Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The former regional governor of the Egyptian Nile Delta City of Alexandria, Hany el-Missiry, has rejected accusations that poor civic maintenance of drains was responsible for recent damaging floods, which led to the deaths of at least 6 people. El-Missiry blames Climate Change.
According to Al Jazeera;
… His resignation, which comes less than a year after he took charge of Alexandria, Egypt’s second-largest city, was announced Sunday by a government spokesman amid widespread criticism over the city’s response to the deluge.
“We are drowning in negligence,” read the front-page headline of Al-Youm Al-Sabaa daily newspaper. “The government drowns in Alexandria,” read the banner headline at Al-Shorouk, another daily.
Alexandria’s frail infrastructure, particularly its drainage systems, likely aggravated the flooding and resulted in the deaths of five people who were electrocuted by a fallen power cable, according to local media. The downpour was five times the amount of rain the city normally experiences in all of October.
Some people pointed to climate change as a major culprit. Missiry called the flooding an “environmental catastrophe” shortly before resigning.
Such flooding could become the norm in Alexandria, the World Bank has warned. It put Alexandria among the five cities across the world most at risk of flooding by 2050 as a result of climate change. The other cities the World Bank lists include Barranquilla, Colombia; Naples, Italy; Sapporo, Japan; and Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. …
I hope you join me in wishing Hany el-Missiry good luck with his next job. I respectfully suggest, that given the political reflexes demonstrated during the Alexandria flood, Hany is a strong candidate for the job of representing Egypt at the upcoming COP21 Paris climate summit.
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Everybody knows that the sea level in the Nile Delta is slowly rising, not because of the AGW but due to the huge weight of the Nile sediments that makes the rocky substratum sinking in the Earth mantle. The same phenomenon can be observed in the Rhône Delta region too.
Exactly how did global warming cause those power lines to fall into the water?
Global warming is like Homer Simpson, it can do anything.
The Nile has been flooding forever. There are hieroglyphs describing the periodic nature of the flood and ancient high water markers carved into the banks of the Nile. The entire Egyptian economy and its ancient prosperity was reliant on the floods. Even the sphinx is thought to be much older than “Egypt” and its body’s misshapen-ness was due to repeated exposure to Nile or even Mediterranean flood waters. Nothing new here.
What else is new. Local officials underinvest in infrastructure, bad things happen, blame something beyond local control. Hurricane Katrina anyone. Super storm Sandy. California drought. It’s a very old trick.
“The Mediterranean sea level (MSL) has changed in recent decades, decreasing from 1960 to 1990 (Gomis et al., 2008) and then increasing from 1993 to 1999 (Cazenave et al., 2001). Cazenave et al. (2001) demonstrated that, except in the northern Ionian sub-basin, the sea level increased throughout the Mediterranean Sea between 1993 and 1999, and the authors expect this trend to increase in the future. Criado-Aldeanueva et al. (2008) found that the MSL changed, but insignificantly, over the 1999–2005 period. More recently, Tsimplis et al. (2013) found that the MSL rose significantly from 1993 to 2011 by approximately 3.0 cm decade−1. Finally, Shaltout and Omstedt (2014) supported Tsimplis et al. (2013), finding that throughout the 1993–2010 period, the MSL displayed a significant positive trend of 2.6 cm decade−1.”
Looks like it’s AMO related.
I grew up in Illinois down where the “corduroy roads” were built during the western expansion of the United States. We maintained those ditches and pipes, we maintained them big-time. If they clogged the town would drown in the rains.
It’s the drainage people, not “climate change”
Who would like a red herring sandwich? I quit counting them, plus the rampant speculation. The people who died were electrocuted. How about blaming Edison and Tesla? Or 3rd world wiring. How does rain become rising sea level? The flooding was caused by a freak rainstorm, not the incursion of the Mediterranean. One occurrence does not equal a pattern or proof of any changes in climate. When it happens again next year, and the year after, etc., then you can start to infer a change in the climate. Climate change is a handy scapegoat. Come to think of it, Climate Change is responsible for me not getting laid! That’s it! I’ve found the answer!!!
Floods in Egypt are cyclical in history to ancient times and beyond mans occupation of the area. In the end floods will dump organic laden silt and increase the fertility of the region If man has gotten in the way of this process, oh well. Ancient Egyptians went with the flow, as it were, and farms thrived there using ancient irrigation techniques. This is probably true today in some regions.
One of the underlying benefits of “climate change” for government leaders is that it is a universal excuse for incompetence, not to mention a convenient cover up for corruption.
Seems like climate change is to blame for everything over their in the middle east…
Including the Syrian Civil War (if you can even call it that):
http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/charlotte-church-climate-change-caused-syrian-war-2015210
“From 2006 to 2011 they experienced one of the worst droughts in its history, which of course meant there were water shortages and crops weren’t growing,” she continued. “There was a mass migration from rural areas of Syria into the urban centers, which put more strain and resources were scarce et cetera, which apparently did contribute to the conflict there today.”
First of all the drought was partially caused by extremely poor irrigation systems which accounts for 90% of their water consumption. And second, only 1.3 million were affected by it from which they received 98% of the aid they needed in assistance to overcome it:
http://reliefweb.int/report/syrian-arab-republic/syria-drought-response-plan
It is really quite simple. Poor planning, historical mismanagement, corruption, lousy engineering and ignorance do not qualify for some of the $100B that could come out of Paris. Only climate change/global warming qualifies. This bloke was only putting his oar in the excess water.
Mark WW says: “The problem is that the UN, as well as all other international bodies are both corrupt and powerless.”
Ancient Mariner says: “Thank God!”.
Bumf—, Egypt?
(Snipped, this is a family site. -mod)
I always thought it was in Idaho. (Or was it named after the one in Egypt, like St Petersburg FL et al?)
The recent rise in bogus studies in the Muslim world are related to the UN call for more claims from an inclusive process of claiming damage from more regions. It is a knock off the cries from Jerry Brown and other governors for extra U.S. Federal disaster funds for unrelated local uses. At some point they expect a payoff from a bagman.
It’s called televangelism.
And apparently it’s extremely effective against the masses:
https://www.google.com/search?q=televangelism&gws_rd=ssl
Oops, wrong link…that was the google search for televangels but you all should watch this:
It’s so akin to cawgism….
There are a couple of references to the Somerset Floods in the comments above.
As an interesting update on this topic.
It turns out that recently some genius decided to create a computer model run of the events and see what would have happened if dredging had been carried out prior to the winter rains:
“Astonishingly, the model discovered that if the dredging work done since the floods had been done before the rain started, and temporary pumps brought in earlier at the height of the disaster, then almost all the homes flooded in the worst-hit areas would have probably escaped intact.”
So two years of analysis and a computer model later – and they are finally beginning to realize that local people and local drainage engineers and farmers, Christopher Booker, Richard North, @Paul Homewood, and yours truly WERE RIGHT ALL ALONG.
Of course, we knew we were right, without any cause for doubt. Because, quite honestly this was patently obvious to any keen observer with a vague grasp of how water behaves.
Some people clearly need an expensive computer model to reveal to them the same mysteries which are revealed to others by the processes silently at work in their own minds.
http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Better-pumps-dredging-stop-floods/story-27574691-detail/story.html
Will Egypt be like the Persian Gulf? Unbearable with all the heat waves, so will Egyptians have to worry about being flooded out when they’ve already been cooked by all that boiling rain falling?
One for the economists among us I suppose. Do they sandbag or roof their cities now?
There was also a time when the ‘settled science’ held that the Nile floods were caused by the appearance of the star Sirius (aka Sothis, or the Dog Star) in the Eastern Sky just before dawn.