Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 10 October 2022
The Monsoon. Life Giving. Life Taking. Bringing both joy and sorrow to all of India. As always has. It is believed by some that India’s history has been determined by the monsoon and its variability over time. Prayers are said to the goddess Mariamman to bring a favorable monsoon.
India’s monsoon is the most important meteorological event in India every year — a good monsoon means good crops and prosperity for millions of farmers and is a such major factor in India’s economic well-being that it is predicted, tracked and reported by India’s central bank.
But while India’s monsoon can be fairly accurately predicted, it is not always the same year-to-year, region-to-region or place-to-place.
Some years it rains too much in one place and too little in another. Some years are drought years and some are flood years. Some years are both.
Henry Fountain, a Times climate reporter, and Saumya Khandelwal claim in a recent NY Times feature piece that:
“The Monsoon Is Becoming More Extreme — South Asia’s monsoon is inextricably linked, culturally and economically, to much of Asia. Climate change is making it increasingly violent and erratic.”
This is a special “interactive” feature, meaning that interesting effects have been created by a special graphics team at the NY Times. Check it out at the link given above. Unfortunately, like many before it, it is, at its most basic, “pretty pictures used as propaganda”.
Let’s check just the claims in the sub-title: Climate change is making the southwest monsoon 1) Increasingly violent and 2) erratic. Henry Fountain doubles down on this claim with this: “Now, however, across South Asia, climate change is making the monsoon more erratic, less dependable and even dangerous, with more violent rainfall as well as worsening dry spells.”
Let’s see if these claims are true:
Increasingly Violent, More Violent Rainfall:
From this year’s roundup of the 2022 monsoon season from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), we have this five-year summary chart:
The chart shows numbers of “heavy rainfall events” across the bottom – both “just heavy” (labeled >115.6 and <204.5) and “extremely heavy” (labeled >204.5) for each year. We see that over the last five years, extremely heavy rainfall events have declined 321, 554, 341, 273, and 296, only 2019 is unusually greater. The same is true of just heavy rainfall events. But 2020, 2021, 2022 are quite normal, with fewer in these years. So, at least the last five years have not seen “more violent rainfall”.
More erratic, less dependable:
The monsoon means rainfall in monsoon season, so to be “more erratic, less dependable” we should see rainfall amounts that fall far below, or far above, seasonal normal:
This is a one hundred and twenty-one year record, meticulously kept by the governments of India, precisely because the monsoon rains means prosperity or disaster for the Indian people year to year. Years outside of the green-shaded area — designated by the IMD as Normal +/- 10% — are years of too much rain and not enough rain. Years outside the yellow-shaded areas are bad flood years and bad drought years. There are always some years in the present decades that fall outside of normal.
We see that those outside-of-normal years are rare in the last 30 years – 1962-1992 saw far more outside of the normal (green) band than 1992-2022. Rather than more erratic and less dependable, the latest climatic period (30 years) has been far more dependable and less erratic than the previous two 30-year periods.
That said, the monsoon that India gets each year is the monsoon that India gets. Some years are better than others. Some years are more evenly spread geographically, some years are “spottier’ with too much rain here and too little there. That is what we call weather and is as always was.
Bottom Line:
It is not true that “The Monsoon Is Becoming More Extreme — Climate change is making it increasingly violent and erratic.”
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Author’s Comment:
I have written about the monsoon previously in 2019 Indian Monsoon – Blessing or Curse? Nothing has changed since then, except that the main stream media is more and more compliant with the demand that journalists exaggerate and bias any and all news that might be related to weather and climate – the demand that all stories claim that there is a Climate Crisis evident in every single story.
There will be others who are more knowledgeable than I writing about this year’s monsoon – it is a hot topic – and a wrap up of the monsoon season story is quite popular.
Thanks for reading.
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Seem worshiping Mariamman is unnecessary.
At least they aren’t destroying their economy worshipping the Green New Deal gods.
Scissor ==> It is their religion and their culture.
Said another way, it doesn’t seem that India lacks rain or fertility.
Sharp Scissor, I got it
In central India where I grew up, the major festivals/prayers were to Kali.
” Mahakali, Bhadrakali,and Kalika (Sanskrit: कालिका), is a Hindu goddess who is considered to be the goddess of ultimate power, time, destruction and change in Shaktism. In this tradition, she is considered as a ferocious form of goddess Mahadevi, the supreme of all powers, or the ultimate reality.”
Never heard of Mariamman.
Fran ==> If you’ve lived there, you know how diverse customs and local religions are. I have not, but I minored in Eastern Religions in uni. I give the Wiki link to Marimman — which they claim is quite popular.
I should have been more careful — one can never dependably say something like “in India” as if it is one place — the same (or even similar) all over.
Mariamman must be a southern goddess. I don’t know. The only one I recall is Shiva Nataraja.
That’s exactly what the Wiki article says in the first paragraph. Rural areas of South India. (Quite likely an accretion from before Hinduism spread into the region.)
There was – I assume still is – a time on Singapore, Sri Mariamman.
It was (is) very striking, much statuary!
Auto
Try Tamil Nadu, many Mariamman temples.
This article is spot on: “the Indian monsoon” was and still is irregular, full stop. Here in the south east Monsoon = an average of 6 low pressure areas swinging in between October and end December. the more or less these repeatedly hit one spot, the wetter / dryer that year. It is quit a micro regional affair.
Do you have a span of years when they did not do so to compare?
Scissor >> – So you think that for little serious-minded human beings, completely depending on good weather for their very livelihood, it is “unnecessary”, perhaps even ridiculous, to pray for a good monsoon??
You really are quite ignorant about the meaning of religion.
There you go again, using readily available facts that NYT ignores/misrepresents.
Rud ==> I do so, with apologies.
AP – Drive for climate compensation grows after Pakistan’s floods
Neo ==> The floods in Pakistan were, of course, caused by heavy rains but the disaster was caused by the fact that the poor in Pakistan are allowed to build on known flood plains that flood, to some extent, nearly every year. Despite the repeated flooding, year-after-year, dikes and berms are not built to protect homes and fields. In the “other Pakistan”, now known as Bangladesh, extensive berms and dikes have been built to protect their people.
A good image of this fact is used at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-62728678 — the center circle slides left and right for before and after.
In the U.S. — the same thing happens along the Mississippi and other rivers. New Jersey has areas that 30 years ago flooded homes every year — and they finally forbade rebuilding (I cleared mud from homes there several years in a row — sometimes the very same homes!)
Of course, the same is true in China, where they built dams and other flood control infrastructure, which reduced flooding, until some bit of infrastructure fails, then they have disaster again.
Every monsoon season, it floods somewhere in SE ASIA — that is their climate. None of it is new, except whole cities or slums built on known flood-prone areas.
Neo ==> Also see his opinion piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/10/opinion/pakistan-floods-flood-crisis.html
India’s monsoons can easily be tied to the El Nino/La Nina cycles. This can be found in the book Floods, Famines and Emperors, El Nino and the fate of civilizations, by Brian Fagan. It covers about 20K years, and shows how ENSO has affected societal groups over those years. It also shows what we can expect over the next few centuries.
Claims of “worse” or “more often” are nearly NEVER found to be correct when a graph going back to 1900 from a reputable source is included.
One would think that at random, made up by monkeys, such claims would be found to be 50% correct….but instead they are 95% incorrect. This is indicative of a propagandized media. And indeed it is rather easy to find media groups like CoveringClimateNow.org planning news headlines for public presentation and many outlets with a “donate” button near their global-destruction-of-the-day article, of course written by a repeat offending hack.
You make a very good point. Hadn’t thought about it that way before. Not random goofs. Lopsided error distribution is proof of misleading intent.
DMac and Rud ==> CCNow leaves no doubt as to what it is asking/demanding that journalists do: Make every story a Climate Disaster/Climate Crisis story — and makes no cmand that journalists sstick to facts — but encourages emotional story-telling and outright political biases.
They do not attempt to hide these facts — they are Proud to be Alarmist.
97% incorrect
Attached shows how the temperature in the Arabian Sea has changed through the satellite era. The generally rising trend is the result of gradual increasing solar intensity.
The ocean surface temperature cannot be sustained above 30C so that is the limit. The surface needs to reach 28C for persistent monsoon conditions.
The peaks have risen steadily over the 4 decades but a slight downswing in the last five years tied to the solar cycle at present. The 11 year solar beat is evident in the peaks.
A failure of the monsoon will become increasingly rare. The monsoon conditions will occur a little earlier because the autumn solar intensity is increasing.
One change that could alter the landfall of monsoon is removal of moisture holding biomass. For example, covering vast areas of the land with solar panels could prevent the powerful convective columns forming over land that draw mid level moisture from the oceans. Land water begets precipitation in tropical conditions.
The sub-continent has not experienced a single hurricane/typhoon/cyclone this season.
First time I can recall this being the case.
TooRight ==> Yes, I think you are right.
I’d rather trust Mariamman than the IPCC. She looks pretty competent, and I suspect she has a no-nonsense attitude.
Kip,
Two weeks ago, a CBS or ABC anchor stood in the rain and wind, reporting on hurricane Ian. Suddenly she broke into a speech about how climate change was creating stronger storms. Totally inappropriate and incongruous.
Ever since I first learned about the Columbia Journalism Review project to inject climate into everything, I’ve seen this increase in CC references in the oddest places.
So, thanks for the link to CCNOW in your closing. Just the opening page is scary and proof of the propaganda project’s reach and scope.
Perhaps it is time for a full article on this attempt to corrupt the knowledge of, as they say, 2 billion people.
John == CCNow (and it is not the only organization focused on turning journalists into propaganda writers) is truly pernicious.
Weather is chaotic atmospheric event!
Merriam-Webster even uses chaotic in a sentence describing weather as an example.
Meanwhile the definition for erratic:
Seems to me “erratic” is a huge improvement to “chaotic”.
Anyway, I seriously doubt that any modern India “monsoon” can have rain/drought events worse than those history has recorded.
New York Times apparently expended a lot of cash cobbling up this falsehood. May their efforts to deceive citizens be rewarded with an “extreme” event, e.g., ‘plummeting readership’.
Nothing to do with China’s rain making machines on the Tibetan plains I suppose?