India’s Monsoon Floods Nothing New & Not Caused By Climate Change

By Paul Homewood  

 

A new paper from Madhav Khandekar, IPCC lead author on extreme weather, has found that recent floods associated with the Indian monsoon are not linked to global warming, and that such events have occurred throughout the 200 year history of the monsoon.

 

FLOODS AND DROUGHTS IN THE INDIAN MONSOON

Natural variability trumps human impact

 

 

Summary

The floods and unfortunate deaths of several dozen people in the Kashmir region of India in September 2014 reignited the debate about increasing human emissions of carbon dioxide and their putative linkage to extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and heat waves. What is missing from many of the media reports and scientific publications on this subject is critical analysis of past weather extremes to determine if there has been an increase in recent years. In this brief report, past floods and droughts in the Indian monsoon are examined carefully and it is shown that such events have occurred throughout the excellent 200-year-long summer monsoon rainfall dataset. It is further documented that such floods and droughts are caused by natural variability of regional and global climate, and not by human carbon dioxide emissions. Improving our understanding of the inter-annual variability of the monsoon and the associated extremes may help reduce damage to infrastructure and loss of life in the future.

 

http://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2014/11/Monsoon-Floods.pdf