BBC’s The Weather machine – 1974
By Paul Homewood
Fifty years ago, the BBC broadcast The Weather Machine, part of its World About Us series:
Unfortunately only have this clip:
But we do have the programme summary:
1974 has been a bad year for weather, with disastrous floods and droughts, a failed monsoon in India, unprecedented tornadoes in America, a dismal summer and unseasonable gales in Europe.
The machine that makes the world’s weather is changing gear – and the shift is downward, against mankind. The smallest change means loss of life in flood or drought, and the wholesale destruction of crops. For us, the price of food goes up; for millions more, it brings hunger or starvation. In the background looms the threat of ice, and the obliteration of northern lands – including Britain. The next ice-age is already overdue.
The trends are revealed in cores drilled from deep beneath the Greenland ice-cap; by instruments high on a volcano in Hawaii, acting as a breathalyser for our planet; by ships that probe the depths of the sea for clues to the weather of 18,000 years ago; and by satellites that look down from space to encompass the storms of half a world. In the Pacific and Atlantic oceans we see the beginnings of a concerted global assault on the problems of our ever-changing climate. Perhaps just in time, the nations are uniting in the war against bad weather.
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/0271db1075b544c2996ebb81b38b9096
There has been much debate about this ice age scare, but what is clear is that extreme weather had grown much worse during this period of cooling. This has long been confirmed by many climate scientists of the time, including HH Lamb.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Cooling or warming, the weather always gets worse in alarmist minds.
It makes sense that an Ice Age would be bad! It makes very little sense that a warmer world would be bad.
Hyeeeessssssss with a big sigh … .. and so says Gramps. .. and now we get “triggered” by these emotional triggerees …. and to cover it all up, we have Mental Health days. Ha!
Why is weather worse during “cold” weather? It is simple thermodynamics. Weather needs energy and that energy comes from the difference between the high (warm) and cold air available. This is how a heat pump works. The more energy available the worse the storms will be or in the case of the heat pump, the more efficient it will be.
Remember, Climate derangement is not based on science, rather it’s origin comes from politics which feeds “feelings” and “emotions of the religiously minded..
Which all goes to show we monitor weather with bad statistics and worse science. I look forward to academia apologising.
Thanks Paul! You are a treasure! simply hilarious!
Yes, delicious including the RP accents. Same old feeling that they’re sitting there with sneering at the peasants however.
It was having read Lamb’s book and Gordon Manley’s “Climate and the British Scene” that “vaccinated” me against the nonsensical claims made by CAGW crowd when they first appeared. They should be required reading.
I recently bought a copy of H.H. Lamb’s, ‘Climate, History and the Modern World’ (2nd Edition, 1995) What he presents is a clear picture of the wealth of historical data, both documentary and pictorial, as well as the information from proxies that back up that picture. His analysis is of what is historically there, not what he thinks is there. What he reveals is the complexity of both weather and assumed ‘climate’ and the lack of any underlying, singular mechanism to explain it. The ‘certitude’ of the computer climate modellers, using mathematics they clearly don’t understand the limitations of, is false. The proper study of physics is mechanism, because if the mechansims are understood, then so are the behaviours that arise from those mechanisms.
But the mathematics left to us by Continental mathematicians, unable to advance past the problems raised by Sir Isaac Newton in his ‘Principia Mathematica’; imposed the a priori assumption of an underlying ‘steady state’ as the pivot point of any analysis. This, using the linear algebra’s of Cotes/Euler/Lagrange allowed algebraic ‘known solutions’ solution to be imposed, suppressing the behviours that Newton had raised as problems.
The computer modellers use ‘software’ to construct their models. But, the underlyling mathematics they use, based on known solutions that work under limited boundary conditions, is no better than ‘software’. And as a tool to predict the future it is deeply flawed as it neglects or destroys the effects of mechanism, by tools such as ‘mean’ or ‘average’. This was clearly shown in the case of Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ which neatly removed both the medieval warm period and the mini ice age.
With computers, we could go back to the mathematics used by Newton and start to find real solutions to the problems he raised, rather than relying on ‘closed’ algebraic software.
There are many versions of this problem, not least Hayek’s discussion of “scientism” in Economics. In the 1970s he described the use of what looked like maths to describe complex economic systems but which was, in reality, only the appearance of maths. More recently, Mervyn King has described the failure of Economic forecasting because forecasts are only necessary when things change but when things change, forecasts fail. Climate science is nowhere near sufficiently advanced to describe our climate and our models cannot model change.
Gamecock, a retired computer scientist, has done computer modeling. Which worked perfectly well. Step #1 in modeling:
Codify behaviors. Describe how things work. Then program said behaviors.
“You have to know how things work to model them.” – GC
‘Climate models’ are DOA. We don’t know how the atmosphere works. We know many things, but there are known unknowns (clouds), and most likely unknown unknowns.
But there is more. We frequently hear of new, improved models . . . which falsify all previous models. Or Gamecock’s favorite, “sophisticated” models.
Weather modeling is now rather good for 2 or 3 days out. The notion that they can predict weather decades out is hilarious. Cirrusly, any mention of ‘climate models’ should be laughed at. They are a joke.
Bigger joke: They run 35 climate models (sic), then average the results, as if the average of junk isn’t junk.
Put 10 economists in a room and you get at least 11 forecasts.
Jim Hacker
“Computer models are no different from fashion models: seductive, unreliable, easily corrupted, and they lead sensible people to make fools of themselves.”
Paul, the general theme and objective of the BBC and other media outlets is scare mongering. What they don’t realise is the environmental, economic and social harm this particular theme is causing. In the 1970s the scare was a pending ice age that we could do nothing to stop. This time its global boiling caused by us, and it can be stopped if we get rid of about 7 billion poor people. The OECD needs Lebensraum.
I wonder who exactly pays the BBC to spend money this way.
Had the prospective Conservative MP round today. Nice guy, so far he has a moderately open mind to this topic. Seemed to agree with my proposition that Net Zero was the existential threat to the life opportunities for my grandkids, not “climate change” per se, which this generation is better equipped to deal with than any in the past.
Who knows, maybe getting rid of the current crop of MPs, then suffering five years of the next Parliament, then having some left who are capable of holding more than one opinion in their minds might just be in time to throw this whole movement back where it belongs.
Meanwhile, why is GB News (which I have never seen) being targeted for bias by OFCOM when the BBC, who never allow any debate on this subject, are not?
How refreshing – no sign of David Attenbollox.
Did anyone else miss Earth Hour yesterday? I usually support Power Hour and turn on all the lights to celebrate this wonderful technology. I have only just become aware of it reading a Daily Sceptic piece on extreme weather referring to the execrable Dim Dale – real name Noel apparently – as well as the leprechaun and the climate party numpty talking about it on GB News this morning. Sadly it was the show with Anne Diamond and Stephen Dixon who don’t do depth of knowledge. Nana Akua, Martin Daubney and some of the others would have given them a grilling.
We were out but left several lights on.
Somewhere at home I have the book of the same name, written by Nigel Calder, to accompany the series. At that time I was studying meteorology at University and the dominant thinking was that we were entering (or at least approaching) a new Ice Age.
I too have that book. Calder is careful to examine the issue in some depth (138 double column pages for just three chapters). In that last chapter he outlines what might happen if the new ideas about a rapid onset of an ice age are correct (page 135).
“Countries in danger of obliteration (complete or almost complete) by ice sheets
Canada,Greenland,Iceland, Irish Republic, UK, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Nepal, Sikkim, Butan, New Zealand.
Countries in danger of extensive glaciation
USA, USSR, Mexico Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Netherlands, W&E Germany,Poland, Austria, Afghanistan, China, Australia
Countries in danger of severe drought during the onset of an ice age
(41 countries including 5 of the countries mentioned above.)”
I graduated on 21 June 1974, I don’t remember the ‘dismal summer’ at all. 30C in London that day. I do remember the winter of 1962-63 being very cold.
Based on this my memory of 1974 was about right.
https://www.hardytropicals.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=19&t=16375
Snow stopped play famously at Buxton in June 1975 of course with Dickie Bird umpire. The following week shirts were off in glorious sunshine.
https://www.thecricketer.com/Topics/features/clive_lloyd_buxton_summer_1975_snow_stopped_play_june_lancashire_derbyshire.html
1974 was a cool and poor summer. I operated a weather station in the Midlands at that time and our top temperature that summer was 24.6c. The highest temperature in the UK that year was only 27c – the lowest for many years. The summer was very unsettled and with spells of heavy rain in England. The summer snow was the next year on 2 June 1975, but that quickly then turned into a warm, sunny summer.
Thanks, my mind was elsewhere I suppose
A couple of years ago, I bought a good quality used copy of the Nigel Calder book. (BBC 1974) on Amazon (I think). I’d also recommend The Chilling Stars by the same Nigel Calder with Henrik Svensmark published in 2007, giving a very different perspective.
Calder’s 1974 book was “The Weather Machine and the Threat of Ice”.
Wih apologahz fah theht interruption, lehdies ehnd gentlemen. Wih nah cohntinue weeth Benneh Goodmehn’s “One O’Clock Jump.”
Nigel David McKail Ritchie-Calder (2 December 1931 – 25 June 2014) was a British science writer and climate change denier (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Calder#Works )
If, like me, you visit Wiki a fair amount, it’s worth the visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_denial
Good for Nigel Calder!
I have my own ‘science denier’ in the form of my (Conservative) MP, whose latest reply to me contains… “I believe climate change is an undeniable scientific fact”. How he cannot see the multiple contradictions in that 1 sentence alone defeats me!