By Vijay Jayaraj
On May 14, Cyclone Mocha made landfall near Myanmar and Bangladesh. It was not surprising to see many mainstream media blame climate change for it. The pattern has now become common.
Every time there is a major cyclonic event, the media fan fear of climate change and argue that human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide are causing more extreme weather. However, an examination of relevant data shows such reports to be misleading.
As I write this, Mocha has made landfall close to the Myanmar–Bangladesh border. Residents of coastal districts of Chattogram and Barishal are likely to experience the worst impact of the cyclone for weeks to come.
Among the most vulnerable are refugees who fled persecution in Myanmar and have been living for half a decade in Bangladesh camps without the protection of storm-resistant shelter. As sad as the situation is, cyclones are not unprecedented for the region.
Incidence of Cyclonic Storms are Decreasing
According to the Indian Government’s “Assessment of Climate Change over the Indian Region,” overall cyclone frequency in the Indian Ocean is showing no increase. In fact, there has been a decrease.
“Long-term observations (1951–2018) indicate a significant reduction in annual frequency of tropical cyclones” in both the North Indian Ocean basin and the Bay of Bengal, the report states.
The data clearly show a decrease in frequency of cyclones for more than 100 years in the North Indian Ocean, the birthplace of storms affecting more than 1.5 billion people. However, this information is obscured by cherry picking data for shorter times frames to suggest alarming weather trends.
Hurricane Data Reveal Similar Decrease in U.S.
It is not just the Indian Ocean region. In the U.S., there has been a decrease in the number of landfalling hurricanes per decade since 1850. According to data from the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the number of major hurricanes have been declining since the 1950s.
“In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity,” NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory states.
The mainstream media is good at tricking people into believing a false emergency. In instances like Cyclone Mocha, they prey on people’s compassion for storm victims and use the calamity to drive fear into people’s minds.
Don’t fall for the climate bait. We will see more and more of it in the coming days, as the climate doomsday bandwagon loses steam in many parts of our world. And desperate times call for desperate deceptions embedded onto the public psyche through repetitive, aggressive media programming.
This commentary was first published by the CO2 Coalition, May 15, 2023, and can be accessed here.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.
“However, an examination of relevant data shows such reports to be misleading.”
So what did those reports actually say?
Dude, you are getting ever faster! Does your troll team have a new, sharp manager, or did you just employ more keyboard jockeys?
But since you are meta-infomed, what you say there is an uptick in hurricane frequency due soon, which you have already prepared all the PR horror tales for, to unleash upon us denialist heathens during the next 40 news cycles?
P.S. Why does it “cost” to have access to all the atmospheric data? Did our taxes and penalties not already pay your friggin’salary, and platinum probes, and all-terrain vehicles and visits to climastrology conferences all over the world? Does the weather bureau not have computers and internet?
I am not being facetious, I am genuinely interested in your ‘business’ model. And I am not addressing Ole’ Nick the Stoker of warmunist hellfire and discord, I am talking to Nick Stokes the bureau agent.
Really cool nom-de-plume, must say. Only caught on two days ago…
Now burst my bubble and tell me that’s a real name of a real person… still a cool coincidence, yeah?
It’s actually the real name of me.
Stokes…
“”to add fuel to a large fire and move the fuel around with a stick so that it burns well and produces a lot of heat:””
Pretty accurate
Well, slap me with a wet brick!
Perfect pasta with chef Mac A. Rauni
GMO for profit by Jen O. Said
The Burning Earth, by Nick Stokes
…an no relation to Old Nick, then?
Did it occur to you to try to find out?
Sometimes one needs to make a little effort
You should know by now that alarmists always demand to be spoon fed any data or information that disputes their preconceived notions. Then once you feed it to them they’ll spit it out and demand you wipe their chin!
That being said here are some search results that claim warming is making TCs worse.
cyclone Mocha caused by climate change – Search (bing.com)
I saw no harm in asking him, but I didn’t expect a reply for obvious reasons.
I never use bing, myself, but the funniest one to my mind was…
“UN agencies brace for disaster”
I read that as itching for….
He could have researched the 1966 Florence Flood in Italy, also being assigned to CC, in the next door region to Emilia-Romagna. But in a charitable act to save his fingers for other important tasks like making irrelevant comments here’s what Wiki says.
The 1966 flood of the Arno (Italian: Alluvione di Firenze del 4 novembre 1966) in Florence killed 101 people and damaged or destroyed millions of masterpieces of art and rare books. It is considered the worst flood in the city’s history since 1557. With the combined effort of Italian and foreign volunteers alike, or angeli del fango (“Mud Angels”), many of these fine works have been restored. New methods in conservation were devised and restoration laboratories established. However, even decades later, much work remains to be done.
The flood has had a lasting impact on Florence, economically and culturally. City officials and citizens were unprepared for the storm and the widespread devastation that it caused. There were virtually no emergency measures in place, at least partially because Florence is located in an area where the frequency of flooding is relatively low. In fact, approximately 90% of the city’s population were completely unaware of the imminent disaster.
Residents were set to celebrate their country’s World War I victory over Austria on 4 November, Armed Forces Day. In commemoration, businesses were closed and many of their employees were out of town for the public holiday. While many lives were likely spared as a result, the locked buildings greatly inhibited the salvaging of valuable materials from numerous institutions and shops, with the exception of a number of jewellery stores whose owners were warned by their nightwatchmen.
Today the worst flood since 1557 would be the worst ever and be caused by Man Made Climate Change.
No doubt he’ll say November not May explaining why it’s not the same
[Edit: Sorry, I don’t know why some of this comes up in a large font]
You can expect that Wikipedia report to disappear now that attention has been drawn to it. Inconvenient stuff has a habit of disappearing, thanks to William Connolley (see below) and his ilk. Like the Wikipedia page Ralph Ellis (author), for example, or see Wikipedia Airbrushes List of Climate Sceptic Scientists Out of History. Ralph Ellis’s Wikipedia entry was deleted a while ago. Wikipedia had its own audit trail (deletionpedia), so the page could still be found at https://deletionpedia.org/en/Ralph_Ellis_(author), but now that page says
“There is currently no text in this page.“.
deletionpedia has itself been deleted. All that useful information – gone.
Well, not quite. The Wayback Machine provides a phenomenal service, and there are three backup copies of http://deletionpedia.org/en/Ralph_Ellis_(author). The first is from 20 Oct 2021. It includes the text that caused its deletion: “Along with co-author Michael Palmer, Ellis proposed a mechanism for the modulation of ice ages by the Milankovitch-precession cycle. They suggest that decreasing concentration of CO2 eventually causes desertification and dust storms. This dust production, in turn, causes lower glacial albedo and increasing global absorption of insolation, forcing the climate into an interglacial period.“. deletionpedia said, of course, that the page was deleted for other reasons.
I find the Wayback Machine difficult to search. You appear to have to know the url of the page you are looking for, ie, you can search for ‘http://deletionpedia.org/en/Ralph_Ellis_(author)’ but not for ‘Ralph Ellis’. Or maybe I have missed something.
About William Connolley: There is a white-washed write-up of William Connolley in Wikipedia. A bit more information is at Shirky and Sanger, or the costs of crowdsourcing – “[William Connolley] was accused of “promoting his own POV [point of view] and of having systematically erased any POV which did not correspond to his own”. His anonymous opponent brought him before Wikipedia’s court of last resort, the Arbitration Committee, where Connolley was, for a time, duly punished:“. but the paper goes on to whitewash him yet again. It seems that the science elites are good at closing ranks.
See also this WUWT article – More on Wikipedia and Connolley – he’s been canned as a Wiki administrator.
Silly violinmaker, Nick is just doing his job. When he can’t find anything to dispute, he deflects with an asinine irrelevant question in the forlorn hope that it distracts readers from the inconvenient facts in the article.
Nitpick Nick nitpicks to distract.
“Did it occur to you to try to find out?”
If Vijay wants to gin up a stream of indignation about the things they are saying, at least he could tell us what they are.
I’ll take that as a no
From the BBC: “Scientists say storms such as cyclones have become stronger and more frequent due to climate change.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-65595693
… Nick Stokes you know damn well what they say.
It’s a fair point. The BBC should be citing reports it refers to.
This is a direct quote from a reply by the BBC to a complaint I made about one of their climate stories.
We are careful to check the facts associated with any story and this figure has been widely reported across various media outlets as it was reiterated by officials, however, we appreciate you feel differently on this occasion.
We have been asking the same question of the sources of your nonsense for years. Yet to get an answer.
A la Griff
The late griff. No longer of this parish.
Are you sure? I suspect he has a pseudonym or two.
Unless Griff was an ailias for someone named Nick……
Nick knows full well who and what perpetually stokes the dooming-
El Niño and La Niña have become more extreme and frequent because of climate change (msn.com)
They are the very model of a modern major modeller. Eisenhower warned us about the rise of these taxeaters and what they’d become.
See, this is how the “climate crisis cult” media works to spread their ooga-booga bullshit –
The story headline:
Global heating has likely made El Niños and La Niñas more ‘frequent and extreme’, new study shows
So that gets the hoopleheads’ attention, but it’s as far as they ever read.
Then, buried deep in the text of the article, we get this –
Dr Sarah Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at UNSW Canberra who was not involved in the research, said she was “a bit apprehensive” because of the reliance on modelling.
. . .
Dr Shayne McGregor, an expert on Enso at Monash University in Melbourne, who was not involved in the research, said he was “not convinced” the study had shown that human-caused climate change was having an effect on El Niños or La Niñas.
“It’s possible, but for me there are a lot of question marks still. Just because the models agree, that doesn’t mean they’re correct [about what’s happening in the real world].”
You didn’t read this part later in the short easy to read and remember article?
LOL
“You didn’t read this part later”
Is that one of the “reports that are misleading” that we are supposed to get worked up about?
Any article about Bay of Bengal cyclones that does not mention the Great Bhola cyclone of 1970 is deceiving the reader. The Bhola cyclone resulted in 300,000-500,000 deaths as compared to less then 100 deaths attributed to the catastrophic Mocha.
Highest recorded death toll for a tropical cyclone.
IPCC rule #94
Cold = weather
Hot = global warming
“”Mocha
If you have a coffee machine, treat yourself to a comforting, chocolatey mocha. “”
https://www.bbcgoodfood.com/recipes/mocha
BTW they should be celebrating the relatively low death count. Though the final numbers aren’t in and won’t be for some time, it is already clear that the toll is going to be tiny compared to that caused by many previous powerful TCs that have come ashore in that area.
Five days in the Bay of Bengal with convection going into overdrive knocking 2.2C off the surface temperature after overshooting the 30C temperature limit. Now comfortably back under 30C ready to ratchet up and more monsoon on its way.
It is across the board in all issues and all aspects of society. A bunch of maladjusted spoiled ( adult) brats with a out of control sense of entitlement want to force all of us to bow down to their delusional thinking. Time to say NO MORE.
John,
Far more than just maladjusted spoiled (adult) brats; the Climate True Believers are a large group of ignorant, frightened children who listen raptly to the psychopaths telling them scawy stories! The only way for liberal Western democracies to survive the current blitz being waged against human freedom and prosperity is to rapidly learn how to identify, denounce and isolate the severely criminally insane that infest their governments and institutions!
Since the current “modern” school system appears to have developed a method for producing ever larger numbers of sociopathic graduates, we had better find a solution quickly!
““In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity,” NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory states.”
Even while attempting to be truthful, a bigger effort is being made to deceive.
Premature to conclude?! How about “Observations do not support the notion that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will have any effect on Atlantic basin hurricane activity.”
They always try to prop up their unsupported speculation even when they have to begrudgingly admit that reality does NOT support it.
And when they have nothing left to support their speculation ( based on cherry picked data in the first place.) They will have their Wicked Witch of the West send out a army of trolls to force you to see things their way.
Observations can only tell us about the past. It should be
Observations do not support the notion that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations have had any effect on Atlantic basin hurricane activity.
No, no, no, no! Clear language has no place in CliSciFi.
Did anyone check the actual data on this Typhoon.
Within an hour or two of making landfall the windspeed was down to 55kph, it must be one of the fastest decaying typhoons ever.
I just wish I could have checked it before landfall.
It was the equivalent a strong CAT V. 175 mph wind speeds at landfall.