Not having a TV licence, my wife and I tend to browse the TV channels whenever we’re away for a few days on holiday, as we were last week in north east Wales. It’s usually a pointless exercise, as we never find anything we would like to watch (thus confirming us in our decision not to have a licence). Once more, last week, we didn’t find anything of interest to us, but while channel hopping we caught the end of Gardeners’ World, and heard Monty Don telling us that it’s great for gardeners that summer now lasts until October.

And yet, barely had we arrived home than the BBC website had a front page article with the heading “Leaves falling, berries ripe, but it’s hot. Is autumn coming early?” Not according to Monty Don, it ain’t, but is it? Well, the BBC article doesn’t exactly overwhelm its readers with science or data. Instead, as one commenter said, “[t]his isn’t news or even facts it is someone writing a column and then wheeling out people to support their views.” [By the way, the BBC opened the article up to a have your say, and the interest levels could scarcely be lower, with just 66 comments at the time of writing, and quite a few of them are the result of an ongoing disagreement between two people].

The article commences with a pretence that something newsworthy is going on:

It’s still hot in many parts of the UK, but some tree leaves are turning yellow and blackberries are so ripe in hedges that they’re tasting alcoholic.

Hmm. Some tree leaves are turning yellow in August – well, that’s nothing new. Blackberries are ripe. That’s nothing new, either. My wife and I usually go blackberry picking in August, and in some years we’re able to make a start in late July. In fact, just a week ago, we indulged in a spot of brambling, and it seemed to us that the blackberries were poorer than usual, and most of them were far from ripe – possibly as a result of it being a bit drier and warmer than usual, but the oppposite of the claims made by the BBC in this regard.

Next:

There is no formal definition of “early autumn” but experts say signs of the season, like leaves falling or apples being ready to pick, are actually nature becoming stressed by the long hot and dry summer.

The experts who say these things aren’t named, but my experience isn’t of apples being ready to pick any earlier than usual. I picked a few yesterday, but they’re still mostly small, and will probably reach maturity at about the same date as usual – at least where we live.

The BBC majors on this aspect of the story, which doesn’t match my own experience:

At the same time, classic autumn fruits like blackberries and apples – normally ready in September – are hanging off the branches.

Then they go on to qualify this: “…but scientists need more information to be certain about the long-term trend.” What else?

In Cardiff, Wanda O’Connor has grown melons outside for the first time since she started growing food six years ago. [Six years doesn’t signify anything, surely].

She shows me ripening limes and lemons inside her allotment greenhouse. “It’s 38-39C in here,” she says, pointing to a thermometer.

A Have Your Say commenter skewered this rather nicely:

The level of journalism is dismal. “Its 38 to 39 degrees in my greenhouse she says” Its a Greenhouse it WILL be hot as soon as the sun shines on it. My car showed 42 degrees but the actual temp was 31. Growing melons for the first time in 6 years is hardly an [sic] substantial sample.

We are referred to the Met Office report, “State of the UK Climate in 2024” to justify the claim that “Climate change is affecting the timings of biological events including spring and autumn…”. It’s as well that the BBC immediately qualified this claim by saying that “the level of change varies year-to-year.” Actually, the Met Office Report was much more nuanced than this simplistic claim. It says “However, such responses can be complex, and short observational records can make detecting trends difficult”, which to my mind indicates substantially greater uncertainty than the BBC would have its readers believe. Ironically too, the Met Office Report (which is about last year, remember, says “Bare tree dates were a few days earlier than the 1999–2023 baseline due to a slightly cooler than average summer and early autumn.” Yet the BBC tries to argue that autumn is arriving earlier this year for the opposite reasons to last year, namely a warmer and drier summer than the average. The BBC makes its point thus:

The UK has had 71% of the average rainfall for the season so far when it should be 79% by this date, according to the Met Office.

And we’ve had 89% of the average sunshine hours for summer. The Met Office says we would expect 79% by this point.

In my humble submission, these aren’t significant differences from the long-term average. As for the use of a phrase like “should be” in this context – oh dear.

The article asks: “But does it matter if autumn conditions come early?” That pre-supposes that autumn conditions have arrived early, and they haven’t where I live. For example, the BBC article includes this:

Bees are also showing signs of shutting down for the winter, after flowering plants finished producing pollen and nectar in the hot weather. That could leave bees without enough food.

Nope, not here. The bees have had a great spring and summer, and they’re still busy and active. The bee-keepers I have spoken to are very happy.

Inevitably, the Guardian waded in earlier today too: “Early ripening of berries in UK shows nature is under stress, say experts”. Given that it’s more of the same, I won’t go through it line by line. Suffice it to say, we are treated to more soundbites from Kathryn Brown, director of climate change and evidence at the Wildlife Trusts, who was heavily cited in the BBC piece. We are again directed to the UK Met Office’s State of the Climate Report. We are regaled with the same apocalyptic concerns.

What strikes me about this is that it isn’t a coincidence. It appears highly likely that there has been a press release, and that this is a concerted attempt to co-opt favoured media organisations (inevitably the BBC and the Guardian, though no doubt others too will be happy to cut and paste) into spreading the “climate crisis” message, based on little more than the urban heat island that is the south east of England.

There is a final irony here – namely this piece from the Wildlife Trusts’ blog as recently as a week ago. Apparently “The brambles are heavy with fruit this year – fat, dark twinkling jewels tucked away in the barbed tangles.” [Compare and contrast the Guardian’s claim that “some [UK brambles are] now bearing only shrivelled berries”]. Further, from the blog, in direct contradiction of the claims of early brambles becoming shrivelled already: “I’ve been watching these hedgerows for weeks, waiting for the fruit to ripen.” Finally, and most deliciously of all on the irony scale:

This year, the hedgerows have been generous. The toing and throwing between heatwaves and thunderous rainstorms created the perfect conditions for fruit to thrive. After a sparse summer last year, it’s a welcome boost.

In answer to the BBC’s question (“But does it matter if autumn conditions come early?”). No, it doesn’t. One year’s decent summer doesn’t matter. It’s weather, not climate. This year the summer weather has been a lot nicer than it was last year. Please let us enjoy it and stop trying to scare us to death.

Guest Post By Willis Eschenbach

Only a journalist truly committed to the ancient art of panic-clickbait could squeeze all the world’s existential dread into a headline like, “A Giant, Destructive Volcanic Eruption Is Set to Shake the World in the Coming Months, Bringing About the End of Mankind, Scientists Warn.” They’ve accompanied it with the following graphic, in case you weren’t adequately terrified.

The dead giveaway? “Scientists Warn.” Whenever you see those two words sandwiched together above the fold, you know you’re about to step into a wonderland of wild extrapolation, qualified maybes, and models run so far into the future they boomerang back with “robots take over” as the y-axis.

They start out as follows:

A detailed geophysical study published in Nature in by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has refined our understanding of the Yellowstone supervolcano, uncovering new insights into its subsurface magma dynamics. Concurrently, climatological assessments by researchers such as Markus Stoffel (University of Geneva) have renewed discourse around the global systemic risks posed by a potential super-eruption — not only at Yellowstone, but at several other active volcanic complexes worldwide.

There’s an oddity here to start with. They’ve pushed together into one paragraph an actual scientific study of the Yellowstone caldera, and a paywalled puff piece by some random guy trying to frighten people about future eruptions. Unless you’re watching very closely to see which walnut the pea is under, it’s likely to be successful in making you think “Wow, a predicted super-eruption at Yellowstone, and the odds are high in other locations as well”.

Which does sound scary. So keep that thought in mind while we look at the first of the two parts they’ve pushed into one paragraph—the actual Yellowstone scientific study.

It’s the latest USGS study published in Nature under the very boring title “The progression of basaltic–rhyolitic melt storage at Yellowstone Caldera”. It gives us an upgraded, high-res CAT scan of Yellowstone’s magma plumbing. Instead of a giant pool of liquid doom sloshing under Wyoming, the new imaging shows a club sandwich: scattered blobs of partially molten rock, unevenly distributed, with most of the melt sitting in the northeast sector. The scale is impressive—400–500 cubic kilometers of rhyolitic magma waiting for its cosmic moment. The heat just keeps bubbling up from below, slow and relentless, and with enough time, these melt zones might even hook up into a larger reservoir. But spoiler: no scientist anywhere is claiming that’s on tomorrow’s chore list.

Which brings us to the great, headline-grabbing “16% chance (one in six) of apocalypse by 2100” further down in the popular reports—a number that, if ever printed on a lottery ticket, would bankrupt Las Vegas. From the article:

Still, climatologist Markus Stoffel and affiliated risk researchers estimate a ~16% probability of a VEI 7 or higher eruption occurring globally before the year 2100.

Except that particular prediction is not referred to by the scientists of the actual Yellowstone study, and has nothing to do with the Yellowstone study.

It comes from a some gentleman yclept Markus Stoffel. And he’s not even talking about Yellowstone. He’s talking about the entire planet. Nothing to do with Yellowstone.

And who is Markus when he’s at home? Is he a member of the team of authors of the Yellowstone study?

Nope.

Well, is he a vulcanologist?

Nope again.

He’s a climate professor at the University of Geneva. He’s published a lot, almost entirely regarding the effects of “climate change” on glaciers, mountain landslides, and mountain lakes. To quote from his bio page,

In a nutshell, my research is related to climate change impacts, time-series and dynamics of hydrogeomorphic and earth-surface processes at altitude and/or high latitudes, as well as on dendroecology and wood anatomy of trees and shrubs.

Translated, that means he mostly studies the nature and dynamics of landslides, and their effect on tree rings and tree populations.

Stoffel’s global “super-eruption” probability is based on … well … it’s hard to find that out. It’s from a paywalled opinion piece (not a peer reviewed study), and I’m not paying the monkey. It’s headlined:

---

The next massive volcano eruption will cause climate chaos — and we are unprepared

Volcanic activity will be experienced differently in a warmer world. Researchers need to understand these risks and how they could spiral.

---

Now, what he’s calling a “massive” volcanic eruption is scientifically known as a VEI-7 eruption or larger. The Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) is a logarithmic scale from 0 to 8 used to measure the relative explosiveness of volcanic eruptions. “Logarithmic” means that each step is ten times the previous step. So a VEI-7 eruption is ten times as explosive as a VEI-6 eruption. And it’s a hundred times as explosive as the VEI-5 Vesuvius eruption that buried Pompeii … so yes. Massive.

Near as I can tell from published reports and descriptions of the piece, the estimate uses a recurrence-interval logic. However, I can’t make that fit with real-world data. There have been 7 VEI-7 or stronger eruptions throughout relatively well-documented history since the eruption of the Akahoya Volcano in Japan in 7,300 BC until the eruption of Mt. Tambora 110 years ago. This makes the recurrence interval on the order of 1,070 years. So we’ll call it a thousand years. And this “thousand-year event” figure is widely quoted in the scientific literature about eruptions of VEI-7 or greater.

OK, math warning. Jump over the marked section if you don’t like math.

WARNING: MATH DANGER ZONE BELOW

---

Now, the Poisson formula for the probability P of a VEI-7 eruption within a certain number of years is calculated as

P = 1 − e^−λt

where λ  is the annual rate (1/1000) and t is the time window (75 years to the year 2100).

---

MATH DANGER ZONE ENDS

This means the odds of a VEI-7 or greater eruption before 2100 is 7%. Counterintuitively, it doesn’t matter how long it’s been since the last eruption. Odds are the same whether the last blowout was a hundred or a thousand years ago.

So Señor Stoffel is doing some kind of plain and fancy statistical tapdancing to get a value more than twice that of traditional math. To get to his 16% chance by the year 2100 number, the recurrence interval of massive eruptions would have to be 430 years, and there’s no evidence of that.

(Curiously, and perhaps not coincidentally, the chance of a massive eruption by the year 2200 is indeed 16% … but I digress.)

Now, about this “end of mankind” bit—don’t bother searching the Nature study. You’ll find plenty of detail on mineralogy and melt percentages, reams of electron microscope scans, and lots of caution about inferring timeframes. You will not, under peer review or USGS letterhead, find predictions about humanity’s extinction. What the data actually say is that Yellowstone’s timetable is wildly non-periodic, there are no clear cycles, and the statistical sample is, by any reasonable standard, too tiny for fortune-telling.

The actual hazard of monster eruptions somewhere on the globe? Real, yes. And it has been for the last nine thousand years.

Visibly increasing? No. The hazards have been the same over the entire nine millennia, and our ability to deal with such events has never been better.

Likely to bring about the “end of mankind”? Well, the last eight such events didn’t even begin to end mankind. They brought a few years of bad weather, sometimes very bad early on and close to the eruption. But not many people died worldwide.

So I’m gonna put my money on “No chance in hell” that the next one ends mankind.

Worth prepping your doomsday bunker over a panicky headline about eruptions written by a man with a PhD. thesis titled “Spatio-temporal variations of rockfall activity into forests – results from tree-ring and tree analysis”?

Maybe not this quarter.

So next time you see “Scientists Warn” above a picture of a bison grazing a steamy caldera, remember: It’s never the geologists issuing the press-release countdown to Armageddon. The real science, as usual, is in the fine print—buried under three layers of model assumptions, and almost always ending with some version of, “we simply don’t know when.”

My very best to everyone, life is good.

w.

As I May Have Mentioned Before: When you comment, I implore you to quote the exact words you are discussing. I’m SO tired of people saying something like “You are entirely wrong about volcanoes” or the like, and I have no idea if they’re talking to me or someone else, and if so, about what.