When the facts get in the way, invent new ones
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Life in the Sahara Savanna, 10,000 BC
Jack Hellner, American Thinker: Media is now peddling another global warming lie.
The story itself was newsworthy and sad. A huge number of children are suffering from hunger due to a five-year drought in Madagascar. The lie occurred when David Muir said this is the first drought-based famine that has occurred because of climate change and implied that it is being caused by oil and humans. That is pure BS.
Anyone who still has a brain knows that droughts and famines throughout history have occurred naturally and cyclically. They are caused by a lack of rain. The Earth's climate has always been subject to change. How does Muir think so much of the Earth is covered by desert if it weren't for long droughts?
Five minutes of research showed famines throughout history, a significant share caused by climate change. Here are a few:
Climate and the Global Famine of 1876–78From 1875 to 1878, concurrent multiyear droughts in Asia, Brazil, and Africa, referred to as the Great Drought, caused widespread crop failures, catalyzing the so-called Global Famine, which had fatalities exceeding 50 million people and long-lasting societal consequences. …. Severe or record-setting droughts occurred on continents in both hemispheres and in multiple seasons, with the "Monsoon Asia" region being the hardest hit, experiencing the single most intense and the second most expansive drought in the last 800 years. The extreme severity, duration, and extent of this global event is associated with an extraordinary combination of preceding cool tropical Pacific conditions (1870–76), a record-breaking El Niño (1877–78), a record strong Indian Ocean dipole (1877), and record warm North Atlantic Ocean (1878) conditions.
Millions of people died due to famines in India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; however, the relationship of historical famines with drought is complicated and not well understood. Using station-based observations and simulations, we reconstruct soil moisture (agricultural) drought in India for the period 1870–2016. We show that over this century and a half period, India experienced seven major drought periods (1876–1882, 1895–1900, 1908–1924, 1937–1945, 1982–1990, 1997–2004, and 2011–2015) based on severity-area-duration analysis of reconstructed soil moisture. Out of six major famines (1873–74, 1876, 1877, 1896–97, 1899, and 1943) that occurred during 1870–2016, five are linked to soil moisture drought, and one (1943) was not. The three most deadly droughts (1877, 1896, and 1899) were linked with the positive phase of El Niño–Southern Oscillation. Five major droughts were not linked with famine, and three of those five nonfamine droughts occurred after Indian independence in 1947.
[Back to FWIW]:
But the average TV viewer thinks history began in 1619, when Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln brought the first slaves to the United States of America, then took a hiatus, and began again around 2020 or so, and ABC takes advantage of this ignorance.
S. Madagascar on the verge of climate change-induced famine
But unlike other countries, where extreme hunger and near-famine conditions are caused by war, conflict, or isolated weather events, in this part of Madagascar, the cause is so far unique: southern Madagascar is on the verge of becoming the world's first climate-change induced near-famine in modern history. [emphasis added]
Southern Madagascar is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years, [so, “modern history” began after 1980?] making the land here too arid to farm and leading to crop failure. For the past four years, the severe lack of rain has led to depleted food sources and dried-up rivers. Climate change has also led to sandstorms affecting these lands, covering formerly arable land and rendering it infertile.
Madagascar has produced 0.01 percent of the world’s annual carbon emissions in the last eight decades, but it is suffering some of the worst effects.
"It is not fair...these people have not contributed to climate change because they do not have electricity, they do not have cars etc., and they’re paying probably the highest price in terms of the consequences of climate change," Mangoni said.
"Having sandstorms in this kind of landscape is not something usual and having the effects of sandstorms shows that nature is changing, the environment is changing, and the climate change is affecting this area more than the rest of Madagascar."
Gee, if only there was some source of cheap, abundant fuel that the rich countries could bring to this benighted country and help the citizens build desalinization plants, fertilize their crops, and build a modern economy. Instead, we offer propeller beanies and shed “oh, it feels so good” tears.
