Climate Astrologers forecast ‘Global weirding’ and climate whiplash will hit the world’s biggest cities

By Jo Nova

Shamen and fortune-tellers are back preying on suggestible minds

A new “study” warns us that the most populated cities on Earth have a distinct trend towards, wait for it, a wetter or drier weather.  Somehow, 95 of the 100 biggest cities do not have the exact same amount of rain that they had 40 years ago. (The horror). And this is “weird” they say, as if shifting patterns of rain have not been normal for the last four billion years.

The new term this week in Climate Bingo is “Climate Whiplash” —  which means a city that has had more droughts and floods lately. It’s just another sort of Global Weirding which was predicted by exactly no models anywhere until after it happened, and sometimes not even then.

The trick here is to study some random permutation in an obscure weather metric over an absurdly short time frame — like for example the moisture surplus/deficit difference between precipitation and evapotranspiration, and voila, we find a “40 year trend”. Given that the Pacific ocean oscillates on 20 – 30 year cycle, and the Atlantic on a 60 to 80 year one,  the world will never run out of 40 year meaningless trends in watery parameters.

Thus paid Blob scientists have come up with another scary headline to justify their grant, and trick a few teenage girls into voting for Big Green Governments that will  give more money to Blob Scientists.

The Guardian, as always parrots the Blob nonsense without so much as 2 seconds of googling “Drought cycles of China” where they could have found out that droughts were worse in the 1960s and 70s just before this study started.

‘Global weirding’: climate whiplash hitting world’s biggest cities, study reveals

Swings between drought and floods striking from Dallas to Shanghai, while Madrid and Cairo are among cities whose climate has flipped

Damian Carrington (Chief of Environmental Propaganda) The Guardian
Wed 12 Mar 2025 11.01 AEDT

Climate whiplash is already hitting major cities around the world, bringing deadly swings between extreme wet and dry weather as the climate crisis intensifies, a report has revealed.

Dozens more cities, including Lucknow, Madrid and Riyadh have suffered a climate “flip” in the last 20 years, switching from dry to wet extremes, or vice versa. The report analysed the 100 most populous cities, plus 12 selected ones, and found that 95% of them showed a distinct trend towards wetter or drier weather.

The shamen and fortune tellers are notorious for ambiguous projections, and it’s right there in the press release. Climate change can look like any change at all, and any change  could be climate change:

Professor Katerina Michaelides, Lead Scientist from University of Bristol, said: “The findings from our study illustrate just how differently and dramatically climate change is expressing around the globe – there is no one-size-fits-all.”

Everything is changing and none of it’s predictable. These forecasts come with excuses built in:

“Our study shows that climate change is dramatically different around the world,” said Prof Katerina Michaelides, at the University of Bristol, UK. Her co-author, Prof Michael Singer at Cardiff University, described the pattern as “global weirding”. “Most places we looked at are changing in some way, but in ways that are not always predictable,” Singer said.

All told, 17 cities are apparently suffering Climate Whiplash, though they were not important enough to list in the Guardian or the press release. Possibly because the full list included  Canberra, Chicago, and Melbourne, where millions of Guardian readers live — who might realize they are not being whipped.

The eye candy graph definitely looks jagged and scary:

But in the long run, these are bumps of nothing. For example, here’s the last 700 years of recharge rates in one part of China where rain has come and gone. Curiously, there are 200 year long cycles in groundwater recharge rates in China that seem to vary with cycles on the Sun.

 

 

Warn the children that the Global Weirding lot are just government marketers wearing labcoats. They fish for random 40 year fluctuations that no one predicted. It ain’t science.

REFERENCE

Water and climate: Rising risks for urban populations, Cardiff University, 12 March 2025 in Climate change, published by WaterAid.