THE BBC has a Climate Disinformation Unit. Perhaps it should focus on some of the BBC’s own output!
Last month BBC News grandly declared that it has been the driest start to the year in England since 1976, based on figures to the end of June. The figures, they say, came from the Met Office.
A quick check of the Met Office’s data, however, shows the claim is fake; both 1996 and 2010 had drier starts to the year:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-and-regional-series
A few days earlier, BBC News published a report on the agricultural crisis in Sri Lanka, titled ‘Sri Lanka’s tea farmers struggling to survive’. As this column reported last month, harvests of tea and other crops have been devastated since the banning of imported chemical fertiliser last year.
According to the BBC: ‘Tea is the island’s biggest export, normally bringing in more than $1bn a year, but the industry is being hard hit by the unprecedented economic crisis.
‘Most of Sri Lanka’s tea is grown by smaller farmers, like Rohan Tilak Gurusinghe, who owns two acres of land close to the village of Kadugunnawa. But he’s still reeling from the impact of a sudden, poorly thought-out government decision to ban chemical fertiliser last year. “I’m losing money,” he tells the BBC despondently. “Without fertiliser or fuel, I can’t even think about the future of my business.”
‘The ban, ordered to try to protect the country’s dwindling foreign reserves, was one of a number of disastrous policy decisions implemented by the now-ousted President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, with agricultural output falling significantly. ‘
The ban had nothing at all to do with ‘protecting dwindling foreign reserves’, a nonsensical claim given that loss of tea exports has cost the country many billions more in lost export income. It was a deliberate policy decision by the President, as part of his climate change agenda. This was what he had to say at COP26:
‘Nitrogen is an abundant element that is essential to the sustenance of all living things. However, reactive nitrogen generated by human activity and released into ecosystems worsens climate change. The overuse of chemical fertilisers has contributed significantly to this problem. It is in this context that my Government took firm steps to reduce imports of chemical fertiliser, and strongly encourage organic agriculture.’
Clearly the fact that actions taken to fight climate change might be very costly and damaging is something the BBC dares not mention, as it goes against its religion.
A few days later, the BBC published another article, written by one of its Climate Disinformation Unit, moaning that weather forecasters faced ‘unprecedented trolling’ during the two days of extreme heat last month. Here are some examples:
Let me be clear – any sort of personal trolling is not acceptable. But the examples given by the BBC are not personal criticism. Licence payers are fully entitled to give their opinions on BBC programmes, and many would certainly agree with the sentiments, not least because the BBC weather forecasters now constantly blame climate change for every bit of bad weather. A couple of years ago, the BBC’s senior management took the decision to build climate change indoctrination into regular programming, including weather forecasts. It is unsurprising that viewers are now reacting.
The Kentucky floods were not caused by climate change, whatever they tell you
Right on cue, the Climate Establishment has been out claiming that last week’s catastrophic floods in Kentucky were linked to global warming.
For example the Guardian, under the headline ‘Heatwaves are getting “more dangerous and deadly” from climate change as catastrophic flash flooding leaves at least 28 people dead’ reported: ‘As the flash floods in Kentucky claim lives and continue to leave behind a trail of devastation, residents and officials in the state are increasingly grappling with the costly impacts of the climate crisis. Earlier this week, the state saw eight to ten inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period, marking what experts are calling a 1-in-1,000 year rain event.’
Joe Biden visited the scene to promote his new climate legislation.
As ever, the claims are rubbish and fraudulent. The record 24-hour rainfall in Kentucky stands at more than ten inches in 1997 so the 1-in-1,000 year claim is nonsense.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/scec/records/all/maxp
Trends in extreme rainfall are not on the rise in Kentucky:
https://statesummaries.ncics.org/chapter/ky/
And heatwaves there are much less extreme than they used to be:
https://statesummaries.ncics.org/chapter/ky/
As is usually the case, the media interviews the locals, who understandably say ‘this is the worst we have ever seen’. Of course it is, because these are localised events, and people’s experience usually only dates back a couple of decades or so.
There are literally thousands of locations in the US alone where events like these can occur, so there will be some every year on average.
The harsh reality, however, is that floods like these happen, and have always happened, somewhere or other every year. They have nothing to do with climate change.
Energy use – the facts that make nonsense of Net Zero
EVERY year, BP publish a detailed analysis of global energy production and emissions. It is widely regarded as the world’s gold standard, and most of the data comes from official sources.
Their latest review shows that energy consumption has not yet returned to pre-pandemic levels, except in China.
It seems a long time ago now, but in the UK we were still in semi-lockdown until the summer. Most of Europe and the US were slower still in recovery. Unsurprisingly, CO2 emissions show a similar pattern, up by 5.6 per cent on 2020, but still slightly below 2019:
In China, fossil fuel consumption has increased by 7.9 per cent since 2019, with coal, oil and gas usage hitting new highs again last year, and with no sign of abating in the foreseeable future.
Fossil fuels now account for 82.7 per cent of China’s energy, compared with a tiny 5.9 per cent from wind and solar power.
Globally it is a similar picture:
Global Energy Consumption
The idea that we can start making significant cuts in fossil fuel consumption any time soon is not only frankly absurd, but dangerous nonsense too.
