Huhne Says The West Must Pay
By Paul Homewood
The criminal Huhne thinks it a good idea if developed countries are sued for climate change. He uses the example of the Sahel drought to make his point.
Would you enjoy the cosiness and warmth of Christmas with your children or grandchildren just that little bit less if you knew that other people’s children were dying because of it? More than four million children under five years old are now at risk of acute malnutrition in the Sahel, an area of the world that is one of the clearest victims of the rich world’s addiction to fossil fuels.
About 18 million people in the Sahel – the vulnerable pan-African strip of land that runs from Senegal to Sudan along the southern edge of the Sahara – faced famine last year. Life has never been easy there. Its land is poor. Its people are often semi-nomadic, moving their animals between the grasslands. But science is increasingly pointing a hard finger at those to blame for the persistence of Sahelian drought – and it is us.
Has nobody told him that the 1968-74 Sahel drought has been described as “perhaps the most devastating drought in recent world history”.
Jean Dresch, Professor of Geography at the University of Paris and a “leading authority” on the world’s arid zones at the time wrote :
Famine threatens millions of villagers and herdsmen with their decimated flocks, today forced into an unprecedented migration in search of food and water, in all the West African countries to the south of the Sahara, from Mauritania to the Sudan. Its cause is drought, a prolonged decline in rainfall that has been recorded as far as central Asia, throughout the periphery of the arid zone, extending from the tropical desert of the Sahara to the continental deserts of temperate Eurasia.
The Sahel drought came during a period of global cooling, and Hubert Lamb explained how this led to “shifts of the world’s anticyclone belts”:
“The subtropical anticyclones associated with the desert belt were displaced somewhat towards the equator, and the equatorial rainbelt seems to have been restricted in the range of its seasonal migrations. In consequence, rainfall increased in Africa close to the equator, causing the lakes to rise, while drought began to afflict places nearer the fringe of the desert belt, no longer reliably visited in summer by "equatorial" rains.”
Not only was the Sahel affected.
“Rainfall at eight places in northern India, the Sudan and at 16 to 20°N in west Africa averaged 45 per cent less in the years 1968-72 than in the 1950′s. In all these areas people have been driven from their homes by the continued failure of the rains, and in the Cape Verde Islands at the same latitude in the Atlantic an emergency was declared in 1972 because of the last five years of drought”.
And other researchers have found that “the Sahel’s history was punctuated by droughts lasting several decades, every 30 to 60 years. Each was comparable to the drought of the 1970s, which killed more than 100,000 people, according to UN estimates.”.
They even say the the 1970’s drought was “relatively minor in the context of the West African drought history”.
They have found that:
“As well as the periodic droughts lasting decades, there was evidence that the Sahel region has undergone several droughts lasting a century or more.
The most recent mega-drought was just 500 years ago, spanning 1400 to 1750 and coinciding with Europe’s Little Ice Age. At the time, Lake Bosumtwi dropped so low for so long that a forest sprouted on the crater’s edges. Those trees now stand in 15 to 20 metres of water.” (see below)
Of course, we hear much more about droughts and famine than we ever did in the past, but the real difference maker has been the explosion in population. Wikipedia shows just how quickly populations have grown in this part of the world.
| 1967 | 2008/9 | |
| Chad | 3,410,000 | 10,329,000 |
| Niger | 3,546,000 | 15,306,000 |
| Mali | 4,745,000 | 14,517,000 |
| Mauritania | 1,050,000 | 3,291,000 |
| Sudan | 14,355,000 | 42,272,000 |
Such rapid growth must place a huge strain on natural resources, food, water etc. But it’s much more convenient for the likes of Huhne to blame it on the western world.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Huhne is a poisonous buffoon, and a badly informed one at that.
This, from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, puts it in perspective
Developing countries’ contributions to climate change approach 50%
Taking into account all greenhouse gas emissions emitted during the 1850–2010 period, the relative contribution by developing countries to global cumulative emissions was 48%. The group of developed countries was responsible for 52%. By 2020, the share of developing countries will probably amount to 51%. Hence, somewhere during the current decade, the share of the cumulative historical emissions in developing countries will surpass that of the developed countries.
http://www.pbl.nl/en/publications/countries-contributions-to-climate-change
After 2020, when the GHG output of developing countries exceeds that of developed countries, does the egregious Huhne expect the developing countries to pay us money?
Reblogged this on CraigM350 and commented:
Huhne is a convicted liar with his nose firmly in the trough and with a vested interest in continued lying for his livelihood. But more to the point they should be suing because of global cooling 1975 During cooler climatic periods, however, the high-altitude winds are broken up into irregular cells by weaker and more plentiful pressure centers, causing formation of a “meridional circulation” pattern. These small, weak cells may stagnate over vast areas for many months, bringing unseasonably cold weather on one side and unseasonably warm weather on the other. Droughts and floods become more frequent and may alternate season to season, as they did last year in India. Thus, while the hemisphere as a whole is cooler, individual areas may alternately break temperature and precipitation records at both extremes.If global temperatures should fall even further, the effects could be considerably more drastic.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/deep-dips-in-climate-science-intelligence/
“Would you enjoy the cosiness and warmth of Christmas with your children or grandchildren just that little bit less if you knew that other people’s grandparents were starving and dying from fuel poverty because of my cupidity?”
There we go! I think that has fixed it.
Turney’s Tourists will no doubt be at the head of the queue.
Like there haven’t been droughts, very bad droughts throughout the ages? These people think that everytime the weather turns bad it is “our fault”. That whole notion is absurd and totally incorrect from a historical perspective.
Catweasel, et al.
DON’T start off by ceding the GHG crock. The Sahel is currently shrinking, though cooling will put an end to that. The added CO2 will help plants resist drought, IAC.
“Catweasel, et al.
DON’T start off by ceding the GHG crock.”
?????
52%, 48%, yadda yadda. Parsing CO2 is invalid, pointless, and that whole frame is fallacious.