By Paul Homewood
As far as climate change is concerned, Sky News have now abandoned all pretensions to factual accuracy, in favour of blatant propaganda.
They have a new 12-minute special report, to set off a week of special reports, but if this trailer is anything to go by it’s going to be the same old garbage the BBC have served up for years:
https://news.sky.com/story/science-storms-and-protests-behind-climate-crisis-11744227
The use of the word “storms” in the link title, along with the phrase “climate crisis” gives a good idea of the junk that is to follow.
Let’s go through the trailer’s claims and statements:
They refer to last year’s IPCC Special Report, which suddenly and conveniently found that we could not let global warming go past the 1.5C mark, when previously a figure of 2C had been plucked out of the air.
As we know, that report was nothing more than a politically motivated exercise, with very little substance in it.
Previous IPCC reports have all concluded that the degree of warming already seen since the end of the Little Ice Age has had no detrimental effect on the earth’s climate. Indeed, during the 2016/16 El Nino, global temperatures effectively reached that dreaded 1.5C mark, with no adverse effect whatsoever.
Rather than address these factual issues, Sky prefer to pay attention to a handful of schoolchildren and eco-loons.
Whenever you read words like “spew”, you know you are about to be conned.
They pluck out a figure of 4C, even though it is way above any serious projections, and is totally out of line with past temperature rises.
After throwing the usual rubbish about rising sea levels, they then claim that there is a” scientific consensus” about 1.5C. This simply is not true. There is a vast array of scientific opinion about how much more warming there might be, and its effects.
Instead of ridiculous claims about ice free Arctics, coral reefs and falling crop yields, it would have been nice to have actually been shown some real information, such as the fact Arctic sea ice extent has not declined since 2007, or that crop yields have been steadily rising as the climate has warmed.
There then follows this utterly ludicrous segment:
If the climate scientist watching on really said that, that tells us all we need to know about his profession!
In this country, humans regularly experience temperature ranges from below zero to well above 30C. Globally, even bigger ranges can be seen, even at individual locations.
Indeed even this week, temperatures here in Sheffield are expected to vary between 15C and 25C during daytime. The idea that people cannot adapt to a half a degree of warming or so over a century is absurd.
And, of course, this is the very real problem that the climate establishment has faced when trying to scare the public.
This is why they have had to brainwash children into spreading their message:
Moving onto Paris, they then gloss over the fact that China never even agreed to cut emissions.
As for the comment about Chinese wind farms, it is grossly dishonest. Certainly, the amount wind power generated in China is bigger than other countries, but this is simply because China also happens to be by far the biggest generator of electricity in the world.
In percentage terms, wind power in China only supplies 5% of the country’s electricity, a pitifully low figure compared to the UK and other western countries.
There is no mention either of the fact that China is busy building hundreds of new coal power stations.
Then comes the extreme weather lie:
There is no evidence that wildfires are getting worse, or that global warming has any effect at all on them. According to the US Forestry Service, wildfires used to be much worse in the past:
https://www.fs.fed.us/research/sustain/criteria-indicators/indicators/indicator-316.php
Experts also tell us that wildfires have decreased on a global level as well.
They mention Typhoon Manghut, implying that this was due to climate change. Yet the IPCC themselves state that hurricanes are not getting worse.
As for Storm Desmond, a month’s rainfall in one day is perfectly common in Britain. In 1955, for instance, the equivalent of eight months worth of rainfall fell on Martinstown, Dorset in one day.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-climate-extremes
As for the “worst floods in 600 years” claim, this is palpable nonsense. The history of Britain is filled with cataclysmic floods, far worse than anything Desmond brought.
Then they present another fake video:
Quite why they quote Carbon Brief, I don’t know. They would have got more reliable information from Greenpeace!
There is of course an industry built up to “attribute” bad weather to global warming, and an extremely well paid one at that. But despite their theorising, the stubborn facts remain, that extreme weather is not getting worse in overall terms, as even the IPCC are forced to admit.
As for the Met Office’s joke predictions, we can safely ignore them given their track record in such matters.
Then comes the bill!
Nowhere do Sky explain how tiny the UK’s emissions are in global terms, or how quickly the rest of the world are still increasing theirs.
And, despite their claims that “it can be fixed”, there is no evidence that the world can run its economy and maintain its standard of living (never mind improve the lot of billions in the third world) if fossil fuels are abandoned, particularly on such a short timescale.
And if they really think other countries will be interested in importing our “green technology”, Sky really must be living on another planet!
This is a huge opportunity missed, I have to say.
There was a real chance to present the facts, minus the myths and hype.
They could have explained how floods, storms and droughts are not getting worse. How sea level rise is gradual and not accelerating. How temperatures at the poles are not high by historical standards. How Arctic sea ice has been pretty much stable for a decade and more, and how the ice mass on Antarctica has actually been growing. How climate models have consistently overestimated warming.
Above all, they could have brought the climate debate back to an objective, unemotional level. In doing so, the younger generation might have learned to become slightly less paranoid.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
June 25, 2019 at 04:09PM

Reblogged this on Climate- Science.
LikeLike