The relentless catastrophising of bad weather is becoming almost a daily occurrence at the BBC, as the Corporation seeks to shore up the elitist command-and-control Net Zero project. As we have seen at the Daily Sceptic, global warming went off the boil almost two decades ago, while it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep a straight face when promoting the farcical forecasts from climate models.
“Heatwaves, deadly floods and wildfires all mean people are experiencing the link between extreme weather [BBC-speak for bad weather] and climate change,” states Matt Taylor of BBC Weather. What link might that be, one might reasonably ask. Certainly nothing that has yet been established by scientific proof. Individual events, however biblical in their incantation, cannot be provably linked to long term changes in the climate – to do so is mere conjecture.
And not very good conjecture at that, if the latest BBC example is anything to go by. Taylor starts by presenting the graph below.
Heatwaves are said to become more frequent and extreme as the bell curve moves. No mention is made that cold claims far more lives than heat. According to a paper published last year in the Lancet, a 20 year global study found that over five million people died of “non-optimal” temperatures every year. Cold was found to have killed over eight times more people than heat. Earlier this year, the U.K.’s Office for National Statistics found that recent milder winters saved nearly 30,000 lives a year.
Taylor goes on to report that last year North America was hit by a long lasting heatwave. A particular heatwave in western Canada “would have been virtually impossible without climate change, according to the World Weather Attribution network”.
However, the data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency doesn’t help the doomsday narrative. Heatwaves are currently trending towards the lower end of the 125 year scale. They were much worse in the 1930s.
Wildfires are always popular in the BBC house of climate horrors. Extreme and long-lasting heat caused by climate change is said by Taylor to provide conditions for fires “which can spread at incredible speed”. In fact, records show that acres burned by wildfires in the United States are barely a fifth of those reported in the 1930s. Over the last 25 years there has been little change in lost acreage. On a global scale, NASA shows (below) a pattern of recent falls in burned areas.
Taylor goes on to note that the northern hemisphere wildfire season has begun “unusually early” in some areas this year. “Unusually” early fires have been reported in the U.K. Let us look at recent record for Wales, a largely rural country, that might be thought particularly susceptible to vegetation going up in smoke.
Happily, Welsh Government statistics report that fires are less than half what they were at the turn of the century and they have been dropping for years.
Rainfall – too little, too much – is of course a regular win, win for the Net Zero propogandist. Taylor quotes a “water specialist” from the U.S., Peter Gleick from the National Academy of Sciences, who explains: “When areas of drought grow, like in Siberia and western U.S., that water falls elsewhere, in a smaller area, worsening flooding.” In Brisbane, Taylor notes that earlier this year 80% of the city’s rainfall fell in just six days. In fact about 1,000mm of rain has fallen in Brisbane in the first three months, well short of the record for January to March set in 1974.
Amounts of 800mm are not uncommon in the record, notably a number of years in the 1950s. The estimable climate writer Paul Homewood noted that none of the daily rainfall totals in Brisbane was remotely unprecedented. The most that fell this year was on February 28th with 344.8mm.
Homewood then supplied the above table, noting that the daily record for February was an astonishing 907mm set in 1893 in a town only 46 miles from Brisbane.
Bad, sorry, extreme weather is increasingly becoming the main battlefield for the waging of green activist warfare. Michael Shellenberger notes in his recent book Apocalypse Never that “leading media companies have been exaggerating climate change at least since the 1980s”. The United Nations IPCC summaries, press releases and authors’ statements, “betray ideological motivations, a tendency towards exaggeration, and an absence of important context”.
As I noted in my last article, Shellenberger spent 30 years promoting green activism, but wrote his book “after getting fed up with the exaggeration, alarmism and extremism that are the enemy of a positive, humanistic, and rational environmentalism”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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