BBC Blame Bologna Floods On Climate Change

By Paul Homewood

The BBC is now even inserting climate propaganda into its weather forecasts:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/av/65640935

It did not take the BBC long to link the tragic Bologna floods this week to climate change. They even included this video at the start of their weather forecast, just in case people missed it.

There are several references to extreme weather, extreme rainfall and extreme drought. The weatherman, Chris Fawkes goes on to say:

“As our planet warms up, climate scientists tell us that extreme weather are likely to become more frequent, and I think that really does fit the bill for Italy for what we’ve seen”

Climate scientists say all sorts of things, much of it lies or baseless. What they say should not though be confused with evidence.

I have seen no official data for the rainfall yet, but 200mm appears credible. Bear in mind though this is over the mountains. Annual rainfall in Bologna is about 1000mm, so clearly the”half annual rainfall” claim is a fabrication.

It is a sad fact that Northern Italy is prone to these sort of disastrous floods. For instance, the 1966 Florence floods killed 101 people, when a third of a year’s average rainfall fell in two days:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2016/nov/05/the-great-flood-of-florence-50-years-on

Before that there were the River Po floods in 1957:

And in 1994, 77 lost their lives in the Piedmont flood. As in Florence, a third of a year’s rain fell in the space of three days.

Such weather events are due to meteorological conditions, not climate change, as even Chris Fawkes admits when he tells us that the storm was the result of the jet stream being far to the south of its usual position. Something incidentally which is more likely in a colder world. A recent study by Grazzini et al looked into the Piedmont floods, and concluded that it was the result of a meridionally elongated upper–level trough embedded in an incoming Rossby wave packet, just as previous severe floods had been.

But leaving the causes of this flood to one side until all the facts are known, which the BBC should have done, does the historic data for Bologna back up the BBC’s claims about climate change making these things worse?

Let’s start with the KNMI data, which goes up to 2021. (I do, by the way, feel very frustrated at times that it is so difficult to access up to date weather data from official sources, including our wonderful Met Office; if climate change is so critical, surely the least they should do is provide the public with this sort of information).

Bologna has data all the way back to 1813, and the daily rainfall chart below quite clearly indicates that rainfall used to be much more extreme in the past:

time series

https://climexp.knmi.nl/getstations.cgi

We get a similar picture from ECA&D, with data up to 2020:

https://www.ecad.eu/indicesextremes/customquerytimeseriesplots.php

Clearly Fawkes’ claim does not stand up to scrutiny.

Before we finish, it is worth looking at annual rainfall, bearing in mind Fawkes’ claims of the extreme drought last year. Remembering that the data only runs to 2020, the evidence clearly shows that droughts were much worse prior to 1950. And there have always been large swings in rainfall from year to year, making a nonsense of his claims.