There’s been an interesting follow-up to this story about the Pakistan floods at the end of August (h/t Tim):
Readers will recall that the claim that one-third of the country was under water immediately set off my BS detector, and I did a full analysis here, totally debunking it.
But just a couple of days after my piece, the BBC’s More or Less radio program also looked at the claim after some viewers had complained:
They interviewed an environmental scientist who checked out what the various satellite records indicated. His conclusion was that the true figure was that about 10% of the country had been affected by floods, and much of this was short-term. [emphasis, links added]
In fact, all the BBC had to do was what I did in a few minutes, and check what NASA was reporting:
It was plainly evident that nothing like a third of the country had flooded. Indeed a simple look at the map would have shown them that much of Pakistan is either mountainous or desert, which would be impossible to flood.
They could also have checked with the UN disaster agency, OCHA, who were publishing regular reports on the flooding.
According to them, the area affected was 75000 sq km or 9% of the country:
In fact, these are precisely the sort of checks the BBC should have carried out before making their absurd claim. One which anybody with an ounce of common sense, or integrity would have immediately suspected was wrong.
It is doubly ironic that the BBC’s defense was that the one-third claim had been widely reported across the media. This shows just how utterly corrupt most of the media is nowadays.
h/t Rúnar O.
Read more at Not A Lot Of People Know That
BBC are numerically and scientifically illiterate. One of their reporters recently claimed that part of the UK coastline had lost millions of “Cubic Tonnes” of beach. I know what a ton is, I know what a tonne is, I know what a cubic meter is but I have never yet seen a definition of a cubic ton!
On this basis how can we expect them to question the “fact” that one third of Pakistan is under water?
Not to mention the fact that losing ‘millions’ of tons / cubic meters / cubic tonnes of anything — especially sand — would be a staggering amount, and the U.K. would need to request an adjustment of their total landmass with The National Geographic Society.
The BBC yesterday said the Somali food shortage was ” as a result of climate change” without consideration that there is a war going on, and covid. Oh no … its because of climate change
https://tradingeconomics.com/somalia/precipitation
If you look at 50y record of somali rainfall, you will see precious little CLIMATE change ( ie: 30 year cycles) in rainfall.
BBC declares their news is all fake when will CNN do the same?
When hell freezes over, that will be climate change as well.