A house on Vanuatu destroyed by Cyclone Pam.
Greenpeace lusts after your donations.
Every storm, every flood, every bush fire drags them from the shadows to whine nakedly for your money. Don’t believe them just because they sound altruistic—Greenpeace unfailingly lies about the climate. Why else did they declare years ago they would no longer debate climate change with anyone? If you believe they tell the truth about climate change, try asking for some evidence.
The latest anti-science outburst is predictable and follows hotly on the heels of the big Cyclone Pam that hit Vanuatu. Never mind mere ambulance chasing—Greenpeace chases hearses to extend their grasps on our wallets and distort science. The new head of their Pacific network, Matisse Walkden-Brown, hits the headlines with the dramatic news that we caused the cyclone. Incredible. They’re still claiming this? In public? They have no shame!
Heed ‘deadly wake-up call’ on climate change, says Greenpeace
“The Pacific islands are fighting for survival,” he says. Then he becomes almost sciencey-sounding, but not for long:
“Global warming, climate change, sea level rise; these are not just problems for the future. They are happening to us right now; and they are only set to get worse. Greenpeace has extended our sincerest condolences and friendship to the presidents of countries affected by Cyclone Pam. We stand with the Pacific people in solidarity to end the fossil fuel age.”
He claims global warming is happening now, except that cyclones have been hitting Vanuatu for thousands of years and nobody has evidence that the tiny 0.7°C of warming over the last hundred years makes any difference to today’s storms. But Greenpeace is certain about the science: it’s the fossil fuel that’s doing it.
“The science is clear: burning coal, oil and gas is cooking the climate. The only true, long-term solution to protect the Pacific is to end the fossil fuel era,” said Walkden-Brown.
It hasn’t warmed in about 20 years but the various presidents of island countries affected by severe storms and as poor as church mice all get on the climate-change bandwagon. Well, of course they do, wouldn’t you? It’s the only gravy train remotely likely to land on their shores. So they have to try.
Unfortunately they have a long history of being battered by the weather gods long before we built our first SUV. Here are snippets from an AP story in the Herald:
Among the island’s 30,000 residents, however, there were just five confirmed deaths, a testament to their experience in dealing with cyclones as well as some narrow escapes. The island has been hit before by big cyclones, including Cyclone Uma in 1987. In the villages, people traditionally built special structures to survive. Unlike the square-shaped open-air huts that people live in most of the time, the cyclone huts are triangular with solid walls to the ground, similar to an A-framed house.
Building strong shelters is a very old idea.
[Hosea, a villager, built a special hurricane-proof hut] He said such huts were used by his great-great grandfather’s generation, but the knowledge of them is being lost on a younger generation. When the cyclone hit, he said, it sounded like a bulldozer smashing through the trees. But his family was safe inside the new hut.
Sure, the people need food and water and help with rebuilding their huts and houses, and they need our sympathy and warm thoughts as well.
But they need no help with changing the climate. The climate does that perfectly well by itself.
Visits: 81
Jo Nova has a good article here on Vanuatu sea level trends: http://joannenova.com.au/2015/03/vanuatu-sea-levels-how-much-did-they-contribute-to-cyclone-damage/
Also at JoNova:
‘Playing politics with every disaster: Vanuatu cyclone blamed on “climate change” ‘
“Despite the pressing need to solve immediate problems, the predictable claims are already starting. How many journalists will bother to check these claims against the history of cyclones in Vanuatu? Accuweather [hotlink] lists a lot, including one in 1951 that killed 100 people when CO2 levels were just 311ppm. In 1987 another storm killed 48.”
http://joannenova.com.au/2015/03/vanuatu-cyclone-due-to-climate-change/
1951 is the first year of the IPCC anthropogenic attribution period. Was that cyclone a ‘deadly wake-up call’ on climate change too?
Or wasn’t there any live TV coverage?
And on sea levels, Steven Goddard:
‘Naomi Oreskes Predicts 10 Feet Of Sea Level Rise In 85 Years’
[See graph]
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/naomi-oreskes-predicts-10-feet-of-sea-level-rise-in-85-years/
Gazumps Commissioner For The Environment, Dr Jan Wright’s 30 to 40 cms by 2050 but similar graph I note:
https://www.climateconversation.org.nz/2014/12/commissioner-wrights-wrong-part-1/
SLR not happening fast enough for Greenpeace though, got to leverage cash out of that cyclone. Now!
‘The BBC could have checked Wikipedia for the truth about Cyclone Pam’
The storm which devastated Vanuatu is not, as some have said, due to climate change. Such winds are hardly unprecedented in the South Pacific
By Christopher Booker, 21 Mar 2015
Inevitably quick off the mark after Vanuatu’s Cyclone Pam disaster were the climate ghouls to claim that this terrible event must have been caused by global warming. First up was the country’s president, Baldwin Lonsdale, who, although aware that the storm was on its way, had departed a few hours earlier to attend a conference on “disaster risk” in Japan, where he burbled to reporters that it was evidence of “climate change, rising sea levels” etc. Next, in a similar vein, came France’s President Hollande, due next December to host the mammoth global conference where they hope to agree on a treaty to halt this threat to the planet.
But equally inevitable was that the BBC would get in on the act. Thus Monday’s Today programme wheeled on Professor Tim Palmer, in charge of climate modelling at Oxford University, to confirm President Lonsdale’s worst fears. Such “incredibly intense” category five cyclones, he told John Humphrys, are “exactly the type of cyclone that is predicted by the climate models to increase under climate change, under global warming”.
When Humphrys suggested that we have always had cyclones, Palmer said that recent examples have seen “wind gusts that have never been measured before, 200-mile-an-hour winds”. When Humphrys asked him to confirm that they were indeed unprecedented, Palmer repeated that “these things have never been seen”.
Had Humphrys or the programme’s researchers spent a couple of minutes on Google, they might have seen from Wikipedia that the South Pacific has seen no fewer than 10 Category Five cyclones in the past twenty years alone. Paul Homewood was soon able to report on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog that, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Pam’s measured wind speed was only 165mph. Of the five top South Pacific cyclones since 1989, this ranked it as only the equal fourth strongest: behind Orson and Monica, which hit the Australian coast in 1989 and 2006 with wind speeds of 180mph. This was also equalled by Zoe, which hit Vanuatu in 2002.
Way back in 1951, an even more disastrous storm killed 100 people on the island nation. Other scientific websites confirmed that Pam was way down the list of Pacific cyclones recorded in the past 60 years, with the wind speed of those hitting Japan in 1961 and 1958 as high as 215mph. As for Palmer’s claim that Pam was “incredibly intense”, with an atmospheric pressure of 896 millibars (mb), this again has frequently been exceeded, with those Japanese storms measured as low as 877mb.
Just as significantly, Homewood was able to cite a graph going back to 1948 showing that there has been no upward trend at all in the incidence of tropical cyclones. The Australian blogger Jo Nova (in a post headed “Playing politics with disaster”) produced a graph for New Zealand going back to 1875, showing that the most intense cluster of cyclone-strength storms was around 115 years ago, long before the global warming scare was invented. As for President Lonsdale’s plaint about rising sea levels, Homewood produced a graph from Vanuatu’s main tidal gauge, showing that in the past five years sea levels have actually been falling.
The fact that the BBC should choose only to interview those it knows will support its own ludicrously propagandist “narrative” on climate change – regardless of the facts – is, of course, nothing new. At least on this occasion, Humphrys did end by asking whether these climate computer models had not sometimes been wrong. Sounding somewhat surprised to be asked such a heretical question by the BBC, Prof Palmer did admit that they are only “approximations of reality”. But he went on to suggest that, if only they were given even more money to buy even more powerful computers, the results might be even more accurate. Out in the real world we cynical observers could only emit a wearily hollow laugh.
[See graphs]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/11485976/The-BBC-could-have-checked-Wikipedia-for-the-truth-about-Cyclone-Pam.html