It’s sad that the climate wars are now being fought out against the back-drop of personal tragedy, but the mainstream media are shameless about it. Distasteful as it may feel, the record has to be set straight.
There has been a lot of flooding around the world in recent days – central Europe, the south of England, and Japan. Certainly Japan has had a pretty torrid time of it, and the headline to a BBC article yesterday makes it clear that one person is known to have died and several are missing. Heavy rains have caused floods and landslides in the coastal region of Ishikawa in northern Japan, which suffered a deadly earthquake just nine months ago.
What the BBC has done, however, is to suggest that the rainfall is unprecedented, while giving itself wriggle room to escape claims of inaccurate news reporting, by putting the word in inverted commas. It did this in both the heading and the body of the article, presumably as the word can be taken to be a paraphrase of the actual words of Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) forecaster Sugimoto Satoshi, who told reporters: “This level of downpours has never been experienced in this region before.”
There’s just one problem – Japan has regularly seen much higher levels of rainfall and much worse floods. Wikipedia might not always be completely reliable, but it’s a handy tool to see if things like floods might have happened in certain locations in the past. Sure enough, its section on floods casts a lot of light on the “unprecedented” claim. In 1920, we learn, the Great Flood of Tokyo saw 37 houses swept away, a further 2,200 partially destroyed, and almost 400,000 damaged.
The 1938 Hanshin flood saw torrential rains result in landslides and floods, with at least 715 people losing their lives.
The 1953 Northern Kyushu flood appears to have resulted from rainfall significantly greater than this year’s “unprecedented” rainfall. Regarding this year’s tragedy, the BBC reports:
More than 120mm (4.7in) of rain was recorded in Wajima on Saturday morning, NHK reported, the heaviest downpour in the region since records began.
Yet in 1953, according to Wikipedia:
[P]rolonged rain from the Meiyu rain front…dropped 1,000mm (3.3 ft.) of rain over Mount Aso and Mount Hiko.
771 people were dead or missing, 450,000 houses flooded, and about one million people were affected.
The highest daily rainfall recorded (though the cumulative totals were much higher) was 500.2mm at Kurokawa, Kumamoto on 26th June.
The 1957 Isahaya flood, again according to Wikipedia, saw 1,108mm of rain fall in a single day (24th July). 992 people died and 3,860 were injured.
The 1967 Uetsu flood saw between 200mm and 700mm of rain fall in four days in Honshu. According to Wikipedia, 146 people died.
In 1996 UPI reported that:
Fourteen workers were missing and at least 12 others were injured Friday in a mudslide and flash flood that struck two work crews near the Yubara road tunnel in central Japan… A mudslide struck a roadworks site near the tunnel along a national highway in Otari, Nagano Prefecture, at around 10:40 a.m. and swept away 15 workers…
Police said four of them were rescued but the other 11 were missing. A flash flood also struck a short distance upstream, washing away four road workers. One was rescued with severe injuries and the three others were reported missing. A total of 11 workers at the downstream site were injured and a further 27 were stranded in the two locations, police said. About 50 workers were in the area at the time, officials said. Heavy snow blanketed the region Tuesday and rains of up to 49 mm (19 inches) the following day were blamed for the floods and mudslides…
There have been more recent floods too, but they are likely to be blamed on climate change, so I conclude with a reference to the 1828 Siebold typhoon. Again relying on Wikipedia, we learn that this is the worst storm in Japanese history. 19,113 people were officially reported to have been killed, and 18,625 were injured. A very short abstract (“Reconstruction of typhoon tracks affected Kyushu, western Japan in 1828 “) suggests that 1828 would have had the climate attribution people out in force had we witnessed similar weather in 2024:
In addition to the “Siebold Typhoon”, we newly revealed that three typhoons (July 10, August 12, October 2) made landfall in Kyushu in 1828. Among them, two typhoons (July 10 and October 2) made landfall in the same area as the “Siebold Typhoon”. On the other hand, August 12 typhoon made landfall in eastern Kyushu, which differs from the “Siebold Typhoon” . In 1828, daily meteorological observations were made by Siebold and his colleagues at a small artificial island “Dejima” (Nagasaki) in western Kyushu. By analyzing their pressure data, we detected decrease of atmospheric pressure (lower than 1000hPa) corresponding to passage of four typhoons, including the “Siebold Typhoon”. We also revealed that unusually high number of typhoons made landfall in Kyushu in 1828 by analyzing interannual variations in frequency of storm surge events during the 19th century.
In fairness, the numerous floods experienced by Japan in the last 200 years, many of which were far worse than those tragically experienced this year, may have affected other areas of Japan (none of the Japanese islands seem to have been unscathed), so that there may just be literal truth in the claim that the are affected this year has not encountered such heavy rain since records began. In the scheme of things, however, that’s not so much of a claim, since the very earliest official weather records in Japan date back only to 1873, following the construction of the Hakodate Meteorological Observatory. Indeed, detailed JMA weather data are only available from the late 1960s to the present.
In conclusion, the BBC can hide behind its inverted commas, and it may even be strictly true that the JMA rainfall records do not show any heavier rainfall in the limited region of Japan affected by this month’s floods. However, if the floods were put in historical context, it would become clear that – tragic though all incidents of this kind are – they are not, in fact, unusual. The BBC might have enjoyed the benefit of the doubt but for the fact that the headline (carefully constructed?) gives the impression, or at least can certainly be read as suggesting, that the recent rainfall is unprecedented in Japan. It isn’t. Worse, they chose to end the article by claiming that “Japan has seen unprecedented rainfall in parts of the country in recent years, with floods and landslides sometimes causing casualties.”
While the second part of that sentence is undeniably true, the first part makes a highly dubious claim. Of course, it’s all part of the climate chaos narrative that is able to take hold only so long as people are ignorant of history. Interestingly, and by contrast, the Guardian report of the flooding is much more balanced and does not make the “unprecedented” claim that is made by the BBC.
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