Calling Europe's Floods "Climate" is Unscientific Propaganda

By Craig Rucker President of CFACT

"When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." To the warming-Left, every natural weather event looks like "climate."  Europe has been hit by devastating floods with the death toll reaching 188 and rising.  Of course the usual suspects are exploiting this genuine, heart-rending tragedy to advance their climate agenda.  

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Germany must "be faster in the battle against climate change." 

"Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo said the link with climate change was clear."

No less an expert than teenage high school dropout Greta Thunberg posted:  

Deadly heatwaves, floods, storms, wildfires, droughts, crop failures...  This is not "the new normal."  We're at the very beginning of a climate and ecological emergency, and extreme weather events will only become more and more frequent.  After the catastrophic recent developments - especially in Western Europe - everyone seems to be talking about the climate emergency, and rightly so. But as soon as these tragedies are over we'll most likely forget about it and move on like before.  Unless we treat the crisis like a crisis all the time, we will not be able to halt the climate emergency.

All three of them, along with the rest of the politicians, media and pressure groups attributing Europe's flooding to climate are shamefully wrong.

Does anyone rationally believe that Europe's floods, or the heatwave in the western U.S. for that matter, were meaningfully worse because the temperature of the Earth warmed slightly, far less than climate models projected, almost entirely last century?

Australia's intrepid Joanne Nova did her usual no-nonsense job of showing that Europe's floods, devastating though they may be, are historically normal. In fact, in 1714 Europe flooded on Christmas Eve killing 14,000!  "It's as if European history doesn't exist," she writes (posted at CFACT.org).

Every so often Europe's rivers will inevitably flood.  The flooding will be worse when, as happened this time, pressure systems leave the weather lingering in place, rather than pushing the storm rapidly through.  This is how Hurricane Dorian devastated the Bahamas two years ago.  This type of extreme weather event cannot be prevented through taxation, redistribution, carbon trading, windmills, solar panels, or electric vehicles. 

We can, however, protect people and property from extreme weather through forecasting, early warning, preparedness and response.

This is where Europe's bureaucrats devastatingly dropped the ball.  This is the preventable man-made disaster.

The London Times reports that the reason for the flood's terrible loss stems from  a "monumental failure of the warning system."  Excerpts via the U.K.'s GWPF at Climate Depot: 

The first signs of catastrophe were detected nine days ago by a satellite orbiting 500 miles above the tranquil hills around the Rhine river. 

Over the next few days a team of scientists sent the German authorities a series of forecasts so accurate that they now read like a macabre prophecy: the Rhineland was about to be hit by "extreme" flooding, particularly along the Erft and Ahr rivers, and in towns such as Hagen and Altena. 

Yet despite at least 24 hours warning that predicted, almost precisely, which districts would be worst afflicted when the rains came, the flood still caught many of its victims largely unawares... 

 "People should have been receiving warnings; people should have understood the warnings. It's no use having massive computer models predicting what's going to happen if people don't know what to do in a flood." 

Instead, the overwhelming majority of people in the path of the floods carried on with their everyday lives, oblivious to the danger, as the waters began to rise .Western Europe had all the infrastructure it needed to protect its people.  It failed to use it.

Don't let Europe's failed bureaucracy wiggle off the hook by shifting the blame to "climate."  Europe was going to flood whether you drove to work and used electricity or not.  The weather warnings were clear, but not shared with the public.  Tragic.

There are a few particularly onerous weasel words the global warming campaign uses when natural disaster strikes.  Warming makes extreme weather "more likely" and "more severe," they say.  The fact that global temperature did not make the disaster meaningfully more likely or severe they leave out entirely.  This is where the media fails its responsibility and declines to ask the relevant questions.

The New York Times reports that team warming is planning to use "rapid attribution" of natural weather events to climate in an attempt to preempt those of us prepared to present the scientific and historical evidence that falsifies their claims.  

That's how human behavior leads to weather that kills -- as it did in Europe.

For nature and people too,