Fake News From The New Yorker
By Paul Homewood
h/t Joe Public
Fake news from the New Yorker:
Ako Salemi took the first photographs of his career when he was a teen-ager, growing up in northern Iran. His earliest subject, a river near his family’s home, is now mostly dirt. In Salemi’s native country, as in much of the water-scarce Middle East, climate change has led to desiccation. Lake Urmia, once the sixth-largest saline lake in the world, now has just ten per cent of the water that it contained in the nineteen-seventies. (Salemi’s childhood river was one of its tributaries.) The sea level along the country’s southern coastline, meanwhile, where most of its oil and petrochemical infrastructure is located, is projected to rise more than two feet by the end of the century, and by 2070 could flood the homes of more than two hundred thousand people annually. And yet Salemi told me that many of his compatriots aren’t really aware of global warming. “They know about droughts and the lack of water resources, but they don’t know why these things are happening,” he said…..
Unlike President-elect Donald Trump, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani has said that he believes that fossil-fuel consumption is the main driver of climate change. Last year, he signed the Paris climate agreement, and his government has committed to reducing Iran’s greenhouse-gas emissions by four per cent, or up to twelve per cent if the United States reverses its sanctions against the country
In fact, as an article in the Handbook of Engineering Hydrology published in 2014 explained, the shrinking of Lake Urmia has nothing to do with climate change:
Page 379
Iran is a semi-arid country, and there have always been droughts from time to time, like the one in 2000/01, since when rainfall have increased:
The Encyclopedia Iranica has some of the history of droughts:
FAMINES. Famines have been reported throughout Persian history by numerous authors and observers. According to a compilation made by Charles Melville, they occurred in Khorasan in 115/733 (Melville, p. 130), in Sīstān in 220/835 (Melville, p. 130), in Khorasan and Sīstān in 400/1009-10 (Melville, p. 136), in Khorasan in 1099 (Melville, p. 136), in Kermān in 576/1180 and 662/1264 (Melville, p. 130), in Fārs in 683-85/1284-66 and 698/1299 (Melville, p. 130), in Yazd in 858/1454 (Melville, p. 130), and throughout Persia in 1870-72 (Melville p. 130), 1929-30 (Melville, p. 138), and 1948-49 (Melville, pp. 138-39). To these should be added the years 735/1335 sqq. (Aubin, pp.131-32), 1226/1811 (Morier, I, p. 170), 1232/1817 (Johnson, I, pp.195-97), 1277/1861 (Brugsch, II, pp. 307, 364-65 and passim), 1296/1879 (Wilson) and “the beginning of the 20th century” (Malcolm, pp. 233, 235-36). However, this enumeration probably remains very incomplete as more or less recurrent episodes of famine have plagued various parts of Persia until the middle of the 20th century. “Hardly a year passes in which there is not a famine in some province of Persia,” wrote a European observer in the beginning of the 20th century (Chirol, p. 97)…
Causes. The territories of Persia and Afghanistan comprise vast, desertic or semi-desertic, regions where the natural variation in precipitation is considerable (see BĀRĀN). Rain water agriculture, which provides an important part of the food resources, is thus especially vulnerable. Drought is obviously the most frequent cause of famine, as was the case in several of the famines mentioned by Melville…
The great famine of 1870-72, the best documented one (Smith, passim; Brittlebank, passim; St. John, pp. 94-98; Bellew, passim, Fasāʾī, pp. 327 sqq.; Eṣfahānī, pp. 281-82; Wazīrī, p. 214), was thus the result of a series of combined climatic catastrophes made worse by poor administration and the human factors previously cited. Since 1863-64, and except for 1865-66, rainfall had regularly been below average. The output of qanats and springs had fallen. The winter of 1869-70 had once again had very little snow and rain, especially in the low plains of Fārs, where herds of nomads who where there during that season suffered greatly. Camels and goats survived, however, and allowed the more prosperous nomads to reach the highlands in spring. Many of the poor ones died. At the end of 1870, famished crowds flocked to Bušehr.
http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/famines
The New Yorker cannot even get Iran’s Paris pledge correct. They claim that Iran has promised to reduce Iran’s greenhouse-gas emissions by four per cent.
In fact all that is promised is a reduction of 4% from Business as Usual, which they don’t even bother to quantify.
http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/indc/Submission%20Pages/submissions.aspx
In the meantime, Iran’s emissions of CO2 are actually 44% greater the the UK’s. Much of this arises from the use of gas to heat people’s homes during the bitter winters they have there.
And the whole economy revolves around the production of oil and gas.
The New Yorker would like to take all that away, and send the Iranians back to the Middle Ages.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
It’s obvious that the Paris Climate Agreement is nothing but a source of corrupt schemes that some countries are blatantly exploiting to get benefits from the gullible rich. Why are we part of it?
Because our politicians are gullible and stupid.
That or they just hate you.
I think it could be said that most of the MSM news coverage of the issue of climate change is fake news. It is based either on fake data or the output of climate models (which by definition are not real) or both.
I heard once that the inventor of the guillotine died by his own invention. That may itself be fake news – but those who will suffer most from this “fake news” tag are those producing the most fake news: the oMSM (once Mainstream Media).
And let’s not forget “Fake temperature” and “Fake climate” and “Fake disasters” and “Fake science” … we will have a ball with this tag.
Genuine fake news. Dr Guillotin survived the Reign of Terror and died in 1814 at the age of 76.
Flooding and drought are two things that are the majority of the time a direct result of human greed or stupidity. Humans think they can grow food in the desert—and they can till the water runs out. Then they try to blame climate change. No, that’s just stupid people. Flooding is the same way. Except for flash floods and tsunamis, most flooding can be avoided with proper engineering. Yet the stupid people live on the beach and cry “climate change” when their house washes away. It’s not climate change, it’s massive denial of reality and/or the attempt to bend reality with one’s will. As I say, “Nature don’t care”. Build your house on the beach, it washes away. Use all the water in the area to farm a desert, the water runs out and you starve. Nature don’t care.
In talking about the drought in the US in the 1930s The Weather Bureau’s chief climatologist said in 1939: “The Weather Bureau has no explanation for the persistency of dry weather in the Southwestern plains or its occurrence in the Northeast, where droughts are uncommon.”
“Droughts” said Mr. Kincer “are weather incidents that just happen”.
We now realize that many floods and droughts are weather incidents related to the “natural variations”…e.g. ENSOs and NAOs.They have been happening for centuries.
Reblogged this on Climatism.
Reblogged this on Wolsten.
How is fake news different from yellow journalism or junk journalism?
Keith, I took a stab at that.
Yellow Journalism: Relying on exaggerated and sensational headlines to sell newspapers.
Fake News: When reporters state their own opinions instead of bearing witness to observed events.
When it comes to climate matters, you see considerable overlap.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2017/01/12/yellow-climate-journalism/
Amongst the absurdities, the lake is being damaged by the action of man. But if you blame climate change rather than the actual reasons (as outlined in the report), even if we cut our use of fossil fuels to zero today, the lake would still dry up.
That is what i don’t understand – are all these Greenies and others willing to sacrifice stuff like this lake to get what they want? Why?
I was just reading about the Lake Urmia region, in a 1915 book, by a victim, describing the massacre of the ancient Nestorian Christian population there by Kurds in the pay of Turkey, after Russian protection was withdrawn.
I looked up the geography of the lake (its name possibly means ‘the puddle.’)
The rivers that feed it were dammed a few decades ago and the groundwater has been extracted ruthlessly. The usual summer evaporation has done the rest over time.
Three normal human stories, therefore:
(1) Murder
(2) Greed
(3) Lies by CO2 maniacs.
If my memory serves but didn’t they try the same sort of hoax concerning the sea of Azoz and with the Aral sea, attempting to link desertification to man made warming – lies, all lies – mind you the problems are man made – that much cannot really be disputed.
They tried it with Lake Poopó, Bolivia
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/22/bolivias-second-largest-lake-dries-up-and-may-be-gone-forever-lost-to-climate-change
But it’s nowt to do with climate:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Poopó
The New Yorker’s claim (last paragraph) that Rouhani’s “government has committed to reducing Iran’s greenhouse-gas emissions …” has a link to Iran’s INDC. This plainly states however that “this document does not constitute committing the Islamic Republic of Iran, in any way, in a binding manner”. Moreover:
(1) The two mitigation actions (4% and 12%) are both stated as being “compared to the Business As Usual (BAU) scenario.” As followers of Paul know, that means emissions will still increase, but by less than previously envisaged – i.e. not a reduction at all.
(2) The conditional mitigation action (12%) is not subject only to “the United States [reversing] its sanctions against the country” as suggested by the NY, but also to the “availability of international resources in the form of financial support and technology transfer, exchange of carbon credits, accessibility of bilateral or multilateral implementation mechanisms, transfer of clean technologies as well as capacity building” … i.e. a long, hugely complex, ill defined and most unlikely to be achieved shopping list.
Fake news indeed.
Good information – thanks Paul.
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The writers writing such trash are not good people. They seek to lay guilt on the developed, stable, and productive societies. Therefore, to investigate and report on – as Paul has just done – actual circumstances just negates what they are really about.
The pushers of this “climate religion” have, in part, failed because they took 75-100 year extreme scenarios (improbable) and got on a soap-box screaming these things are happening now. Lake Urmia is just another thing to add to “the list.” Insofar as there has been no real climate change (and global warming) any guilty verdict is false.
The trees and other plants on the hill I see out my window are the same ones or same sorts of ones that have been there for a long long time. The big ones are Ponderosa Pines. I’m watching for a Palm Tree, so far, in vain.
You are right about the guilt. But climate change really appeals to politicians, like these in Iran, or like Jerry Brown in California, when drought threatened the water supply because of reservoir neglect. Blaming it on climate change makes it everybody’s fault, and nobody is accountable.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2015/12/15/greatest-cop-out-ever/
I just mentioned this post over at ‘no trick zone’ with this added:
I briefly looked at some of her other articles and they suggest to me she is more about literature than science. This might be above her pay scale.
Thank God for President Trump and the resetting of common sense. Only just in time.