David Craig, on January 22nd, 2020(Wednesday/Thursday blog)
Clarkson discovers climate disaster?
You may remember that a few weeks before Christmas, there was great excitement in the mainstream media when arch petrol-head Jeremy Clarkson seemed to agree that there was a climate crisis. Here’s how the hopeless, Greta-worshipping Grauniad reported the story:
Jeremy Clarkson finally recognises climate crisis during Asia trip
Grand Tour host says impact of global heating on lake bed in Cambodia was �genuinely alarming.�Clarkson has made what could be the biggest reversal of his 30-year career. The anti-environmental columnist has, for the first time, accepted the existence of global heating after seeing the impact for himself.
Clarkson�s epiphany came as he and his Grand Tour co-stars ran into difficulty while filming a 500-mile boat race from Siem Reap in�Cambodia�to Vung Tau in Vietnam.
The group�s jet boats slowed to a crawl and they were forced to wade through Tonl� Sap lake in the usually vast Mekong river system, which has been affected by water shortages. �The irony is not lost on me,� he told the Sunday Times. �A man who hosted a car programme for 30 years, limited to 7mph by global warming.�
He described enduring �two days of absolute frustration� as the group had to be towed through the river, which had been reduced to a �puddle�. The former Top Gear host confessed he found the �graphic demonstration� of global warming �genuinely alarming�.
So let me tell you a little bit about the Mekong River
Environmental disaster – Made in China
The Mekong springs up from the Tibetan Plateau in China and flows to the South China Sea through Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Around 60 million people depend on the river for fishing, farming and transportation.
But there’s a problem. China and Laos are furiously building dams on the Mekong and its tributaries – partly to harness hydro-electric power and partly to provide water for agricultural irrigation.
China has built�seven hydropower�dams�on the upper�Mekong�River (known as the Lancang in�China), and plans to build 21 more.�Laos, one of the region�s poorest countries, to turn itself into �the battery of Southeast Asia� by building dozens of hydroelectric dams on the Mekong River and its tributaries and selling power to neighboring countries. Last year, Laos had 46 such power plants operating and 54 more planned or under construction.
Dams disrupt the migration of fish, preventing them from reaching their spawning grounds upstream and hampering their natural life cycles. This, in turn, could significantly affect fish production in the Mekong, home to the world’s largest inland fishery. Experts have predicted up to a 40% reduction in Mekong fish stocks of by 2020, and up to 80% by 2040 as a result of hydropower dams in the region. And water extracted for irrigating agricultural land, of course, reduces the water flowing downstream of the dams.
Moreover sediment is critical to the health of the river and essential for replenishing fish life. For Vietnam, the Mekong is crucial � a source from which the country�draws approximately 50% of its foodstuffs, and which contributes more than 23% of its GDP. Vietnamese ecologist Nguyen Huu Thien is deeply worried about the next 15 to 20 years. �I am not sure how Vietnam can survive as a nation without the delta,� he said.
What the Chinese and the Laotians are doing to the Mekong with their damn dam-building is going to be an act of massive environmental and economic vandalism on a level with what the Soviets did to the once huge Aral Sea:
How about protesting against that, Greta and the brainless Greenies?????
Where are the real journalists?
What’s worrying about the Clarkson story is the way the supposed ‘journalists’ reported it.
Not a single mainstream media journalist did what I did – thought the Clarkson story sounded a bit dubious and spent just a minute Googling “Mekong River water level“. If they had, they would have found plenty of well-researched and well-written articles from serious publications detailing the catastrophic environmental and economic damage the Chinese and Laotians were causing with their short-sighted race to construct dams.
Then the journalists could have written decent balanced reports about the Mekong River disaster instead of the shallow rubbish most came out with.
Category: 
There are no real journalists left now. they are all cut-and-paste merchants too busy smoozhing with their MSM buddies telling each other how clever they are and all they need to do is regurgitate the script of a 16 (17?) year old Swedish puppet.
I’m glad I’m nearer my 3-score years and ten than being younger as I don’t think our world will last much longer!!
It really is astonishing to witness how climate change seems to be acting like a brain disease. It is human caused climate change he is talking about, but now all climate change is now assumed to be human caused. The hundreds of thousands of years of ice ages and interglacial has been wiped from our knowledge. Of course, he might have found that he has to join the believers club if he want to continue working. At least Trump gave a different view yesterday, but I suspect it was more boasting than informed comment.
I think the human race is not as intelligent as it likes to think. There seems to be a few exceptional brains and the rest of us are just good at copying. Copy works for real science and fake science and most people don’t seem to know the difference and groupthink dominates.
I’m not a fan some of Chris Packham’s environmental ideas but I thought his views on the population on BBC yesterday were interesting. He did not make much reference to climate change and I certainly think some of the issues he raised are far more important than natural climate change. He didn’t offer any solutions but he did at least raise the issue of keeping the elderly alive with no quality of life and he also touched on fertility treatments. Medical advances could be causing us problems. What if all the improvements to infant mortality rates are introducing poor genes into the gene pool? .
We do not have journalists. Havent had any for years.
Their ony required qualification now is the ability to copy and paste from Twitter , Faceebook etc or to wait on the end of a phone line for some agency to send them some hollywood gossip or photos of kardashians butt
Very informative blog – as always. Thank you, both for the information itself and for having given the necessary time to the research to obtain it. I read about Clarkson’s volt-face a few weeks ago and assumed he’d been “got at”. Well, perhaps he had, but more likely he was merely a victim of his own superficiality and readiness to tow the accepted greenie line.
I guess I am not alone in finding the sight yesterday of our Heir to the Throne fawning over the obnoxious Saint Greta more than a little distasteful. The least he should have done, given that he evidently considered it obligatory to be at Davos for the annual carbon-guzzling, first-class air travel, 5-star hotel, cordon-blue catered, hypocrites’ shindig was politely but firmly to appear to remain impartial. We’ve learned to expect such grovelling sycophancy from the libtard, woke generation, but are entitled to hope for better from the man who will probably be our Monarch before many more years have passed.
I am struggling not to be consumed by a hatred of the Chinese. They are ripping Africa to shreds, rose woods from Madagascar, mahogany from Zim and Mocambique. Industrial fishing in the Indian Ocean ( and the Pacific) – shark fin, skates plundered for their primitive medicine. On land anteaters, rhino horn, elephant tusks etc No idea of ecological balance/ care. And in the background the out of control African population as our host has brought to our attention. It’s all over really, isn’t it?
Yes Leila, it does all appear to be more or less over. It’s becoming ever more evident that the Chinese are relentlessly aiming for total world dominance economically and politically. While feeble-minded Western leaders, together apparently with the majority of the electorates who voted them into power, are navel-gazing about “religious tolerance” and “multi-culturalism” and agonising over LGBT and an ever-expanding list of more nonsensical “gender” issues, China is single-mindedly advancing scientifically and economically, not giving a fig about “carbon reduction”. China happily plunders other nations’ resources, whilst ruthlessly suppressing (and who can blame it!) any religious beliefs which it regards as antipathetic to national aspirations. The only hope for Africa is stringent birth control, thus enabling children who ARE born to receive sufficient education to enable them and their descendants to heave themselves out of the filth, poverty and ignorance in which most still exist. I believe even the revered David Attenborough has dared to hint at this, if only in the context of expanding world population and food provision.
St Greta doesn�t seem to have an opinion on China and India with their huge contribution to pollution, can�t think why! Only predominantly white Christian countries seem to be villified these days.