BBC’s Climate Check

By Paul Homewood

We did not have to wait long for the first of the BBC’s monthly Climate Checks, all part of their indoctrination programme for this year:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/51127701

According to the introduction, it will give a picture of the “state of our changing climate”. This is in itself absurd, the idea that climate is changing so fast that we can actually see it.

The climate may be slightly warmer than a hundred years ago, and there may be have been some subtle climatic changes during that time. But the simple reality is that the climate that people are used to is today’s, not one from the 19thC. And I defy anybody to honestly state that they’ve spotted any changes in their lifetime.

Predictably it begins with the chart of “rapidly rising” global temperatures, thanks to the con man’s trick of a shortened Y-axis.

A more honest graph might have looked like this, showing that the average global temperature last year, a meaningless concept anyway, was 14.85C, which is 1.07C higher than in 1880:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/time-series/globe/land_ocean/12/12/1880-2019?trend=true&trend_base=10&begtrendyear=1880&endtrendyear=2019&filter=true&filterType=binomial

They might also have mentioned the Little Ice Age, probably the coldest era since the Ice Age.

The climate was so wonderful back then that the famous CIA climate report in 1974 had this to say about it:

http://www.climatemonitor.it/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/1974.pdf

Indeed, the BBC could fill a whole documentary explaining how in so many ways the Earth’s climate is now better than it was in the 19thC.

The video then goes on to claim 400 temperature records were broken last year, without putting this figure into any context at all. For instance, how many sites did not set records?

Record breaking ocean temperatures were also quoted, without a warning that the year to year changes are far too small to actually measure in practical terms.

We then hear about how warmer air can hold more moisture, leading to more extreme rainfall. Cue film of floods.

However, regardless of the theory, there is no actual evidence that floods are getting worse, as the IPCC themselves confirmed in AR5, and subsequently in their special 1.5C report:

“There is low confidence due to limited evidence, however, that anthropogenic climate change has affected the frequency and the magnitude of floods.”

IPCC AR5

Inevitably, we move on to Australian bush fires, and the claim that “scientists say global warming will make these dry years more frequent and extreme” in Australia.

Given that the BBC like their graphs, I wonder why they did not publish this one, showing that the opposite has actually occurred – Australia generally speaking has got a lot wetter as the climate has warmed:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=timeseries&tQ=graph%3Drranom%26area%3Daus%26season%3D0112%26ave_yr%3D0

“Unprecedented” fires in the Arctic are also wheeled out, apparently caused by global warming as well. (If high temperatures really are the cause of wildfires, there would never be any in the Arctic!)

The worst of last summer’s fires were in Siberia, yet the BBC themselves debunked the idea they were “unprecedented” last August:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-49515462

No climate disinformation report would complete without a mention of the Arctic – “temperatures rising twice as quick as the rest of the world”, “melting ice” etc.

In fact temperatures there have barely changed in the last decade, and are at a similar level to the 1930s and 40s:

https://climate4you.com/

Meanwhile September sea ice extent has been stable since 2007:

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover_30y.uk.php

It seems pretty obvious that future editions of the so-called Climate Check will be little more than a few cherry picked bad weather events, all shown out of context, and all linked to climate change by “scientists say”.