Cyclone Mocha: Don’t Fall for the Climate Bait
By Paul Homewood
From the CO2 Coalition
On May 14, Cyclone Mocha made landfall near Myanmar and Bangladesh. It was not surprising to see many mainstream media blame climate change for it. The pattern has now become common.
Every time there is a major cyclonic event, the media fan fear of climate change and argue that human-induced emissions of carbon dioxide are causing more extreme weather. However, an examination of relevant data shows such reports to be misleading.
As I write this, Mocha has made landfall close to the Myanmar–Bangladesh border. Residents of coastal districts of Chattogram and Barishal are likely to experience the worst impact of the cyclone for weeks to come.
Among the most vulnerable are refugees who fled persecution in Myanmar and have been living for half a decade in Bangladesh camps without the protection of storm-resistant shelter. As sad as the situation is, cyclones are not unprecedented for the region.
Incidence of Cyclonic Storms are Decreasing
According to the Indian Government’s “Assessment of Climate Change over the Indian Region,” overall cyclone frequency in the Indian Ocean is showing no increase. In fact, there has been a decrease.
“Long-term observations (1951–2018) indicate a significant reduction in annual frequency of tropical cyclones” in both the North Indian Ocean basin and the Bay of Bengal, the report states.
Image: Annual Frequency of Cyclonic Storm (CS) between 1891 and 2016. Linear trend lines are indicated by dashed lines—black (1891–2018), blue (1951–2018). 10-year running mean is shown by a solid-green line. Source: Extreme Storms, Indian Meteorological Department, Govt. of India. Published June 13, 2020.
The data clearly show a decrease in frequency of cyclones for more than 100 years in the North Indian Ocean, the birthplace of storms affecting more than 1.5 billion people. However, this information is obscured by cherry picking data for shorter times frames to suggest alarming weather trends.
Hurricane Data Reveal Similar Decrease in U.S.
It is not just the Indian Ocean region. In the U.S., there has been a decrease in the number of landfalling hurricanes per decade since 1850. According to data from the Hurricane Research Division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the number of major hurricanes have been declining since the 1950s.
“In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity,” NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory states.
The mainstream media is good at tricking people into believing a false emergency. In instances like Cyclone Mocha, they prey on people’s compassion for storm victims and use the calamity to drive fear into people’s minds.
Don’t fall for the climate bait. We will see more and more of it in the coming days, as the climate doomsday bandwagon loses steam in many parts of our world. And desperate times call for desperate deceptions embedded onto the public psyche through repetitive, aggressive media programming.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.
https://co2coalition.org/2023/05/15/cyclone-mocha-dont-fall-for-the-climate-bait/
The above chart tracks all tropical storms (CS):
However the same source also includes the numbers for Severe (SCS), and these show a similar pattern of decline since the 1960s.
Also there is this chart of the stronger cyclones, VSCS, which again have clearly declined, (although the paper shows a spurious increasing trend since 1998!)
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-15-4327-2_8
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The Northern Italy floods are being given the usual climate alarm treatment by the MSM. Massive short period rainfall totals with flooding and landslides are same old same old.
https://www.britishpathe.com/search/?searchQuery=Northern%20Italy%20flood&page=1
1966 Florence floods in a region next door to Emilia-Romagna killed over 100 people and damage to works of art still being restored. The worst flood since 1557, these days that would be the worst ever and a symptom of Man Made Climate Change
Yep, that’s the playbook.
Have these msm idiots never listened to Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons” – snow in the winter,thunderstorms in the summer – plus ca change!!!
It is clear that any variation in any parameter in any subject no matter how absurd is now an opportunity for the arts graduate “science reporters” pushing climateageddon, vying with each other to coin the latest climate nonsense term. All meteorological organizations including our own Met Office should be broadcasting constantly in the face of collective asininity that weather is not climate and offering a voice of reason based on empirical data. That they do not and instead are broadcasting sensational twaddle labelled as “expert opinion” brings shame on all who work there makes me question their funding as clearly much of that funding is being misappropriated!
They answer to politicians and the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, two diametrically opposed concepts, formerly BEIS. Their brief for a long time has been to produce “science” that supports policy.
This is from a Defra document in 2006:
“The Met Office will focus on research that contributes to UK government policy objectives and will communicate the results to government and the public. This will be done through leadership of the UK climate community, collaboration with UK and world-wide institutions and internal customer-focussed links within the Met Office.”
This Mail article dates back to 2010 and explains much.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240082/It-gigantic-supercomputer-1-500-staff-170m-year-budget-So-does-Met-Office-wrong.html
In 2010, they had a £30 million supercomputer. “In 2020 the Met Office announced it would spend £1.2 billion (US$1.56bn) on building the world’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated to weather and climate. ”
The contract just happened to be awarded to Microsoft.
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/atos-lawsuit-over-met-office-microsoft-supercomputer-to-go-to-uk-high-court/ May 23, 2022
The clowns in East Anglia are asking for 1.25 billion for a new computer so they can steal from the public for another 25 years doing absolutely nothing of value.
Interesting. There seems to be a major cyclone event every 50 years or so.
It’s now almost 45 years since the Climate Fear Campaign began and the world is a far better place than it was then in most ways. The driving factor that is repeated ad nauseam is that the temperature is now almost 1.5 deg K higher than it was in the LIA (15 C as opposed to 13.5 C) and for some unknown and unproven reason 1.5 deg K increase will kill us all. The only brainwashing tool left is to attribute all weather events to climate change and hope that the masses will continue to be taken in so the free-spending and governmental control can continue unquestioned.
Kelvin is an absolute scale, hence no degrees.
None of the apocalyptic predictions made at Earth Day 1970 have come to pass.
https://www.netzerowatch.com/earth-day-at-52-none-of-the-eco-doomsday-predictions-have-come-true/
We cannot have too many of these ‘failed’ predictions and hope that netzerowatch are keeping a tally. The list to be updated and supplied to Rowlatt et al annually together with the list of those predictions that proved right — for the sake of balance you will understand, the sort of balance the BBC is supposed to espouse.
If memory serves (and I confess it serves me less well than in the past) the original ohmygodwereallgoingtodie threshold was 2° above some arbitrary pre-industrial average which morphed into 1.5° when it became clear that 2° was not about to happen any time soon.
Considering that most of the previous Warm Periods have been at least as warm as today if not that magical 2° warmer it is hard to understand why there is such a fuss. We are forced to the conclusion that there is more than genuine climate change in play here. (Surprise, surprise!)
To anyone who is interested, we have been keeping weekly max/min records for the last 11 years. I don’t pretend these are up to Antony Watts’ standard (!) but they are from the same thermometer on the same site throughout.
Average weekly maximum over the year is 21.0, ranging from 19.4 in 2013 to 22.7 in 2020. Minimum is 5.0, ranging from 3.9 in 2021 to 6.3 in 2013. Breaking them down by week, month or season shows no consistent trend at all.
Demand explanation for climate attribution. If BBC says it was caused by climate change, demand they explain just exactly, “How?”
Climate change attribution is political agitprop, not science.
With people like Justin Rowlatt being the voice of climate on the BBC it would be a waste of time. He appears to have a licence to say just what he wants, without justification or reason. And he always presents his propaganda in an annoyingly “learned” tone, as he if knows what he’s talking about. The man’s an absolute menace.
CO2 was 0.04% of the atmosphere in 1990, and now it’s…0.04%. How’s that for climate change? Or is the third decimal place the problem 👎
Jet propulsed Jimbob Hansen and his excruciatingly hammed up appeal to congress ‘we’re all gonna burn’ – was in Jun’ 1988. It is nigh a generation and a bit since the climate scare, aka man made warming was invented, propagated, then hatched on an unsuspecting western nations’ taxpayer. Sounding his own trumpet, apparently Johnny two jags Prescott (thank you Johnny) sealed the deal in Kyoto 1997, agenda green oblivion, year zero was to be 21 then dialled up to 30.
Another 25 years of dumbing down the populace has elapsed and the pressure has been ramped up to insane levels of brainwashing global warming news ‘porn’. The corporate sphere inclusive of the investment banker cabal, the wef and all politicians or most of them are fully on board the alarmist gravy train. The media now pounces on any dire global weather and pronounces in their infinite wisdom on all things man made CO2 equals catastrophe.
Most of the sane world knows it, the great green scam and hoax. But the rest of the west is pretty insane about it. I don’t think that this train can be derailed.
Before that there was the Ice Age is Coming! But some really that it wasn’t scary enough and switched, e.g. 1981: Scientists (including Steven Schneider) warn global warming would see Buckingham Palace 7 feet underwater (Thames TV)
A quote from Cassells History of England written in 1891, and referring to the year 1851
“There were terrible atmospheric disturbances. A cyclone suddenly burst forth in the Bay of Bengal, and swept in three storm waves across the islands, many of which it covered with a wave twenty feet deep, and thence spread to the mainland. The loss of life covered by this whirlwind was enormous, and does not appear to be overstated at 215,000.”
It is gratifying to see that the cyclonic storms I experienced in Singapore in the 1960s have made it into the record. It was 1967 0r 1968 I rememer wading across the Roundabout where Scotts Road met the Buki Timah Road, chest high in water holding up an umbrella. An American tourist was so struck by the sight of this demonstration of the British stiff upper lip, he dropped his camera! I also remember watching reports of severe flooding in Bangladesh on the black and white TV. We were always glad when to monsoon broke; by that time the monsoon drains and the Singapore River were getting very smelly…..
My father, as an oil tanker’s First Officer in the 1920s, was nearly sunk by 80 foot waves in a cyclone near the Dutch East Indies. When he reached port, the local meteorologist merely said, “Yes, we have had other reports of there being something quite nasty out there!”
OTT, the local garage has diesel at £1.44 a litre which is down from £1.80, a year ago. If you just leave markets to sort out crises they usually sort them out.
Yes, I saw diesel at Sainsburys the other day at £1.439.
Unfortunately I’d filled up a couple of days before. I was tempted to drive down the M1 for a couple of hous, so I could fill up again!
Paul , you could have mentioned the peculiar anomaly of Very Severe Cyclonic Storms [ VSCS’s ] clustered during the post 1950’s ‘global cooling ‘ decades 1960 – 1980 and the peak column consisting of 7 VSCS’s in the year 1976 at the height of the global cooling climate scare . This period was notable for harsh droughts afflicting the Indian subcontinent.
As it all seems to come down to models it was quite a coincidence that this bit of news came up on my laptop…. Apparently, the James Webb telescope is finding huge galaxies further than man has looked before. The thing is, the galaxies are far larger than the science (I assume, the scientists) had figured. They realised that the ay they determined the size of galaxies was based on computer models which were programmed to calculate galaxy sizes based on a faulty assumption in their model code. A young PhD student discovered the models’ error……etc….
More here: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/acc5ea
and the report here: https://phys.org/news/2023-05-james-webb-massive-galaxies.html
Government announces today that the UK is to join Biden’s emissions challenge as it forges closer energy security links with USA.
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-to-join-bidens-emissions-challenge-as-it-forges-closer-energy-security-links-with-us?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=govuk-notifications-topic&utm_source=1e349f23-d427-4c2f-885e-4a1106715cbc&utm_content=daily
It would appear that after Grant Shapps has committed the UK Tax Payer to spending £20 Billion on Carbon Capture and Storage, he is
possibly hoping to get this investment back from co-operation with the USA to store their Carbon…?? The Official statement in this document again uses
the highly technical description of our capacity as “one of the largest carbon storage potentials, including under the North Sea, of any
country in the world, with capacity to hold up to 78 billion tonnes of carbon – equal to the weight of 15 billion elephants.”
Maybe the US President is impressed with this Disney Dumbo reference, and will send us all his CO2 in the holds of sailing ships wafting across the
oceans powered by the wind.
Well this is silly, but I am imagining being surrounded by 15 billion elephants and directing them to pass through a single gate. I have a magic want that points each of them in the proper direction and they go willingly. They are going through at one per minute. The magic wand has a 1 year battery. I’m off to check the math.
“weight of 15 billion elephants”
Gamecock always likes new, useful units of measure.
As I noted elsewhere I doubt China wants to store about 20 years of their coal consumption under the North Sea.
I feel sure that a Dimocrat “President” will do his utmost to drop as many ‘elephants’ as possible to the bottom of the North Sea.
The donkey.
Politicians’ and MSM panic rising apace. Still not a single Brit-named storm this year so they need anything they can find from anywhere in the world to keep the story going.
Admire the blank spaces at the ‘Storm Centre’ here…
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/warnings-and-advice/uk-storm-centre/index
That form of words from NOAA/GFDL always foxes me; it just sounds contrived and probably aims to confuse though ambiguity:
“In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that increasing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations from human activities have had a detectable impact on Atlantic basin hurricane activity.”
The problem lies with the “high confidence” bit. They try to make it read like it is attached to the prematurity of coming to a conclusion. That way, they wriggle out of saying there isn’t a detectable association but instead leave a lingering impression that the effect is there but there wasn’t quite enough data to prove it. Just wait a year or two and we’ll be there with our “high confidence” categorisation!
Of course the reality is that there is no detectable association but the rules of the game are predicated on the truth of the hypothesis that man’s activities affect the climate. Players are instructed to judge only how consistent observations are with that basic axiom. Conclusions have to be expressed in terms of the level of consistency – high, medium or low – with no space for concluding absence of consistency or consistency with an alternative explanation (like in proper science).
So, in this instance, they couldn’t say that the observations do not suggest any influence of human activities…” or that “observations are consistent with long-term natural fluctuations etc etc …” . Such statements would be outside NOAA and IPCC remit.
I have made the same observation. The way it’s framed it is “almost high confidence “ whereas (as you say) they are not even on the first level. There is no trace of any relationship between ghg and cyclones.
Reminds me of the Python sketch where the political commentator says “just as I predicted, only the Silly Party won”
When I first read the IPCC reports (AR3 & AR4) I was struck by the recent book out Weasel Words, then explaining political speak.
Mocha seems to have ended up being a weak latte. Barely a Cat I at landfall it dissipated rapidly. Peak rainfall over land was about 1 inch per hour, with most accumulations being less than 6 inches. Enough to make a mess, but not devastating as hurricanes go.
Justin Lowrat was at it again a couple of nights ago.
He ended his scary shroud waving by revealing that the MET’s tame X-box fiddler had prognosticated that, in the next five years we would experience the “Hottest Year Evvvaahh!” (99% probability.)
(Obviously, on past experience, Evvaahh means since Justin was nowt but a lad.)
And, for good measure, the MET was proud to announce that 1.5°C temperature rise above pre-industrial levels would at last be experienced. (66% probability.)
Justin seems to have discovered ENSO explaining that the last couple of years of excessive heat, had actually been a bit parky, because La Niña but (roll of drums) an El Niño would soon smite us with its fearful hotness.
Perhaps by Royal Command?
Actually, if I survive the next five years, I fear we will see our chum confirming that indeed it was worse than he thunk, the MET X-box confirmed as the oracle of the age.
And, if not, then it was all that lovely cheap Ruinables and banning travel and central heating wot dun it.
But, as any remaining Typhoon jets will by then either be in Ukraine or a museum and, anyway don’t like recycled chip shop oil, it will be no use returning to Coningsby.
A new weather station atop Drax’s chimney? You have to admit that Justin, the Beeb and the MET will always represent policy based evidence making at its finest.
“the MET was proud to announce that 1.5°C temperature rise above pre-industrial levels would at last be experienced”
Measured HOW? We can’t measure today’s GMT; we can only estimate it. GMT for 1880 is a wild ass guess. Completely FAKE.
Misleading reports, come on Paul call a spade a spade, downright lying reports?
Does anyone have the actual ground based wind speeds of this Typhoon. Because when I checked NUSchool Earth shortly after landfall the maximum wind speed in that area was 55kph.
I am fed up with the “authorities” quoting satellite based calculated wind speeds for modern day Hurricanes and Typhoons.
I used Ventusky which allowed me to look back at 3 hourly intervals at various altitudes in the run up to landfall and beyond. Obviously, like all these versions it is a modelled output. But it only showed a bare Cat I, at around 75mph sustained wind, with gusts to a little over 100mph particularly around hill ridges etc..
Either way, there companies world wide that need $$$$$$$$$ for studies and making new crap to adapt to their grand ideas. Perhaps in 1000 years, the 2020s will be time of the great human brain damage from drugs, poisons for batteries and consuming of poisons.