Global Warming, Steve Backshall? No, Weather!
By Paul Homewood
The BBC has just launched its Undiscovered Worlds series, with the intrepid Steve Backshall kayaking up the Scoresby Sund , the world’s largest fjord in Greenland.
The BBC’s puff says:
Adventurer and naturalist Steve Backshall is on a mission to visit parts of the world yet to be explored.
On this expedition, he is in the Arctic to kayak up the largest fjord in the world. It is a dangerous undertaking, only made possible because the sea ice has broken up early here following the warmest winter on record. It is a chance for Steve and his team of explorers to see what impact global warming could be having on this pristine wilderness. They face many threats, from perilous sea ice that could crush their boats to a terrifying encounter with a hungry polar bear
According to the film’s producer, Rosie Gloyns, interviewed in the Telegraph:
I was filming Undiscovered Worlds, a BBC documentary airing on Easter Sunday, along with presenter Steve Backshall. We kayaked up the Scoresby Sund in Greenland, the world’s largest fjord, surveying the damage inflicted by climate change, which is melting the region’s ice and destroying habitats for local wildlife.
The sea ice around Greenland is following the same trend seen all across the Arctic, shrinking in size and melting earlier in the year, depriving polar bears of their prime hunting habitat and making their behaviour less predictable. Indeed, paddling as far as we could into this beautiful country, it was clear that the situation was more grave than we had realised, and the fjord – which would usually have been covered with sea ice at that time of year – was a pale imitation of itself.
In normal years, it would have been full of breathing holes for seals, and local Inuits would have been using dog sleds to propel themselves across. Instead, the ice atop the fjord had melted earlier in the year than ever recorded, and the point where the ice meets the water had receded disturbingly far up the fjord.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/moment-came-face-face-polar-bear/
It will come as no surprise to hear that the truth is not quite what the BBC would like you to believe!
The Cult Of Greta
By Paul Homewood
Brendan O’Neill attacks the cult of St Greta:
Anyone who doubts that the green movement is morphing into a millenarian cult should take a close look at Greta Thunberg. This poor young woman increasingly looks and sounds like a cult member. The monotone voice. The look of apocalyptic dread in her eyes. The explicit talk of the coming great ‘fire’ that will punish us for our eco-sins. There is something chilling and positively pre-modern about Ms Thunberg. One can imagine her in a sparse wooden church in the Plymouth Colony in the 1600s warning parishioners of the hellfire that will rain upon them if they fail to give up their witches.
t actually makes sense that Ms Thunberg – a wildly celebrated 16-year-old Swede who founded the climate-strike movement for schoolkids – should sound cultish. Because climate-change alarmism is becoming ever stranger, borderline religious, obsessed with doomsday prophecies. Consider Extinction Rebellion, the latest manifestation of the upper-middle classes’ contempt for industrialisation and progress. It is at times indistinguishable from old fundamentalist movements that warned mankind of the coming End of Days. I followed Extinction Rebellion from Parliament Square to Marble Arch yesterday and what I witnessed was a public display of millenarian fear and bourgeois depression. People did dances of death and waved placards warning of the heat-death of the planet. It felt deeply unnerving.
Read the full post here.
“Pictures Of Starving Polar Bears Convinced Me”
By Paul Homewood
h/t stewgreen
https://twitter.com/tan123/status/1120669325260668928
And where did she get this strange idea from? As she relates, her teachers at school told her, when she was about eight.
By Paul Homewood
Harrabin is off in the clouds again!
Protests by Extinction Rebellion’s seemingly inexhaustible army of activists made plenty of headlines last week.
They say politicians are out of touch with climate reality. But what do they want, and can ministers realistically make it happen?
Let’s consider XR’s three core demands: for the government to "tell the truth about climate change", to create a citizens’ assembly to oversee progress, and to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2025.
- If Mrs May regularly referred to a "climate crisis" or "climate emergency", that might fulfil their wish that the government should "tell the truth"
- A citizens’ assembly looks unlikely, especially during the current constitutional mayhem of Brexit
- The third objective of cutting CO2 emissions to almost zero by 2025 is surely unachievable.
So, if not all this, then what?
This weekend, I asked environmentalists on Twitter for their suggestions about what ministers can do to show XR they mean business.
Here – in no particular order – is my summary of some of the responses, with my own micro-analysis along the way.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48015293
I’m not quite sure who his environmentalist chums are, but they seem pottier than him judging by their replies, not least because they seem to think their ideas will make the slightest difference, or why ministers should want to convince this tiny motley band of middle class hippies.
But the final item is the one which really stands out:
Should the BBC be employing anybody who even thinks that capitalism should be overthrown?
If Precipitation Extremes Are Increasing, Why Aren’t Floods?
By Paul Homewood
According to David Attenborough’s “Climate – Change The Facts”, climate change is making floods much worse:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00049b1/climate-change-the-facts
This must have surprised the IPCC who found no evidence of that whatsoever in 2013:
IPCC AR5
Note as well that although flooding in India and other parts of Asia, this was in comparison to megadroughts in the past.
In theory, a warmer atmosphere should be able to hold more moisture, and therefore lead to heavier rainfall.
Last year, scientists investigated this contradiction, with this paper:
If anything, they argued, flood magnitudes were actually decreasing.
There is one possible explanation not mentioned, and this concerns the definition of “extreme precipitation”, which is only a relative term.
In areas that are normally dry, heavy rain is defined as “extreme”, when in reality it simply tops up the water table and fills up the streams.
A classic example is in the US, where ostensibly the area affected by extreme rainfall has shot up since the first half of the 20thC. Below is the graph for the South:
The definition for the index is:
Twice the value of the percentage of the United States with a much greater than normal proportion of precipitation derived from extreme (equivalent to the highest tenth percentile) 1-day precipitation events.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei/graph
But those early years were marked by regular, severe droughts. And extreme rainfall and droughts are simply opposite sides of the same coin.
In short, what we call “extreme rainfall” is nothing of the sort, and does not lead to flooding.
BBC Play The Easter Three Card Trick
By Paul Homewood
More pure, unadulterated fraud from the BBC:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48004374
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-48013791
OK, this nonsense might be alright for the Guinness Book of Records, but the BBC know full well it is meaningless, as this Easter is one of the latest on record, with many Easters occurring in March.
At no stage is this pointed out in any of the reports, which are written deliberately to foster belief in global warming.
To put this Easter into perspective, the highest temperature recorded over the weekend was 77.9F at Gosport on Saturday. It was also the hottest day of the month.
However this was way below the temperature set at Camden on Easter Saturday in 1949 of 85F, which is also the highest April temperature on record in the UK.
Not only that, but the weather in April 1893 was every bit as remarkable as in 1949:
https://digital.nmla.metoffice.gov.uk/digitalFile_3e966701-f0d2-4565-838c-a58548ebe149/
As this week, there was an extended spell of high pressure bringing in winds from the continent, and temperatures reached 84F in Cambridge on the 20th.
In short, there is nothing at all remarkable about this week’s weather, despite the BBC’s attempts to persuade us otherwise.
Germany’s Drive For Wind In Trouble
By Paul Homewood
Standing beside a windswept junction near Germany’s Baltic coast, Thea Funk points at a stretch of land to the north.
“They want to build 12 turbines up there, each one 240 metres high. And down there there are plans to put up more, somewhere between six and eight,” she explains, gesturing to a field across the road. “We’re going to be encircled.”
Behind her, 30-odd people line the road holding signs bearing anti-wind energy slogans. Residents of the Friedland Moor in northeast Germany, they are convinced their landscape is about to be destroyed for the gain of landowners and energy magnets.
Rural protests against wind farms are increasing in Germany and the effect has been dramatic on the country’s flagship green energy programme. Energiewende, one of the most ambitious state-led policies in the world, is now stalling, with key targets disappearing into the wind.
Last year new wind farm projects plummeted by 55 percent as energy companies baulked at the growing number of legal complaints made by restive locals and wildlife funds.
By Paul Homewood
Ross Clark has also joined the party:
Given the reception that awaited Richard Madeley when he ventured last week that David Attenborough is “not a saint, just a broadcaster” – something which is evidently true, though I haven’t formally checked with the Vatican – one delves into this subject with some intrepidness. Nevertheless, great documentary-maker though he may be, Attenborough cannot be allowed to get away with the propaganda element of his latest piece, his documentary Climate Change: the Facts which went out on Thursday evening….
If you are going to present a film called Climate Change: the Facts the very least you should be doing is, well, presenting the facts. Well here they are, in two of the areas which made up such a hefty part of the film: wildfires and hurricanes. Are wildfires increasing? They are according to Attenborough. One of the scientists who takes part in the programme, Professor Michael Mann of Penn State University, goes as far as to say there has been a “tripling in the extent of wildfires in the Western US”. He is not specific about his evidence for this claim, nor said over what timeframe wildfires are supposed to have trebled, but it is not a fair assessment of the data collected by the US Environment Protection Agency (EPA). This shows no upwards trend in the number of wildfires in the US over the past 30 years.
But then again, go back further, to the 1920s, and you see that both the number of US wildfires and acreage burned in them has plummeted.
That is nothing to do with the climate – more down to firefighters getting better at tackling fires. But that reduction in wildfires – which, after all, were occurring naturally long before Europeans arrived in the US – has brought with it a problem: deadwood is not being cleared out at the rate which it used to be. As a result, when a wildfire does take hold, it tends to be a more powerful fire, which is one reason large acreages tend to get burned when fires do take hold. That was a large part of the debate which followed the wildfires in California last November.
But I know what will have entered the heads of many of Attenborough’s viewers: that wildfires are being caused by climate change and that is that…..
The same will be true for hurricanes. If you are child, for whom hurricanes are a novel phenomenon, watching the film will have given you the impression that hurricanes are pretty much a function of man-made climate change. A voiceover, indeed, makes the claim that climate change is causing ‘greater storms’. But again, the data on cyclone activity in the Atlantic, Gulf and Mexico and Caribbean does not support that idea. Figure one shows a very slight upwards trend in the number of hurricanes occurring in these waters but a flat or perhaps slightly downwards trend in the number of hurricanes making landfall in the US. There are two other methods of measuring hurricane activity which are used by the EPA. The first, the accumulated cyclone index (figure two) shows no obvious trend over the past 70 years. The second, the ‘power dissipation index’ shows an upwards spike in the early years of this century, followed by a reversion to mean since then.
Not that this seems to prevent documentary-makers like Attenborough resorting to footage of houses being demolished by winds and lorries being blown off bridges to show the supposed climate change we are already experiencing.
It is little wonder that terrified kids are skipping school to protest against climate change. Never mind climate change denial, a worse problem is the constant exaggeration of the subject. I had thought David Attenborough would be above resorting to the subtle propaganda which others have been propagating, linking every adverse weather event to climate change. But apparently not.
You can read the full article here, though you will need to register for three free articles.
David Rose Attacks Attenborough’s “Flawed” Documentary
By Paul Homewood
I said the other day that the BBC might have gone too far with Attenborough’s pack of lies, and risked a backlash which would ultimately undermine their credibility on climate.
Well, the fightback has begun, with attack from David Rose:
One of the most talked-about programmes of the past week – a primetime documentary on BBC1 – featured two people many seem to regard as living saints.
One was the presenter, Sir David Attenborough, the other Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage activist inspiring climate change ‘school strikes’ in several countries, including Britain.
The film’s title was Climate Change: The Facts, and these, Sir David claimed, are now ‘incontrovertible’. The film’s message was so bleak it could have been made by Extinction Rebellion, the eco-anarchist protest group which has brought Central London to a standstill.
No one has done more to convey the marvels of the natural world than Attenborough, and his long career has rightly earned him public acclaim.
Sadly, on this occasion, I believe he has presented an alarmist argument derived from a questionable use of evidence, whose nuances he has ignored.
Isle de Jean Charles & Sea Level Rise
By Paul Homewood
Jaime Jessop has written the first of what may be a series of posts on Attenborough’s documentary the other day.
She has taken a close look at the Isle de Jean Charles, which you will recall is gradually being flooded:
Well, I sat through it, much to my disgust. It wasn’t easy. I don’t really know where to begin with the dissection of this truly awful climate change documentary from the BBC, so I guess I’ll just fire off this initial post picking up on one of the more obvious and egregious attempts to misinform the public.
The Isle de Jean Charles, Louisiana. It’s been largely submerged beneath the sea over the last 6 decades. The program gives the definite impression that the main reason for this inundation is sea level rise due to melting ice and thermal expansion of the oceans – driven by man-made climate change. Attenborough does mention oil extraction as a cause but his narrative is lost to the general tone of the messaging that this is a “climate catastrophe” and that the families driven from their homes in this part of Louisiana are some of the world’s first “climate refugees”. This is palpable bullshit.
Read the full post here.
I would two factoids:
Sea levels in the Mississippi delta have been rising at 9.08mm per annum, with no sign of acceleration.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8761724
Global sea levels are, of course, rising at about 2mm a year, so only about a fifth of the rise at Grande Isle (one of the barrier islands) is due to absolute sea level rise.
Most of the rise is due to the land sinking. This can be clearly seen on the map below:
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends.html
Whereas most global sites are seeing relative sea level rise of between 0 and 3mm pa, the east coast of the US is slightly higher, between 3 and 6mm. This is because the east coast has been tilting downwards since the end of the ice age, as the NW rises as a result of ice melting.
However, you will note those two red arrows off the Louisiana coast, denoting a rise of above 9mm pa. They represent Grande Isle and Eugene Island, which I gather is actually an oilfield on top of a submerged mountain!
Clearly whatever local factors are at play, they have nothing to do with climate change.
The Isle de Jean Charles is also badly affected by coastal erosion and the dredging of canals, which prevents sedimentation from rebuilding the Isle. A double whammy, in other words.
