By Jim Steele

The alarmists’ narrative: Wet regions will get wetter, and dry will get drier. They argue burning fossil fuels are warming the planet and increase evaporation. More water vapor causes more floods. More evaporation also dries the land causing more drought.

What scientific data reveals: Kazemzadeh (2021), using satellite data, determined that about 88% of the earth’s surface shows no trends in precipitation. (So, no warming effect?).

Of the small remaining percentage of areas with significant trends, 50% show more rain while 50% experience less rain. That balance suggests rainfall trends are simply due to changes in circulation patterns that re-distribute where water-vapor rains out. This is especially true over the oceans, where 90% of all evaporated ocean water-vapor rains-out back to the ocean. The global hydrological cycle shows that changes in precipitation over land depends on when and where moisture rains-out. Additionally, lost wetlands and lost vegetation can reduce the recycling of water on land and cause a negative precipitation trend.

Despite landscape changes and in contrast to alarmists’ narratives, increasing rainfall trends are rare over the continents. Many droughts and floods are associated with El Nino/La Nina oscillations. Our past 2 decades experienced more La Nina-like conditions that have caused more drought in western United States, while simultaneously increasing monsoon rainfall and floods over Asia.

As a result the largest positive rainfall trend (shown in green) were observed in the highlands of Pakistan and northwest Indian region. Accordingly, alarmists opportunistically cherry picked the 2010 & 2022 Pakistan floods as proof of a climate crisis, and greedy governments demanded industrial nations pay for Pakistan’s flood damage by falsely attributing the floods to burning of fossil fuels.

Yet again, the data refute the alarmists’ attribution claims. Scientists who actually study this region’s climate had concluded, “the 2010 Pakistan floods, although seemingly unprecedented, were well within natural variability of the monsoonal climate over the Indian subcontinent.” “A rapid transition from El Niño to La Niña between spring and summer of 2010 appears to be the key element in triggering a vigorous monsoon of 2010.”

Furthermore Pakistan’s flood and drought data since 1850 (middle panel) clearly show how it is ENSO that causes alternating decades of floods and droughts, not global warming, explaining why three of Pakistan’s past seven droughts happened in the cooler 1800s.

But climate alarmists hate to attribute any extreme event to such natural oscillations. So, to maintain their CO2 crisis narrative, they shamelessly invented a brand-new climate dynamic, claiming CO2 warming is causing “climate whiplash”.

For details about the natural dynamics affecting Pakistan watch: ARE PAKISTAN’S FLOODS YOUR FAULT AND SHOULD AMERICANS PAY?

This video provides the public with an understandable introduction to the complex dynamics driving Pakistan’s monsoon floods and droughts. The following information will provide the public with facts and a few critical thinking tools needed to decide if Pakistan’s floods were the result of your carbon-rich lifestyles, or just natural events long endured in Pakistan.

Jim Steele is Director emeritus of San Francisco State University’s Sierra Nevada Field Campus, authored Landscapes and Cycles: An Environmentalist’s Journey to Climate Skepticism, and proud member of the CO2 Coalition.

The scientific data also revealed less precipitation in warmer areas and more in cooler areas. Colder areas condense water vapor. Kazemzadeh (2021) reported, “Our analyzes revealed that most significant negative precipitation trends occurred in warm temperate (84.3%) and equatorial (74.8%) climates while we found least negative precipitation trends in the arid (36.3%) and polar (41.5%) climates at 0.05 significance level” . The data turns alarmists’ models upside down! The wet got drier and the dry got wetter!