BBC’s Climate Check–Feb 22

By Paul Homewood

The BBC’s monthly dose of climate propaganda is presented by Sarah Keith-Lucas. It is the usual mixture of misinformation, outright lies and misdirection:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/60780761

She begins:

“The latest report from the IPCC has been called the bleakest yet of the impact of global climate change. And some recent events support this assessment!

This is really quite fraudulent, because what follows does not bear any of this out.

The first port of call is Australia, where heavy floods have hit Brisbane and Sydney. She says that Brisbane had two months of rainfall in two days, but this is not unusual. February 27th and 28th recorded 613mm:

This may sound a lot, but maybe Sarah should have put this into perspective, as Queensland has often had much more than this in a single day:

She also claims that Sydney had its wettest start to the year in 150 years. In fact, rainfall across the whole of the summer in NSW has been pretty much average.

If Sarah thinks that heavy rainfall is due to global warming, maybe she would like to explain the 1970s!

Summer Rainfall - Total for New South Wales/ACT

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=timeseries&tQ=graph%3Drain%26area%3Dnsw%26season%3D1202%26ave_yr%3D0

There follows an explanation of the effect of La Nina and El Nino, with the former bringing heavy rain to Australia. But then she make the highly debatable claim that these ocean cycles MAY be increasing in frequency and strength because of climate change. (Note the weasel word “MAY”!)

The actual data shows her claim is nonsense:

https://psl.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/gcos_wgsp/tsanalysis.pl?tstype1=63&tstype2=0&year1=&year2=&itypea=0&axistype=0&anom=0&plotstyle=0&climo1=&climo2=&y1=&y2=&y21=&y22=&length=&lag=&iall=0&iseas=0&mon1=0&mon2=11&Submit=Calculate+Results

She then goes on to claim that Perth has just had its hottest summer.

Perth, with its urban heat island may have, but Western Australia as a whole certainly did not:

http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/index.shtml#tabs=Tracker&tracker=timeseries&tQ=graph%3Dtmean%26area%3Dwa%26season%3D1202%26ave_yr%3D0

We then move onto Madagascar, where Sarah falsely claims there have been five tropical cyclones in six weeks.

In reality, there have only been three cyclones, Ana, Batsirai and Emnati. Dumako did hit Madagascar, but it was never above Tropical Storm strength, with winds of 40 mph.

Cliff was also no more a TS, and never got anywhere near Madagascar.

So far this season, which runs from November to May, there have only been five TCs and TSs, well below the average of twelve.

http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/storm_archive/indian.html

Antarctic sea ice extent has also been low this summer, according to Sarah. But she does not mention it was at near record highs only a few years ago.

Naturally, she wants you to think global warming is melting the South Pole, with images of collapsing glaciers. But the changes we are seeing are plainly simply normal variations.

https://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/

Finally we learn that the UK has had a mild winter, and it is true that mild winters tend to be more common nowadays. However, this hardly supports her opening claims about the “bleakest report yet”. On the contrary, our climate is far less extreme than it used to be.