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Small flood in Asia. Not many affected

By Clark Nida

Question: what has climate change to do with the floods in Pakistan?

Is that a puzzling question to ask? Isn’t there a bigger puzzle over why nobody is asking it?

Has nobody even noticed?

Readers won’t fail to have noticed however that, ever since the Copenhagen fiasco, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been incessantly and spitefully pilloried in the right-wing press for the quality of its science. In particular the chairman of the IPCC, Dr Pachauri, has faced what amounts to character-assassination for daring to predict that Himalayan glaciers will have disappeared by 2035.

Then, all of a sudden, Pakistan has a disaster on a truly mind-boggling scale. The River Indus, carrying perhaps 40 times as much water as usual, burst its banks, making millions homeless.

The Indus rises in the Himalayas, specifically from glaciers in the Tibetan plateau, a geographical region considered to contain the world’s third-largest store of ice. Qin Dahe, former head of the China Meteorological Administration, said on 18 August 2009: “Temperatures are rising four times faster than elsewhere in China, and the Tibetan glaciers are retreating at a higher speed than in any other part of the world. In the short term, this will cause lakes to expand and bring floods and mudflows. In the long run, the glaciers are vital lifelines for Asian rivers, including the Indus and the Ganges. Once they vanish, water supplies in those regions will be in peril.”

So let us say it in words which a child can understand:

The Glaciers Are Melting Too Fast. They have just drowned Pakistan.

Maybe the IPCC has been guilty of obfuscating its message, of not saying clearly enough what needs to be said. But how can anyone credibly accuse it of scaremongering?

Yet the Daily Telegraph will never let up. On 30 August 2010 we read, in an article entitled: Flawed science. Telegraph View: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was rightly warned not to stray into what might be seen as scaremongering and policy advocacy we read the following egregious remark:

“...The investigation (by the Inter-Academy Council) was prompted by the IPCC’s bogus assertion that glaciers in the Himalayas were melting so fast that they would disappear by 2035.” http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/telegraph-view/7972077/Flawed-science.html

The Telegraph’s big-business friends, major earth-plundering industries like oil, don’t want the world as a whole to make the obvious inferences from climate research and do something about the express train we are all on, thanks to big oil, which is racing towards the buffers. They certainly don’t want to be blamed for the inevitable and imminent impoverishment and death of millions, if not billions, of people which will result from the manufacture of a bogus climate debate by the oil companies, and the consequent dissuasion of effective action by world governments, which reached its disgraceful climax at Copenhagen last year. Exxon, in particular, has spent millions of dollars financing shady think tanks to cast doubt on the findings of respectable scientists concerning the inevitable effects of growing man-made carbon emissions, which have been clear to everyone with ears to listen for the past 20 years or so.

The Telegraph, and its friends, don’t want us to listen. They want to kill the bearer of bad news.

When will we stop letting them do that? When will we stop them using their extravagant profits to muddy the waters covering their nefarious activities? When will we start turning our guns on the real authors of avoidable environmental disasters which are increasingly set to trouble our world?