At the Germany-based European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) veteran, retired meteorologist Klaus-Eckard Puls flatly dismisses the assertion made by many leading officials that climate change is a driving force behind the wave of refugees now sweeping into Europe from the Middle East and Africa.
German Meterologist Klaus-Eckart Puls. Photo: EIKE
Germany Minister of Environment Barbara Hendricks recently blamed the refugee crisis on climate change, and urged countries to commit themselves to a binding Treaty in Paris with renewed vigor. Puls responded at EIKE.
Puls reminds us that even the IPCC has found no basis to support the claim. A number of skeptics view the claim as a desperate stretch designed to divert attention away from the real reasons: abject social and foreign policy failure. Recently the IPCC backed off from the speculative claims of climate driven refugees.
Puls writes that the “UN IPCC took back its analyses and prognoses on climate refugees in its last 2013/14 report” and that “the steppes and deserts are in fact ‘greening'”. At EIKE he provides the following chart which clearly shows that Africa is greening and that it is all part of a natural cycle:
Chart depicting Sahel Zone June-October precipitation from 1950 to 2010. Source K.E. Puls
Last weekend meteorologist Joe Bastardi showed that also in Syria precipitation has been on the rise over the past few years.
Puls cites Spiegel, where in 2011 the UN took back its earlier 2005 projection of 50 million refugees by 2010. Spiegel writes:
The UN told SPIEGEL ONLINE that it is backing off its prognosis – in countries of the alleged danger zones populations are in fact growing. The corresponding prognosis has been removed from the UNEP site.”
That particular UN backpedaling incident took place back in 2011. Puls also writes that the latest UN IPCC 2013 report also distanced itself from the projections, seeing no scientific relationship. The claim that climate change is driving the refugee waves appears totally baseless and highly speculative.
The seasoned German meteorologist also cites a recent paper by Colorado University-Boulder geography professor John O’Loughlin on the subject. The paper concludes:
While a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder shows the risk of human conflict in East Africa increases somewhat with hotter temperatures and drops a bit with higher precipitation, it concludes that socioeconomic, political and geographic factors play a much more substantial role than climate change.”
Puls summarizes in his commentary:
When Ms. Hendriks makes up stories of climate refugees, it is all about her private Weltanschauung. It has nothing to do with reality – and also nothing to do with the statements of the IPCC because the IPCC finds no climate refugees, and even writes this (AR5 2013/14). The UNO/UNEP deleted such claims (made in 2005) from its website! The waves of refugees have many reasons – climate is not among them!”
Like i said in the Bastardi topic:
Look at the pictures of lake Chad.
http://www.cblt.org/en/history-lake-chad-basin
If you look at the timeline given under that link, you will notice that there are cyclical changes over 1000s of years, but what has happened now was very fast.
And again: Do not only look at rainfall, but also at temperature.
I suppose we can blame Henry Ford for initiating the first wave of Automobile-Induced Global Warming & Lake Drying
quote from your linked site
“1908, the lake was merely a wetland with two small basins to the north and south, and then its level increases”
Correlation and Causation Modelling: EPIC FAIL
Why? Because we can thank Henry Ford for contributing to the refilling of Lake Chad.
Seriously, this is what passes for science amongst most of the grifters who call themselves contributing scientists to the IPCC.
sod 18. November 2015 at 8:27 PM | Permalink | Reply
“If you look at the timeline given under that link, you will notice that there are cyclical changes over 1000s of years, but what has happened now was very fast. ”
I am pretty sure you will never understand the difference between measurements of different time resolution. Because I think you have a very hard time understanding anything.
Warmunists claim no responsibility for Paris attacks in run-up to COP. Oh wait, I got that wrong. The article in fact says, no climate marches during COP because security.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/nov/18/paris-attacks-suspected-mastermind-abdel-hamid-abu-oud-was-target-of-raids-latest-news
[…] By P Gosselin | NoTricksZone | November 18, 2015 […]
Lake Chad:
Link.
“They calculated that the lake’s size decreased by 30 percent between 1966 and 1975, with irrigation accounting for only five percent of that reduction. However, irrigation demands increased fourfold between 1983 and 1994, accounting for half of the additional decrease in the lake’s size, …”
And …
“… the construction of dams on the Jama’are and Hadeja rivers in northeastern Nigeria are among factors that hastened the shrinking of the lake“.
This seems to say that while Earth was cooling (up to 1975) much of the problem was a dryer climate, while as the Earth warmed (’83-’94) the main issue was irrigation and other demands.
“while as the Earth warmed (’83-’94) the main issue was irrigation and other demands.”
Do you really not see the connection?
During drought, people need more irrigation.
After droughts, people build dams (which often speed up evaporation) to prepare for the next drought.
Bastardi made a simple claim: By looking at a single statistic (rainfall) he could show that a claim was false.
I am just pointing out, that he is wrong. A little bit of more rain is useless,when the lake is gone. Adding a small drought after a big drought will make the effect worse and will often NOT be a relieve.
And people who constantly celebrate a plateau (which actually does not exist, as current data shows to everyone) do not understand, that a plateau on a high level is not good news for those who have to deal with the heat already.
Population of Chad 1985 5.15 million
Population of Chad 1995 6.99 million
So, a population that increased by 36% over those ten years has exactly what effect on water demands? Nothing?
Funny though, when you and your gang look at a single statistic (temperature)you claim that Man-Made carbon dioxide production (and ONLY man-made carbon dioxide production) is causing Climate Change.
So according to you and your fellow Global Warming Scientologists, Joe is full of crap and you are not.
If I said something like this when I was still in britches and eating zwieback covered in jam, my mother would roll her eyes and give me ‘die lange Nase’ gesture.
Not to seem chronically contrarian, but . . .there is a lot that ain’t makin’ sense here.
#1
Fer instance you say: “Puls cites Spiegel, where in 2011 the UN took back its earlier 2005 projection of 50 million refugees by 2010.”
Let me see if I can get this assertion straight. Do you mean that in 2005 “the UN” made a projection that there would be 50 million refugees by 2010, but in 2011 they took back that projection. Sorry, but this makes no sense because, naturally, 2011 came AFTER 2010 and therefore in 2011 there was no projection to take back because the year projected had already passed. Did you mean to say that in 2011 the UN discovered that their 2005 prediction about 2010 was wrong?
#2
I also gotta’ whine about how Puls has the gall to rely on the IPCC and AR5 – when it suits him. I thought Puls was the one who said he used to support the IPCC’s work and bought into the climate change BS and all those early AR’s, and then he had an epiphany about how everything they were saying was BS. Is this the same Klaus-Eckard Puls now citing IPCC? He seems to change colors faster than a chameleon trapped in a kaleidoscope.
#3
When I saw Puls’ nice red and blue bar graph, I thought: Wow, that exactly points out what I said in my last post over on the Bastardi thread about the drastic droughts in the Sahel during the 1980’s driving hundreds of thousands of migrants from Niger and Chad into the arms of Boko Haram. But the more I look at Puls’ graph the more bizarre it becomes.
I believe the legend can be translated to: “Rainfall in the June-October in the Sahel 1920-2010. Shown is the deviation from the average for the years 1950-2010 in mm per month.”
Rainfall from 1920-2010 – WTF??? The graph clearly goes from 1950-2012. So where is 1920-1950? Are those years included in the averages? And the reason I say it is we know that this region experienced the most intense droughts during the 1940’s – so why are those years referenced in the legend but missing in the graph?
And why does Puls show data all the way to 2012 on the graph but, apparently, discards 2011 and 2012 from the analysis, according to the legend? Is this just sloppy work?
#4
And what are these data supposed to be showing anyway? There is one bar for each year, so each bar presumably represents the average rainfall for Jun-Oct of the respective year subtracted from the average of all Jun-Oct periods for the 62 years from 1950-2012 – the “0″ representing that 62 year baseline. At least that would be my guess.
Anyway, the Y axis says mm per month, so maybe that’s a hint at what Puls is pulling. If you look at that long red line at 1984 for instance, what does that mean?? Is it a deficit of 30 mm per month on average over the whole year of 1984, or averaged over each of the months Jun-Oct 1984 – or what?? Who can say? This is gibberish.
#5
And speaking of gibberish, look at 2011 on that graph – a downward projecting blue line. Now, what can that possibly mean? Is that meant to be an excess of 10 mm/month in a downward direction? And Puls’ black arrows are certainly conspicuous and entertaining, but do they represent anything having statistical significance? There are no standard deviation lines or any other indices of variation.
Like Bastardi, this is garbage, which is absolutely typical of these climate people on both sides of the issue.
#6
Finally, I would point out that Puls, being a physicist and climatologist, may have a lot of good insight and information about physics, climate, and maybe even the physics of climate, but that gives him no more insight on anthropology, sociology, human starvation, or any of the other complex factors that determine how, when or whether changes in climate will induce large migrations and what effects those migrations will have on political stability in the regions the migrating people leave behind and the regions they migrate to.
So if he cleans up his data, Puls might have something worthwhile to say about how much or whether the climate changed, but that is as far as his climatology training & experience take him. As to whether people migrate in response to sudden, unfavorable changes in climate, well . . . John Steinbeck probably knows heaps more about that than Puls.
Puls looks to me like he’s as full of BS and that Bastardi guy.
You may be right, Pierre. Maybe drought or other sudden adverse changes in climate don’t cause people to move to better places where they can, for instance, eat. And maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of migrating people of differing sectarian, ethnic, and racial backgrounds have absolutely no effect on social structures and social stability. But I think you are choosing the wrong climatologists to support your position. Just looking at their data and their arguments anyone with one functional retina can see that they are wackos.
Woe,woe, woe the lake be gone
“Do you mean that in 2005 “the UN” made a projection that there would be 50 million refugees by 2010, but in 2011 they took back that projection.”
Standard Operating Procedure for the UN. Translated as “sorry our projections have the appearance of being wrong, what we meant to say was…” “so we were totally right all along”
You are correct though, Denis, Climate Science is a Mug’s Game. Part of the reason for it is that the complexity does not lend itself to modelling and prognostication, and part is due to so-called scientists acting as advocates, usually for the purposes of keeping the gravy train running in.
For the most part, in finance, many of the variables are better known and their driving forces better understood. If no one can produce a predictive algorithm for a stock price, how in Heaven’s Name can anyone predict what will happen climate-wise save for trends that can be reasonably assumed by large-impact forces (solar cycles etc). Somehow, however, these so-called scientists are able to declare that my ’74 ‘Cuda is going to cause the sea level to rise.
So, I can see the dispute with Joe and others for talking in a grade-school manner, but have you not listened to the media these days? They are the ones that deliver IPCC-propaganda to the public using this self-same infantile language. Just look at the processed meats scare. Totally delivered as your chances of getting cancer goes up by 25 percent, with the people thinking (I know, listening to the radio talk-back line) they they have an actual 25 percent, rather than more correctly their personal risk went from 5 percent to 6.5 percent.
This is the state of discussion of everything Science. The problem is that the state or UN sanctified science is treated as the Gospel Truth using this kind of infantile drivel made to sound like scholarly works, and when countered by others using the same kind of language in order to “get to the masses in a language they understand” (thanks to dumbing-down), the same media says that the nay-sayers are infantile and resort to childish arguments that cannot compare to the sanctified and blessed words of the approved sources.
Crap science would never be getting any headway if it were not for enabling crap media. Believe me I see/hear it every day. I’m stuck with the CBC and even now, CKNW (local Vancouver radio) which has become the same kind of pablum and drivel outlet of Social Justice and Climate Porn.
A Himalayan typo error…for sure they really meant writing 2100, and not 2010.
The IPCC and other UN agencies make it mean whatever they want it to mean, after the fact.
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