There have been headlines across the mainstream media following the BBC and Met Office complaints of “unprecedented levels of trolling” during the recent brief heatwave in the U.K. Hundreds of “abusive” tweets and emails have been received, claimed the BBC, one of which urged the forecasters to “get a grip”. BBC meteorologist Matt Taylor said he had never experienced anything like it in nearly 25 years working in weather. Violently abusive and threatening messages are, of course, unacceptable, but a review of Mr. Taylor’s own twitter feed for the period around the heatwave shows no abuse, unless one counts a sarcastic comment that, “we are doomed Captain Mainwaring, we’re doomed”.
Met Office lead meteorologist Alex Deakin claimed it was “scary in some ways”. He added that he found it “frustrating and offensive” on behalf of his colleagues – some of the great minds in climate science. “Show a bit of respect,” he said. One of the tweets complained: “What a load of rubbish nanny state again having another fake emergency as you will do as your (sic) told.” The “Get a grip” man went on to say: “This will not last. It will be back to freezing soon.” Professor Liz Bentley, chief executive of the Royal Meteorological Society and a former BBC meteorologist, added that no one should have to deal with this kind of abuse, “especially when the scientific evidence is so clear”.
Needless to say, this level of ‘abuse’ would barely register with anyone who dares to challenge climate groupthink. After all, we are all used to being called ‘deniers’ with its clear implication that we are morally indistinguishable from Holocaust deniers. Seemingly without irony, the Metro newspaper wrote: “Weather forecasters have faced unprecedented levels of trolling from climate change deniers over this month’s extreme heatwave.” Over at the Met Office, Professor Peter Stott has recently written a book entitled Hot Air: The Insider Story of the Battle Against Climate Change Denial. In the course of a promotional interview in the Guardian, he referred to “denialists”, and noted there were “fewer false-balance debates on TV between deniers and scientists”. Recently, the green activist Al Gore compared “climate deniers” to the Uvalde police in Texas who waited an hour to attack the gunman who shot dead 21 students and teachers.
Any attempt to bring scientific scepticism to the debate around ‘settled’ climate orthodoxy is, of course, as the unpleasant Gore demonstrates, met with constant vulgar abuse.
This tweet recently appeared following an article in the Daily Sceptic reporting on a number of sceptical views on current climate orthodoxy. Richard Lindzen has spent a lifetime in meteorology and atmospheric science, and holds the honorary title of Emeritus Professor at MIT.
If you want to be loved in journalism, goes the old saying – buy a dog. You certainly need to be a less sensitive flower than many BBC weather correspondents. Marr is fully signed up to the command-and-control Net Zero political agenda. Known as ‘Red Andy’ from his time at Cambridge, he has a first class degree in English. Thankfully, this qualification has not stopped him giving us the benefit of his views on a wide variety of political, economic, social and scientific matters during a 30-year career in journalism. It could be worse. He could be a PPE-ist.
Of course, at the heart of the BBC and Met Office complaints is a deep irritation that their ideology is being challenged. Investigation of the complex workings of the Earth’s atmosphere is still a substantial work in progress, and a great deal is open to debate. The ‘settled’ climate ideology is a political construct, designed to radically change and control economic and social lifestyles across the world. As with all ideologies, it relies on a great deal of faith, and the ruthless suppression of alternative narratives.
Global warming was the initial driver of this latest green campaign and when that started to run out of steam over 20 years ago ‘climate change’ became ‘climate breakdown’, with messages from the heavens in the form of bad weather events, then a ‘climate emergency’. But despite over 50 years of work, scientists are no nearer discovering how much global temperatures will rise, or fall, if carbon dioxide is doubled in the atmosphere. Consistently wrong climate models provide forecasts of thermogeddon based on guesses that temperatures will continue to rise. No science paper has yet been produced that proves conclusively that humans cause all or most climate change by burning fossil fuel, and ditto for the fanciful current suggestions that single event extreme weather is also caused by our wicked ways.
The climate writer Paul Homewood was unimpressed by the BBC’s recent reaction to criticism. A couple of years ago, he explained, the BBC senior management took the decision to build climate change indoctrination into regular programming, including weather forecasts. “It is unsurprising that viewers are now reacting,” he noted.
Over on the Watts Up With That? climate site, Eric Worrall made similar points, suggesting that the Met climate change clergy faced a social media uprising. He said Britain was in for a horror winter of spiralling price rises and shortages. In his opinion, this was “largely a consequence of a long-term Met Office and BBC climate scare campaign which undermined mainstream political support for reliable energy”.
Worrall is also clear that politics lies at the root of the climate change campaign. He suggests voting for politicians whose focus is on today’s problems. Even if they don’t win, politicians will be panicked into responding, he explained. “It will no longer matter what Met or BBC climate scaremongers believe or say, if they lose their position of influence,” he suggested.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
Stop Press: The Government recently awarded a contract for a company to advise on “Everything Net Zero”. The value? £70 billion over four years. Meanwhile, household energy bills continue to soar.
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These nonladies and ungentleman have learnt the lessons of the pandemic well: Someone who’s in control of the megaphones can tell an unlimited amount of plain lies unchallenged. There was no summer in 2021, it just kept raining until autumn. Then, preciously few warm and somewhat dry weeks followed before it started getting cold again. With the exception of April, winter 2021/ 2022 basically lasted until the first week of July. There was plenty of rain and more often than not, it was so uncomfortably cold that I had to turn the heating on. I’ve never done that in June before. Come July, sort-of sommer came. Often overcast and rather cool but with longer pauses between the downpours. In the middle of this exactly three warm (not hot) days occurred. This doesn’t make an extreme heatwave and BBC employees who keep claiming the contrary and who know very well that they’re lying shouldn’t wonder why annoyed people keep calling them out on that.
Was it at least a safe and effective heatwave?
We’ve had some average July days this year, two really hot days thanks to a particular weather system, that was followed by a week of below average temperature and above average rainfall. Now it’s back to July norms. Overall I’d guess this July’s average temperature was middle to slightly low compared to the multi-year average.
There’s a technically interesting article in the Udraigna on this:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/uk-farmers-count-cost-as-heatwave-kills-fruit-and-vegetable-crops
The first interesting thing to note here is that the top heading and the sub heading already differ in meaning, the top heading claiming a catastrophe (of sorts) occurred while the sub heading states that a catastrophe might occur if more extreme heat caused by clima crisis materializes. Chances are that the point of the sub headline is mostly to put extreme heat and clima crisis in one sentence, thereby implying a factually wrong cause-and-effect relation.
Half of the article is composed of quotes from a guy running a green wholesale business for fruit and vegetables in London. This is basically just a lot of handwaiving as no London business man has any first-hand experience of growing stuff in the fields somewhere out of London. The most amusing one is his assertion that he had faced a day long shortage of berries because they had all been cooked out in the open. As the cooking temperature of water is 100C and not 40C (at Heathrow), this certainly didn’t happen. As the next sentence reveals, this was really because fewer berries were picked for a couple of days, followed by the assertion that there could be real trouble of more hot spells occurred.
It then switches to farmers being concerned about the possible effects of the recent dry spell, implying that a few weeks without rain (we haven’t seen yet) would be somehow uncommon and dangerous during the summer months. Farmers – obviously – doesn’t refer to farmers but to another pencil pusher, namely, the deputy secretary of the union of farmers. Again, nothing has happened so far, but if different stuff would happen in future, there could well be difficulties in future.
— I really wish I was better at describing this, IMHO, the article is a textbook example of lying by implication while accurately reporting that nothing happened —
I was reading today that British winegrowers don’t want any rain because they are going to have the best wine year ever if the dry weather continues. My own observations show bumper crops of fruit coming on the trees and the wheat still standing, waiting to be harvested, has ripened perfectly (as opposed to some recent years where it has gone black on the stalk due to the wet). Even some blackberries are ready to pick.
According to the Met office, the definition of a heatwave is FIVE consecutive days of very high temperatures…not the one and a half we had the other week – Monday was Costa del Sol hot, Tuesday started that way, but by the afternoon it was raining. Call that a heatwave? No, Met office, you can’t because it b****y wasn’t you dorks.
The climate changer dream summer was 2018 which it was really unpleasantly hot and dry for an unusually long time. Since then, they’ve been trying to rerun this based on media fantasies every summer (with the exception of 2020 and 2021, when these clowns of doom were too occupied with COVID to care for the weather). 2018 was also the last year when we had normal weather forecasts in summer instead of climate catastrophe nudging by swapping the informational map showing a green outline of the country with cloud, sun and rain symbols to indicate local weather conditions to one using a gradient of light red to dark red calibrated such that the highest temperatures expected on a certain day get the darkest red, regardless of what these temperatures actually are. Any other information which used to be on this map has been silently dropped.
I’d really like to ask this BBC meteorlogist of 25 years why the BBC has chosen to remove the cloudy/ rainy/ sunny/ windy symbols from the overview map in favour of focussing exclusively on temperatures indicated in colours commonly associated with mortal danger from fire. There’s certainly no science which has determined that clouds, rain and wind don’t occur over England anymore. Hence, the BBC is selectively withholding important meteorological information about the actual weather in England in its visualizations of the weather forecast. What’s the rationale behind this?
Great points but this stopped being about observable reality, demonstrable fact and science long ago.
Crybullies, as they are known, have been a long established tactic of the left. It’s pretty easy to do:
Step 1, stoke up anger with a series of unprovoked inflammatory and/or abusive social media posts.
Step 2, cry victim when you get the inevitable backlash. If you are an A-lister this involves a sympathetic appearance on the BBC or in The Guardian.
The best way to deal with a crybully is to give them something to cry about, lol.
For most climate alarmists it’s a fashionable bourgeoise religion and one that ties in nicely with their pathological snobbery and their desire to tell the ghastly stinky little people how to live their lives. But for the BBC – the Grand Muftis of the sect – it’s more serious. They have most of their pensions invested in carbon trading and so-called renewables. The pyramid is collapsing and the only way they think they can shore up its foundations is by calling in ever more frequent truck loads of tax payer funded junk science bullshit, otherwise it’s goodbye gold plated pensions.
Driest July since 1935 according to met office as reported by the BBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62382703
Not sure how wet July 1976 was or July 2003.
This is the same bullshit as with the global temperatures: They’re averaging different rainfall measurements to arrive at a fictional England-wide level of rain. Mathematically, averages are subject to distortions by outliers and regardless of that, averaging measurements of different quantities still makes no sense.
A sensible way to present this information would be something like the “We’re on fire!” temperature map, just using a neutral colour (eg, light grey to dark gray) which would show how much rain was measured where. One could also create a so-called histogram by adding measurements rounded to mm of the same value together and present the outcome as 2D-plot. One could get then an idea of weather trends by calculating the average number of entries in each category for a number of years.
This isn’t exactly rocket science, more basic working with numerical data. When the Met Office doesn’t do this, either the people working there are very unqualified or a serious presentation of rainfall data would not suit itself to the intended kind of headlines.
I came across a speech made by Hitler in Munich in 1937. He emphasises community, much like Twitter, Facebook and the New World Order gangs.
“…And that brings us to the problem of freedom! Freedom, yes! Insofar as the interest of the national community gives the individual freedom, it is given! Where the freedom affects or even impairs the interest of the national community, the freedom of the individual ceases! Then the freedom of the national community takes the place of the freedom of the individual.”
If you’re stupid enough to watch the BBC you get what you deserve. They’re a propagandist organisation; they pump out propaganda.
Turn it off.
On a positive note. Greta Thumberg has just won (for the 3rd consecutive year) the award for “International Truant of the Year”
The 4-year contract for broadband services costing £70 billion sounds like a modest Government programme to manipulate our lifestyles.
The £70bn contract went to a small company called Place Group Ltd, which in its last published accounts had 2 employees.
Correct. More about this surprising contract award here:
https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/small-company-cornwall-awarded-giant-7407664
Most people promoting net zero and a climate change “emergency” are not scientistists and Marr is a typical example. I listem to the view of those scientists who have studied climate and what has efffected it over billions of years rather than people whose opinion is based on what happened in the last few weeks. Most real climate scientists tell us that CO2 generated by humankind has a very minor impact on climate compared to a whole list of other factors that mankind can neither impact or control. There is no current climate emergency apart from that generated by politicians and companies that benefit from the idea of it.
The climate crisis scam that is reaching a scope of almost 1 trillion per year worldwide. This is all funded by tax money from rich Western Countries treasuries using Non Profits NGOs, fake charities, billionaire class trust funds & charities, University grants & government funded agencies. Tens of thousands are making a living & rely on peddling this religion for their livelihood. Climate change only occurs in rich western countries for a reason. This climate crisis will not end until rich Western Countries stop allowing abuse of their tax systems.