Climate Change Stops Play!

By Paul Homewood

h/t mjr

More dross from Matt McGrath, who has recently been demoted to rea boy following the arrival of “Chief Environmental Correspondent Justin Rowlatt.

It sums up everything which is wrong about BBC coverage of climate change. It offers full, uncritical coverage of a sloppy, partisan and unscientific report full of unproven assertions, written by a group of climate activists:

 

Global sport faces major disruption from climate change in coming decades, according to a new analysis.

By 2050, it’s estimated that almost one in four English football league grounds can expect flooding every year.

But tennis, rugby, athletics and winter sports will also face serious challenges from the impacts of rising temperatures, the author says.

The study finds that sports leaders are, in the main, failing to address the issue seriously.

While the Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted sports as much as any other aspect of social life, many experts believe that this is just a dress rehearsal for the long-term impacts on sport of a world that’s way too hot.

Extreme weather events, related to rising temperatures, have already disrupted some of the world’s most high-profile sports in recent years.

A typhoon, which wreaked havoc in Japan last year, also affected fixtures at the Rugby Union World being held there.

Smoke from bush fires stopped play at the Australian Tennis Open at the start of this year.

These and many other instances are a foretaste of the future, according to this new study compiled by academic and author David Goldblatt.

As football slowly recovers from the coronavirus crisis, his analysis shows that 23 of 92 English football league clubs will face partial or total annual flooding of their stadiums by 2050.

In the current Premier League, the home grounds of Southampton, Norwich, Chelsea and West Ham face a similar threat.

Cricket faces huge challenges globally as temperatures rise in places like India, Australia and the West Indies.

Venues in Adelaide and Perth will see a 60% increase in days with temperatures over 40C over the next decade.

In golf, one in three British Open courses will be damaged by rising sea-levels, the report says.

Winter sports also face an uncertain future.

Researchers say that of the 19 venues that have already hosted the Winter Olympics, just 10 will be able to hold them by 2050.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53111881

The report, which is here, makes various claims, but without any context. For instance:

In English cricket, for example, 27 per cent of England’s home One Day internationals since 2000 were played with reduced overs because of rain disruptions, and the number of rain affected matches has doubled since 2011; 5 per cent of matches have been abandoned altogether over the last decade.

But there is no mention of how many matches were lost in the past, to tell whether things are getting worse. The comparison with 2011, by the way, is an utterly fatuous one, as nobody would seriously claim that the climate has changed so much in a decade.

Football too:

Even English football, a game not unused to rainy playing conditions, saw more than twenty football league fixtures cancelled in the 2015/16 season.

Where is the evidence that twenty postponements in a season is remotely unusual? During the good old days of global cooling. hardly any football at all was played between Christmas and early March during the frozen winter of 1962/63. Barnsley, for instance, (where men are men, and some of the women are too!), only two matches were played between 22 December and 12 March. The third round of the FA Cup had begun on 5 January and lasted 66 days through frost, snow, ice, power cuts, thaw, rain and mud. The third round was spread over 22 different playing days and there were 261 postponements. Sixteen of the 32 ties were called off 10 or more times.

Indeed, relatively few games get called off because of rain – anyone who remembers Derby’s Baseball Ground during Brian Clough’s era would wonder how they ever managed to pass the ball, given what a quagmire it became in winter. The main cause of postponements is snow and ice.

Further afield, the report claims that it will be too hot to play sports in Australia and India. So what, they will simply bring their seasons forward a month.

Quite ludicrously, they even mention the typhoon, which brought a halt to the rugby world cup in Japan last autumn:

Typhoon Hagabis came ashore in Japan with such torrential rain and winds that three games at the Rugby World Cup were cancelled.

Don’t these morons know that typhoons are not exactly uncommon in Japan? Tokyo certainly ain’t no Twickenham, when it comes to weather!

Naturally, they try to justify all of this with some “climate science”:

There is of course absolutely no evidence for any of this, as the IPCC themselves make clear. But poor little Matt McGrath would know nothing about “the truth”, and probably care even less!

Inevitably they throw in silly sea level rise scares, claiming that grounds such as Chelsea’s will suffer annual flooding by 2050. This is all based on RCP 4.5, the mid range emissions projections (effectively 2C stuff). The sea level numbers come from Kopp et al 2014, but these only amount to a rise of between 5.2mm a year between 2000 and 2050. Are we really expected to believe that Stamford Bridge, which is 14 feet above sea level,  will flood annually because of a sea level rise of about 6 inches?

Clearly not. If that were the case, half of London would already be flooding every year. So where did this fairy tale stuff come from? None other than that Micky Mouse tool from another bunch of climate activists, Climate Central:

https://coastal.climatecentral.org/map/13/-0.1893/51.4795/?theme=sea_level_rise&map_type=coastal_dem_comparison&contiguous=true&elevation_model=best_available&forecast_year=2050&pathway=rcp45&percentile=p50&return_level=return_level_1&slr_model=kopp_2014

 

Which brings us back to the Rapid Transition Alliance, who commissioned the report. As their name suggests, they want “rapid, transformative changes “ to society. According to their website, they are a small grouping drawn from four far left organisations, funded by an obscure Danish foundation, KR:

The Rapid Transition Alliance is being coordinated by a small group of people drawn from the New Weather Institute, the School of Global Studies at the University of Sussex, and the ESRC STEPS Centre at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) and the Institute of Development Studies, and with help from our friends, colleagues and supporters. The work of the Alliance is kindly supported by the KR Foundation.

https://www.rapidtransition.org/about/

 

 

There is, of course, a myriad of climate activist outfits like this one, and one of their main jobs is to push their incessant propaganda with the help of a compliant media. And they don’t more compliant than Matt McGrath!