This is a long post, for which, apologies. Ever heard of Cherrapunji, in the remote north-east of India? No? Well neither had I. But it does have a place in the Guinness Book of Records because it is the wettest place on earth, with up to 1,000 inches of rain falling in a year, though the average is nearer 350 inches.
What’s the relevance? You may recall from previous postings that BBC environment editor Peter Thomson is part of the Society of Environmental Journalists which pushes a Columbia University guide on brainwashing techniques to persuade people of ‘climate change’ alarmism. So I have been digging further to see if there is any hard evidence on the BBC website that Mr Thomson has been evangelising among his colleagues, and if so, whether it has had an impact.
It’s here that Cherrapunji becomes interesting. Apparently, it’s been a little drier of late and this has attracted the interest of BBC Calcutta correspondent Subir Bhaumik at least three times. Back in 2003, he filed a story explaining that water holes were drying up out of the monsoon season and that locals were worried about the impact on tourism. Mr Bhaumik is quite clear about the causes. Quoting SC Sahu, deputy director of the Central Meteorological Department of the local India region, he says:
Mr Sahu blames it (the drop in rainfall) on the deforestation in the area and environmentalists agree. “Ever since Meghalaya became a separate state, there has been a rise in deforestation,” says Ba Mark West, convenor of the Cherrapunji Soil Research Society. “Tree felling is rampant and the loss of forest cover around Cherrapunji is more serious than ever before,” he says. In 1960, Cherrapunji was still a town of just 7,000 people. Now, there are 15 times that number and a cement plant at Mamlukcherra, a few kilometres away, was built 20 years ago. The cement plant polluted the environment and added to the population pressure in the area. And if there are more people, the pressure on the forests will increase.
I’ve quoted that at some length, because it could not be more specific. No mention of global warming at all, and none, of course of ‘climate change’ in its current loaded sense, because it had not yet been invented. According to Mr Bhaumik, Cherrapunji’s woes are the result of mushrooming population (from 7,000 to 105,000 in fifty years), industrialisation and reckless tree-felling. Of that, the local met office is sure.
Spool forward to August 2007, Mr Bhaumik, seemingly with total amnesia about his previous report, said:
Khasi tribes people in the Indian state of Meghalaya have decided to honour former US Vice President Al Gore for promoting awareness on climate change. They say changes in the weather are devastating the picturesque hill state. The tribes people say that they also want to honour him for his award-winning 2006 documentary…which….dramatically highlights changes to the environment because of global warming. The award will be handed over at the second Dorbar Ri (People’s Parliament) on 6 October near a sacred forest at the village of Mawphlang, which has been preserved untouched for more than 700 years.
Astonishing! Then shortly before Christmas just gone, Mr Bhaumik revisited Cherrapunji again and now, the propaganda message is complete. Hey presto!
Residents say their heavenly abode in the clouds is hotter and drier than ever before – and they blame it on global warming.
He then quotes Millergrace Symlieh, no less, a senior member of Sohra Science Society, who seemingly either doesn’t know the area or has had a remarkable loss of memory. He states:
“We never cut a branch in these sacred forests. So you cannot say this adverse weather change is our creation. We are affected by what’s happening all over the world. This hot weather and less rain here is not due to huge deforestation or massive industrialisation,” says Mr Symlieh. “We only have a cement plant near here.”
Over the next three pages, Mr Bhaumik gradually embroiders –without providing a scrap of hard evidence – this alarmist picture and readers are left in no doubt: the locals need more money to be compensated for the terrible injustice they have suffered. It’s the terrible West and its ‘climate change’ pollution that’s to blame, and Cherrapunji is on the edge of the abyss. The role of the locals in this alleged catastrophe has been totally airbrushed out.
So what has happened between 2003 and 2009 to account for this? I can only assume that Mr Bhaumik has read very carefully and ingested fully the Thomson/Columbia University diatribe, or perhaps been on a BBC brainwashing weekend.
The evidence of his writing elsewhere is that Mr Bhaumik is a typical BBC lefty. For example, on his rather polemical and partisan blog, he spouts vitriolic anti-UK anti-US sentiment and lauds the EU as the model to answer India’s prayers:
We cannot trust…the US because (it )…would not hesitate to use military force and other forms of power against us. As they say, if US is your friend, you really don’t need an enemy. The European Union is our long term ally of choice. But India has this huge problem of looking at Europe through Britain and Britain is in the European Union but not quite in it. It has still not accepted the Euro and it wants to retain its national identity and it is behaving like a surrogate of the US. India will not only have to look closely at the European model to create a new kind of union, so that we can handle the separatist tendencies and other internal conflicts – India will have to befriend the European Union as its ally of choice in the global arena in years to come.
So perhaps Mr Thomson didn’t have a very difficult task in converting Mr Bhaumik. I think that all adds up to a bit of a smoking gun. We know that between 2003 and 2009 the BBC news top brass all became fanatical ‘climate change’ acolytes; and we know that people like Peter Thomson took up positions in AGW organisations, who in turn proselytise that reporters should find local examples of their creed. Here, from the north-eastern frontier of India, is firm evidence that there’s been a concerted effort to make sure that when it comes to lying to the world about ‘climate change’, facts should never get in the way of the BBC mission to deceive. And Mr Bhaumik, it seems, is happy to do his masters’ bidding because it ties in nicely with his anti-US venom.
Nice job, I suspect that sooner or later one of the MSM will start to dig into the BBC and its releationship with all these climate change turds.
The longr this freezing process goes on the better, don’t you if you can do a FOI on these beeboids shit sniffers to see what they get up to.
So this must be a lie.
“REPUTED to be the wettest place on Earth, Cherrapunji is not the lush green spot you might expect. It is a barren ‘wet desert’, and one of the forerunners of environmental disaster in the Himalayan region.
Sandwiched between the Himalayas and the Burmese mountains, the area used to be forested. Today there is no vegetation to hold the soil, and no soil to support a forest.
Population in the area has soared and pressure for agricultural land is acute. Shifting cultivation, locally known as jhum, was traditionally practised, and fallow periods ranged from 20 to 30 years. Now they have fallen to under five years – insufficient for forest cover to regenerate. As a result, up to 170 tonnes of soil per hectare are being washed away by the monsoons each crop year. The soil cover in Cherrapunji is now so thin that in many places nothing can grow – bedrock lies under the few centimetres of soil. It would take decades of lying fallow for the soil to recover.
Ironically for a region with the highest rainfall in the world (1,150 cm or 450 inches is the annual average), Cherrapunji has begun to face chronic shortages of drinking water. The lack of vegetation causes rainwater to run off the surface into the plains of Bangladesh, causing rivers there to swell and flood.
Deforestation in the Himalayas thus creates deserts and flood-regions side by side, marooning villages in a landscape of despair.”
http://www.newint.org/issue156/update.htm
There also seems some problems in measuring the actual rainfall.
“It is not the first time that doubts have been expressed by the knowledgeable about the rainfall data. As early as 1850, Joseph Dalton Hooker, a Royal Navy doctor turned naturalist, who spent the monsoon months at Cherrapunji, recorded such variations. “He was puzzled by the curiously localised patterns of rain; move your gauge a few hundred yards and it registered only half as much as before”, writes Alexander Frater in his celebrated book, ‘Chasing the Monsoon’. If anything this shows that recording the rainfall at Cherrapunji has always been an uphill task for the weatherman.”
http://www.tribuneindia.com/2003/20030824/main8.htm
Could this latest conversion to “AGW” be anything to do with money?
I notice that So far, Cherrapunji has received 8,800 mm of rainfall against its average of 11,070 mm and this has led to water shortages.
So how do we not have any in Britain?
http://www.nerc-wallingford.ac.uk/ih/nrfa/yb/yb98/figure1_rainfall.htm
I can remember my geography teacher reciting this little rhyme:
“It’s very spongy in Cherrapunji”
to help us remember that Cherrapunji is the wettest place on Earth.
I’m pretty sure that he also taught George Monbiot!
I see that Sky News are also getting in on the act, there was a news item today that was showing climate change in the Falklands Islands affecting penquins.
So I looked up the Falkland Islands temperature on Wolfram alpha
it comes up with a nice graph, so if you then click on all it gives a graph from the 1950’s until now. It then shows quite a steep graph downwards since the 1950’s. So presumably the climate change is the fact that it’s getting colder.
Do these reporters ever check before they blindly trot out this rubbish. Talk about gullible!
Chris – I suspect that most news organisations only read the press releases from Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. Much easier than actually researching the subject first.
This is an outstanding piece of work! Great bit of digging Robin, well done!
<i>So what has happened between 2003 and 2009 to account for this?</i>
Well, cretins like Brown have been giving hundreds of millions of our money to compensate them, as long as they are not to blame themselves.
Brilliant. I think this is some arcane long lost art called — I’m only guessing JOURNALISM.
It died out around 1963, which was rather late for me. Between the end of the Chatterly ban, and the Beatles first LP.
Heh, nice one, the Philip Larkin quote there. 🙂
cheers millie — thanks for picking that up!
Cagle’s Political Cartoonists Index has quite a section labeled Global Warming Hoax.
Excellent analysis, Mr Horbury.
“By their blogs shall you know them” – it seems a lot of BBC tossers run self-preening blogs that show very clearly their political bias.
Maybe a key chapter for Mr Vance’s book.
And maybe there are many more BBC “journalists” whose blogs can “out” them ? Just like the formal press articles that people like Humphrys get to write.
Ray Snoddy’s Newswatch piece had the Chairman of the BBC Trust lying through his teeth about the “balance” the BBC gives on climate issues. And I think Lyons knew he was lying through his teeth, was squirming a bit.
But so many other BBC types can lie through their teeth in full knowledge that they are misleading the audience. Ansd maybe worse – some of them are just sweopt away with all the BBC groupthing, they don;t even know they are misinforming the audience. So far, we have seen NO BBC reporters giving a proper balance on AGW other than Paul Hudson – who looks to be frozen out now ! – and Andrew Neil who is a freelance rather than a staffie.
So – out of hundreds and hundreds of BBC “reporters” and editors, no scepticism ? That is ridiculously biased, when set against the mixed views of its audience.
And of course the people of Cherrapunji only coverted to the AGW religion because the BBC “preachers” told them about it and told them that there were bigs wads of cash for the faithful.
Anyone else hear the queen of breakfast radio (Nicki Campbell) spinning for his ‘friend’ Chowdry this morning? Endless callers backing Chowdry’s ‘right’ to protest.
The BBC are clearly getting behind their Muzzie mates on this story, another chance for the BBC to stick two fingers up to the English majority and the armed forces in particular.
Anyone else hear the queen of breakfast radio
Harshly funny — but fair.
More excellent digging on the scam. Richard North on his eureferendum blog, Dellingpole and Booker and now this site all providing more and more evidence that this is nothing more than a money making scam for the privileged elite.
You should work closely together and keep digging at different aspects of the scam.
I’ve never regarded Cherrapunji’s claim to world’s wettest place as very strong anyway, as it is based on one particularly wet year back in the 19th Century and the rainfall there always seems to have been rather variable.
A stronger contender is Lloró in the Atrato valley of north west Colombia as its record is the average of a longer period (it is also almost uniformly wet throughout the year).
Almost all of Cherrapunji’s rain falls in the summer time, so it should not be a surprise if they are running out in the winter, especially if they have cut down the forests that held water in the soil in the dry season.
I don’t doubt climate change may be a threat, but the hysteria surrounding it is obscuring more pressing concerns like the ones of deforestation, soil erosion, overpopulation etc that are evident in Cherrapunji. I guess there is no political milage in soil erosion and no gravy train to join.
My abiding thought about “climate change” is that it is always changing, and that mankind is well able to adapt to it. The capitalist system remains the best form of adaptation economically.
Helsinki is hugely prosperous – average temperature under 10 degrees C ? Singapore, Hong Kong etc – also hugely prosperous, average temp. 25 C upwards ? Man has no bother adapting to a wide range of temperature.
So suggestions (probably false since based on spurious models and cooked statistics) that we might face an increase globally of 2 degrees C is a bloody non-event.
So why the panic ?
People who cry “Fire” in a cinema get prosecuted. The damkn warmists probably can’t be prosecuted, but they need to be ridiculed. And their careers destroyed as punishment for all the worry they have caused, especuially among the young.
RICHARD BLACK IS A KNOB- OFFICIAL
I’ve posted this already on the open thread but I thought it needed spreading around a bit.
Reading the Torygraph I came across this from Pistolpete
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/richardblack/2009/10/climates_magnetic_attraction.html?page=19
Basically he is taking the piss out of Piers Corbin in a non too subtle attack. Funny now as its blowing back in his face.
‘The UK winter, he forecasts, is likely to be cold with some very cold spells. His bete noire, the Met Office, says in an “early indication” that temperatures are likely to be near or above the recent average (3.7C for December), though there is a one in seven chance of a cold one.
So there you are. The forecasts are out; let battle commence.’
He is, as I have stated above a complete Knob.
Or maybe its just the one in seven get out scenario as he stated?
With luck things will get warmer for the Labour propagandists!
Climate change is a significant and lasting change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns over periods ranging from decades to millions of years. It may be a change in average weather conditions, or in the distribution of weather around the average conditions (i.e., more or fewer extreme weather events). Climate change is caused by factors that include oceanic processes (such as oceanic circulation), biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics and volcanic eruptions, and human-induced alterations of the natural world.”
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