NOT MANY PEOPLE KNOW THIS
By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
Matt McGrath blames climate change for Pakistan’s floods (although scientists aren’t so sure!):
Global warming may have played a role in the devastating floods in Pakistan, scientists say.
Researchers from the World Weather Attribution Group say climate change may have increased the intensity of precipitation.
However, the results were fraught with many uncertainties, preventing the team from quantifying the magnitude of the impact.
Scientists believe that there is a 1% chance that such an event will occur in any of the years to come. ..
But extreme precipitation events are difficult to estimate. Pakistan lies on the edge of the monsoon region where the rainfall pattern varies greatly from year to year.
Further complications are the effects of major weather events such as La Niña, which also played a role in the last major floods in Pakistan in 2010.
During the 60-day period of the heaviest rainfall this summer, scientists recorded an increase of about 75% over the Indus River Basin, while the heaviest five-day period over the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan saw rainfall increase by about 50% recorded.
Researchers then used climate models to determine how likely these events would be in a world without warming.
Some of the models suggested that the increases in precipitation intensity could all be due to human-caused climate change, but the results were fraught with significant uncertainties.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62915648
Perhaps McGrath and the “scientists” should have looked at the actual data instead of playing with their computer models. According to the Pakistan Meteorological Service, most of the excessive rain in August hit on August 18-19. and 25./26. a. In fact, 41% of the month’s precipitation fell on these four days:
http://www.pmd.gov.pk/cdpc/home.htm
The cause of this heavy rain was simple – two tropical storms that had crossed from the Bay of Bengal – BOB06 and BOB 07. (In the Indian Ocean they are categorized as “Depression” and “Deep Depression”. In Atlantic storm terminology, these would be referred to as tropical depressions and tropical storms respectively).
http://www.pmd.gov.pk/cdpc/home.htm
Both storms followed identical routes west of Bengal and tracked Rajahstan before hitting Sindh province head-on, the most flood-affected region:
Unusually, these storms did not dissipate after landfall, allowing them to wreak havoc for days. Pakistan, of course, is not immune to tropical cyclones. Last year Cyclone Tauktae hit the country, but that was in May and not during the monsoon.
But for two storms to occur within a week in the same location and during the wettest month of the year is an extremely rare combination of meteorological events.
Pakistan was already experiencing a wetter than normal monsoon thanks to La Nina, but those two storms pushed the rains into a record area, the wettest August since 1961.
There is, of course, no evidence that tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean are becoming more frequent or more intense, so consequently there is no evidence that last month’s rains had anything to do with climate change.
However, the chart of annual rainfall in Pakistan published in the State of the Pakistan Climate 2021 is significant:
Pakistan annual precipitation
http://www.pmd.gov.pk/cdpc/home.htm
In the 1960s and 1970s, annual precipitation was significantly lower, a direct result of global cooling. Those drought years were a disaster for Pakistan, and the country has welcomed the increase in rainfall ever since, just as they do across the border in India.
It is also significant that the 7-year moving average has changed little since the 1980s, oscillating up and down but with no long-term trend. If global warming really did bring more extreme rainfall, we should expect evidence of that in the annual numbers.
You won’t hear any of this from Matt McGrath or the so-called scientists who write these fraudulent climate attribution studies, like Friederike Otto:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62915648
So let’s recall what Roger Pielke Jr. had to say about climate attribution:
Or as Obama’s climate scientist Steve Koonin put it:
“Practitioners argue that event attribution studies are the best that climate science can do to link weather to climate change. But as a physicist, I am appalled that such studies are given credence, let alone media coverage. A hallmark of science is that conclusions are tested against observations. But this is practically impossible for weather mapping studies. It’s like a spiritual advisor who claims his influence helped you win the lottery – after you’ve already won it.
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