JIM Dale is a meteorologist who frequently appears on TV and radio spouting climate alarmist nonsense. For example, he is often on Julia Hartley-Brewer’s TalkRadio show, and although she always gives as good as she gets, he often gets away with blatantly false information simply because she does not have the knowledge to challenge him. Dale’s interviews are always utterly devoid of hard facts and data; instead he simply parrots UN propaganda.
However Dale has met his match in the last two weeks on Nana Akua’s GB News slot, where he has come face to face with a real climate scientist, Paul Burgess.
In the first programme, Dale ludicrously claimed that Storm Ciaran might be a ‘sign of climate change’, even though it was a damp squib. This week he ranted on about how all the world’s weather was getting more extreme and claimed that this year would be the hottest for 120,000 years. He also talked of ‘climate deniers’ and a fossil-fuel-funded rump of sceptical scientists.
Burgess patiently shot down every claim with facts, charts and references, and has posted all of these on his YouTube site, along with the clip of the show and a detailed takedown of Jim Dale’s fact-free presentation.
The video is below, beginning with the clip if you don’t want to watch the full 41 minutes.
I have also taken the liberty of copying Paul Burgess’s charts below, all of which are derived from official sources and scientific studies.
First of all, he destroys the ‘hottest for 120,000 years’ claim, then goes on to look at trends in droughts, wildfires, hurricanes and floods:
As you can see in the clip, Jim Dale’s reaction to the facts is very telling – he pulls faces, shakes his head and complains they are just ‘opinions’! He even quotes a Netflix documentary to support his own views.
What is also noteworthy is that, according to Paul Burgess, Dale bragged that he gets invited on to BBC and ITV, but that the former never would. Which of course tells us plenty about the MSM’s bias on climate issues.
Maybe Dale should stick to weather forecasting, though he does not seem very good at that either. In July he warned there was a 10 per cent chance we could see 40C by the end of the summer. We all know how that worked out.
PS: Funny that Dale shares his name with the Carry On comedy films stalwart Jim Dale, who is now 88.
This year’s storms are nothing to the 80s and 90s
A POLL in the Express this week asked: ‘Are storms worse this year because of climate change?’ What made the poll remarkable is that storms are not getting worse – on the contrary, they have declined in intensity since the 1990s.
But that is not message the public are being fed. The media are happy to hype normal weather events to bag scary headlines. Meanwhile the Met Office, who long ago sold their soul to climate alarmism, help to build the hype by giving silly names to every passing depression, and by reporting high wind speeds only at totally unsuitable locations at clifftops and so on. (More on this next week).
But even the Met Office admit that ‘there are no compelling trends in storminess [in the UK] when considering maximum gust speeds over the last four decades. More comprehensive studies across the North Atlantic region have reached similar conclusions.’
In fact, not for the first time, they are being economical with the truth, because their own chart quite clearly shows a declining trend:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joc.8167
Storminess peaked in the 1980s and 90s, and archives describe many storms the like of which we have not seen since.
We all know about the Great Storm of 1987, but that was by no means unique. The late Philip Eden, one-time vice-president of the Royal Meteorological Society, wrote in the Telegraph following the winter storms of 2013/14: ‘It is generally reckoned to be the windiest spell since January/February 1990, when twelve severe gales hit much of the country in the space of six weeks. That February was almost certainly the windiest month of the 20th century. It began with the Burns Day storm in late January, arguably the worst storm of the last century, and the death toll of 47 certainly supports that contention.’ He stated that the gales lasted 18 hours, with winds up to 107 mph, and over 100 mph in many places.
More severe gales were to follow. On February 11, winds of 93mph hit Devon; the wildest day was the 26th, when much of the country was badly hit again. Leeds experienced winds of 98mph, which is astonishing for an inland, unexposed location. The storm overwhelmed the sea defences at Towyn in Wales, which suffered serious flooding.
Analysis of the Met Office weather reports for February 1990 show that none of the country escaped the extreme weather that month (see here). Virtually everywhere had at least one day of 70mph-plus winds.
1990 was not just a one-off, because January 1993 brought storms almost as bad. Scotland had 25 days on the trot with winds of 80mph and more, and Leeds once again was hit with incredibly strong winds, this time 94mph.
On the 5th, gales drove the oil tanker Braer on to rocks in the Shetlands, causing widespread pollution. That storm still is the deepest cyclone recorded outside the tropics. Fortunately it bypassed mainland Britain.
Across Britain, 17 people died on five separate days as a direct result of the storms that month.
The only storm in the last ten years which even remotely approached any of these storms in 1990 and 1993 was Eunice in February last year.
There is actually a very good, scientific reason why storms are not as powerful now. Contrary to alarmist claims that global warming is powering storms, the opposite is the case.
Extratropical storms are fuelled by the temperature differential between warm and cold air – the larger the difference, the stronger the storm. The renowned H H Lamb, the leading climatologist of his time, describing the 16th and 17th centuries, wrote in 1982: ‘The spread of the Arctic ice to Iceland and the polar water to the Faroes meant that the surface of the Atlantic there was 5C colder than is usual today. Consequently there was a greatly strengthened thermal gradient between latitudes 50 to 65N. This seems to have been the basis for the development of cyclone wind storms exceeding the severity of most of the worst storms of modern times.’
During the period of global cooling which set in after the 1940s, Arctic sea ice expanded massively, and it was this that powered the storms of the 1990s. Since then then Arctic sea ice has receded again, thus weakening the thermal gradient because temperatures in the tropics have barely changed.
