Tag: famine

Godzilla Weather, Widespread Devastation & Economic Disruption

Will somebody save us all from these clowns who call themselves “journalists”?

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

Will somebody save us all from these clowns who call themselves “journalists”?

Experts fear a ‘Godzilla’ El Niño will be strongest on record and cause widespread devastation.

The world could be on the brink of a “Godzilla-like” El Niño extreme weather pattern that could trigger economic and political disruption around the world.

El Niño, an oceanic heatwave that occurs two to three times each decade, is building in the Pacific around the equator, and is expected to peak in September, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has warned.

The warm current will affect weather patterns and increase the risk of droughts in Australia, and southern parts of Asia and Africa. It will also increase the likelihood of violent storms and heavy rainfall in parts of the Americas.

While droughts and storms are bad enough, experts say this could be the strongest El Niño on record, with even more severe potential outcomes. These include flooding, landslides, wildfires, famine, conflict and migration.

The expected severity has led to some meteorologists using the term Godzilla El Niño – after the colossal dinosaur-like creature that has featured in dozens of monster films.

El Niño has been causing weather-related disasters for centuries. It is thought to have contributed to the collapse of Peru’s ancient Moche civilisation in the eighth century, for example.

So, at a time when global supply chains and geopolitics are especially fragile, what could a Godzilla El Niño mean for the world? Here are three potential effects.

Read the full fairy tale here.

The report goes on to claim that food supply will be disrupted, migration will increase and and there will be “conflict zone flare-ups”.

All this from a weather phenomenon that comes around every four or five years – something humanity has managed to survive for millennia! Indeed, when you add in La Ninas, which also impact the weather, most years are “abnormal”!

El Ninos create a problem for the alarmist media. As global temperatures can rise by as much as a full degree in the space of a couple of years, as the climate swings from La Nina to El Nino, without any noticeable detriment to human life, why on earth should we be worried about much smaller rises in temperature spread over many decades?

Hence the attempts to frighten us with childish descriptions of Godzilla weather patterns triggering economic and political disruption around the world.

In reality, the changes to weather patterns brought about by El Nino have nothing at all to do with higher temperatures. They are the result of the change in atmospheric weather patterns.

The Met Office have this useful video, showing exactly what El Nino is:

Because of the changes in Pacific trade winds, as shown above, precipitation patterns around the world are also affected:

To label weather as “good” or “bad” is an oversimplification. The BBC, for instance, talk about floods in some regions, but heavier rain is more often than beneficial for agriculture.

But these effects tend to be much smaller than they would like us to believe. They are usually much more subtle. Take the Indian monsoon, for example:

Monsoon On Line

Yes, El Ninos tend to lead to droughts, but not always so. Droughts often occur in other years as well. But more significantly El Nino-linked droughts have not become more severe over time, which the silly Telegraph article implies. Indian rainfall patterns respond to atmospheric changes, not global temperatures.

Finally, just to deal with the food supply crisis, we are supposed to expect, the chart of cereal production proves that recent El Ninos have had zero effect on output:

FAOSTAT

I cant leave this without mentioning that the young reporter who wrote this twaddle is the Telegraph’s “Global Health Security Reporter”:

The Telegraph’s Global Health Security coverage is partly funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Fake Famine Fears at the Collapsed COP30 Fuel Net Zero Fantasy

The UN climate chief Simon Stiell was in fine hysterical form at the start of the COP30 conference in Belém, telling delegates that squabbling would not be forgiven while famines take hold, forcing millions to flee their homelands. “To falter whilst megadroughts wreck national harvests, sending food prices soaring, makes zero sense economically and politically,” he was reported to have said by the Guardian. Fine words, of course, maybe even worth cutting down 100,000 mature rainforest trees so that 50,000 other COP clowns can hear them.

A vintage-style propaganda poster featuring a stylized image of a man in a military uniform, raising his hand in a gesture of leadership, surrounded by a crowd holding flags. The background features rays of light in red and white, with Chinese characters at the top, and text indicating 'COP 30 Brasil Amazônia Belém 2025.'

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

The UN climate chief Simon Stiell was in fine hysterical form at the start of the COP30 conference in Belém, telling delegates that squabbling would not be forgiven while famines take hold, forcing millions to flee their homelands. “To falter whilst megadroughts wreck national harvests, sending food prices soaring, makes zero sense economically and politically,” he was reported to have said by the Guardian. Fine words, of course, maybe even worth cutting down 100,000 mature rainforest trees so that 50,000 other COP clowns can hear them. Almost a shame to note that over the last 30 years, higher crop yields, thanks to hydrocarbon-produced fertiliser and increases in global biomass caused by a little extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, have led to the almost complete elimination of natural famine. Nobody can adequately define a climate refugee but no doubt millions, nay billions, are already on the move in the fevered imaginations of COP attendees and Guardian readers.

Over the last 25 years, natural famine, those primarily caused by environmental factors such as droughts and heat, has become exceedingly rare. In fact, natural famine mortality has been falling dramatically over the last 100 years. Almost all famines are caused by local conflicts or senseless outbreaks of political ideology. Chairman Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ in the late 1950s destroyed traditional farming in China and led to tens of millions of deaths through starvation. Ironically, if the hard-Left Net Zero numpties get their way and abolish hydrocarbon-produced fertiliser across the globe, even higher numbers of people, stretching into billions, will starve and likely die.

According to the latest WHO State of Food Security and Nutrition Report, hunger affected 8.2% of the global population. This was down from 8.5% in 2023 and the peak of 9.2% in 2022. One always needs to see the workings out whenever the United Nations is involved these days, but famine classifications are said to be limited to warzones.

Simon Stiell is a major league climate hysteric with plenty of past form. Former Amnesty International Secretary General Kumi Naidoo was also on COP manoeuvres and offered the opinion that “we’ll warm up the planet to the point where we destroy our soil and water, and it becomes so hot we can’t plant food”. The picky might note that it is difficult to “destroy” H2O – just ask hydrogen fans who have the devil of an expensive job in separating its two constituent parts. Heat can work in separating the individual atoms – 10,000°C near the Sun is a good bet. Meanwhile, World Food Programme Executive Director Cindy McCain claimed that unchecked climate change was already driving millions towards hunger through extreme weather. Checking climate, stopping the temperature, getting rid of all hydrocarbons from a modern society to bring forth a bright new future – Chairman Mao must be quietly chuckling in his Tiananmen Square mausoleum.

Regular readers of the Daily Sceptic will, of course, be up to speed regarding all the twaddle spoken about extreme weather and natural events such as drought. But it seems that however many times it is pointed out that even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) detects little, if any, change in most extreme weather trends, the scare – the number one scare – is too good to let go to promote the Net Zero fantasy.

Professor Gianluca Alimonti said that in 2022 and an unholy alliance of activists manged to get his widely-publicised paper retracted in Nature a year later. Now he is back with Alimonti 2 noting there have been no statistically worsening trends of climate impacts. On the other hand, there have been many improvements in humans adapting to whatever nature has thrown against them. Alimonti draws attention to IPCC findings that there is “low confidence” in the emergence of drought frequency, “for any type of drought, in all regions”. Similar lack of change is detected in cyclones, floods and wildfires.

Meanwhile, evidence continues to accumulate showing the Earth is increasing biomass at a considerable rate as higher levels of CO2, partly helped by humans using hydrocarbons, rescue the atmosphere from the near-denuded levels of the immediate paleo past. As the COP clowns travelled down their local ‘Highway of Shame’, built for their comfort by chopping down 100,000 rainforest trees, they would at least have been cheered by the recent news that the remaining mature Amazon trees are gorging on the gas of life. According to a recent paper published in Nature Plants, they are getting fatter by 6% on average every decade.

Hydrocarbon-based fertiliser has been an enormous help in feeding the world, but the role of higher levels of CO2 is also crucial. More CO2 in the atmosphere has boosted plant growth almost everywhere, leading to notable de-desertification in marginal living areas in places such as sub-Saharan Africa. Another advantage is that plants growing with more CO2 need less water and can survive in areas where local droughts occur. More biomass also leads to a healthier planet with massive benefits cascading through the ecosystem.

Promising famines while promoting the ‘Great Leap Forward’ of Net Zero is just one reason why this deluded elite COP30 gathering collapsed under the weight of its own sinister inconsistencies.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.

The War on Fertiliser Comes to Britain

Having made an excellent start in trying to make British citizens both colder and poorer, the Net Zero fanatics in the new Labour Government are turning their attention to making them hungrier. New taxes on agricultural fertiliser could add £150 million to the costs of local farmers faced with a choice of producing less food or raising prices.

From The Daily Sceptic

By Chris Morrison

Having made an excellent start in trying to make British citizens both colder and poorer, the Net Zero fanatics in the new Labour Government are turning their attention to making them hungrier. New taxes on agricultural fertiliser could add £150 million to the costs of local farmers faced with a choice of producing less food or raising prices. Such bravery in the governing Ship of Fools can only be admired. When President Gotabaya Rajapaka of Sri Lanka imposed a ban on similar fertiliser, the local harvest failed and he was forced to hightail it out of the country in a military jet ahead of an angry delegation of concerned citizens. One protester, G. P. Nimal, told the BBC that they wanted to put the Rajapakas in an open prison, “where they can do farm work”.

The U.K. Finance Minister has confirmed plans to levy a ‘carbon’ import duty on a number of vital supplies including fertiliser, cement and aluminium. The Daily Telegraph reports that the tax could be around £50 to £75 a tonne. It is not clear how much extra the farmers will have to pay since the tax applies to imports from countries that don’t load so-called carbon penalties on fertiliser production. Lord Fuller, Chairman of the liquid fertiliser firm Brineflow, suggests that farmers will have to bear an extra annual burden of £150 million.

The blow comes just weeks after the Government imposed an inheritance tax on farms starting at values of just £1 million. Many small family holdings may need to be sold in future, although they could find willing buyers with subsidy-loaded operations looking to blanket the countryside with unreliable giant wind turbines and solar panels. Wind farm operator Dale ‘how many bats have you killed today’ Vince might look to increase his land-based wind fleet in the wake of giving £5 million to the Labour party.

The world is rapidly moving towards some restoration of sanity and a realisation that it is impossible to live in any degree of comfort and security without hydrocarbons. Unfortunately, Britain finds itself under the control of one of the most extreme gangs of Net Zero fanatics on the planet. It says it all that the increasingly weird Sir Keir Starmer, U.K. Prime Minister, complete with his sidekick, the unhinged MilliVolt, is the only world leader from a major economy to turn up at the Trump-wrecked COP29. The rupture of the Right at the last General Election, caused by past leaders such as Boris Johnson embracing or accepting extreme Net Zero, open borders and virulent woke policies, led to a new Labour Government. It collected a huge loveless Parliamentary landslide on a vote total less than that achieved by its defeated Marxist leader in 2019.

At the Daily Sceptic we frequently make the point that if you want to understand what the extremists are planning, look at what they write. U.K. FIRES is a group of green academic activists and is funded with a £5m grant from the previous Conservative Government. It takes an “absolute” view of Net Zero, as do many fanatics, and the table below shows what it means. By 2050 there will be no hydrocarbons in use. This means no flying or shipping. Heating will consume only 60% of current use, while energy for cooking and transporting food will be reduced by 60%. Materials for building will be almost non-existent.

The war on food and farmers fits nicely into this planned scenario. The widespread use of nitrogen fertilisers has led to soaring crops yields around the world and has helped alleviate famine in many developing countries. This has been helped by a recent 14% increase in plant growth caused by higher levels of carbon dioxide. Such is the crucial importance of these fertilisers, there are fears of billions of people dying if their availability is restricted. But natural gas and nitrogen are used in the process of making these essential farming aids, and nitrous oxide is created as a byproduct. This seems to be enough for a generation of maniacs to push back on their use and risk mass death and starvation on a global scale. Add in the virtue-signalling about ‘rewilding’, a plan to further curtail food production, and the introduction of bug diets and widespread ‘organic’ farming, and it is difficult to see how these people will feed the world, let alone half of it. One of the original founders of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore is in little doubt about what will happen if hydrocarbons are removed from food production. He recently told Fox News: “If we ban fossil fuels, agricultural production would collapse. People will begin to starve, and half the population will die in a very short period of time.”

Of course the fear about nitrous oxide is overdone for the usual political purposes. The gas is one of the so-called ‘greenhouse’ gases with atmospheric warming properties, but there is very little of it in the atmosphere and amounts have varied greatly over time. A group of four scientists recently noted that N2O is growing at only 0.00085 parts per million per year, and might contribute an almost unmeasurable 0.064°C of warming over 100 years.

For this the death cultists plan for mass starvation and population extinction, a process unfortunately alive and kicking in the United Kingdom.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Drought in Southern Africa — Officially NOT Climate Change

Southern Africa has had very low precipitation over the last few months – which is the end of their summer.   November through March, are the rainy season bringing 75% of the precipitation for the year, but even then, compared to elsewhere, they are dry-ish.  As happened last year, when it does rain, it floods.

Dried maize corn plants grow in a drought affected field operated by farmer Ryan Matthews in Lichtenburg, North West Province of South Africa, on Friday, March 20, 2015. The worst drought since 1992 in South Africa, the continent’s biggest corn producer and traditional supplier of its neighbors, has damaged plants, with the nation predicting a 32 percent drop in the 2015 harvest to the smallest in eight years. Photographer: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg

From Watts Up With That?

News Brief by Kip Hansen — 21 April 2024

Southern Africa has had very low precipitation over the last few months – which is the end of their summer.   November through March, are the rainy season bringing 75% of the precipitation for the year, but even then, compared to elsewhere, they are dry-ish.  As happened last year, when it does rain, it floods.

“The rains this year began late and were lower than average. In February, when crops need it most, parts of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique and Botswana received a fifth of the typical rainfall.That’s devastating for these largely agrarian countries, where farmers rely entirely on the rains”.  [ source ]

The year before was particularly wet, leaving vast areas of mud still sticky, in some cases leading to free ranging cattle to get stuck in the mud seeking water. 

This type of meteorological drought, simply less, or lack of, precipitation is particularly hard on subsistence farmers who depend on rain-fed crops for their livelihoods and to feed their animals and their families. 

The story originates with the UN’s World Food Programme and from OXFAM.    

Caveat:  OXFAM is terrific at raising money and public awareness of human suffering in many parts of the word, but it is an advocacy organization prone to exaggeration to achieve its ends. The linked article from OXFAM makes the claim:  “Since October 2022, the cholera outbreak – which experts attribute to climate change –   has killed more than 3,000 people and affected over 130,000 in Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi.”  Climate Change does not cause cholera.  According to the CDC:  “Most cases [of cholera] continue to occur in resource-limited settings that have unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation, and inadequate hygiene. The African continent has the highest case fatality rates. About 1.3 billion people are at risk of cholera in countries where local transmission occurs.  ….  Global Cholera Challenges:  Large population migrations into urban centers in developing countries are straining existing water and sanitation infrastructure and increasing disease risk. Epidemics are a marker for poverty and lack of basic sanitation.” 

It is no surprise that southern African nations are experiencing yet another drought – a brief check of news stories for hunger, famine, drought, and flooding in southern Africa return far too many results to be counted.  Each of those adverse weather and social conditions are the norm not the exception.  The actual causes are also far too many to list but conflict, lack of development, less stable governance, and increasing populations without increasing affluence drive vulnerability to weather variations.

The highlight of this story is the report  [.pdf] from the so-called World Weather Attribution  (WWA) group that operates out of the Imperial College London.  WWA states its purpose is to “To encourage actions that will make communities and countries more resilient to future extreme weather events, WWA studies also evaluate how existing vulnerability worsened the impacts of the extreme weather event.”  In short, their job is to show that weather is caused by climate change, but only bad weather. Good weather is natural variability.

In an astonishing turn of events, and much to the dismay and disappointment of the team assigned to evaluate the drought and impending famine in southern Africa, they were unable to blame climate change for this disaster.  Even worse, they had to admit that climate change made the drought less likely.  Some excerpts from the report titled:  ”El Niño key driver of drought in highly vulnerable Southern African countries”:

  • “Multiple drivers contributed to the currently high, and rising, food insecurity and malnutrition levels including several years with high food prices, ongoing recovery from floods, as well as agricultural pests and diseases.”
  • “High deforestation rates are a major driver of environmental degradation across the countries, exacerbating risk and impacts associated with drought.”
  • Using four different observational data products we find that droughts such as this one are expected to happen in today’s climate about once every decade. However, when we consider the effect of El Niño, we find that these droughts are twice as likely to occur in El Niño years. Thus El Nino is a key driver of the 2024 event.
  • To analyse the role of human-induced climate change we first looked at the relationship between global warming and rainfall anomalies in observation-based data products. We find that as global temperatures increase, rainfall in DJF also increases. This means that in the current climate, with 1.2ºC warming, droughts such as this one are actually less likely than in a cooler, pre-industrial climate. This finding is consistent with previous studies that show wetter conditions in DJF that contrast with drying in the region earlier in the season, between the months of September and November).
  • In summary, our analyses show that El Nino significantly increases the likelihood of such a drought to occur, while climate change did not emerge as the significant driver influencing assessed drought in the affected countries.

So,  it is business as usual in southern Africa, not the flood this time, but the drought, and the resulting hunger and social breakdown.  Millions of dollars in aid are required to ease the suffering, yet again. 

And kudos to the WWA team that produced an honest report.

# # # # #

Author’s Comment:

Hunger and famine are seldom caused by the weather – but rather by grinding poverty and lack of development.  Families that have what most readers here would easily refer to as “nothing” can be ruined by a single crop failure.   If you are thinking of donating funds to help relieve the suffering there, pick you charities carefully.

Some charities spend almost 90% of funds on actual programs that help people.  Some charities are the reverse, spending 80% on fundraising.  My wife and I worked with a church-based group that spent 100% on programs that actually helped people in need, with our church itself covering all of the administrative and other costs.

It was refreshing to see a report from the WWA group that pointed out that climate change would make things better in southern Africa. 

Thanks for reading.

# # # # #