Guest essay by Eric Worrall
My climate journalism model suggested the attempt to link the tragedy in Thailand to climate change was inevitable.
Flooding in Thai cave reflects climate change as wet season gets wetter
By Kendra Pierre-Louis
12 July 2018 — 4:37pm…
By now, it’s well known that their predicament was caused by rising floodwaters in the cave. What is less known is that the pattern of precipitation that ensnared them is in keeping with broader changes to the region’s seasonal monsoon that researchers have attributed to climate change.
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No one is suggesting that climate change itself was responsible for trapping the boys in the cave.
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But what has changed in recent years is that those wet periods have been wetter.
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Those children were trapped because some idiot led them into a dangerous cave system in Wet Season, not because of Western CO2 emissions. In my opinion it is shameful but predictable that a mainstream Western journalist would think it appropriate to trivialise the suffering of those Thai children, to promote their climate cause.
Although all the children were thankfully rescued, there was a fatality. Former Thai Navy Seal Saman Kunan died during the desperate effort to maintain oxygen levels in the cave while the children were still trapped.
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So, what they mean is that “weather, not climate” caused the cave to flood, but, no mention of a careless man for taking the children into the cave prone to flooding during the rainy season; which would make the situation a “man made” event.
Of course it was climate change. And CO2 is the Satan of the New Religion.
never let a good story go which can be exploited.
I really wanted to debunk this but a quick look at the 1901-2015 data for Thailand from
http://sdwebx.worldbank.org/climateportal/index.cfm?page=downscaled_data_download&menu=historical
Shows a small rising trend in temperature and June to September rainfall. Correlation value positive 0.51.
The whole year correlation is positive 0.49
Sorry.
https://www.google.at/search?q=karst+caves&oq=karst+caves&aqs=chrome.
Eric, stop it now.
Just say:
Young boys love adventures and MYSTERIES.
In thousands of years of Thailand settlement there must be thousands of juveniles lost in that caves never found again.
Their parents relieved their grief with thinking that sons ‘rode into sundown’ ‘living in a better place now’.
Thai government promised to let this never happen again.
So stop this now.
Of course. Climate change affects everything, even contradictory things. Which is why it’s not science in any way.
Not bragging but I thought of this happening about two days after I first heard of this story. I also told my girlfriend after the 1st 4 kids were rescued that there will be a movie about this someday.
“Recent years” is weather. Recent decades is almost climate, recent centuries would qualify as climate. The only thing is, climate changes on its own. How can you tell which did what to who (or who’s on first, for that matter)?
The author should consider what being an “alarmist” is really about:
“someone who is considered to be exaggerating a danger and so causing needless worry or panic.”
In other words, a fibber.
I used to fly over that exact same country in the mid-1960s during the war in Southeast Asia. This is the time for the wet monsoon in that part of Thailand.
Absolute clown. Where was this prawn when we had 13 monsoons come through in one season in 2005? Chiang Mai partially flooded 3 times in 6 weeks. My house was inundated each time. No one thought it was Climate Change then because it had flooded like that about 50 years beforehand . Much of the city flooding was more to do with poor dam water level control than a half degree change in temperature!
The wet season is wet. Period..!
Ek is not an idiot, just he has been to the cave many times and made a mistake. He knew the cave floods during the rainy season but did not know that the water inside the cave can rise so fast in just less than an hour AND that that fast rise becomes permanent until November when the water levels finally go down.
Maybe, just maybe, would entering a cave prone to flooding not be the cause of all this?