Justin Goes To California
THE BBC’s Justin Rowlatt has travelled to California for the next episode in his climate disinformation series.
Broadcast on BBC News during COP26, it shows him wandering through a patch of forest burned in wildfires earlier this summer. He claims that fires there are worse than ever before, thanks to years of ‘climate-induced droughts’. So far this year, he says, nearly 2.5million acres have burned in California.
As usual, Rowlatt is not telling the whole story. In reality, this year’s fire season is not exceptional in the US, being below the ten-year average.
Before European settlement, pre-1700, several millions of acres used to burn there every year. This was vital for the health of the forests, as it prevented overcrowding and the build-up of undergrowth, while maintaining ecosystem vigour. Much of California was open, park-like forest as a result, meaning that large fires simply were not able to take hold.
Then along came decades of fire suppression, starting in the early 1900s, but notably effective after 1950, which led to a build-up of fuel loads, deadwood and dense undergrowth. In other words, ideal conditions for the large fires we are now used to seeing.
None of this is controversial. Forestry experts in the US have been pointing it out for years. To make matters worse, draconian restrictions on logging and prescribed burns, thanks to environmental regulations, have prevented foresters from addressing the problem.
There is no evidence either that the recent drought is unprecedented, never mind ‘climate-induced’.
As ever, the BBC is not interested in the facts, only the propaganda.
Rocketing energy prices? Don’t worry, they’re good for the planet!
I know I’ve asked this before, but why does the BBC hate ordinary British people so much? Last week it published this article, written by its Economics Correspondent, Andy Verity. I quote:
‘Are higher energy prices good for the environment? For any member of a household paying an energy bill, it’s obvious why the sharply-rising prices are concerning. And of course, for poor households, especially pensioners, it will hit them hard financially.
‘But at least from an environmental point of view, there may be an upside. Cheaper bills can carry hidden costs because they do too little to discourage us from wastefully emitting greenhouse gases. The effects of that may not be visible to us, but they’re not invisible if, for example, you live in a Pacific island nation.
‘Where we don’t need to burn energy and do so, for example, because we prefer the house to be at 21C rather than a perfectly habitable 16C, higher energy costs will make us think twice.
‘That could do more to encourage us to invest in insulation, curb unnecessary emissions and to be mindful of what we are doing to the planet than any resolution at last week’s COP26 conference in Glasgow.’
So stop moaning about being cold, and be grateful you don’t live on Tuvalu!
This shows the utter contempt the BBC holds you in. It is not even as if millions of pensioners freezing to death will make the slightest difference to the climate in the Pacific, or anywhere else for that matter.
The arrogance of these people is breathtaking!
The Indian monsoon – myth v reality
One of the most common myths peddled by climate alarmists is that droughts are increasing worldwide thanks to global warming, thus leading to falls in food production. One study in April ludicrously claimed agricultural yields had been cut by 20 per cent in the last 60 years, with India highlighted as being one of the countries most affected.
The Guardian was at it again last month, making the same sort of claims, and again India was picked out as especially affected.
But, far from seeing farm output falling, India has just announced a record grain harvest for this year (measured on a July-June cycle). A bumper harvest is also expected next year, thanks to abundant rainfall this summer. And these are not flukes, as year-on-year output has been steadily rising since the 1980s:
Cereal Output in India – 1961 to 2019 – UN Food & Agricultural Organisation
There are of course myriad reasons for this, but what is absolutely clear is that monsoon rainfall in India is not declining, as the graph below shows. In contrast with recent years, severe droughts were common there in the 1960s to 1980s, a period of global cooling.
Indeed, this is no coincidence. When the world cools, the tropical rain belts are squeezed towards the equator. In the case of India, this means that the monsoon does not go as far north. Scientists at the time knew this full well.
Exactly the same phenomenon led to the catastrophic Sahel droughts in the 1970s, when hundreds of thousands died. And that drought belt extended across Africa and the Middle East.
And, of course, the 19th century was littered with examples of drought and famine in India, when the world was still in the grip of the Little Ice Age. Perhaps the most notorious was the Great Famine of 1876 to 1878, which killed an estimated eight million in the country.
But climate alarmists are not interested in inconvenient facts.
Harrabin and his cronies
You may have noticed that the BBC’s barrage of climate propaganda ended after the gavel came down at COP26. Most of it had, of course, been rehashed anyway.
Roger Harrabin, the corporation’s Environment Analyst, was forced to console himself with his alarmist chums, who he laughingly refers to as ‘experts’.
First up was the utterly discredited Sir David King, one-time Chief Scientific Adviser to Tony Blair. King told our Roger that ‘heating is already at a dangerous level, with Greenland sitting in blue sea for three months, losing ice.’
For some reason, Harrabin failed to point out that this is what Greenland does every year – it is called SUMMER. In WINTER, it snows and the ice is replaced again.
King would of course like you to believe that Greenland summers are now wall-to-wall heatwaves. However, summer temperatures in Greenland now are no higher than they were a century ago.
Average Daily Maximum Temperatures in Summer in Greenland: Ilulissat (West Coast) and Tasiilaq (East Coast)
King’s track record on climate is hardly one to write home about. He it was who famously forecast back in 2004 that Antarctica was likely to be the world’s only habitable continent by the end of this century if global warming remained unchecked.
He also grossly misled a Parliamentary select committee in the same year, when he claimed that the South Pole ice cap was 40 per cent as thick as it used to be. (Most estimates suggest that the ice there is actually getting thicker). He also told the same committee that the Greenland ice cap might disappear within 50 to 200 years. At the current rate of melt, it would take 25,000 years!
If that was not bad enough, he also gave false evidence to the Energy Select Committee in 2014, claiming that Hurricane Sandy was the first to hit so far north in America. In fact, since 1950 alone there have been nine hurricanes which made landfall further north than Sandy.
Put simply, the man is a clown.
Harrabin then turned to Piers Forster, an IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) lead author. He claimed that ‘people are already dying with current temperatures’.This is another grossly misleading statement. Many more people die from the cold every year than die from extreme heat. This is even the case in countries such as India.
Meanwhile, the official data shows that deaths caused by all kinds of extreme weather, such as floods, storms, extreme temperatures and drought, are now at record lows:
However, one of Harrabin’s chums, Julian Allwood, Professor of Engineering and the Environment at the University of Cambridge, rather gave the game away when he inconveniently pointed out that the solutions being discussed in Glasgow depend on unrealistic amounts of clean electricity, carbon capture and biomass.
He said: ‘If you compare the amount with what’s available today and any plausible growth rate, there’s no possibility we will have enough of those.
‘We therefore need a different set of policies, such as using half the amount of electricity. We must cut levels of flying, shipping, cement and ruminants because there’s no way of dealing with them.’
This is of course the real agenda. We must all drastically cut our standards of living and radically change our lifestyles.
Yet strangely, neither Harrabin nor his cronies mentioned the herd of elephants in the room – China, India and the rest of the developing world.
