Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Al Jazeera, a news outlet of the Qatari Royal Family, has blamed climate for a deadly landslide in Sierra Leone, though they admit cutting down local trees might have contributed.
Is climate change to blame in Freetown?
Humanity may have worsened the conditions on the ground but is the weather worse anyway?
The deadly landslide in Freetown, Sierra Leone on Monday morning was undoubtedly partly the result of deforestation. During the rainy season, Sierra Leone is one of the wettest places on earth, statistically. And from that point of view, it is a surprise that such disasters don’t happen more often.
It looks as though the changing climate may make the future risk even greater as more frequent and more violent rainy season events such as this are a measurable consequence.
…
You may be surprised to hear that African thunderstorms are among the most intense on earth. That finding came from a scientific paper published in 2006, a study using a worldwide database. A more recent investigation has found that the number of these storms has increased in sub-Saharan Africa, by a factor of three, since 1982.
That latter conclusion came from another scientific paper, published this year, discovering evidence that looks like a clear link to a warming climate. It is a well-established expectation that temperatures will rise, as a global average, and that local variations will be vastly different.
…
Read more: http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/08/climate-change-blame-freetown-170817133120465.html
This isn’t the first time Al Jazeera has flogged the climate horse.
Back in 2015, Al Jazeera made an outrageous claim that “climate deniers” cost 400,000 lives every year.
Climate change is also slowly becoming a favourite excuse for Middle Eastern administrations looking to deflect blame for their incompetence.
In June this year, several gulf states cut diplomatic ties with Qatar, accusing Qatar of supporting terrorism. Qatar, which owns Al Jazeera, denied the claims.
I don’t know what Al Jazeera think they are doing, pushing blatant climate spin, implying the West are responsible for climate mass murder. Whatever contribution climate made to that tragic landslide in Sierra Leone, cutting down trees on an unstable hillside was a much larger contributing factor.
Words can have consequences.
Back in 2013, Al Gore sold his TV channel to Al Jazeera, vastly extending Al Jazeera’s reach with US audiences. No doubt if a group of Middle Eastern or even a group of domestic US terrorists decides to embrace climate as one of their excuses for Jihad, as Osama Bin Laden once did, Al Jazeera will be there to provide sensationalist news coverage of their atrocities against US targets.
My understanding is that the temperature has not gone up for the last 20 years or so, except during natural El Ninos.
So how can ‘extreme weather’ be attributed to warming? Does the weather operate on what the models say should be happening rather than reality?
What does the Quatari Royal Family believe, is the reason that all of those beautiful buildings, that the Dubai Royal Families have watched getting built on that pile of deep sand, that is Dubai; do not simply fall over into the waters offshore ??
Is there any reason to believe that all the reinforced concrete “trees” that they have going way down in all that sand, have anything to do with the buildings not falling over ??
Would all that sand slip into the ocean if they tilted Dubai a bit ??
G
I don’t know but the Dubai(ous) had better be careful how tall and how much they build or they could suffer the same fate as Guam
You know Bryan, they say we get the government we deserve, but I honestly don’t think I deserve Hank Johnson.
OOHHHHH!!!! You one of those *snip* who wants to keep piling America troops on Guam until it capsizes, ain’t ya?!?!?(that was hank johnson that said that, right? the stupid pours out of congress so fast it is hard to keep track of which idiot says what boneheaded crap!)
Well, in all honesty I don’t want to keep piling on troops in Guam. If there were a cushier posting it would be hard to find in my opinion. Whip me! Beat me! Send my sorry butt to Guam!
No, I wouldn’t be advocating more troops in the South Pacific laying about on white sand beaches drinking Pina Colladas. Where to I sign up for that? OK, I spent 3 years posted at Hickam AFB, who am I to complain?
Yea, I love when people threaten me with a good time! And yep, it was The Hankster who was worried about Guam capsizing because we were moving Marines and their aircraft/equipment from Okinawa(don’t get me started, that rock belongs to the USMC), much to the chagrin of USAF who really like to consider Guam their private beach club. Well, next to Diego Garcia. Two beach clubs are certainly better than one!
Oops. Runaway bold tag. Should have ended on “don’t”…
Modern weather satellites and a more comprehensive view of worldwide weather just makes ‘extreme weather’ more visible. Prior to the invention of satellites, it was easy for a Hurricane to occur where the only people to notice ended up at the bottom of the ocean. It wasn’t too long ago, that nearly all Hurricanes went unnoticed.
Mods cursor freeze from WordPress advertisement is a pain in the cursor.
There is no more mainstream news. It’s all propaganda and opinion pieces bought and brought to you by the so called “Progressives”.
“Pregressive” – Regressive policies spun as being ‘Progressive’
BRILLIANT!
Neofascism.
The Progressives are allied with the Islamists. Globull Warming is the main ideological underpinning of the Left after the Dictatorship of the Proletariat went down in 1989. It is not surprising that Islamists are incorporating Globull Warming into their propaganda. Now every bad weather event can be cited as a reason to kill Westerners.
All paid for by the UN. Someone needs to investigate how much the UN is paying third world media to spread climate change propaganda.
Someone needs to compile all of these sorts of articles as evidence before they’re ‘scrubbed’.
Great ! — Human-caused climate change can now be paraded as a form of terrorism.
Climate alarmists, I hope you are all happy now. Great job.
The phrase, “Comes back to bite you in the ass”, comes to mind.
The leftists are just linking up with their natural allies on another front. They all ready agree with them on immigration, special rights because of their religion, anti Semitism, and oppression of Christians. So why would they not ally on the climate change scam.
All white westerners, even those who lived hundreds of years ago must be judged by the highest standards put forth by leftists.
All non-whites are not to be judged. That would be racist.
Hate is the progressive’s bread and butter, whether baiting it up, or acting on it – all while claiming the moral high ground, of course.
My guess is modern progressives would pretty much condemn the entirety of human history, judging the past by their own tight-assed, apologist standards. It’s really a perverted form of absolution – where penance is projected on others, while the self is whitewashed.
Tearing down the confederate monuments is the same as book burning IMO. History is not just what was, it is what is! It is not just what we were, it is how we got to where we are! it should be remembered and learned from and not destroyed or hidden.
Except Antifa.
The President’s attempt to call BS on Antifa has turned out to be a disaster. Instead of going to jail for assault with a deadly weapon, they are getting no attention at all.
BTW, the alt right folks who deserve it should also serve time.
Another profound retort, CommieBob. According to the Left, YOU are the problem, according to the Right, you may be the solution…
It is of MHO that the ONLY solution is, …… unless Law enforcement personnel immediately begin “shooting-to-kill” anyone that is observed to be actively engaged in protesting a “cause” by their willful infliction of bodily harm or the destruction, looting and/or burning of public property or the property of private citizens ……. then activities such as was witnessed at Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12th, and at other recent events, will only exacerbate in intensity and frequency throughout most every small, medium and large city in the US of A.
For those who remember, …… remember that it only took “one (1) shot” to put the quietest to the Kent State Rioting.
@rah August 18, 2017 at 3:11 pm
Tearing down the confederate monuments is the same as book burning IMO
Yep just like these guys were in Palmyra – bloody vandals.
https://www.google.co.nz/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwi2m7qOheLVAhUJv5QKHWUYBYcQjRwIBw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.aljazeera.com%2Fnews%2F2015%2F07%2Fisil-looting-heritage-sites-syria-iraq-palmyra-150703010527634.html&psig=AFQjCNHcu139aW7GyS7Cw5sfN6CLgrkBiQ&ust=1503188872367353
Oops and grrrr
This is the image I wanted
http://www.aljazeera.com/mritems/imagecache/mbdxxlarge/mritems/Images/2015/7/3/11fde91abd394612b927e363b49d4d59_18.jpg
We created Lefties [though you could blame the French for it in it’s entirely] and Lefties created climate change. And when “climate change goes, Poof, because the stupid has limited lifetime.
Will we be credited for getting rid of climate change?
“Extreme weather” can be attributed to any scapegoat du jour. “Eek! It rained on my picnic because the president of Mondo Industries made a stinky.”
Environmentalism is a new religion, and unpleasant weather events are the New Wrath of God — not too different from old-time holy men insisting that unbelievers and apostates were going to be struck down by lightning.
The figure of 400,000 struck down annually by climate deniers is obviously a fake estimate. The accurate figure is 400 bazillion jillion.
Of course the problem here is that over all globally losses from natural disasters is way down compared to the mean:
http://notrickszone.com/#sthash.0w77LgqV.WRbjoR7G.dpbs
And when considering the longer term losses in life due to natural disasters has greatly decreased in the last 80-90 years.
https://ourworldindata.org/natural-catastrophes/
@ RAH and that reduction is despite massive global population growth.
And dispersion with people populating places that were previously not populated. AND the natural inflation of reported disasters resulting from ever improving communications and detection technologies. About like what has happened with the detection and reporting of hurricanes and tornados.
We really need to notice the elephant in the room. The trouble is the elephant is called Malthus and that name tends to annoy many people here.
The population, as in much of Africa and many other areas, has tripled in the last 60 years, from some 2 million to over 6 million.
http://countrymeters.info/en/Sierra_Leone#Population_clock
They cut down trees to build homes and create substantial deforestation for growing crops as well, whichm combined with more roads and buildings diverts water into rivers which will have inevitable effects. In some countries, such as Syria, the huge increase in population can not be kept pace with and food shortages ensue.
Each of these rapidly growing countries would have to have the most perfect climate in the world to support their burgeoning populations. As they have never had a perfect climate none is likely to arrive in the future to rescue them
Tonyb
Malthus was a false prophet.
And an evil fraud.
The corrupt and negligent governments that decline to build reasonable infrastructure and enforce reasonable building codes got those people killed.
Pretending its the white devil and their CO2 is disgusting.
The name Malthus bugs many here because so use his name to justify all sorts of stupid and dangerous policies.
The problem is poverty, it is not population.
NOTE: Increased population does not and never has created poverty.
Mark
If you have an undeveloped country with few resources an inadequate infrastructure and a population of say 50 million poor peoples, how does adding another 50 million make everyone Less poor ?
The increase in population in many African and middle eastern countries is astonishing. For example Syria had some 4 million people in 1960 and at the time of the civil war some 22 million. It could barely feed it’s 4 million people let alone 22 million.
My main point is that the claims of climate change causing millions of climate refugees is a false one, because the country would have to have a climate far better than any in it’s history to be able to support its new increased population if it remains an essentially poor and under developed nation.
Population growth can obviously be accommodated if the climate cooperates, whilst an improved standard of living provide funds to improve the infrastructure
Tonyb
Well, cheap, affordable power goes a long way.
And Mark W’s assertion was that the population count did not create the poverty.
Mark, I think you’re off base with this one; Tony’s right that going from a population of 4 million to a population of 22 million in 60 years is going to result in poverty unless the infrastructure to support that growth happens.
200 years ago, even 100 years ago, a problem like that would go unnoticed in developed countries. There would be war, plague and famine, all of which would reduce the population to a sustainable level. That isn’t happening now and with modern transportation, it would be dangerous to allow it. These undeveloped countries are essentially blackmailing developed nations using bio-weapons of natural design. If I had a solution other than enforced birth control I’d suggest it, but I don’t.
climatereason,
Do you think 50,000,000 people just double through mitosis?
Your reasoning on this seems as shallow ad Ehrlich’s, but perhaps you have a realistic analysis to offer?
Umm, the main cause of the population expansion is the introduction of modern, (western), medicine to the world including Africa.
The survival rate of children and mortality rate of adults in Africa and India, while not what we would describe as great even now is the base cause of this population growth.
This is definitely a sad and depressing fact.
https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality/
In western society, the tendency towards small families is the right thing to do. In countries like Africa, India etc, ones retirement and latter years, depends on having an adequate survival rate of ones children. These people will not risk their latter lives by not having children.
There is no easy answer to this.
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
It is the application of modern medicine that slows down population growth. With no medicene lots of children are required to secure a continuation of the bloodline. With improved survival rate more is invested in fewer babies and the population growth slows down,
One of Malthus’ modern day flag bearers and a disciple of Paul Ehrlich- John Holdren – was Obama’s science advisor for both terms. Anyone wonder where all the anti development policies and Obama greenie thinking came from?
Far more likely that climate change Belief kills 400,000 a year. Fire with fire I say.
NYT published articles saying deniers are worse than Nazi’s, so it’s a matter of time before deniers are identified as a ‘hate’ group and WUWT will be taken off the internet. It looks like other thought police, I mean news organizations would agree with that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/opinion/sunday/the-next-genocide.html?mcubz=1
I have to wonder why they are moving the boat, with someone in it, to higher (already wet) ground?
Did the tide go out before they had a chance to move it?
Was this picture taken at Inchon?
What a chilling reactionary deceptive rag the NYT has devolved into.
It should be simply to show increasing rain falls levels to help justify their claims , but oddly they seem not to be able to . No I wonder why that is ?
Thom Karl hasn’t touched the data yet
In that case Qatar should stop producing crude oil now.
Big oil has never liked coal.
Isn’t Qatar a developing country?………….
http://qatarchamber.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/about-qatar-610×380.jpg
WTF is that thing on the left? It looks like a yuuge c*ndom. Is it getting ready to mate with the weird looking building on the right?
“That finding came from a scientific paper published in 2006.” And the journalist is aiming his article at children it seems!
“I don’t know what Al Jazeera think they are doing, pushing blatant climate spin …”.
======================
A distraction, an ‘imaginary hobgoblin’:
https://www.ceicdata.com/datapage/charts/gdp-per-capita-qatar?
A hockey stick can be a useful lever to achieve a number of purposes.
Al Jazeera is not nearly as bad as major US MSM outlets, like the NY Times, the HuffPost, Washington Post, LA Times, etc etc.
The NY Times seems to require journalists to write stories that align with Editorial Narratives — narratives for each topis and sub-topic. Regular readers of the Times will notice news pieces that are perfectly ok — then, out of nowhere seemingly — will be a paragraph about how climate change makes it worse or climate change may cause this-or-that. that’s the editor’s demanding the narrative on climate change be added to the piece.
We saw this with the recent North Korea Threatens Guam with Nuclear Destruction news — the editors at the Times, picking up “Guam” (an ISLAND!) and “Threatened” ordered up a custom-written piece from a stringer in Hong Kong (Mike Ives) titled “North Korea Aside, Guam Faces Another Threat: Climate Change”.
These editor-driven narratives are far and away more pernicious than individual journalists’ bias and social pressure on specific topics (like CliSci).
Yeah, what happened to last week’s narrative.
Weren’t we all about to be nuked by the NORKs?
“Run to a cave!”
Now we’re threatened by statues.
Any predictions for next week?
Exactly Kip. Actually Al Jezeera is a much better world news reporter than US or Canadian MSM. Even RT, when you understand the spin, gives superior world coverage. I never heard of the landslide in Freetown at all from North American TV. I get the story but can laugh off ‘it’s the CO2 what done it’. They at least said cutting the trees off the hill was ‘partly’ to blame. NYT, Huff, Wapo would have left that information out.
Rob McElwee was, until 2011, a BBC weather presenter. Wikipedia says that, “He gained an HNC in maths, statistics and physics from Reading College of Technology.” Furthermore, Wikipedia states that, “The attainment level of the qualification is roughly equivalent to one year of university.” Does he count as a climate scientist?
I went there briefly; it was known as Reading Tech. I was trying to improve A levels after being ill during the exams for maths and physics and also do chemistry which had not been on offer at school. I didn’t last there as the other students were so slow that I was bored out of my brains and left.
Rob McElwee, a Fellow of the Royal Meteorology Society, was a long-serving and very good BBC weather presenter before his services were dispensed with. So far as I know he never claimed to be a so-called “climate scientist”ans his views on CAGW are unknown.
Al Jazeera is owned by the Qatari royal family. It could, therefore, never really be independent but, at one time, it was a much less biased broadcaster than the BBC or CNN and may still be. But because Qatar, a long term supporter of the Moslem Brotherhood, Hamas and other terrorist groups, is now cosying up to Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf States and several other Arab countries have finally severed ties with the Qataris.
Qatar is therefore looking to the US, which has a naval base there, the UK, where it is now one of the largest property owners, and other Western countries for support. Perhaps it does not realise that President Trump does not share Obama’s and Merkel’s obsession with Climate Change.
“It’s time, it’s time, it’s time to hate the West!” (bell rings)
It would be comedy if the opposition wasn’t always trying to kill or enslave everyone else.
There are other games, guys, the “Re-fight WWII” server is completely overloaded.
Sorry, that is all it ever was. No science, no facts, globall coolining/warmining has always been a lie used to tear down the developed world, to destroy high energy civilization, to wipe out high yield agriculture. Dragging the human race back into the Neolithic while the leaders of this lie spewing cabal continue to benefit from all they claim to hate.
If we want to look at historical climate change, we might want to look at Lebanon. The national flag shows a cedar tree, but those are quite rare (there) today. In Roman times, Phoenicia had a major shipbuilding industry, and the hills were stripped of the cedar trees that covered all the hillsides. Chalk another one up to the white man…
http://www.2020site.org/trees/lebanon.html
There are still a good number of the cedar trees when you get well up into the Shoulf mountains. But down around the coast where most of the people live the land is denuded of most everything and only small groves of the cedars have survived.
BTW I hold the Lebanese Order of Merit 3rd class.
http://www.arabicmedals.com/Merit%20Medal%203.JPG
It was fun having that red and white striped ribbon with a little green cedar tree in the middle in my salad bar and guys asking “WTF is that?”.
Did you receive that in the early 1980s or in the late 1960s?
Several years ago I worked with some people from Lebanon. One person went back to Lebanon and brought me a small carving of a cedar of Lebanon made out of cedar wood. Pretty cool. And it was legal.
1984. SF MTT, Jan – Apr.
However, the spotty pattern of heavy rainfall variations contrasts with the much smoother spatial distribution of the mean annual rainfall changes, pointing to the necessity of developing specific regional approaches if one is to reach meaningful conclusions with respect to a possible enhancement of rainfall intensities.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/figures/doi/10.1002/joc.3984#figure-viewer-joc3984-fig-0001
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.3984/full
That’s a 2014 paper cited in the above paper. They manage to convolute the data to show a trend of more storms of greater rainfall but a decreasing trend in rainfall. Possible but you would want to go through it with fine tooth comb before believing, and ignore that it made through peer review.
The main reason why Al Jazeera, and to some extent RT, are pushing the climate change meme, is because their sponsors see the United States as a threat to their influence in the world, which is based on their natural gas economies.
Works for me.
Why pick on Al Jazzera?
Climate Change/Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming is the modern version of a religion for self loathers.
The concerned ones,have a first world problem,they feel undeserving of the earthly paradise our forefathers developed. Because they are.
Being lazy clingers,usually with lips fully locked to the public teat, they know their own worth, thereby hating anyone who enjoys their life and skills.
How dare you be happy when I hate myself.
It is all about “me”,to every one of the virtue signalling crowd.
Really? You don’t know what Al Jazzera is doing with climate spin? Isn’t it obvious? The left in the west already sides with these lunatics by their silence, now they’ll jump on board with full leftist support and vocalizations about alarmism and turn a blind approving eye when the terror comes especially with a climate spin.
Oh, I thought Al Gore had changed his last name to Jezeera. He SOLD his TV licence to the Qataris! I find it amusing AJ is down on fossil fuels. It was more likely the oil and gas from the Emirates, Saudi, Iraq and Iran that caused the landslide in Freetown if that were a cause. I think it’s time for the center for disease control to check out if stupid is actually a viral pandemic. The climate in the tropics is unchanged – that’s the only part of the science that they got right and they continually shoot that part down. Al’s “Inconvenient Spoofs” are full of the wreckage of shot down science and clung-to fairy tales.
This is a little over the top?
I don’t think the Qatari royal family personally set the news agenda for this TV channel?
And if you are not a climate skeptic, this report is standard, ordinary news… any UK TV channel or newspaper would run a similar story.
Actually they do, directly, at least they say they do, but they lie as much as you do, so take it with a grain of,,,,,no, a tablespoonful of salt. Real human beings do, perhaps you should join us.
more frequent and more violent rainy season events such as this are a measurable consequence..
Measurable how, exactly? I blame a decline in decent education for the inability to see this argument as substantively meaningless. How can a consequence be measurable before it has happened?
What is the scientific basis for the statement above anyway, whether these alleged consequences are measurable or not?
No, it is not metastisizing into a reason to hate the West. It was conceived as a vehicle to convey hate for the West – and was aimed from the very outset at hating the West.
Maybe the West should sue the Arab nations for willfully and negligently allowing all that desert dust to pollute the atmosphere especially in Europe.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sahara-desert-dust-pollution-create-perfect-storm-of-smog-in-britain/
How many millions of people have been seriously affected in Europe by these Arab nations laxity in fixing this problem?
That dust blowing west over the MDR in the Atlantic helps cut down on the number of hurricanes we see over here during a typical season.
Self loathing tends to invite outside help.
“It is a well-established expectation that temperatures will rise” – lol
I though it was about CBC…
The NYT isn’t a “news ” paper it’s a news manufacturer .
Brietbart is the future and at least they don’t pretend to be journalists .
This head posting is puzzling. Was Eric Worrall alive when bin Laden cited climate change driven by activities of western powers as a motivating factor in his 1995 fatwa document? This is nothing new.
Really? How about you post that document for us? Not some sh*t spew, the actual document. He was quite prolific with publishing actual, physical documents so this should not be a problem for you.
“Acts of God” are replaced by “Acts of Climate Change”
Everyone hates the ‘West’ because we are the best. Granted we have to defeat the domestic terrorists such as BLM, antifa, and drive islam from our country, because they are all incompatible with the notion of civilization, and seek to destroy everything that they cannot control. Look at Boston this weekend, 1000’s of terrorists marching, screaming for love and tolerance,and beating the crap out of EVERYONE who stood against them.