ARE weather disasters becoming more common? You’d have thought so, because we keep on being told so. A few months ago, the BBC informed us:
‘The number of weather-related disasters to hit the world has increased five-fold over the past 50 years, says the World Meteorological Organization. As global temperatures have risen in recent decades, there has been a significant uptick in the number of disasters related to weather and water extremes.’
They even gave us this convenient chart:
Now, you might ask, if this is all true, why has the number of disasters actually declined in the last decade?
Every year, we are fed similar claims. Last week it was the turn of the UN to publish their latest report on natural disasters. They say:
https://www.undrr.org/gar2022-our-world-risk#container-downloads
As with the BBC chart, we see that there has been no increase since 2000. But why the startling increase since the 1970s?
The answer is simple: there was no formal reporting system for disasters prior to 1998, when EM-DAT, the International Disaster Database, began to be published. Consequently many disasters were not formally recorded.
Indeed, CRED, the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters, who maintain the database, made this totally clear in 2004, when they had this to say about the collection of disaster data in their Annual Report:
‘Until recently the needs were addressed on an ad hoc basis . . . As a result data were incomplete, outdated or unusable . . .
Since 1900 more than 9,000 natural disasters have been registered in EM-DAT. Of these about 80 per cent have happened in the last thirty years. [This] might lead one to believe that disasters occur more frequently today . . . however reaching such a conclusion would be incorrect . . . Over the past thirty years, development in telecommunications, media and increased international co-operation has played a critical role in the number of disasters reported. In addition increases in humanitarian funds have encouraged reporting of more disasters, especially smaller events which were previously managed locally.’
Indeed, the latest UN report emphasises that ‘99.7 per cent of all disaster events between 1990 and 2013 were smaller disasters, involving fewer than 30 deaths or 5000 houses destroyed. Thousands of these smaller-scale events are unreported every year’.
If thousands are still being unreported now, heaven knows how many were missed in the 1970s! Still, it gives ample opportunity for the bureaucrats to record ever higher numbers of disasters in years to come.
The formal reporting of disasters in the 1970s was so poor that the database does not even include the Red River flood in August 1971, which killed an estimated 100,000 in North Vietnam.
Experts in these matters know all about this, from international aid agencies to charities. But they all turn a blind eye each year when the UN publishes fraudulent reports like this one.
And every year they are faithfully reported by the likes of the BBC, in an attempt to persuade the rest of us that we are heading for climatic Armageddon if we don’t do as we are told.
BBC Uphold Two More Complaints Against Justin Rowlatt
The BBC have upheld two more complaints against climate editor Justin Rowlatt. Both concern last November’s Panorama edition, ‘Wild Weather – Our World Under Threat’, which was presented and written by Rowlatt.
The whole programme was a clumsy attempt to persuade us that we are heading for climate catastrophe. It ended with an appeal for leaders to come together and cut emissions at COP26 – in Rowlatt’s words, ‘to save us from climate catastrophe’.
There was no attempt by Panorama to justify these silly claims, or offer alternative views or even the actual data so that viewers could make up their own minds. Indeed, it could have been written by Greenpeace and the UN.
Rowlatt began with this absurd claim: ‘The world is getting warmer and our weather is getting ever more unpredictable and dangerous. The death toll is rising around the world.’
The opposite is true: the death toll from weather disasters has fallen dramatically in recent years, as the World Meteorological Organisation clearly state.
A viewer who complained was at first given the excuse that they were referring to the cumulative death toll! After he persevered, the BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit upheld his complaint, and a correction has been added to the iPlayer page.
The programme then went on to show graphic footage of some weather disasters, without even attempting to show that they were in any way unprecedented. One was last year’s drought in Madagascar, which Rowlatt blithely described as ‘the world’s first climate change-induced famine’. A few weeks after the programme was aired, a scientific study was published categorically proving that it was neither climate-induced, nor unprecedented. My complaint about this was also upheld.
BBC programmes often attract multiple complaints. But for two separate complaints on two separate points to be upheld against one programme must be some sort of record, particularly on the basis of accuracy.
There have now been three complaints upheld against Rowlatt in the last year. The first was when he falsely claimed that the offshore wind industry was ‘virtually subsidy free’, in a puff piece for renewables filmed last summer. (At the time, subsidies were running at £3.5billion a year).
It is abundantly clear that Justin Rowlatt is using his role as BBC climate editor to promote his extreme eco-agenda. Facts, it appears, are of little relevance to him, to be ignored if they don’t fit in with his prejudices.
How much longer can he remain in the job?
Extreme weather? Sorry, I must have missed it!
The BBC’s weather forecasters must be under instruction to label our weather ‘extreme’ whenever the opportunity arises.
According to a new video by Sarah Keith-Lucas, April weather is becoming ‘more extreme’, because last month continued a run of drier than average Aprils recently. We are also experiencing more extreme wet Aprils as well, she says. https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/61275197
In fact, last month was only the 52nd driest since 1836, well within the normal range. In Sarah’s world, of course, anything above or below average is extreme and must be due to global warming!
According to the Met Office data, only one April since 1980 appears in the ten driest since 1836. This was in fact last year, hence the attempt to fool the public while it is still fresh in people’s minds.
April 2012 obviously appears as an outlier as the wettest, but it is the only one on the list of wettest since 2000. It certainly is not part of any ‘trend’, as she claims.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Rainfall/date/UK.txt
The reality is that no sane person would call the weather we had last month ‘extreme’, unless you are a BBC weather girl.
Bologna to introduce social credit system
We have long suspected that Covid lockdowns would morph into climate lockdowns, along with all of the control of our lives these things bring.
Breitbart have just reported that the city of Bologna in Italy is to introduce a pilot scheme to reward ‘virtuous’ citizens for recycling, taking public transport, and curbing energy usage.
The programme, which has been likened to China’s social credit system, is slated to go into effect in September, using a ‘smart citizen wallet’ app for cell phones.
The reference to China’s social credit system is a warning of what is to come. Orwellian does not even start to describe it.
And let us be very clear – what may begin as voluntary rewards programme will quickly develop into a compulsory one, which actively punishes as well as rewards.
