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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My advice in life in general is not to get too excited by phenomena.Just chill and contemplate the deeper levels.
Chill? Haven’t you heard about warming.
Warming.Cooling !!! the morons have told so many lies. while pushing their scam they themselves cannot get the story right
It’s bound to be difficult for serial liars to keep with their own nonsense, so have a care for them.
My personal favorite is still the winter 2020/21 in Germany when amounts of snow which seemed very moderate, although more like winter than what has been the norm for about 25 – 30 years, to someone who lived in the 1970s and 1980s, went through the headlines as examples of extreme weather caused by climate change.
To a climate change zealot, everything is evidence of climate change.
Snow is extreme weather.
Hot weather is also extreme.
And mild weather is proof that the weather isn’t how it used to be because we used to have more hot and cold spells.
You can never win with these people.
That’s a special case of To someone with an axe to grind, everything proves that he has been right all the time (or rather, he utilizes everything to claim that). But this story was obviously targetted at people lacking person experience with snowy winters and supposed to scare them. Hence, pointing out that this was by no means extreme make sense.
Lomberg provides the answer to this.
30 years ago there wasn’t a cellphone on the planet. Nowadays you can’t go anywhere without tripping over someone reporting rain as extreme weather.
What we’re seeing is an upsurge in detection of extreme weather, not extreme weather itself.
I agree, but it’s not detection as such that has increased, rather the globally-connected news media, as you say, has reporters poised everywhere to look out for some heavy rain and connect it to climate change in some sensationalist headline. If the above graphs are anything to go by, then detection of the relevant metrics by meteorologists has been sound for at least a century. But it just wasn’t used so fervently to prop up a narrative that green activists are so desperately trying to resuscitate.
Detection of hurricanes, wildfires and weather fronts have increased dramatically since satellites were first used in the mid 70’s.
Doppler radar now detects tornadoes that were never seen. They can disappear as quickly as they appear.
No. What we’re seeing is geo engineering or now known as solar radiation management! You could not make it up.
All you need to know (if you’re interested) is here:
https://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/
Make sure to check out the ‘About’ page to see how the site started.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering
As far as I can gather, geoengineering (chemtrails) goes something like this.
Global warming is happening and will be catastrophic, so we’ll seed the clouds and such like to stop the planet warming. But the alarmists say it’s still warming, so it can’t be working.
If it is working and the earths temperature should be 5ºC above where it is now, why is no one stepping forward to take credit for stopping the warming using chemtrails?
If the planet isn’t warming to any considerable degree, then why continue to use chemtrails?
You need to read at least some of the content on the website I posted above. All answers to your questions; and then some; will be revealed.
I’ve looked into chemtrails before. It could be happening, the technology is available, but why would they do it, for the reasons I gave?
It is very deeply disturbing and answers many questions I have been puzzling over regarding the construction of the “Climate Emergency” as a weapon now seemingly being used against the population of the world.
We currently seem to be under attack from every direction – including the blue skies above us!
In the midst of this Carbon Dioxide is clearly not the problem, growing human ‘unreason’ is!
Oh dear I was really hoping that I would be able to avoid chemtrails but if its ‘deeply disturbing’ I now have a moral duty to investigate. I can see why people just ignore it all and carry on in blissful ignorance. This little light of mine is getting dimmer by the day.
Why indeed?
Ask the Industrial,Military Scientific, Deep State Complex, which control all US policies in all matters and exports them to the world.
Devastating website!
Explains the Chen Trails I know see every blue sky day over my house!
Yes. You can see a beautiful blue sky slowly turning white as a couple of planes fly back and forth emitting this toxic rubbish. Then watch as the plumes feather out across the sky eventually blocking out the sun. Several days later the weather turns cold, wet and miserable….. or worse depending on what havoc TPTB want to reap!
It’s very interesting reading why Dane Wigginton set up the site and about his engineering background.
Once you begin connecting all the different dots across myriad subjects, you slowly begin to see the elephant in the room…or…the world we think we live in.
This is a great video about observation originally made for a campaign about bike safety.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahg6qcgoay4
That’s the story of the news generally. Up until a few decades ago, international ‘news’ was usually stale by the time anyone received it.
Australian cameraman Neil Davis relates in Frontline how the footage he shot in Vietnam took a week reach the tv reports. Now you can practically see the carnage in real time.
See geoengineeringwatch.org for explantions.
Could also describe the last two years of covidmania. Or wokery, the obsession with slavery and imperialism. Sexism and misogyny. You name it.
Exaggeration without context. Millions are dying from a rebranded flu. Our cities were built on slavery, despite the industrial revolution providing the wealth. Women are treated more poorly now than they were in 1850.
Is the antidote to provide the context? Probably not.
Australia, which since colonisation until the 1980’s, was known as “The Land of Flood and Fire”.
The perfect weathervane for climate alarmists, if you forget it’s history.
Well its been bloody freezing most of April, global warming my arse. There has always been extreme weather but what there hasn’t always been is an internet connecting together bilions of fuckwits
If you want policies that can’t be challenged base them on something unpredictable like the weather. That sounds like a quote from ‘Last of the summer wine’.
The weather is both unpredictable and predictable in that from time to time something extreme will happen, it always has.
Just think about it, the warmer it gets we will be able to spend less on heating our homes, so saving on extortionate utility bills, leading to fewer fossil fuels being used. Win, win…
Its been a very late spring
Not according to the nature diary I’ve been keeping since I moved here in 2011.
It has been a really good spring for wood anemones, early purple orchids and wood spurge.
Blossom on Damson trees was very early!
To extend Cloud6’s comment. Reduced northern sea ice could mean a newly-navigable and much shorter journey for container ships bringing all our stuff from China. Hence, less diesel consumption. Result! But the impending depression will see to that anyway.
As the covid fraud depends on people getting ill, as they always have done; climate change fraud depends on crappy weather, which we’ve always had.
But hypothetically speaking, if man made climate change is real, why won’t the BBC talk about those most likely to be responsible?
What do we suppose happens when the Saudis transform entire desert regions into green hills? I’d expect it to cause strong winds in other parts of the world when the oxygen produced by the greenery rises too fast due to the scorching temperatures out there.
What do we suppose happens when the Chinese dump X-amount of sand into international waters to build countless new islands and claim as military territory? A slight rise in sea levels per chance? This is also the trendy thing to do in Abu Dhabi for celebrities to buy their own islands.
I don’t think the sea is rising but if the Greta gang want to complain about the possibility that it is, they need to start with the obvious suspects.
Of course this won’t happen because it’s another fraud to move along Agenda 21-30.
Extreme weather in the UK!! Giving a rainy/windy day a name does NOT make it extreme.
I would say: “I’m just waiting for the nutters to blame extreme cold” on the supposed warming … but they’ve already done that.
Those who remember, and were in the path of, the 1987 ‘hurricane’ in the UK…can you imagine that event occurring now and the massive flurry of doom it would cause amongst the climate worriers? My god, they’d be wetting themselves with the excitement of it, and it would be held up as an example of imminent catastrophe.
I flew back into Gatwick the morning after, took me 8 hours to get down to the south coast, hardly any transport, roads closed plus all my fences gone in the garden, memories!
This diagram looks very like one in The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray (and many other publications on the same subject) showing that small group differences in mean intelligence make a big difference at the extremes. I hope Matt Taylor has not been reading heresy.
By the way, are the temperatures of heatwaves normally distributed? I don’t know, but I should have imagined that low and high energy events would conform to a power law like earthquakes.
Way too soon to be trying the Horror Weather scenario again. But it must say something about the R vs U story’s lack of success that it needs to be replaced after just two or three months. And that was in itself timed to distract from the crumbling covid narrative.
Weather forecasters are even bigger liars than politicians. You get a forecast from Barbie after the news that its going to be sunny tomorrow, then 30 seconds later you get the local Barbie doing local weather, telling us that it will rain. I wish I could work a job where there are no consequences to my output.
Far to much money is being made by too many people for any of this nonsense to go away any time soon.
Also it gives government an unacceptable level of control over us, just as the “pandemic” did.
There are lies, damned lies and climate change propaganda. No prizes for guessing which is the worst.
Climate change is racist
The Climate Alarmists remind me of the cartoon Scooby-Doo which I watched as a child. In every episode the young, impressionable group gets “spooked” by a ghost/monster ….. they panic and run frantically about … only for the ghost/monster to be revealed as a hoax.
The “climate crisis” and the monster CO2 are exactly the same….. a hoax.
a “water specialist” from the U.S., Peter Gleick from the National Academy of Sciences
I may have picked a different ‘specialist’.
Document forgery for the ’cause’ tends to give the game away.
What is in the Chem Trails and what are they doing to the atmosphere?
Chem trails contain highly toxic molecules of H2O, which are programmed by the CIA to evaporate and become invisible after a few minutes.
Their main effect is to fuel conspiracy theories and turn men into Incels, to stop them breeding.
The thing about ‘bad weather’ or ‘extreme weather events’ is that the outcomes of identical events might be different in history due to the general human population and the amount of concrete covering the land.
Anyone who has lived in a hilly part of a major city has seen how a cataclysmic thunderstorm can turn a road into a torrential river. Concrete doesn’t let water soak through and the only escape is drains. If it had been a field of grass, there would probably have still been running water, but far less of it. So the outcomes of the same storm are now ‘more extreme’. Damn city dwellers, eh?!
But most of the arguments are based on complete historical ignorance. I’ve barely come across a single UK greenie who has heard of the great 1961/62 flood in California. That’s the single greatest extreme flooding event in the modern history of California. It hinged on the pineapple express systems from Hawaii hitting California at just the right angle so that the contours of the Sierra Nevada were almost at right angles to the direction of the storm: that caused maximum stalling of the weather system when it hit the mountains and caused maximum rainfall south and west of the range. The crux of the 1861/62 event was that storm after storm seemed to approach at pretty much the optimal angle and quite a few were pretty warm, so less snow fell and more rain fell, which caused the entire central valley to turn into a vast inland lake which remained a lake for most of the 1862 growing season.
It’s the same with the great 1987 storm in the South of England. Those sorts of winds really aren’t that rare in the NW Highlands and the Shetlands, but because they came down south in areas of high population, they became an ‘extreme weather event’. Up in the Shetlands, they never build houses with more than one storey because they know what winds they can get. The population density of the NW Highlands is so low that 100mph winds is rarely ‘newsworthy’.
The reality is that recordings of historical events tend to be much more qualitative than the data-driven hypochondria of today. We do know, however, that great floods in China in the late 19th- and early 20th century were far, far worse than anything the West has experienced the past 50 years. Far, far worse. But that doesn’t fit the PC narrative, does it?
We know that there have been California droughts lasting a few centuries, but everyone keeps damn quiet about that too. Just accepting that California isn’t usually a temperate rainforest like Washington State doesn’t fit the scaremongerer’s agenda, does it?
We know that the Romans grew grapes in Lincolnshire the best part of 2000 years ago, which doesn’t fit well with us suddenly being the hottest we’ve ever been. So keep quiet about that too, eh?
And as for the growth of the Caledonian Forest 5000 years ago being promoted by warmer, agreeably damper climes? Off with my head for raising those inconvenient truths….
1861/62 flood in California, not 1961/62. Damn typo and inability to edit!!
As weather events are driven entirely by energy – ie thermal – gradients, perhaps it is worth noting that if the Earth is warming the due to the physics of thermal radiation Equatorial regions will warm less than the temperate and polar regions, so fewer violent events are likely to take place.
Hence it could be surmised that an increase in such events may be a precursor to a cooling trend.
“Extreme Weather” is nothing but WEATHER MANIPULATION using Haarp, Chemtrails, Ionospheric Heaters and others alike. There are tons of information out there regarding GEOENGINEERING; they manipulate the weather and then blame it on us – plus we know that CO2 is the gas of life!!! See: 1976 UN Weather Weapons Treaty!