BBC & The Sunderbans
By Paul Homewood
Today’s BBC propaganda!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-india-57929463
This latest ludicrous piece of climate propaganda shows a total lack of understanding of how deltas function and deliberate ignorance of some of the real factors involved.
Much of the video is devoted to recent cyclones there, which are of course directly attributed to climate change.
So let’s look at some of the things the BBC did not tell you:
1) The major reason why the delta is sinking is subsidence, due to a combination of isostatic subsidence and dewatering, which estimates put at 2.2cm a year and more. In comparison global sea level rise is around 2mm a year.
The population of the Sunderbans has exploded to 4 million, putting huge pressure on the delta, in particular water extraction.
2) Human pressure remains the largest threat to the Sundarbans like any other mangroves across the world. Though Sundarbans is claimed to be pristine in state, more than 50% of the north-western parts and intertidal lands of Sundarbans delta have been continuously cleared for human habitation and settlement, agriculture and brackish water fisheries. Land use change, pollution from industrialization and economic activities e.g. shipping port close to the forest, intensive aquaculture and over-extraction of resources remain the major threat to the forest.
It has been estimated that agricultural activities had destroyed around 17,179 hectares (42,450 acres) of mangroves within three decades (1975–2010). Shrimp cultivation had destroyed another 7,554 hectares (18,670 acres).
3) The BBC even ridiculously claim that global warming induced melting of Himalayan glaciers is flooding the Sunderbans! In the the problem is the opposite – construction of the Farakka barrage in India in 1975 has diverted water away from the delta, reducing freshwater supply and thus increasing salinity, which mangroves are extremely sensitive to.
4) Land clearance, increasing salinity and pollution from industry and shipping have all contributed to the decline of the mangrove forest. The forest is, of course, absolutely crucial to the delta, as it helps to reduce erosion and trap sedimentation.
5) The report highlights islands which are gradually disappearing under the sea. But this shows a total ignorance of how deltas form and evolve. Low lying islands and mud flats are forever shifting as they erode and grow back, caught between the forces of tides, storms, sedimentation and flooding. There is no reason why any island there should be permanent.
But instead of giving viewers the actual facts, the BBC would rather peddle climate propaganda.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
It reinforces that well-known phrase or saying “Is that true, or did you hear it on the BBC?”
Maybe the author of this BBC article has never heard of the word littoral.
As I have been led to understand it, by people who used to work in the area on a temporary basis, much of the problem in the Bay of Bengal occurs far away in the Himalayas, with rains washing soil and other sediments down to the Bay and out into the sea. The fertility and richness of this soil for agriculture both incentivises and then leads to points 1., 2. & 4. that Paul makes above, that are omitted from the BBC article as he correctly says.
Brilliant. Thanks.
Are we the only audience for Paul’s careful and compelling detail? Does the BBC ever see it except in the context of complaint. I will forward it to the Tax Payers Alliance who , like Janet Daley in the S. Telegraph, really wonder what sort of public broadcasting obligation the BBC now fulfils. Hence the TPA’s challenge to the licence fee.
Our national woke rag the Irish Times has an editorial today basically saying that all recent weather events are unequivocally caused by CAGW. Their source is “scientists” at World Weather Attribution. I don’t know anything about this organisation but suspected even from the name that it is an Activist front and not impartial. I googled ‘World weather attribution bias’ and guess what nothing critical of the organisation came up.
Can anyone give me the lowdown on them?
World Weather Attribution seems to be another group of professorial-luvvies who have come up with a new pseudo-scientific gimmick called Extreme Event Attribution which tries to relate the likelihood of any weather event to climate change and get loads of press coverage for their doom-saying. Basically, Paul demolishes their type of pseudo-scientific nonsense almost every day here. They, of course believe in their models over any reality.
From WWA home page https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/about/
the fist individual’s name for reference to is Leo Barasi and here he is
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/leo-barasi
Straight off the bat we get XR. Essentially I would suggest WWA are a bunch of XXXXXX
What is also interesting are some of the other links on that page; other names and organisations that are involved. I do not have journalistic skills but an expose Paul style could be revealing!
Telegraph carries news that National Grid ESO is warning of low energy supplies this winter with Dungeness B and Hunterston B closing. I am not sure I share their confidence that they will have sufficient supply if a blocking high comes over western Europe sending up demand in all the countries at the end of our interconnectors.
And Dementia Joe Xiden’s climate nutter Lurch has been plaguing us in the UK at Kew Gardens to say that we have only 100 days left to save the planet. It’s COP26 or bust…..or actually nobody will notice other than food production is reducing and cold records tumble around the world.
Bangladesh has failed miserably to deal with the water flowing into the country and out to sea. In medieval times, the Dutch with primitive technology would have made villagers build dykes, build canals, build windmills, and used forced labour to maintain the system. Land which floods all the time and destroys farmland, putting pressure in areas previously uninhabited, is a result of a lack of planning, selfishness on the part of landowners, and neglect where works have been done and not maintained.
Stupidity, laziness and selfishness is rife throughout all parts of the world where there are existing problems which can be solved when people are organised and made to work to preserve their own and their communities’ livelihoods.
We may add to your litany of indolent shame “clean water for Africa” within every village for which I was compelled by peer pressure to contribute from my inadequate monthly salary in, wait for it, 1956.
No longer stupidity and laziness but now after sixty odd years welfare complacency and scam.
It’s amazing they can still find places to dig a well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_water-related_charities
I don’t know what proportion of clean water supplies in Africa have been supplied by western charities in the last decades, but I bet it’s high.
I haven’t the precise reference, but google ‘the land area of Bangladesh is increasing’ and in about 2017 a study was published by a research institute at the University of Dakha that concluded that the area of Bangladesh had increased in recent decades, based on satellite photo data. This is through silt deposition from the Ganges and Brahmaputra and the fluctuating interface between the delta and the sea. The study said there was every expectation that the total net land area would continue to increase, with localised losses only as a result of local erosion and channels shifting – but the net effect was increased land.
Yes, lots of reports over the years, +1000km2 since 1973,
BBC even has one in 2008.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/7532949.stm
Actual evidence says one thing but the “Nobel Peace Prize-winning” IPCC says it’s a disaster by 2050, and James Hansen is “predicting the entire country could be under water by the end of the century”, laughably.
https://www.geospatialworld.net/news/bangladesh-gaining-land-not-losing-scientists/
It is obvious the current extreme weather is attributed to worldwide covid lockdown.
We need to get CO2 emissions back up to get rid of this extreme weather.
Please see below copy of letter to Express:
The Great and the Goodall? The chimp lady and the human problem
Dame Jane Goodall, a ‘[l]eading anthropologist’ and ‘one of the world’s top experts on primates’, was today named an advocate of the COP26 climate change conference, to be held in Glasgow this November; the 87-year-old Dame Jane, whose ‘60-year studies of chimpanzees’ is ‘unsurpassed’, believes the ‘world has reached a turning point in its relationship with nature’. Accordingly, she ‘will address people around the globe on the importance of taking action against climate change’, and ‘will also highlight what needs doing to help the planet’ (‘Dame Jane takes lead role at climate change summit’, *Daily Express*, July 23, 2021). https://www.express.co.uk/ourpaper/view/2021-07-23
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/daily-express/20210723/282213718846527
Chosen as one of the ‘Top 25 Brits turning the country green’ in the effort ‘to tame climate change, cut pollution and reverse shocking declines in plants and wildlife’, along with Sir David Attenborough and Chris Packham, https://www.express.co.uk/news/nature/1458427/green-britons-britons-climate-change-politics-agenda
Dame Jane went on to say that in her lifetime, she has ‘“seen the ice melting in Greenland and the glaciers vanishing on Mount Kilimajaro and around the world. Forests are disappearing – deforestation means we are losing one of the lungs of the world. In 100 days, it is crucial that world leaders come together at COP26 to take urgent action to protect our plant.”’
These are shocking claims, but they have been disputed by scientists, not all of whom support the ‘climate change’ narrative. https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/06/21/how-david-king-lied-to-parliament/ Yes, human beings cut down trees, but they also plant them; and glaciers do melt – they are, after all, made of ice, and if they didn’t the world would be covered in ice.
Shocking claims cease to shock if they are made over and over again, with global disaster (as opposed to normal, if apparently extreme, weather events) failing to materialise. There are only so many environmental ‘turning points’ that can be claimed before a turning point is reached at which people wake up to the fact that these are not facts but scare stories designed to prod them into taking drastic action about ‘global warming’ that with cooler heads they would never contemplate.
This is because according to Dame Jane and her climate colleagues, ‘what needs doing’ is to impoverish most of the people on the Planet, returning them to a stone age existence. https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2021/06/28/prepare-for-the-populist-backlash-if-net-zero-becomes-an-elite-project/
Far from wishing to help the human race, Ms Goodall has been outspokenly anti-human, believing that ‘what needs to be done’ is to prevent more humans coming into the world, although in this she is not alone: Sir David Attenborough sees humanity as a ‘plague’ on the Planet, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/earthnews/9815862/Humans-are-plague-on-Earth-Attenborough.html
and with fellow wildlife broadcaster Chris Packham, he is a patron of Population Matters, https://populationmatters.org/our-patrons
along with Dame Jane.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/11/improve-contraception-access-to-tackle-wildlife-crisis-urges-campaign?utm_source=SPUC+News+List&utm_campaign=10dd1310d2-news190520_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_826f492851-10dd1310d2-148123137&mc_cid=10dd1310d2&mc_eid=c2228029a3
And with Sir David Attenborough and *Population Bomb* author Paul Ehrlich, Dame Jane is a patron of population control organisation Population Matters;
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/11/improve-contraception-access-to-tackle-wildlife-crisis-urges-campaign?utm_source=SPUC+News+List&utm_campaign=10dd1310d2-news190520_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_826f492851-10dd1310d2-148123137&mc_cid=10dd1310d2&mc_eid=c2228029a3
indeed, in a highly publicised encounter in 2019, Prince Harry pledged to her that he would stop at two children in order ‘to save the planet’. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2019/07/31/harry-meghans-malthusian-two-child-pledge-no-way-save-planet/
This was an interesting announcement, in view of his own brother’s three children, but the decrease in world population that could be achieved if all princes restricted their offspring to two would be minimal; the real target is not princes but paupers. Dame Jane says on the Population Matters website, which is festooned with pictures of black people, that ‘“population growth…underlies just about every single one of the problems that we’ve inflicted on the planet”’. https://www.populationmatters.org/goodall-population/
The Jane Goodall Institute is closely involved providing Africa with long-term contraception – aka sterilisation, since it cannot be removed by the woman herself – along with the controversial Marie Stopes International and the UN Population Fund, a powerful front for population control, under the Thriving Together programme; a declaration signed by the groups stated: ‘“We believe that by working together we can help human communities and their ecosystems thrive.”’ https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/11/improve-contraception-access-to-tackle-wildlife-crisis-urges-campaign?utm_source=SPUC+News+List&utm_campaign=10dd1310d2-news190520_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_826f492851-10dd1310d2-148123137&mc_cid=10dd1310d2&mc_eid=c2228029a3
In other words, by preventing black people from having children, the Planet can be saved – for everyone but them, obviously.
Many people support the environmental campaign, encouraged by people like Jane Goodall, but a great part of that campaign is devoted to promoting the view that people are responsible for killing the Planet.
It must be obvious from all this that for many of the ‘great and the good’, the environmental campaign is a handy weapon for promoting their own interests. For the great and the not-so-good, people are the problem – but mainly other people. Ms Goodall has only one child, but has consumed a fair amount of the Earth’s resources in her 87 years telling the poor how to be mean and, above all, not to be so selfish as to have children. And significantly, she does not reveal the cost of the COP26 climate conference, at which, one presumes, attendees will not be regaled with bread and water while they emphasise the need to save precious resources.
She clearly thinks it would be better for chimpanzees if there were not so many humans, but if chimps could communicate as well as she believes they can, they would tell her that their species does not approve of preventing the births of their own offspring. But even if she were the all-time expert on chimpanzees – or on anything at all – it does not give her the right to decide how many children other people can have.
The ‘great and the Goodall’ may want to save the Planet for chimps, seeing human beings as the problem; but the real human problem is elevating dumb animals to justify putting down (sometimes literally) our fellow humans.
Yours faithfully,
Ann Farmer