Greta Thunberg Blames European Floods On Climate Change
Greta Thunberg has declared the floods in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands to be the product of man-made climate change, adding: ‘We’re at the very beginning of a climate and ecological emergency, and extreme weather events will only become more and more frequent.’ Well, that’s sorted out that one, then.
We hardly need Angela Merkel or the Prime Minister of the Netherlands, Mark Rutte, to confirm it for us.
Nor, indeed, do we need to hear from Michael Mann – aka Mr. Hockey Stick – to tell us that the floods are the living embodiment of what climate scientists have been warning us about for decades.
It was climate change wot flooded Germany and that is that – there is no reason for any further debate on the issue; indeed, even to suggest that there is a debate to be had is to mark yourself out as an evil ‘denier’, intent on blinding yourself to deadly reality, and probably in the pay of an oil company.
Except there is just one niggling little doubt at the back of my mind – and which perhaps ought to be leaping up and down in the minds of Greta and Chancellor Merkel, too.
Far from predicting more summer rainfall in the German Rhineland, climate models have tended to do the opposite: to predict less.
Had these floods occurred during the winter, it would have been reasonable to claim that they were consistent with climate projections.
Had they occurred in Scandinavia or the Baltic states that, too, could have been claimed to be consistent with climate change projections.
But as you can see from the below map put out by the European Environment Agency, the clear prediction for the Rhineland of southwestern Germany, as well as for Belgium and the southern Netherlands, is that summers will become drier.
Indeed, when Germany did have a dry summer last year that, too, was put down to climate change.
Image: European Enivoronment Agency
Could Germany end up with summers that are generally drier but which nevertheless have more severe incidents of heavy rainfall?
The two are not necessarily inconsistent – except that if you are going to have two months’ worth of rain in a few days, as happened in some places last week, that doesn’t leave a lot of rain for the rest of the summer.
There is an alternative explanation for last week’s floods: that they are mere weather.
Weather, indeed, caused similarly devastating floods in nearby areas in 1954, leaving 10,000 Germans homeless.
We went through a similar process with the 2007 floods in southern England. Initially, and lazily, they were attributed by government ministers to climate change – a very convenient thing to blame because, of course, it distracted attention from the failure to provide and maintain flood defenses, and from a disastrous planning policy that allowed new homes to be built on floodplains.
Yet when the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology looked into the 2007 floods it found it couldn’t attribute them to climate change.
To have such large volumes of rainfall in the summer simply wasn’t consistent with models that predicted southern England, like Germany, will see lower summer precipitation in the future.
To lazily blame the German floods on climate change is a case of predicting one thing and then, when the opposite happens, turn round and say ‘look, I told you so’.
If you want to try to blame last week’s floods on climate change, it is first necessary to argue that the models have been wrong all along – and that actually Germany will suffer greater summer precipitation.
But then that might undermine climate models in general.
Alternatively, you can argue that the floods are a weather event that happened in spite of trends towards drier summers in Germany.
Hysteria, I fear, has moved on a bit since 2008 when the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology delivered its report on the 2007 floods.
I suspect that public bodies will be more reluctant now to point out what I have just done – and to risk being labeled ‘deniers’.
See more here: climatechangedispatch.com
Header image: Reuters
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sir_isO
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Yeah well, I blame her idiocy on her being retarded and souled out.
At best, she needs to clarify what she means with “climate change”. And not just forget about all that geoengineering and say, the effects of the sun.
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Alan
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What is the point of having past records of temperature and rainfall that show these are extreme weather events? Greta thinks that the average temperature is an actual temperature. She knows nothing of statistics.
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sir_isO
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Accuweather for instance, every day, easily happens to be incorrect.
Last week, at around 11pm I was checking their prediction for the minimum here, the next morning (like 6 hours later)…
So, they reckoned it’s gonna be 3c. It turned out to be -5c.
Every day, they “recorded” a higher temp here than it was, for the past two weeks at least. I’ve seen them say things like it’s currently raining, for like 2 hours, and nothing, clear skies, nice sunny day. And not irregularly either. This would be a sort of well-monitored area (metropolitan, relatively important, large city).
They can’t even tell you what the weather currently is, they even “record” obviously fake data. Complete ignorance of geoengineering, the sun’s effects (and I’ve been correlating this stuff for 10 years, I can “predict” some strange things, though crudely).
Yet, they use horribly limited, massively quantized, biased, skewed extrapolating models…for like 50 years in the future….and people believe that?
I guess someone needs to explain to people that as soon as you’re extrapolating in dynamics, particularly when it’s explicit from horribly lacking/flawed models…it’s automatically GARBAGE.
Physicists should understand this, I mean, ANY unaccounted for factor/variable/process in that modeling when integrating your extrapolated garbage can then act like a discontinuity, or even worse, an external factor…and that also compounds error for every moment of time it’s unaccounted for.
It’s unbelievable the religious crap people believe, in the name of science.
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sir_isO
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Besides my ranting, did Greta also conveniently forget to mention the rather intentional govt mismanagement of those situations? Like making sure dams are super full just before flooding (aided by geoengineering, no doubt).
That just like slipped her mind, right? Easy mistake.
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Michael James Clarke
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Did you people not notice the huge amounts of wood and vegitation piled up around those worst flooded areas?
A treee falls and soon there is a dam and the water backs up. then it finds another way to go and you get a FLOOD. bet those greens that prevented the clearance of dangerous trees and vegitation keep silent about that!
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Andy
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That is it exactly Michael.
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A Reasonable Man
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Greta Thunberg, High Priestess of the new”scientific “dark age. We ll be sacrificing vestal virgins next.
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dnomsed
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At times, I wonder if giving the dear Greta mouthpiece an additional braincell, that it may feel very lonely.
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Peter
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Greta, go home and shut up!
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Tom
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Greta and billy share the same brain cell and science doctorate degree, which dr gates found in a Cracker Jack box and then gave half to greta. Even more astounding are the brain dead residents on mother earth who worship these nefarious characters without question.
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Andy
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Well said Tom.
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Geraint Hughes
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Greta is just plain mad, who cares what she thinks
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Adam
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It’s not Greta. There are thousands like her in schools up and down the countries of the world. It’s the propaganda machine giving her the platform. Don’t blame the poor, deluded inexperienced girl… follow the money.
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Nelly
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I am afraid that this courages Greta from a few years ago, has lost connection with reality –
The reality is that these places have had every 100 years such a food. And the most annoying detail is,
that there came a warning from England 9 days before the rain started falling, reaching the government and no one acted. That means people could have been evacuated. And the many years before their where no undertaking to repair the places where much extra water could be led into . To talk immediately about climate change is a slap in the face of the people who underwent this catastrophe –
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Donb
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There are two main causes of the major floods/droughts we have seen!
1. River management has been cut back or stopped i.e. dredging to clear silting and clearance of debris such as fallen branches/trees etc!
Though the EU hasn’t banned dredging, the requirement for environmental reports and disposal of dredged silt reports has made it untenable!
2. Our sun is going into a Grand solar minimum! This has affected the jet stream which though once roughly circular is now wavy! These extended waves move slower that the circular stream and therefore weather events stay longer over certain areas creating droughts or flooding as we have seen!
As the sun plunges further into its grand solar minimum theses events will probably become more common place and therefore we should take note and prepare for what may be upon us in the foreseeable future!
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David
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Greta blamed it on global warming. Whew. No way to have seen that one coming.
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A
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This is not about climate change, it is about enforcing the Sunday law, the mark of the beast!
https://youtu.be/sXtmnaQWXr8
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Howdy
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Seen this kind of stuff before.
As soon as attenborough’s face appeared I stopped watching. Can’t stand the man. After all the years he’s been around, he’s just another example of the dark side acting as good, based on previous reputation (one of many).
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