Delingpole: No, Lying BBC, Britain’s Weather Isn’t Getting Wilder

“Britain’s weather is getting wilder,” claimed the BBC on a Panorama documentary this week.

This is actually untrue — as we’ll see below — but the BBC knows it can get away with blatant lies about climate change these days. Partly, this is because the sensible people who might object stopped watching the BBC long ago. And partly because there is no one left in the mainstream media left to criticise it.

As the Telegraph‘s economics commentator Jeremy Warner wrote this week:

Whatever the merits of their case, climate change sceptics have lost the argument.

I deplore the triumphalism of his tone but cannot dispute the premise. The only thing I’d add is that it isn’t shortage of facts or evidence which has caused climate change sceptics to lose the argument. It’s quite simply that the mainstream media — led by the BBC — has become such an uncritical propaganda mouthpiece for the Climate Industrial Complex that it has effectively gaslighted the world into believing that there was never an argument in the first place. That is, the sceptical case against “man-made climate change”, though overwhelming, is aired almost nowhere these days outside the fringes of the internet. The MSM has shut down the story by refusing to give it any coverage.

Hence the bizarre state of affairs in which the BBC can flagrantly breach its Charter obligation “to provide duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming” by broadcasting outright lies.

Here is how presenter Justin Rowlatt began the programme:

Britain’s weather is getting wilder. This year we have been soaked with record breaking rainfall and have sweltered in soaring temperatures. We’ve also seen some of our most extraordinary destructive weather yet…

He added:

A year of weather extremes, which have shattered previous records. This year we have seen our wettest day on record, England’s driest May, a record breaking heatwave and more winter storms.

But Paul Homewood has gone through these claims with a fine-tooth comb, using actual temperature records as opposed to anecdote and gut-feeling, and found that none of them holds up.

Here is a taste of Homewood’s devastating analysis:

August Heatwave

Rowlatt talks about sweltering in one of our most intense heatwaves yet, based upon a few hot days at Heathrow, when the thermometer peaked at 36.4C. He omits to tell viewers that temperature readings next to a tarmac runway are artificially raised.

In fact across England as a whole, there was nothing unusual about August’s temperatures at all:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series

 

According to the Central England Temperature series, which far more representative than Heathrow, we had three days over 30C this summer (marked in blue), which is not an uncommon event, and has occurred on six prior occasions since 1906.

It certainly was nowhere as extreme as the nine days recorded in 1976:

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/index.html

Meanwhile summer as a whole was pretty ordinary:

 

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-temperature-rainfall-and-sunshine-time-series

In a nutshell, Rowlatt’s doomsday claims just don’t stand up. He has cherry-picked weather events that suit his scaremongering thesis — but ignored the only thing that matters: whether or not there is a trend towards more extreme weather. Which there simply isn’t. There is, as Homewood notes, no trend towards springs becoming drier; no trend towards Mays becoming drier; no reason to blame the derailment of a train in Stonehaven on “climate change”. Britain’s weather — contradicting the entire message of this Panorama documentary — just isn’t getting wilder.

A decade ago I can think of at least four conservative newspapers and one conservative magazine which would have had a field day exposing this nonsense — perhaps with a plea at the end for the BBC’s special, licence-fee-funded monopoly status to be revoked.

Not one of those publications would do so today. They’ve all been bought and paid for by the green blob. It’s why we’re in the mess we’re in. Our media is now longer holding the enemies of truth and freedom to account. Instead, it’s acting as their mouthpiece.