By Paul Homewood
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/53418023
The BBC’s Climate Check focusses on the Arctic this month. I did not even have to watch it to know exactly what they would say:
- Fastest warming
- Arctic heatwaves
- Wildfires
- Permafrost
- Sea ice melt
- Albedo
She begins by talking about “Unprecedented temperatures in the world’s fastest warming region at the poles” homing in on the heatwave in Siberia, with the record temperature of 38C set at Verhojansk, and eleven days above 30C there.
In fact temperatures above 30C there are perfectly common events, and June 2020 was not even as hot as June 1912. As we also know, the new record temperature was only 0.7C higher than the previous record set in 1988, hardly a cause for alarm.
The hot weather last month in Siberia was to the set up of the jet stream, not climate change. The same meteorological factors have brought one of Greenland’s coldest Junes for years, something the BBC are not so keen for people to know:
And when they claim that the Arctic is one of the “fastest warming regions on earth”, they don’t tell you that it was just as warm there back in the 1930s:
Neither are wildfires anything new in Arctic regions. In fact they are vital for the spread of larches and other trees which benefit from fire suppression of monolithic pine and fir.
As for summer sea ice, it has been stable since 2007:
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/icecover_30y.uk.php
The BBC refer to the albedo effect, whereby sunlight reflects away from sea ice, claiming that reduced sea ice extent allows sunlight to warm the seas. However, it is equally true that by September loss of heat from open seas more than outweighs the rapidly declining effect of the sun.
Finally she also refers to the South Pole, curiously claiming temperatures are rising at three times the global rate. There is no evidence for this whatsoever, with HADCRUT4 showing little increase at all since the 1970s:
The BBC also claim that the ice sheet is losing mass, but this is disputed by NASA, who insist that the ice cap is actually growing.
As with every other so-called Climate Check, this one has more to do with fiction than fact.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
July 31, 2020 at 06:24AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 
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