Media: the climate beat goes on

By Richard North - December 30, 2023

As we come to the close of a busy and an event-filled year, there is one recurring story which refuses to go away, despite how tediously repetitive it gets. That, of course, is the climate change narrative which in its different forms has hogged the headlines, which are now being regurgitated as part of the year-end retrospectives.

One of the first out of the traps, as might be expected, is the Guardian with a tendentious headline which reads: “World will look back at 2023 as year humanity exposed its inability to tackle climate crisis, scientists say”.

As so often, the paper implicitly relies on an appeal to authority with its “scientists say” – a magic talisman which is invoked to give the assertions the credibility which is neither deserved nor warranted, especially when the paper flatly states in its sub-heading that “Disastrous events included flash flooding in Africa and wildfires in Europe and North America”.

It compounds the offence by then showing a picture (illustrated) with the caption: “Flash floods in the Libyan city of Derna were the most deadly climate disaster of 2023, killing 11,300 people”, a scene of devastation which is unequivocally attributed to the said “climate crisis”.

What seriously disturbs me about this assertion is its utter dishonesty, allied to the cynicism which so gratuitously harnesses a human tragedy to a political cause which has neither merit nor science to support it.

In the context of the Guardian piece, the tragedy is exploited to support claims made by Francisco Eliseu Aquino, a professor of climatology and oceanography at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and the deputy director of Brazil’s polar and climatic centre.

To this grotesque individual is attributed the claim that West Antarctica was affected by several winter heatwaves associated with the landfall of atmospheric rivers. In early July, a Chilean team on King George Island, at the northern tip of the Antarctic peninsula, registered an unprecedented event of rainfall in the middle of the austral winter when only snowfalls are expected.

In January, we are also told, a massive iceberg, measuring about 1,500 sq km, broke off from the Brunt ice shelf in the Weddell Sea. It was the third colossal calving in the same region in three years.

This gives some idea of the things to come as, in the enthusiasm to recruit Antarctica to the “global boiling” cause – with West Antarctica as the poster child – we rarely see any reference to the volcanic activity under the ice sheet.

The only allowable reference (which is not employed in this instance) is from Nasa contradicting the view of the US National Science Foundation, in declaring that this massive heat source has nothing whatsoever to do with the melting of the ice directly on top of it – while the record cold on the continental land mass is assiduously ignored.

But this is just a warm-up for Francisco Eliseu Aquino who goes on to declare that human influence – through the burning of fossil fuels – had also created “frightening” dynamics between the poles and the tropics.

Cold wet fronts from the Antarctic, he claims, had interacted with record heat and drought in the Amazon to create unprecedented storms in between. Floods in southern Brazil killed 51 people in early September and then returned with similarly devastating force in mid-November.

You can see the technique here, as quantity over-rides substance, allowing Aquino to mark this as a “record record”, which to him, as he piles on layer after layer, is “a taste of what was to come as the world entered dangerous levels of warming”.

“From this year onwards”, says Aquino, “we will understand concretely what it means to flirt with 1.5ºC [of heating] in the global average temperature and new records for disasters”.

It’s then that we are treated to the Derna experience, with it used to support an argument that the disaster scenario is “already happening”. This year’s deadliest climate disaster, he claims, was the flood in Libya that killed more than 11,300 people in the coastal city of Derna.

In a single day, he asserts, Storm Daniel unleashed 200 times as much rain as usually falls on the city in the entire month of September. And, to stake the preposterous claim, he comes to the punch-line that “Human-induced climate change made this up to 50 times more likely”.

Yet this is one of the so-called “climate episodes” that occurred during the year that I looked at very carefully. And no, I am not a “climate scientists” – whatever that might be, but a do have a PhD, which makes me a qualified researcher – which is what I do for a living.

My definitive article on the disaster was published on 14 September and those familiar with the issues will know that the proximate cause was the failure of two already inadequate earthen dams, after decades of neglect following the political instability in Libya.

As to the rainfall at the time, the satellite radar – which recorded the passage of Storm Daniel – showed that while the “Medicane” did dump exceptionally heavy loads in the general region, in the catchment area of the Wadi Derna which drained into the dams, the rainfall was by no means at record levels, and less than during previously recorded floods.

Even the Guardian at the time cited Rashad Hamed, a data specialist consultant at the UN children’s fund, Unicef, saying: “The humanitarian catastrophe in Derna, Libya, is different from the humanitarian catastrophe in Marrakech, Morocco.

The Moroccan earthquake (which had happened he few weeks previously), he said, “could not have been avoided or mitigated, while the Derna disaster was caused by negligence and gross negligence, the price of which was paid by thousands of victims”.

In his view, the Wadi Derna dam “retained rainwater and the neglected spillway for the dam, which had not been cleaned for a long time, failed to drain the water. As a result, the dam collapsed and the water swept the city and threw it into the sea”.

We also had a clinical view from Malak Altaeb, a fellow at the Centre for Climate and Security, who studied at the University of Tripoli.

She said, “Dams in Libya and especially in the east of the country, haven’t received maintenance in years and management bodies haven’t provided adequate financial support and means to support the dams, which has led to adverse effects”.

One then has further to consider that Storm Daniel was shaped by the meridional flow/Rossby wave phenomena prevailing at the time, which some theorise are attributable to solar activity, the rainfall experienced may have been entirely unrelated to any claimed global warming.

Whichever way you cut it therefore, there is – at the very least – insufficient evidence to attach a climate change signal to the Derna tragedy, and to do so negates the fundamental principles of science.

But this is the way the climate zealots work. They cherry-pick scenarios and, on the basis of slender and often disputed evidence, claim that their cause is proven – ignoring and contradictory evidence or doubts. Everything becomes black and white.

Typically, this article also claims the wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, despite the strongest of evidence that this was a man-made disaster.

And yet, they go on and on with their propaganda, sustaining a campaign the breadth of which even Goebbels would not have dared tackle, filling the public discourse with lies and distortions, all drive an obsession which, economically, could prove a disaster bigger than the one they are trying to prevent.

Some time, this will have to stop and the media will have to admit that it has been taking people for a ride with dodgy data and false claims.

Unfortunately, that time is not yet, and we have another year ahead of us of indescribable tedium, as the scaremongers continue to peddle their deadly wares and our contempt for them grows.