I posted this message today on the BBC's Word of Mouth Board

I would like to draw the attention of this board’s wordsmiths to something which I find interesting in the BBC's reporting of the recent floods in the North West Frontier District of Pakistan and Afghanistan. I was away on holiday last week and not following the news at all so the first I heard of the disaster was on the radio4 1 pm news yesterday Sunday 1st August. On this programme the lead statement was that the floods were “the worst in Pakistan’s history”. Later, on the radio4 10pm News this, to my mind, very peculiarly phrased statement, was replaced by “the worst for several decades” by the newsreader and Lyse Ducet later in the same bulletin described it as the “worst in a generation”. Having looked to see what other statement in this litany of misinformation might be on offer from the BBC I found “the worst in lving memory” on the BBC News web page here. www.bbc.co.uk/news/w... You can find the matter of the “timescale” raised here and discussed in some detail. www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mb... Since we are in an era of extreme sensitivity to the nuances of reporting weather because of the implications of what are now routinely called “extreme weather events” for the purported Anthrpogenic Global Warming scenario, I find this sloppy mish-mash of statements from the BBC (ALL of them wrong, as far as I can see) extraordinary. In fact the first statement I heard seemed positively designed to mislead. Did the news-writers (yes, indeed, some “creative writing" is clearly happening here) mean to say: 1) 1947, the date Pakistan’s ‘history” began, or 2) did they mean the slightly more precise “several decades” ( 20 to 40 years, say?) or 3) did they mean the “generational" space between a mother’s birth and the birth of her first grandchild which is very short, as we know, in that neck of the woods or 4) did they mean within the personal memory of the most ancient elder in the village, which could be almost a century, say? Is the BBC incapable of accurate research into the matter of frequency of severe floods in this region? Or do they think ANY statement about a disaster is as good as any other? I found the following level-headed report within a few seconds of googling “Pakistan history of flooding” here http://www.southasianfloods.icimod.org/contents.php?country_code=PK&c_id=11 Floods have been recognized as a major natural calamity and the country has a long history of flooding from the Indus river and its tributaries. Floods of 1928, 29, 55, 57, 59, 73, 76, 88, 92, 95, 96 & that of 1997 are the sad yet memorable events entailing tremendous damages to the life and property. Quoted from this message A little further googling informs me that several other factors are also implicated in the perception and retailing of the severity of the flooding - first, the size of the population affected which is ever increasing within the same area and second, the response of the government to the emergency. Natural disasters happen but it is how they are dealt with that leaves the memory of just how disastrous they really were. We have here shades of the Hurricane Katrina Disaster, another “extreme weather event” laid by climate alarmists at the door of AGW. The damage was excessive certainly, but why? Because New Orleans city planners permitted the city to grow and grow in size and population on below sea-level land, protected only by ill-maintained levées. Hurricane severity is now routinely assessed in financial terms (claims on the Insurance Industry) rather than by actual climatic variables. Hurricane Katrina was nothing special as hurricanes go. It was the place it made landfall that was special, and the inadequacy of the subsequent response of Government of the richest country on earth. In the North West Frontier we have something similar affecting the perception of “severity”. Severe floods in this region are, sadly, rather common. What is different over time, whether it be in “Pakistan’s history”, or in time measured in “decades”, “generations” or “living memory” is that ever MORE people are affected by them due to population growth and ever MORE property damage is done because even this poor country is getting richer over time. The inadequacy of the response by a government famed for its incompetence, corruption and veniality will also play a part in the perception of the "severity" of this particular flood. I would hate to see poor old AGW getting it in the neck again for this latest installment of the region’s natural disasters so this post is something of a pre-emptive defense of Mother Nature and an attack on the BBC and Reuters, AP etc for sloppy use of alarmist rhetoric. The floods in Pakistan are bad but they should not become a source of unfounded alarm for the rest of us. That’s all today from the VocabularySection of the WeatherisnotClimateDepartment, folks. Cheerio. 00000000000 Yesterday I started a discussion on the same subject on the BBC Science Board, here http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/mbradio4/F2766778?thread=7660137&skip=0&show=20#p98975272