BBC "climatechange" romancing

11th December 2009

Did you know that sea level in the Mediterranean* was rising?

I didn’t. Under the title of yet more “Climate Change” we were treated on Newsnight tonight to a sad tale of the Nile Delta inundation with sea water. Rice paddies have been replaced with fish farms.

HOWEVER, very early into the report we were given the real story! The delta is not so much being inundated by rising a Mediterranean sea-level, rather the delta is sinking because thanks to the completion of the Aswan Dam up stream back in 1970 the delta no longer receives its annual refreshing dollop of life-giving silt carried by the Nile flood which it enjoyed for thousands of years and which built up the ground level of the delta making it a very fertile environment .

How has Martha Carney the nerve to present this story as a “climate change” story? It is a simple story of unintended and unforseen consequences resulting from a huge-scale hydro engineering project.

Earlier in the evening there was another tale presented as an apparent “climate change” tragedy in Mali. Lake Faguibine is shrinking "because of drought" is the first explanation we are given - cue view of cattle skull on dusty earth.

Here is the real story - “Lying at the end of a series of basins watered by the Niger River when it floods, Lake Faguibine has experienced widely fluctuating water levels since the turn of the twentieth century but, at its fullest, has ranked among the largest lakes in West Africa. In 1974, this lake covered roughly 590 square kilometers (230 square miles). Starting in the late 1980s, a drop in precipitation steadily dried the lake. By the late 1990s, the traditional livelihoods of fishing, agriculture, and livestock herding became impractical. Even though normal rainfall resumed after the year 2000, the lake remained nearly dry.”

Then we see images of villagers digging away the sand dunes that are blocking the rivers that normally feed the lake. So it is not really a matter of the lake drying up due to “drought” after all. It is a matter of dredging the water courses which feed the lake which have been blocked by sand. When the rivers are unblocked the lake rises and the annual flood, yes, you heard right, the "annual flood” of the River Niger, is permitted to reach the lake and inundate the land surrounding it which once again has become fertile and productive. Yes, the locals need heavy earth-moving equipment to make this task easier. Story over.

Desertification is not necessarily a result of “drought”. There are other possible factors involved, including loss of trees due to firewood scavenging and the fact that Desert dunes “march” and encroach quite independently of rainfall.

I am not against wealthy nations helping the poorer ones to overcome the problems that face them but I do object to ecological matters being indiscriminately laid at the door of “climatechange”. It is an insult to our intelligence.

Even earlier in the evening on the BBC News we were treated to the Federation of Small Islands demanding £100 billion from the West to protect them from sea level rise that they claim the West has caused, and that therefore the West West should cure.

Well first, the sea is not rising any faster than it has in recent geological time and no anthropogenic fingerprint has been detected in the trend. All the scare-mongering is based on predictions from computer “models” that have been based on fiddled data. We have already had demonstrated elsewhere on this blog the distortion around the world of the raw temperature data by the CRU, GISS and NOAA. The predicted “unprecedented” temperature trend, it is posited, will cause “unprecedented” sea-level rise and both sets of false data are then fed into a computer program that spews out climate catastrophy.

A couple of months ago the BBC was telling us of the plight of the Carteret Islands being inundated by “rising sea-level” when in fact it is the islands that are sinking, due to tectonic plate activity on the ocean floor. Other islands that are claimed to be affected by rising sea-level are also sinking because of factors related to water table depletion. Yes, low elevation islands are in danger of being swamped by the seas which are constantly changing due to tides, El Nino events and atmospheric pressure. But these are not “climate change” events.

I’m sure I’m not the only one finding this tiresome.

The entire world benefits from the industrial, technological and scientific advances of the developed world. There is no so-called “climate debt”, nor any pressing need for the recognition of so-called “climate justice”. Many well-meaning folk have however been convinced that “climate guilt” is an appropriate mindset.

Yes, there has been exploitation of the third world and it is still going on. And remedies for the damage done to economies and ecologies are required. But this is not to be confused with “climate change”.

*Mediterranean. The Eastern basin is experiencing sea-level rise, the western basin is experiencing sea-level reduction, the Ionanian sea and Adriatic no change. A complicated picture, then. The Med and Black sea are peculiar maritime environments due to being virtually closed systems with varying salinity issues.