If you took the last 10,000 years and laid them out as a neat, clinical timeline—then started counting every flood that hit a specific region between then and now—you’d see what looks like a massive, alarming increase. A biblical surge of watery doom. And the climate hysterics would jump up and down, shrieking, “See? Proof!”
But stop for a moment and ask the obvious question: did floods simply pop into existence the moment humans decided that living in caves and clubbing dinner was no longer fashionable? Did rivers wake up one morning in 3500 BC and say, “You know what, boys? Let’s try this overflow thing.”
Or—brace yourself—is it simply that nobody wrote these things down? Because for the vast majority of human existence, no one did. For most of our species’ time on Earth, if a village was washed away by a swollen river, the only documentation was a pile of soggy bones and a few traumatized survivors telling stories that died with them.
The closer we get to the present, the more granular the information becomes. The 19th century? A treasure trove of meticulous notes, letters, newspapers, and parish records. The Dark Ages? You’d be hard pressed to find anything beyond a monk scribbling in the margins about a plague, a famine, or the bishop’s gout. There’s a reason it’s called the Dark Ages—we’re in the dark about almost everything that happened.
Fast-forward to the last fifty years, and humanity has vomited out more data than in all previous human history combined. That includes records of every puddle, every overflowing stream, every inch of rain that fell slightly out of line. Naturally, the database of floods explodes—not because the floods are new, but because we finally bothered to write them down.
Floods have always been there, happily wrecking things since before the first brick was stacked into the first city wall. They didn’t suddenly become dramatic, lethal, or more frequent. The only real change is that we now trap every event in digital amber. And yet, the climate cult insists that because the record begins at a certain point, the phenomenon began at that point.They act as if history started in 1970 and anything before that is myth—conveniently forgetting that nature didn’t wait for humans to buy clipboards before misbehaving.