Essay by Eric Worrall
What catastrophe?
Climate change is the catastrophe to end all other catastrophes
By Fatima Bhutto
October 16, 2023 at 6:30 a.m. EDTFatima Bhutto is a Pakistani writer and novelist. Her latest book is “New Kings of the World.”
This past summer, the primordial elements conspired to ravage Greece, the birthplace of Western civilization. The Mediterranean’s many islands were swept by water, air and especially fire, leaving a trail of wreckage. Helios, the sun god, whose statue in Rhodes was among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, brought scorching temperatures to that island, sparking hundreds of wildfires. In coastal Alexandroupolis, pine forests were “reduced to blackened, skeletal bark,” according to Reuters, while fires in the Dadia forest, home to a magnificent nature sanctuary, torched 281 square miles — an area roughly the size of New York City.
Across Greece, tens of thousands of people, locals and tourists both, had to be evacuated, …
In September, scant weeks after the fires, came the deluge. Storms buffeted Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece, precipitating massive floods. Regions logged record rainfall — a season’s worth in a day, according to one estimate. The crescendo — for now — was the inundation of Derna on Libya’s Mediterranean coast. Whole neighborhoods were swept out to sea after rains overwhelmed the city’s aging dams. The death toll there stands at 11,300, with 10,000 people still unaccounted for.
This barrage in and around Greece could not help but remind me of my country, Pakistan, and the so-called super flood it endured one year earlier. As more adventurous tourists will be aware, the reaches of northern Pakistan are home to Earth’s largest collection of glaciers outside the polar regions — surrounded by the three highest mountain ranges in the world: the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush. The landscape is surreally beautiful: lunar visions of ice and rock, encircled by jagged peaks. But as global temperatures rise, glacial melt has led to the formation of more than 3,000 new lakes, posing flood risks to the 7 million people downstream.
…
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/16/climate-catastrophe-greece-wildfires-pakistan-super-floods/
This is the nonsense climate believers want you to accept as a climate emergency.
None of this is historically unusual. Greece suffers large fires from time to time. If they want less destructive fires, they should try some forest management.
Libya suffered large casualties because not enough people evacuated. Libya is a political mess, large scale consequences to natural disasters are an inevitable consequence of nations suffering political chaos.
Pakistan is a land of droughts and floods – but there has been enormous neglect of water infrastructure.
Compare all this to how Florida handled recent hurricane disasters – like the highly praised evacuation of the Florida Keys during Hurricane Harvey. Modern countries rarely suffer major loss of life during disasters, simply because we are better organised.
Building wind turbines won’t help people who have suffered recent devastation. What would help them is fossil fuel modernity and better government – just as a modern, high energy lifestyle and better government has helped most of us.
Blaming climate change is easier than dealing with Greens opposing dams and forest management.
Blaming the weather is climate commentary
Remember when red was for danger?
“…rare 35 hour ‘danger to life’ amber warning”
https://www.express.co.uk/news/weather/1824746/met-office-amber-weather-warning-storm-babet
Only the Met Office would consider shifting the goalposts
Pakistan is a very violent basket case
And its population has increased to nearly 250M from about 60M in 1960, all settled along the Indus and in Punjab and Sind provinces which contain its major tributaries. They don’t have a climate crisis, they have a population crisis.
There are a great many inbred cousins in Birmingham etc
“”The babies paying the price of cultural tradition: It’s estimated that more than half of Pakistani-heritage couples in Britain are in cousin marriages. Now community leaders are confronting the troubling medical risks””
…
“” Britain’s second city Birmingham recently announced an emergency taskforce to investigate high levels of infant mortality after health and social care officials revealed deaths of newborns there are twice the national average.””
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-9645571/More-half-Pakistani-heritage-couples-Britain-cousin-marriages.html
It isn’t cheap
So why is it that the UK has allowed so many immigrants? Is it fearful of depopulaton? Do the former colonies have special rights to move to the UK?
It was fearful of the Conservatives, and welcomed a new electorate.
Empire.
Following the Second World War and the break-up of the British Empire and the independence of Pakistan, Pakistani immigration to the UK increased, especially during the 50s and 60s. This was made easier as Pakistan was a member of the Commonwealth.
Do they have an absolute right to move to the UK or just given extra consideration, being in the Commonwealth?
Quite a few years ago (maybe 1970’s era) we in Oz had a “last chance” to claim entry to UK based on grand parents origin.
Our family had that with one set of grandparents. Some of us did. I’m short on detail as I didn’t
50 years ago Idi Amin ejected all those of Asian extraction. At that time they all had U.K. passports (& citizenship)and therefore they had right of entry.
Im not sure but I think that in 1947/48 both those in India and Pakistan post partition and independence also had U.K. citizenship.
Since then rules about U.K. citizenship, passports and right of entry have changed.
Note that the commonwealth membership has nothing to do with right of domicile, U.K. citizens still need visas to go and live or work in Australia, New Zealand and your northern neighbour Canada, all of which are in the commonwealth, as they are all sovereign monarchies that happen to have the same monarch as the U.K.
Now if they intermarried with the Anglo-Saxons and Celts, that would be a good thing- hybrid vigor!
They tend not to bother with the marriage bit so far as the Anglo-Saxons and Celts and Normans are concerned. Often they pick out those below marriageable age.
That is already happening with second- and third-generation Sikhs and Hindus, who are now intermarrying with White British people. Strangely enough, no one particularly wants inbred Pakistani Muslims.
very interesting! 🙂
With billions in foreign aid thrown at it over decades – where’s the money gone? Why is its infrastructure so archaic? Why are its masses so poor?
In a word, islam
Nukes.
Unfortunately, Pakistan have had to play their international Cricket matches in Dubai for many years now due to terrorist attacks in and outside Pakistan.
England returned to play in Pakistan for the first time last year but everyone was under restricted movement with heavy military guard everywhere they went.
Rather them than me.
“Fatima Bhutto is a Pakistani writer and novelist.”
A novelist. Well there you go.
…and she comes from the Bhutto lineage, one of the elite ruling families in Pakistan. Her grandfather President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto and aunt Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto were no better than any of the other corrupt individuals when it came to ruling their country for the benefit of it’s people rather than for their own benefit.
Anyone who ruled Pakistan for the legitimate benefit of the people would run mortally afoul of the resident Islamists.
That’s not the only problem.
Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was tried and executed by the military.
Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. The author of the Wash Po article has accused her aunt and her husband of sponsoring it.
Something is rotten in the state of Pakistan.
Of fiction obviously
Correction: This is the
nonsense(balderdash, hogwash, horse manure, bullshit or some cruder term) climate believers want you to accept as a climate emergency.WP’s climate alarmism goes to 11.
Just like Spinal Tap’s volume.
It is every bit as farcical.
Another dinosaur-killer asteroid collision would be the catastrophe to end all other catastrophes. An extra degree or two of warming is going to make sweet FA difference in the grand scheme of things.
Short search say it’s “sweet Fanny Adams”
Actually, that was a dang useful event for the evolution of almost everything on earth right now. Which in and of itself refutes the idea our tiny amount of CO2 will be a catastrophe at all. Current evidence is we likely saved the world from a CO2 derth which would have stopped photosynthesis. THAT would have been world ending.
During the Holocene Optimum (approx. 12,000 to 5,000 years ago) temperatures were several degrees warmer than present, and things were great for life. And that was without the added benefit of enhanced CO2 levels.
Flying toasters would shoot bread higher. Cars with six wheels would make more road noise. A cat with no tail would land less gracefully. An extra degree or two of warming is going to make sweet FA difference in the grand scheme of things.
I assume Fatima’s special area as a writer is fiction.
Yes, climate fiction, it attracts big bucks from the western shills
When you think about it, carrying cash on a hot day must be very dangerous. Maybe that’s the explanation for spontaneous human combustion.
Spontaneous human combustion is causing all those battery cars to ignite, allegedly /sarc
Anyone who’s jogged on a hot day with a few dollars rolled up in their sock knows that combustion would be impossible. Blech it gets soggy.
“Helios, the sun god, whose statue in Rhodes was among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, brought scorching temperatures to that island, sparking hundreds of wildfires.”
Helios was not among those arrested apparently.
https://knews.kathimerini.com.cy/en/news/over-100-arrested-for-starting-rhodes-wildfires
Regardless, blaming the sun for recent warm temperatures makes a lot more sense than does blaming CO2.
But what would the trendologists do with all that free time?
Please remind me, exactly where has Pakistan spend its billions in foreign aid over decades? Maybe Bhutto should ask its leaders before blaming some invisible, made up hoax
Nukes
And in hospitality to foreign refugees.
Like Osama Bin Laden.
No mention of the utter lack of maintenance of those dams?
Yes, contrary to the insinuation of several/many/most/all news channels Derna got only ~75mm of rain. That was a lot for the locale but a modest amount in civil engineering terms. (400mm did fall—160km to the west!). The parlous state of the Derna dams had excited several warnings by engineers who had studied the history of heavy rain in the region. What happened was definitely a “when” not “if” situation.
We need less anarchy.
Less of Fatima Bhutto’s purple prose would be no bad thing either. Ugh.
In coastal Alexandroupolis, pine forests were “reduced to blackened, skeletal bark,”
Likewise in California in the 2020 fires. But guess what? That’s how pines propagate. The fire triggers the opening of the surviving cones in the treetops, and the seeds are broadcast over time into the ashes below, and in a year or two a whole new forest of little pine seedlings erupts and goes about reaching for the sky.
Have you ever seen a forest fire which did NOT do that?
Wasn’t there something like 160 people arrested for arson in Greece ?
“Round up the usual suspects”?
The mother of all catastrophes. I like Arabian Nights.
Did you check your pockets?
Apparently the environmental problem is human stupidity- when people light forest fires forests burn. Build bad damns, they break.
Damn dams break.
Had the two dams been taken out a few years ago, and they should have been, this would be a non-story.
WaPo needs to keep the catastrophe tripe in play for revenues. Their recent layoffs were apparently not enough. Or does climate catastrophe serve to check the boxes of oligarch owners in deflecting attention?
“As more adventurous tourists will be aware, the reaches of northern Pakistan are home to Earth’s largest collection of glaciers outside the polar regions — surrounded by the three highest mountain ranges in the world: the Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush. The landscape is surreally beautiful: lunar visions of ice and rock, encircled by jagged peaks. But as global temperatures rise, glacial melt has led to the formation of more than 3,000 new lakes, posing flood risks to the 7 million people downstream.”
In response to Pakistan’s rapidly growing population, those 3,000 new lakes could provide a great supply of fresh water to people downstream during the dry season. Building some water-management dams on some of these lakes would be a lot easier than hiking into the mountains to eat snow.
These “new” lakes could also be stocked with fresh-water fish appropriate to the climate, allowed to multiply for several years, which could then provide an additional food supply for people living near them.
Let’s face it–liquid water is necessary for all life, while snow and ice are of little benefit to man, beast, or plant life. Glacial melting can be a net benefit to all life, if properly managed.
How well will wind and solar “farms” hold up to a hurricane? Even a small hurricane. I’d think not so well. Ergo, putting them on or near the American eastern seaboard is a stupid idea, given that we’re supposed to be seeing far more and bigger hurricanes. (which I doubt is true)
Off topic but important- for those in USA – all after noon during my breaks I have been taking the trouble to call all the 6 Republican Congress man that are NOT supporting Jim J. – The Dems stick together and we don’t- go on line there names and numbers are there call them- right now we need a united front not “ a childish I am standing on principle” BS. Call them.
Your wasting your time. Call YOUR Rep and that is it. Why would the staff of any of the others care about the opinion of a person who cannot vote for or against them?
I mean, even when you call your own rep, unless your a known significant doner, your opinion is just tallied with the rest.
And as far as Jordan goes? He is NOT the MAGA conservative you and so many others think he is. He is the current version of Trey “Rooster head” Gowdy. But he is the best that conservatives can hope for now.
It’s 73° in East Texas today. Might get into the low eighties this week, A disaster of biblical proportions.
Washington DC <strike>Post: Climate change</strike> is the catastrophe to end all others.
Fixed.
More hogwash from the unenlightened. Eric’s response was superb. Examples of bad government nothing more. Even good government struggles to do the right thing, bad government is hopeless.
Climate change? Oh catastrophe! Oh existential threat! What rubbish. The biggest existential threat to anyone or anything are the mad neo-cons in Washington & Biden with his support for the Ukraine war who want to nuke & declare war on anybody & everybody, 500,000 Ukrainians are dead, more than any recent weather event has killed.
If a changing climate is such a looming catastrophe, or one that’s actually occurring, I’ll ask my standard question: why does the planet’s population continue to rise along with life expectancies and food production? Shouldn’t they be going in the opposite direction? Or maybe such a catastrophe doesn’t exist in the first place.
Again, not one of the usual trollettes comes to defend this idiocy.
Why would that be. 😉
I have taken the liberty to rewrite the first paragraph bu this time I put truth in it.
This past summer, the primordial elements again visited Greece, the birthplace of Western civilization. The Mediterranean’s many islands were swept by water, air and especially fire, leaving a trail of normalcy. Helios, the sun god, whose statue in Rhodes was among the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, brought regular temperatures to that island, while arsonists sparked hundreds of wildfires. In coastal Alexandroupolis, pine forests were “reduced to prime fertilizer,” according to Reuters, while fires in the Dadia forest, home to a magnificent nature sanctuary, torched 281 square miles — an area roughly the size of a contested windpark.
What do you guys think?