By Paul Homewood
Even by BBC standards this is breathtakingly dishonest:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-australia-62489574
Jim Steele has written a detailed piece on this at WUWT, which is well worth reading – see here.
In short, the BBC video features Dr Norman Duke, of James Cook University, claiming that there was a massive die off of mangroves in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Australia, and that it has been caused by climate change:
The very headline used by the BBC is little more than propaganda, implying that trees have sensory ability.
As the video goes on to explain, the trees died when sea levels fell by 40cm during the El Nino of 2015/16. Mangroves, of course, grow in the intertidal zone, between high and low tide; some of the trees at the highest locations would inevitably have died when the sea levels dropped for several months.
But sea levels drop in this way every time there is an El Nino, and there is no evidence that El Ninos are becoming stronger or more common because of global warming.
And tide gauges at Weipa, which is at the tip of the Gulf, confirm several other such events in recent decades:
https://www.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=680-021
Although 40 million trees sounds a lot, it is less than 1% of Australia’s mangrove forests.
But then the dishonesty gets even worse, implying that all of Australia’s mangroves are in peril. In reality, it is only really the Carpentaria region that is affected by El Nino sea level drops.
And then it goes on to declare the natural El Nino event as “climate-related”:
Then implying that the weather was also extremely dry:
El Ninos do lead to drier weather in Northern Australia, but rainfall was actually above average in 2015/16, and the climate used to be much drier pre-1970:
In short, the weather and sea levels in the Gulf of Carpentaria in 2015/16 were what you would expect for any El Nino, and Mangrove die offs like these must be regular, natural occurrences.
Dr Norma Duke, by the way, hails from the James Cook University, You may recall that this was the very same university which Dr Peter Ridd exposed a few years ago, for its shoddy work on the Great Barrier Reef. He was, of course, sacked for telling the truth.
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August 16, 2022 at 09:30AM
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