As the media become increasingly bored by Covid, it is time to return to an old favourite…

The temperature is rising within the Climate Change movement. The latest flooding of the Indus River in Pakistan is, as are all extreme weather events, blamed on Climate Change. Whilst the flooding is extensive, and has resulted in an estimated 1,200 lives lost, this is nothing new for Pakistan.

The last major flood event was as recent as 2010 when 1,600 lives were lost. There have been 21 major events since 1950, claiming an estimated 9,000 total lives.

Attempts have been made to control illegal logging in the region. Logging is a significant factor in soil erosion and water retention, where it flows from melting glaciers in the Himalayas. There are other man-made factors involved; silting up of irrigation channels increases flooding, and an increased population living too close to the water, increase the likelihood of loss of life.

The annual monsoon rainfall is low in the south of the country, but can vary enormously, between 400 and 1,000 mm a year in the north.

The graph of average rainfall, above, shows no pattern of change to suggest a link to changing climate.

For those who read history, this flooding is well documented over thousands of years, resulting in the destruction of several previous civilisations. Similarly, Himalayan glaciers are misreported to be melting at an ‘extraordinary rate’; these glaciers have been melting for 12,000 years and Indian satellite monitoring shows no increase.

The other headline of the moment, similarly attributed to Climate Change, is the ice melt in Greenland. New modelling has confirmed that the melt is ‘unprecedented and unstoppable’, and will result in conservative estimate of sea-level rises around 35cms by 2050, and perhaps ultimately as much as 110cms, with catastrophic flooding ensuing and many islands disappearing.

The origin of the name of Greenland is disputed by activists, but most believe it was so named because, in the climate period known as Medieval Warming, it was a green land, allowing Viking settlement and the growing of crops.

Subsequently, in the Little Ice Age, temperatures dropped again, (graph below) and many settlements died out as crops failed.

An insight into the reality of Greenland’s supposed global warming phenomenon was provided by the finding of two crashed second world war American planes from 1942. One was found in 1992 and the second in 2018 – buried in accumulated ice to a depth of 90 metres, supposedly as ice melted over the years!

A similar story has played out for Arctic ice, embellished by the plight of the polar bear. Annoyingly for the zealots, Arctic ice refuses to shrink and polar bear numbers are increasing, with a quadrupling in numbers since 1950.

While there has been some reduction in Arctic sea ice over many years, the latest (unreported by the media) statistics for 2021 show that Arctic sea ice increased significantly last winter, to the second highest in 18 years. Meanwhile, this loss has been more than compensated for by an increase in the Antarctic ice accumulation, meaning sea levels continue to rise only slowly, due to thermal expansion.

This year the UK has been subjected to ‘unprecedented’ drought, although rainfall was 30 per cent less in 1976, an event I well remember as a resident. The best the media could manage in temperature catastrophism, was the hottest summer since 2018 – really? The summer in Europe, has again resulted in its ‘unprecedented’ season of droughts and fires, events which history again tells us are unusual, but not without precedent. In Australia, we have been subjected to a barrage of ill-informed exaggeration about our country’s traditional droughts, floods, and fires.

Each weather event of modern life is attributed by the media to carbon dioxide-induced Climate Change; but even the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change has found little evidence that cyclones, floods, fires etc are increasing in frequency, and annual statistics show progressive decline in lives lost due to natural disasters. Satellite photography shows that most Pacific Islands are increasing in size, rather than decreasing, they also show that rising temperatures and CO2 levels have had a greening effect on the planet’s vegetation, with shrinking deserts.

This winter in Australia, we have been subjected to La Niña-related increased rainfall, and an unusually (not unprecedented) cold period, with electricity supply bordering collapse because of premature closure of backup coal-fired generation and reduced renewable input. The coldest winter for 30 years, in some areas, has not produced concerns about global cooling; were the story to be one of temperature increase the headlines would be screaming out.

None of these facts alters the media’s sensationalist view that just about everything is caused by Climate Change.

Whilst there is no doubt global warming has occurred, records confirm this is not unparalleled, and the temperature has now risen to that of the Medieval warming period of 1,000 years ago. Species did not become extinct, and the world did not come to an end then, it will not come to an end now.