BBC Repeat Fake Extreme Weather Disaster Claims
By Paul Homewood
h/t qaesoveritas
Politicians and policymakers have failed to grasp the gravity of the environmental crisis facing the Earth, a report claims.
The think-tank IPPR says human impacts have reached a critical stage and threaten to destabilise society and the global economy.
Scientists warn of a potentially deadly combination of factors.
These include climate change, mass loss of species, topsoil erosion, forest felling and acidifying oceans.
The report from the centre-left Institute for Public Policy Research says these factors are "driving a complex, dynamic process of environmental destabilisation that has reached critical levels.
"This destabilisation is occurring at speeds unprecedented in human history and, in some cases, over billions of years."
The IPPR warns that the window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic outcomes is rapidly closing.
The authors urge three shifts in political understanding: on the scale and pace of environmental breakdown; the implications for societies; and the subsequent need for transformative change.
They say since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.
At least climate change features in policy discussions, they say – but other vitally important impacts barely figure.
What issues are being under-played?
- Topsoil is being lost 10 to 40 times faster than it is being replenished by natural processes
- Since the mid-20th Century, 30% of the world’s arable land has become unproductive due to erosion
- 95% of the Earth’s land areas could become degraded by 2050
These matters are close to home for British politicians, the authors argue, with the average population sizes of the most threatened species in the UK having decreased by two-thirds since 1970.
The UK is described as one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.
Some 2.2 million tonnes of UK topsoil is eroded annually, and over 17% of arable land shows signs of erosion.
Nearly 85% of fertile peat topsoil in East Anglia has been lost since 1850, with the remainder at risk of being lost over next 30–60 years.
The IPPR says many scientists believe we have entered a new era of rapid environmental change.
The report warns: "We define this as the ‘age of environmental breakdown’ to better highlight the severity of the scale, pace and implications of environmental destabilisation resulting from aggregate human activity."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47203344
I have no particular views on most of this report, but would strongly challenge this statement:
They say since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.
That immediately set of the BS buzzer, so where did this patently ludicrous claim come from?
The report quoted by the BBC is from the IPPR. Note that this is not a scientific body, but a politically activist, left wing think tank:
https://www.ippr.org/research/publications/age-of-environmental-breakdown
And lo and behold, the same claim appears in the Summary:
And again on Page 13:
Readers may recall that I have come across EM-DAT (The International Disaster Database), and carried out a detailed analysis of their methodology last year, after similar wild claims from Lord Stern, which were also based on their disaster database.
My full analysis can be seen here. But in short, EM-DAT are registering disasters reported, rather than actually occurring, a crucial difference. This is something acknowledged by EM-DAT themselves.
I include below some of the key parts of my analysis:
Back in 2004, EM-DAT published a report, “Thirty Years of Natural Disasters 1974-2003”. It included these comments:
https://www.emdat.be/publications?page=7
This evolution in reporting is self evident from Figure 2:
Nobody in their right mind would believe that there were hardly any natural disasters in the first half of the 20thC. Many disasters happened in the past, but which don’t appear in the official stats.
A clue to this is that most of the apparent increase is due to small disasters:
In fact, the criteria for what constitutes a “disaster” is set at a very low level indeed:
Thousands of such small events would have escaped official notice in the past.
There is one more clue in the 2003 report:
While the number of reported disasters has remained pretty much flat from disaster agencies and governments, there was a huge increase from specialised agencies in the 1998 – 2000 period, along with a steady increase from insurance companies.
This is clear evidence that the apparent trend is solely due to how the data is collected.
In 2007, EM-DAT published another report, “Annual Disaster Statistical Review 2006”, which included this statement:
It is worth noting that that CRED, who maintain EM-DAT only began publishing statistics in 1998. It is pretty obvious that it was this factor that led to the increased reporting of disasters around that time.
In short, many more disasters get to be officially registered by EM-DAT nowadays. Many that occurred in the past simply never appeared on the database.
But there is one last thing. Where did the IPPR report get their fake claim from? Look again at Page 13:
Who are GMO?
Fortunately IPPR tell us in their list of references:
J Grantham, eh? And that link takes us to:
It is the same Jeremy Grantham, the billionaire who funds the Grantham Institute. Oddly though, he has published this white paper under the auspices of Grantham, Mayo, & van Otterloo (GMO), the Boston-based asset management firm of which he is co-founder.
Why it was not formally vetted and issued by the Grantham Institute is a mystery, as is the question of why the IPPR have made use of work from a billionaire businessman, instead of proper scientists.
Perhaps Bob Ward might like to raise a complaint with the BBC for using fake data, supplied by his boss!
As for the IPPR, it was a silly question. They are not a scientific organisation, but simply exist to promote their left wing agenda. Facts do not matter to them.
Which all brings us back to Roger Harrabin and the BBC. Surely it should have been immediately apparent to any journalist in his field that the claims made by the IPPR simply did not stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
After all, even the IPCC never made such outlandish claims, and could find no real evidence that extreme weather was increasing, despite intense efforts to do so.
Is Harrabin so incompetent that he simply echoed these lies, without even bothering to check them out?
Or is he so tied up in his quasi religious devotion to the evils of climate change, that, a bit like the Soviets and their tractor statistics, he assumed they must be right?
Either way, the BBC have made it clear to their reporters that they must not simply accept the word of sceptics like Lord Lawson, but challenge them instead. This is a classic instance where Harrabin has failed in his duty to question the fake science he has been fed.
It is no good the BBC simply saying they have only reported what “scientists” have said. What is good for the goose is good for the gander.
A strong complaint is in order!
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
I’m getting a little worried about the continuous stream of misinformation. I meet sensible educated people who are brainwashed into believing it.
So do I, and some others I know. It is difficult to get past all the daily scary headlines and the “official” forecasts and predictions that are simply assumed and accepted to be correct. It is indeed worrisome, especially when the media is complicit.
There was an interview this morning on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, with report lead author Laurie Laybourn-Langton:
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/2019/20190212_r4
“There are not small fixes that can be done here to sort out these enormous problems – it needs to be a large-scale transformation in how our societies and economies work, because a lot of the ways that they are built, that we’ve built them are causing a lot of this environmental breakdown.”
“… and it needs to happen now.”
I think it will have to wait until Thursday, at least. 🙂
There’s the nub – the GW scare is an experiment in International Socialism disguised as science.
On topsoil loss it is rather farming machinery compression, its still there and last time I checked Roman roads run 3 -5 meters below the surface in my area – the George and Dragon still has its ghost legions waling through the cellar on Chester road, some soils were always thinner than others and East Anglia specialises in EU subsidised grain which has a high crop fail rate – wheat is simply not worth growing in the UK. If someone stops paying the farmers silly money for failed crops they would return the area to a mixed agriculture with some fallow areas, like in the 1970s when the area was the UK sugar beet captial, by and large a crisis made in Whitehall since they were monitoring the ‘crisis’ for decades, knew about changing land use and the subsidies which caused it yet have not produced reports recomending a reversal. The only policy we have is build houses on the fields, which will solve the problem with a quick concrete caused famine.
‘A long time back’ whilst bouncing a couple of ‘good humoured’ emails to and fro with a BBC environment reporter over some report, I once referred to Roger Harrabin as a green parrot which resulted in instant excommunication. It appears hes still sitting on the same perch
If I recall correctly one of Harrabin’s BBC predecessors (ca 2003) was an ex religious affairs corespondent given the enviro-beat who penned a piece opining that parrots were in fact telepathic and could read human minds.
There is a crisis, an existential one.
But it’s not in the climate, nor even more generally in the environment.
It’s a crisis in intelligence – fostered by opportunists, conspicuously by the media.
Throuigh relentless bomardment of the public with its superfical view of reality,
the media is systematically reducing the public’s IQ to that of its own.
Most egregious is the Beeb, which will continue the public’s indoctrination
until the public gets fed up and stops paying for it. Until then, God help us.
As you say, the 15x flooding claim since 2005 is obvious BS, that does not pass a basic sanity test. Yet it was mindlessly regurgitated by Harrabin and also by Martha Kearney at about 6.55 this morning on the Today programme.
The IPPR was called out on this by Mark Lynas. They claimed that it was a “typo”. And if you look at the document now you can see 2005 has been changed to 1950. This is still BS – the IPCC says there’s no trend in flooding. But the IPPR would rather rely on an investment fund manager with no expertise in science.
My blog post on this
Consider the statement from page 13 of the IPPR report
The Sks trend calculator for GISTEMP gives
1900 to 1958 – 0.066 ±0.112 °C/decade
1958 to 2016 – 0.150 ±0.112 °C/decade
1998 to 2016 – 0.139 ±0.112 °C/decade
Jeremy Grantham seems to have made a typo, and IPPR have not checked the data before repeating the error.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
Grantham has simply (ab)used the error range to come up with the scariest possible result. Only in the present frenzied state of eco-politics — and I agree with Jeremy above about the existential crisis in intelligence — could a global temperature increase of one-quarter of a degree C per decade be considered relevant to anything. It doesn’t even start to qualify as a typo; it’s simply meaningless.
If Grantham has “(ab)used the error range” with respect to 1998 to 2016 result he has not done so with the other two periods – 1900 to 1958 & 1958 to 2016.
Notice a couple of things.
First, 1900 to 1958 & 1958 to 2016 are both half the period 1900 to 2016. 1998 and 2016 are two peak El Nino years. The third period was chosen on the basis of looking at the data for two peaks in natural phenomena, to infer an acceleration in human-caused warming.
Second, the paper was delivered in April 2018, when the 2017 data had been available for been available for weeks and Gistemp data starts in 1880.
Annual Gistemp anomalies are
2013 0.65
2014 0.74
2015 0.87
2016 1.00
2017 0.91
2018 0.83
Mike Jackson
You are quite right about Grantham abusing the error range – or at least making a mistake. Well spotted.
For 1998-2016 trend is 0.139 ±0.112 °C/decade (2σ)
The range of uncertainty is 0.003 to 0.025 °C/year
https://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
Laughable nonsense. According to EM -DAT it can be recorded as a disaster if ‘100 people or more are reported affected’. Well my train was cancelled which i’m reporting as affecting more than 100 of us waiting at Paddington Station. Better add that to the International disaster database!
“ … it can be recorded as a disaster if ‘100 people or more are reported affected’.”
Holy Cow! Washington State just had 53 inches (134 cm) of snow at the pass where the main cross-state highway (Interstate 90) goes over the Cascade Mountains.
Thousands of folks have been impacted in many different ways.
Just a 1 item note:
Police and highway trucks led a convoy of over 250 vehicles from the summit down into the Puget Sound Lowland. With the East-bound lanes empty, the convoy used those lanes to go West.
The West bound lanes remain closed until . . . ?
Compare Exhibit 7 of an April 17 report
With Figure 1 from the New Climate Economy Report
This report was covered at
Consider the claim
From Exhibit 7
The 15 times Floods increase is for 2001-2017 compared to 1950-1966.
The 20 times “Extreme Temperature Events” increase is for 1996-2017 compared to 1950-1972.
The 7 times “Wildfires” increase is for 1984-2017 compared to 1950-1983.
Am I alone in thinking there is something a bit odd in the statement about being from 1950?
In 2006, IPPR issued a report called “Warm Words: How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better?” https://www.ippr.org/publications/warm-wordshow-are-we-telling-the-climate-story-and-can-we-tell-it-better
“This report was commissioned by the ippr as part of our project on how to stimulate climate-friendly behaviour in the UK. It analyses current UK constructions and conceptions of climate change in the public domain, using some of the tools and principles of discourse analysis and semiotics.”
Their recommendations included the following:
Treating climate change as beyond argument:
“Much of the noise in the climate change discourse comes from argument and counter-argument, and it is our recommendation that, at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won.
This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.
The certainty of the Government’s new climate-change slogan – ‘Together this generation will tackle climate change’ (Defra 2006) – gives an example of this approach. It constructs, rather than claims, its own factuality.”
The head of “climate change” for IPPR at that time was Simon Retallack. He is now a Carbon Trust director for S. America. https://www.carbontrust.com/about-us/our-experts/simon-retallack/
Another climate careerist:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2006/nov/09/greenpolitics.politics
“The world has less than a decade to reverse the growth in greenhouse gas emissions if dangerous climate change is to be avoided, according to a report from a thinktank that goes further than the landmark Stern review last week.
Lord Stern’s report said that unless greenhouse emissions were tackled the world faced an economic downturn on a par with the great depression.
Yesterday’s report from the Institute of Public Policy Research suggests Lord Stern’s analysis was too conservative and governments need to move further and faster. To minimise the risk of a 2C rise – seen as the threshold for dangerous climate change – the authors say global carbon dioxide emissions would need to peak between 2010 and 2013.
Yesterday Tony Blair received a petition signed by 150,000 people and delivered by six children. The petition, from the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition, called for a climate change bill in next week’s Queen’s speech to cut UK CO2 emissions by at least 3% annually.”
The rest, as they say, is history.
The claim that disasters have increased since 2005 has now been changed in the report (after being taken off line yesterday) and in the BBC article which now reads:
“They say since 1950, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.”
This ties in with the EM-DAT data base but ignores the fact that according to that, the number of disasters appeared to have peaked around 2000 and has since fallen to around the 1998 level, which is quite the opposite to the impression given the original report.
If indeed disasters have been falling since 2000 then “climate change” must also be declining.
Anyone who wishes to check this for themselves should register with the data base here:
https://www.emdat.be
‘dishonourable BBC’ handle the IPPR FakeNews claim about “since 2005” flooding, honourably ?
Nope, stealth-correction
Material edit “since 1950” with no correction note
I believe the line usually trotted out is that with fast-moving stories entries are constantly being edited, & it would be impractical to keep a record of all such, &c, &c.
No such excuse can justify editing what is essentially a fixed story without admitting the original was plain stupid.
Thanks
I was unaware if the “Media Bias Monitor”.
Those bar charts are utter nonsense. The dates are purely arbitrary, and I suspect it you shifted them slightly by moving say 2005 and 2006 into the earlier data sets the slop we would fall dramatically.
Just non-science lies.
If the BBC has decided that climate change in s real, fine, but that doesn’t mean they should give airtime to every piece of political propaganda masquerading as climate science. This utter junk, not science.
To add to my point, notice how in those bad charts each one has different time series!
Now why would that be I wonder? And why not just use annual figures?
The biggest disaster here is that the BBC has now morphed into a GreenBlob propaganda machine which effects millions of people.
Just looking after their green pension fund investments.
The IPPR warns that the window of opportunity to avoid catastrophic outcomes is rapidly closing.
But it’s a good idea to burn wood (biomass) in power stations instead of coal, churning out even higher levels of carbon dioxide, while waiting decades for the felled trees to be replaced by fully grown new ones?
Does not compute, if they believe their own failing theory of super-powerful trace gases in the atmosphere.
The primary solution for problems of environmental degradation is WEALTH, which is based on … fossil fuels and capitalism, not on what these people are really advocating, which is a socialist and decolonised version of pre-industrial times.
The really worrying thing is that most readers of the BBC article. (as evidenced by the comments) seem to believe everything the BBC says without question.
Questioning figures, renders one accused of being an ignorant denier, and being subject to incoherent abuse.
Even after the figures are “corrected” people may not notice and are unaware that they were wrong and the BBC makes no attempt to correct this impression.
It is a sad state of affairs.
@quaesoveritas Comments are still open on the BBC page
Some of the Climate Activist people are sitting in taxpayer or subsidy funded offices doing a grand job of downvoting comments,
Notice that when you view comments by “lowest” most of them actually seem pretty reasonable.
A brand new comment
Dan001 said \\ Not a lot of people know that Mr Homewood is a retired accountant with no scientific expertise, is unpublished, though loves conspiracies.//
… There that ad hom has told you !
Paul’s own reasonable comment was quickly downvoted by 6 people
stewgreen the mobbing is I think consistent with your claim about eco-activists – but then it’s the BBC….
When have you ever known a warmist respond to points raised with rational argument instead of ad hominem attacks?
Stew, I noticed that you “liked” one of my posts here.
How do you do that?
I have never been able to find out how.
It’s ironic that the BBC engages in “fact checks” to challenge (mainly) government pronouncements. It’s a pity they don’t apply the same rigour to this sort of rubbish.
Perhaps we should challenge the BBC labelled Harrabin an ‘analyst’ since all he does is regurgitate alarmist propaganda unquestioningly. He is certainly no journalist but then they are pretty much extinct now.
Great post.
The BBC is not alone in this racket.
The Guardian carried a flawed report the other day, polar bears = something something climate change.
I took the time to sign up to refute the journalist’s incorrect opinions and was seriously taken aback at the level of in-house biased backroom moderation preventing anything other than hysterical comments about climate catastrophe being published.
Rational scientific facts clearly contravene the Guardian’s community guidelines.
The worrying this is that reasonably intelligent people are falling for this, hook line and sinker.
They really do not seem to understand that they will not like the anti-human green “solutions” that they are demanding.
To paraphrase what Judith Curry said lately, it is looking increasingly likely that implementing the alleged “cure” for climate change will be far more damaging to society than the alleged disease itself.
Dee It must be 10 years ago that we were all banned multiple times for merely trying to engage rationally in Guardian comments.
..one time a Guardian guy even made death threat and it was allowed to stand for some time.
Corrections could be forced, but they would be stealth ones made long after the disinfo had spread
The BBC and Guardian may be sisters, but the Guardian is more extreme.
Even if topsoil is disappearing it only matters if food production drops and food production is going up. We can certainly grow food without topsoil via hydroponics. In fact growing some food in cities makes sense if done in a factory setting where insects can be exclude. No insecticides needed and much more intensive growth. The light is artificial so needs more power but if power was provided by the cheapest means it would be feasible. Can also supplement the air with CO2 to enhance growth.
No topsoil disapppearing here in England so where is the problem meant to be occuring? Thats the problem, they make claims with no data. No soil loss in England so where’s the problem?
PS. Im only a farmer now so what do i know about the land compared to a 20yr old ‘scientist’ in a city playing computer games?
Was it global warming that wiped out half of the biggest port in Suffolk?
From the BBC itself- Two great storms in 1286 and 1326 resulted in the loss of its harbour and started its decline.
Prof Sear said pollen analysis revealed how “people gave up on Dunwich” after 1338, when another great storm silted up the port for good, and food production declined.
Sediment gathered from the cliffs, he said, “independently confirmed the sequences of storms recorded in the historical record”.
According to the EM-DAT database, there were virtually no natural disasters prior to the 1940’s and very few up to the 1960”s
What is incredible is that some people actually seem to believe that was the case and not simply due to lack of data.
This also featured on BBC’s “Beyond 100 Days” on 12/2, preceded by presenter Katty Kay announcing:
“Its snowing in Hawaii, , yep snow in Hawaii, another example of how the climate is changing in strange and unpredictable ways”
Yet the following day, on “Afternoon Live”, BBC weather man pointed out that it snows every year in Hawaii, although it does not often snow at lower levels. He did say that “no one can exactly say whether they have ever had snow this low in Hawaii, although no one can actually remember that being the case before and you probably have to go back a long way back to find snow at such a low elevation in of all places, Hawaii. He added that it was probably the first time it had been videoed.
So apparently simply because nobody can remember something happening before, that makes it “climate change”.
Sorry I should have said the BBC weather man was Nick Miller.
I submitted this complaint to the BBC and would encourage others to follow.
Misleading Pollution Images This morning
on BBC news/Today, prior to an interview
with Sadiq Khan about air pollution in
London there was an illustration of
showing copious amounts of steam being
vented into the atmosphere. Steam is not
a pollutant and the BBC should stop
showing it as such, as it is alarmist
and factually incorrect.
The trouble is, people have been complaining about such images for years and the BBC takes no notice.
You will have to be very persistent to get past the BBC stonewalling and even if you get a grudging admission that they were wrong they will probably continue to show such images.
Sorry to be so negative.
I realise that but it’s worth a try and the more the merrier.
Another thing about these images, is that the video is frequently shown at faster than normal speed. I can think of no good reason for this except to make the images appear more dramatic, I have complained about this myself, but it doesn’t seem to make any difference. It’s all part of the BBC’s subtle propaganda machine.
I have also sent a formal complaint.
Notwithstanding what I have said about the fake “climate change” disaster claims, I still think the BBC article and the IPPR report are partially correct about environmental damage.
However the does not excuse the use of substantially fake data which can only detract from the real issues.
There was an interview on R4 “Today” programme at about 06:50 on Feb. 12th, with Laurie Laybourn-Langton, a “senior research fellow” at IPPR, about their report, before the correction was made from 2005 to 1950. He did not correct the date during the course of the interview, so I presume he was then unaware of the error.
For those who can access the BBC iPlayer, it is still available via the BBC website albeit a bit more difficult to find on BBC “sounds”.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002gq2
I intent to take this up with him using the email address here:
https://www.ippr.org/about/people/staff/laurie-laybourn-langton
I have looked at the entire database by decade, splitting disasters into four types – climatic, epidemic, geology and other. In the current decade there are 65 times the number of climatic events per year than in the period 1900-1949. But recorded total deaths per year are down 84%. Deaths per recorded occurrence are down 97.7%.
Proper analysis of the EM-DAT database reveals humans are increasingly able to cope with the harms of external freak events.
For comparison with the number of deaths, here is the number of occurrences by decade. Note that the current decade is only for 8.5 years.
There is one category where recorded deaths per year are greater in the current decade than in the period than in 1900-1949. That is what I call “Geology”, which includes earthquakes and landslides. Of the 272,000 deaths recorded in the current decade, 223,000 were in the 2010 Haitian Earthquake.
Of course the alarmists would probably claim that earthquakes were made worse by “climate change” and that they didn’t happen prior to 1900.
Test
My two posts here seem to have disappeared!
Why has this appeared but not the previous two posts?
Is it because of a link to iPlayer which I included?
I give up!
Found it in the spam box!
I’ve now released it , but it’s on the About page
Presumably this was the result of some sort of automatic process?
If so, why did it think it was “spam” and how can I avoid that in future?