Floods in Texas and Louisiana

We are assured by Trump that it isn't man made

Yes, we were saying the same thing today. Of course, the floods in the US are devastating and tragic - obviously to those who have lost friends and family - and homes (especially those who are poor and perhaps uninsured).

However, as has been said, they are not on the same scale as the floods in Asia where hundreds - and possibly thousands - of lives have been lost and where millions of people are at risk of disease and hunger. It is quite noticeable how little attention the media has paid to the personal stories and individual tragedies of these people.

Channel 4 news at 7 last night had an item on the floods in Asia. It was mentioned in the headlines with the floods in the USA, and the facts that so many people have died and that so many are in urgent need of help were made clear. Unfortunately I couldn't watch the whole programme last night, but I do normally find Channel 4 news very good, and it often gives a different view of things from the BBC.

Another thing that I saw before I had to turn off last night was a scientist (American) pointing out that the floods in Texas are worse than they should have been as the water in the Gulf of Mexico so warm because of climate change. Trump would probably regard her as a traitor!

Tonight the C4 news led with the US floods but the Asian ones were mentioned at the same time, including by their US reporter. The second item is the Asian floods.

It has always

Ignore that!!

www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/641041/melania-trump-texas-houston-flood-hurricane-harvey-flood-watch-barbie-sexy-pictures

guardian.ng/life/whatsnew/dear-melania-trump-a-flood-zone-is-not-a-runway/

Just watching I TV news. Top flood story America. Why?

www.thecanary.co/2017/08/31/bestselling-author-naomi-klein-nails-exactly-whats-wrong-media-today-video/

Naomi Klein linking the two floods, in US and Asia.

What difference does it make whether the cause of climate change is man-made or 'natural'? Whatever the cause climate change is happening and it makes sense not to do anything that might make it worse.

I think the US floods are headline news because it is affecting a huge area of land that has not flooded in the past. Rather like the way the great rain on 2007 got all the news because it flooded huge areas of the UK (including my village) that had no history of flooding or fear of flooding.

Bangladesh is built on the Ganges delta. Floods are an annual event, and people adapt to them, just as people living in exceptionally cold or hot areas adapt to their conditions.

This year the floods are particularly bad in both Bangladesh and the US but the US has more people using social media to film it, tweet it and all the rest.

Sorry, but of course it matters. If it's manmade we can try and do something to slow it down.
Just as when we realised that it was CFCs that were destroying the ozone layer and stopped using CFCs in fridges, it made a big difference.

No it doesn't, whether it is man-made or natural we need to take all the measures we are taking to stop making a bad situation worse by our behaviour. Even if climate change is natural, releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere through our actions is only going to make a bad situation worse. If it is man made, once again, most of the cause goes back far into time and all we can do at this stage is not add coal to the fire.

That doesn't make sense.
If we release more CO2 into the atmosphere through our actions it makes it manmade.
It's not just CO2, by the way. Methane is worse.
Stop eating meat if you want to stop methane getting into the atmosphere.

No, not if the underlying cause is natural.

If I pour petrol on a wildfire caused by a lightening strike, it doesn't change the cause of the fire, although it will make it worse.

But lightning strikes and wildfires are increasing in number because of global warming. They don't stand in isolation.

Sorry, the point of your last post eludes me DJ

How do you work out how much of global warming is natural and how much is manmade?
We can only do something about the manmade.
Every 1 degree rise in temperature increases the number of lightning strikes by 12% We only have two degrees to play with.
We have to do as much as we can to reduce global warming. Otherwise we may as well just give up.

"This is for two reasons. One, as temperatures increase and we are seeing warming across the globe, the glaciers and the snowmelt are swelling rivers as they come through, down through the Himalayas, through Nepal, India, and into Bangladesh, where they go into the sea. At the same time, warming temperatures in the sea means that there’s more moisture in the atmosphere, which means more intense and heavier rains.

Now, this is not something new. Climate scientists have been telling us and have predicted what would be happening. That these kind of storms, these intensity of storms, which used to happen every few hundred years, would happen much more regularly, and every decade, and now become literally an annual thing. The problem of course is the ability of people and the government to be able to respond. When you have these floods which wipe away infrastructure, schools, hospitals, roads, it is very hard to rebuild. And of course, these are countries which have had and do have flood systems, and those are overwhelmed."
The reason these floods are getting worse in Bangladesh, etc., is because of climate change. The increase in temperature is not natural. We can't just stand by and do nothing.
I lived in York for ten years. We had four 1 in a hundred year floods in those ten years. That wasn't natural.

dj, all this is irrelevant. All I said was that it doesn't really matter what anyone believes as to the cause of global warning, as long as we all do all we can to reduce anything we are doing that may make a bad situation, however it is caused, worse.

Personally, I am quite happy accepting the evidence that global warning is man-made.