in the Mist’, Rwanda is green and lush.
BTW in the Roméo Dallaire story you can watch the NZ President of the UN Security Council at the time (Colin Keating) move the motion to deny Dallaire authority to take action and instead reduced UNAMIR to a token 270 troops thereby precipitating the massacre. The reason Keating gave afterward was “We were kept in the dark”, referring to reports by UN staffer Boutros Boutros-Ghali.
A search: “we were kept in the dark” colin keating, brings up the books:-
Understanding the UN Security Council: coercion or consent?
Humanitarian space and international politics: the creation of safe areas
Obviously the UN didn’t learn from the ’94 Rwanda experience because it was repeated in Srebrenica a year later in ’95 when only 110 Dutch troops were supposed to defend the Srebrenica “safe” area (Boutros-Ghali again along with Kofi Annan):-
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/16/world/un-details-its-failure-to-stop-95-bosnia-massacre.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm
I guess when you’re busy “saving the planet”, the prosecution of your actual mandate can get a little loose at times.
The UN is driven by the Rockefellers, Bilderbergs et al. It’s all about the money, the power, the enslavement. “Saving the planet”? LOL
What are the odds that after saving USA from evil coal via EPA regulation, that Obama makes a pitch for Ban Ki-Moon’s job at the UN as a contingency for being ousted as President?
Then he can continue his communitarian “saving the planet” policies even if he doesn’t get a second term and he’d fit right in at the UN.
Scary thought huh?
Bob Brown’s “Fellow Earthians” speech is good for a laugh
He talks not of a global government but an Earth Parliament no less.
Yoiks! An “earth parliament” that’s “agreeably empowered” by whom to do what?
Not looking good for us Non-Fellow Earthians [Ha! The spellchecker suggested “Earthlings”]
Bob’s cosmic perspective makes Oblahblah [spellchecker suggested Hezbollah] look insular by comparison e.g. the Head of Nasa has said Barack Obama told him to make “reaching out to the Muslim world” one of the space agency’s top priorities and to make them “feel good”.
A conservative columnist for the Washington Examiner, characterised Mr Obama’s space policy shift as moving “from moon landings to promoting self-esteem”:-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/7875584/Barack-Obama-Nasa-must-try-to-make-Muslims-feel-good.html
One wonders what an Obama-Brown policy partnership would lead to…..
Pingback: Prat watch #5: Ignorance is bliss
I see Gareth has linked to [AP/NZ Herald, AFP.] rather than the actual SREX report (Prat watch #5).
Roger Pielke Jr provides A Handy Bullshit Button on Disasters and Climate Change along with quotes from the report:-
Gareth intones:-
He must mean the coming 22nd century because SST in particular has been in a downward trend since 2004 and Jason-2 SSL -0.13mm/yr since beginning of 2010 this century.