Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Bangladesh government has blamed global warming for poor water flow from the Ganges River. This contrasts with 2008, when melting of the Himalayan Glaciers by Global Warming was blamed for flooding of the Ganges.
Global warming, absence of rainfall to blame
Water Resources Minister Anisul Islam Mahmud believes global warming and absence of rainfall in India were to blame for Bangladesh getting only 25,000 cusecs of water through the Ganges river on the first 10 days of March this year.
“It has happened after a long break…we (usually) get 65,000 cusecs,” he told a two-day “National Water Rights Conference-2016” in the capital’s Krishibid Institution Bangladesh yesterday against the backdrop of World Water Day, to be observed tomorrow.
Comparing Joint Rivers Commission, Bangladesh’s data which was gathered centring the 10 days since 2008, The Daily Star found this year’s figure to be the lowest.
Read more: http://www.thedailystar.net/city/global-warming-absence-rainfall-blame-1197358
From 2008;
Early monsoon floods “point to climate change”
The monsoon floods have come early to Bangladesh, with thousands of people losing their homes and crops to river erosion, in what specialists say is a clear sign of climate change.
Most major flooding in the low-lying nation is not expected until July and August.
“Early flooding of the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers is an example of climate change caused by global warming,” Atiur Rahman, an environmental economist, told IRIN, noting a gradual advance of the annual flooding over the past 50 years.
“Global warming causes the snow-caps of the Himalayas to melt early and in bigger quantities, causing early and extra volumes of water to flow through the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers. This adds to the already full volume of the monsoon water and causes early and sustained floods that take a devastating shape,” he explained.
Read more: http://www.irinnews.org/news/2008/06/25-0
To be fair to Atiur Rahman, he might have been basing his conclusion about flooding on bad information provided by the IPCC.
Mr Rahman has a track record of caring about poverty – he was the architect of prominent poverty alleviation programmes, and was until a few days ago the governor of the Bangladesh Central Bank. Rahman stepped down from his Central Bank post, in the wake of a major cyber-heist.
Ex IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri, who resigned after being accused of sexual harassment, once claimed the Himalayas was melting so fast, that the ice would all melt by 2035. Pachauri accused people who disputed his 2035 claim of practicing “voodoo science”. The nonsensical claim was only formally withdrawn in early 2010, after the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference.
No doubt if river flow returns to normal next year, the suspiciously average river flow activity will also be blamed on mankind’s unnatural influence on the global climate.
Not My Fault said government officials.
To be fair, global warming is supposed to cause more extreme weather fluctuations, so more extremes in both directions are exactly what you would expect.
So I suppose you have evidence that floods and drought are both becoming more common in Banglasesh?
GLO-BULL warming causes droughts, floods and just right conditions …. don’t you guys know nothing 😉
Well there’s a difference between less water precipitated, and less water precipitated on my land. That is a consequence of climate NOT being a global constant of Nature.
G
You’ve got to love a theory and its models that predict any result is expected. Positive or negative (not neutral) – all within range of the impacts of a catastrophic theory. In this case only one variant is constant: CO2 concentrations go up. The impacts on temperatures, rainfall, earthquakes(!), etc, are all over the place, but devastating. I marvel at the intelligence of the dinosaurs to be able to survive the Mesozoic at nearly 2500 ppm CO2. If only modern climate scientists had their intellect, the problem would assuredly go away.
In fact, there is substantial research that suggests that variability in the atmosphere could deamplify as the planet warms.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/03/the-golden-rule-of-climate-extremes.html
So, benben, that covers all the bases. Anythng that happens is the fault of global warming.
Do you have any idea how stupid you sound? How old are you, anyway? Twelve?
As one statement made by the Wet Office covered all bases too. SOme areas will hav more rain, some areas will have less rain. Some areas will be drier, other areas will be wetter! This Climate predicion crap is easy-peasy. Just state every conceivable weather event possible & your prediction will be right somewhere down the line!
Honestly, it would be nice if the mods step in every now and then. This behaviour of dbstealey is unacceptable. And ironic, considering that I haven’t tried to win an argument by calling someone names since I was twelve
benben,
Stop writing as if you’re a 12-year old and we’ll treat you like an adult. Read KD’s comment below. The things you are advocating are literally killing people. But you don’t care. You’re taken a position. You’ve dug your heels in, and you refuse to discuss the real problems — problems that are caused by people like you, running interference against the policies that would help feed them.
The added CO2 in the air is keeping food costs down. There is plenty of food available using the correct policies. But your side is comprised of the corrupt UN and other governments that are using the “carbon” scare to raise taxes. If you have even average intelligence you should be able to see that.
You should also be able to see that the rise in CO2 has been entirely beneficial. It is a completely harmless trace gas that you would be unaware of if people didn’t have sensitive instruments to measure it.
And what did they find? Over the past century CO2 has risen by just one part in 10,000. The only result has been a greening of the planet. But you want that to stop.
You argue as if you have actual evidence of your assertions and beliefs. You don’t. How often have we asked for someone like you to produce measurements quantifying the fraction of anthropogenic warming, out of all global warming? But you can never produce those measurements.
I think Dr. Leon Festinger would have plenty to say about you and your tribe, benben. He’s writing about you here:
A man with a conviction is a hard man to change. Tell him you disagree and he turns away. Show him facts or figures and he questions your sources. Appeal to logic and he fails to see your point. We have all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We are familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed through the most devastating attacks. But man’s resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it; finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before. Indeed, he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting other people to his view.
~Dr. Leon Festinger, The Seekers
I see – Melting in the Himilayas, in the “warmest year ever”, now causes the Ganges to dry up…
Its just sad to read these kind of comments. Bangladesh is a beautiful country that is suffering a lot from changes in its water system. We can argue about the underlying cause of these changes, but to deny that these things are happening. Why would you do that?
benben, please tell me you are not serious with this last comment, that you aren’t that naive. One of the reasons Bangladesh is suffering is because money that could be going to solve their real problems is being diverted to “global warming/climate change/climate disruption” research and policies. That their own government would come out to “blame” their woes on the climate rather than on their own ineptitude is not surprising. Their people deserve better.
For another example swing over to the post on the Ivanpah solar plant… another waste of $s in the name of “global climate change” that could have been used to solve a real problem.
You are joking, right? Go look up the Bhola cyclone that hit Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) in 1970. Anywhere from 500,000 to a million people died in that catastrophe.
When I was a kid in the sixties, Pakistan/Bangladesh were in the global news virtually every year. Alternating floods, droughts and good years with monsoons which they rely on being terrifyingly variable. Much like the cyclicallity of la nino/ el nino which I believe they show some links with. The big difference is that about 500 million people depend on weather in that part of Asia when that weather has never been dependable.
How do you debate someone essentially saying “the average seems to be made up of positive and negative anomalies, exactly what we predicted, so we are right.”
That would be weird and not falsifiable, I fully agree with you RWturner. Fortunately, the actual thing being said is ‘the average seems to be going up slightly while the extremes are becoming more extreme in both directions’, which is much easier to validate. So instead of name calling, perhaps someone can find a chart with some statistics on how rainfall etc. has changed in Bangladesh over the past 50 years or so. That would be relevant information (as opposed to i.e. random factoids like Mohatdebos above says).
Cheers!
ben
benben,
The issue isn’t the climate in a given area. That’s cherry-picking. The issue is this:
Is the steady rise in anthro CO2 causing an acceleration in global warming?
Everything else is just pablum, because the fact is, there is no correlation between the rise in CO2 and global warming.
You lost. Your side was wrong. The planet has rendered judgement.
But you can’t let go. You’re fixated. Sad.
Festinger would understand. So would Leo Tolstoy, who wrote about people just like you:
I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth, if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.
That’s you, benben. There’s also Chris, and a few others. You’ve preached so long and hard that you can’t back off now.
I don’t think benben is saying that. I’ve been trying to find some statistics for Bangladesh, but nothing current. The official claim appears to be about 0.3 to0.5C of warming in the last 50 years and http://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/research/climate/projects/undp-cp/UNDP_reports/Bangladesh/Bangladesh.hires.report.pdf says that rainfall decreased by 0.5% per decade between 1960 and 2003 (which includes a cooling period) and basically says that rainfall is expected to *increase*. If there is any truth worth having in the models then Bangladesh’s problems are NOT due to global warming. Of course, the models could be completely wrong, but in that case, we’ve no reason to blame global warming for anything. For what it’s worth, figures I’ve seen for 2012 and 2014 (2666 mm) are definitely higher than the 2003 figures.
Thanks for actually reading what I write Richard 🙂
I guess one of the problems with these longer term statistics is that it they generally don’t capture what you’re trying to find out. For example, in my country we’ve had problems with extreme rainfall in the past few years, where a weeks worth of rain falls in an hour (or something along those lines). That doesn’t show up in precipitation statistics, but it does cause a lot of damage, and it certainly isn’t normal for northern Europe.
No actually benben, we wouldn’t expect both colder and hotter temperatures to come roiling out of the combination of a sun warmed rock, and frigid gas envelope chilling it, getting ever warmer.
If you have a room full of cold air that is being kept colder than the big warm rock in the middle of it,
making the overall air mix in that room warmer, through refrigerating it less, is not something, that could possibly come out of it, no matter how many academics get drunk and play the accordion while being creepy and anti-scientific method.
IF we had say, a bowl of frigid ocean water – and we immersed a sun warmed rock into that bowl of frigid ocean water, till 70% of it was covered – then whipped the exposed surface of the rock with air that was many degrees colder than the exposed rock surface –
and the bowl of cold water got warmer,
and the freezing winds we blew on all that warmer,
we wouldn’t expect to see both higher and lower temperatures in that experiment.
It’s just complete bullsh** by repeatedly busted, thermodynamically incompetent rats gnawing the legs of the scientific method in agitation their leaderships’ scams might not dominate culture of the entire world through lying about chemistry to steal money.
You’ve seen a heat pipe cooler for a computer, they’re one of the most common cooling mechanisms.
They take a pipe, and flatten the end, and give it a little bend so it’s flat down at the bottom. They solder both ends, having put in a little alcohol/acetone/sometimes adding water mix,
and then clamp this to the chip.
The chip heats up: Like the surface of the earth.
The liquid condensed at the bottom evaporates creating local cooling and rises;
the way ocean water and all water does from the surface as an enormous pool of evaporative phase change refrigerant for the surface (and the atmospheric bath of nitrogen/oxygen).
It rises till it emits energy to lower energy dense regimes above – they strap a big cooling fin to the top in the computer of course, the heat is washed/radiated off into the room and beyond;
and in the storm system the heat is given off toward higher atmospheric regions and ultimately space
So: round warm sun heated rock,
oceanic basins of chilled to liquid, phase change refrigerant.
There’s the gas of the atmosphere additionally which the refrigerant, cycling through it’s phases, also cools.
If we saw the entire thing containing more and more energy, thermal energy – saw it retaining higher and higher temperatures – due to the nature of such we would not expect to see both colder and warmer extremes.
Like all reality based events if the total system energy grew – such that total system heat grew – we don’t expect to find places where that energy refuses to distribute due to magic wackos running their mouths about – well, magic gas and magic heaters that defy logic.
So I mean – you know – I’m just saying. No – we wouldn’t expect just whatever some endlessly busted bunch of pseudo scientific quacks say, to define the thermodynamics of a warm rock, being scrubbed by frigid winds, immersed in freezing cold phase change refrigerant.
When people say more extreme weather they dont say that it becomes both hotter and colder. It means that the dry seasons are dryer and the wet seasons wetter. But nice analogy though!
Other Ben, there’s nothing that actually predicts extreme weather fluctuations in the climate models. In fact, climate models can’t model weather fluctuations on any meaningful scale, and the various scaled-down models that can often predict directly contradictory results (I’d suggest doing a search for Joshua Trees on this site). The “extreme weather” prediction was an ad-hoc addition that really has no basis in mathematics or physics. There’s very little evidence to cite or refute as it was completely made-up.
As far as long term records, graph away. Here’s a source. Let us know what you find, but it is on you to show a trend, not anyone else to prove one doesn’t exist.
http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/maproom/.Regional/.Asia_Indonesia/.Bangladesh/.Historical_Precipitation/
However, going by eyeball, there’s very little meaningful difference between the 1900-1930 and 1990-2012 average rainfall in the worldbank’s website.
I’m very inclined to blame this on weather, such as a late spring thaw. We are at the tail end of their dry season, after all. We’ve always had floods and droughts, and claiming “Climate Change” anytime anything is outside of normal is just nonsense, because something is always outside of normal somewhere. The thing is that any rational estimation is that there will be a net increase or decrease. Predicting a generic “more extreme events” just doesn’t make physical sense. The atmosphere isn’t like a spring that increases its swings in both directions when pulled. There’s simply no mechanism that would amplify both sides of the equation but always to the extreme. Either you are getting warmer or colder, wetter or dryer, but you can’t predict both without giving an explicit mechanism for this unusual prediction.
Also, I apologize for the rudeness of some of the others on this site. What can I say, it is the internet.
Hey other Ben,
Thanks for your comments. True, at first blush there doesn’t seem to be so much of an effect. But the effect probably would be quite small (most of the predicted effects of AGW are yet to show themselves). You’d need to do statistics and include more regional data… Beyond the scope of a comment for sure so I’ll just concede the point 🙂
With respect to your more general point. Interesting. My roommate is doing a PhD in atmosphere chemistry. I’ll check with him.
So, a bit late, not sure if you’ll read this, but the explicit mechanism for increasing temperature leading to both wetter and dryer seasons is that a warmer atmosphere can contain more water vapor, and can carry that vapor higher before it adiabatically cools and it starts to rain. Because a warmer climate will contain much more water, once it starts raining, a there simply is much more water and therefore more precipitation in a single event, leading to flooding.
The same effect will lead to drought in the dry seasons, because much more water vapor is necessary to fill the air column so that it will start raining. So there will simply be more days where that limit hasn’t been reached, and therefore less rain. There are other more complex interactions also, but this is the main one.
Hope you find it interesting!
benben–do you want to take your comment back? Sounds like it isn’t consistent with what “global warming” acolytes have told us.
These stories are at different times of year, so what is the contradiction? From wikipedia: “There are three distinct seasons in Bangladesh: a hot, humid summer from March to June; a cool, rainy monsoon season from June to October; and a cool, dry winter from October to March.” In March, the monsoon is not present, meaning low water flows in the Ganges under normal conditions, and even less so under drought conditions such as this year. In June,, the monsoon is well underway, meaning higher water levels in the Ganges, which is thus less able to absorb the high levels of glacier melt that occurred in 2008.
Sooo, in reality, everything is NORMAL !
No, 25,000 cusecs of water when the usual flow is 65,000 cusecs is not normal.
You can’t expect 10 DAYS to be exactly the same every year !
Chris,
Go stand in the back with benben and the others who gon’t get it.
So Chris, are you saying 65,000 cusecs is normal? Based on what evidence? What’s the mean over a statistically significant time frame? Standard deviation? What are the values over the same period for say the last 50 years?
As tragically wrong as this sounds to you,
it is not possible to put more and more energy into the fluids chilling a sun warmed rock
so they don’t chill it as much,
and have every possible weather get more amplified.
Don’t act naive intentionally, Chris, you’re humiliating other low information voters before they even get a chance to express their own
incredibly insipid
lack of grasp
of a light warmed rock,
with some freezing ocean water, and turbulent, frigid gas,
washing heat from it.
To you and others like you – it may seem intuitive that when you sit a large stone saucer of water out in the sun, magic forces make part of it get colder due to green house gas effect chaos.
That if you put a clear hood over it trapping heat inside, it would get both colder, and warmer, would become both drier, and wetter.
But no.
There’s just Phil Jones admitting he fabricated every single tenth of warming he ever put on a database past 1998, to the BBC in his Feb2010 don’t go to jail interview,
Michael Mann hitting you up for donations so he could sue a guy who said he’s a liar – getting caught lying about winning the Nobel Prize in his court filing documents,
”Death Trains of Heating Supplies to Auchwitz” ‘Homer ”Rowboat” Hansen’a, getting arrested for screaming obscenities at power plant employees as they try to drive into work, they should be tried for crimes against humanity – a government employee, screaming at power plant employees at their driveway at work, that they’re murdering people, by providing heating supplies.
Steven Schneider ”writing a program in Excel which makes it finally possible to calculate temperature FROM WIND SPEED ALONE” so that ”soon no one will use thermal sensors or thermometers any more they’ll use climate math” (The Answer Is Blowing In The Wind paper)
Michael Mann telling Congress that – he swore the world was going to end – some trees, he bored holes in said so, when he put them through a ”climate math” computer ‘model’ – but that he couldn’t let Congress take a look at that data because that information was his own private research, and he might need that research product to make money with in the future.”
Then leaving it on an FTP site and having a guy download it and say – look guys, we put in calibration data: and HUNDREDS and HUNDREDS of HOCKEY STICKS pop out!
Damn.
Angry Bird HATES it when that s**t happens. The geologist who looked into some tree wood and declared the world is going to end, claimed it was ”anti-science” to find out his KooK-0-MeteR was a hockey stick generation program. Using calibration data. Hundreds, and hundreds of hockey sticks.
The contradiction Chris is that you can’t remember being told all this yesterday, which without even having to have been around here much I can tell from your faux shocked tone – you were, and acted as blown over by it all being fake, as you’re acting now.
Ryan, it’s virtually impossible to decipher what you are saying. My point was quite basic, that Worrall was comparing waterflow events that occur at different times of year. You didn’t refute that, you went off on about a dozen unrelated tangents.
I’m sorry, the President is out of town transferring our wealth to other countries. Please leave a message after the beep.
I just wanna tell you, I came here the first time today and saw your comment. I thought it was funny as could be so I read more climate change on other sites and here. It’s becoming more and more clear the entire thing is nothing but scam on top of more scam in an attempt to create so much of it that there’s no way stop the flood of simply faked pseudo scientific authority in a “majority” manufsctured to protect Al Gore’s reputation after he lost the presidential election and tried to create a comeback.
Global warming reminds me of the story about the patent medicine that claimed to treat only “cattarh”, but defined all disease as cattarh. What are they predicting, anyway? Drought, floods, hot ,cold are all climate change, so keep sending money.
United Nations has created a total mess.
How on earth did they think they would be able to see the difference between: Climate changes caused by increased level of CO2 in the atmosphere and weather events, long term weather variations, natural climate variations, poor land management, man made causes other than CO2 etc.?
United Nations has created an economic quagmire, or a nirvana for the best paid bureaucrats in the world, depending on perspective.
“I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.”
– Michael Crichton
I think the Himalayas are experiencing a late spring thaw. Note temperatures near the top of the graphic here Bangladesh is. Also, how does an El Nino year effect this region.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/fnl/sfctmp_01.fnl.gif
Canada here. Can you please advise where we could get a warmer climate model or map or better yet how do we adjust our temps higher like NOAA and IPCC? That map is kinda depressing. We promise to only do it in the winter and only where it won’t bother the polar bears. Which is anywhere really, lol. They don’t really care.
Global weather change makes for a great scapegoat. Because weather is supposed to be “normal”.
They know the UN/IMF/IEA/World Bank drill.
..Tomorrow the U.N. will be announcing that CAGW causes temperatures to decrease during the night time and, even worse, causing temperatures to rise in the daytime !! We are soooooo dooooomed ! LOL
What I want to know is, when is Ban Ki Moon and Obama setting a wedding date?
Well now, it couldn’t be a proper World Water Day without a steady flow of water catastrophes (real or imagined) leading up to the big day.
/snark
Makes sense:
“World Water Day is an annual event celebrated on March 22. The day focuses attention on the importance of freshwater and advocates for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.”
This made me wonder – how many World Something Days are there?
These are the international days currently observed by the United Nations. New international days are established regularly.
Pick your favorite! – Here is mine. D) :
“21 June
International Day of Yoga (A/RES/69/131)”
I could not find a football or a golf day – however!
United Nations is totally out of line with it´s charter.
“The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”
— Dag Hammarskjöld, Secretary-General from 1953 to 1961
May I suggest another World Day: World day for demolition of bloated bureaucracies.
And this is quite funny:
“17 June
World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought (A/RES/49/115)”
Mankind has actually found an efficient way to combat desert and drought:
Arid Areas Greening Because of Higher CO2 Levels
“Researchers predicted foliage would increase by 5 to 10 percent given the 14 percent increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration during the study period. The satellite data agreed, showing an 11 percent increase in foliage …”
May I suggest that United Nations start to promote CO2 emissions.
19 November
World Toilet Day (A/67/L.75) (draft)
Though if you are a female there are about 6-7 days. 0 for males.
In keeping with the earlier post…
22 March
World Water Day (A/RES/47/193)
23 March
World Meteorological Day [WMO] WMO/EC-XII/Res.6
#gametheory
They don’t have to worry about flooding or drought in Bangladesh, as the sea will soon be rising up catastrophically and engulfing the whole country, according to CAGW theory.
Kinda reminds me of the medical field. Lots of things go wrong with our bodies. The older we are, the more things go wrong. That’s life. Once the “wrong” is given a name, someone develops something to cure it. (I won’t even attempt to bring in the psychological side of this.) The “cures” then produce law firm commercials willing to sue the developers of “the cure” for even unrelated effects that they tie to “the cure”.
When it comes to the weather and climate, the difference is there’s nothing “wrong”. But “Man” is still the “cause”. There are “law firms” out there willing to make the rest of us pay (them) for something that is natural.
PS No, I’m not knocking the medical profession. My Dad was a practicing physician for over 50 years.
From Wikipedia: “Each year in Bangladesh about 26,000 km2 (around 18% of the country) is flooded, killing over 5,000 people and destroying more than seven million homes.”
So is the complaint really about not enough citizens being killed and seven million homes not being destroyed?
The real problem has nothing to do with climate but rather population.
Too much water = Glowbull warming.
Too little water = Glowbull warming.
Just enough water = too much, or too little water coming soon, due to Glowbull warming.