IPPR lies promoted by BBC and Guardian
The self-styled “progressive” think tank IPPR has issued a ridiculously alarmist report today, This is a crisis: Facing up to the age of environmental breakdown.
The report recycles various bogus scares, and contains obvious falsehoods such as
• Since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times
The IPCC says in AR5 that
In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.
Unsurprisingly, useful idiots Roger Harrabin and Jonathan Watts have unquestioningly promoted the IPPR’s bullshit, including the blatant lie about floods, for the BBC and the Guardian, without questioning anything or subjecting the report to any kind of fact-check or sanity check.
Here’s another lie from the IPPR report:
Average global surface temperature increases have accelerated, from an average of 0.007 °C per year from 1900–1950 to 0.025 °C from 1998–2016
What is the temperature increase from 1998-2016? According to the Woodforthetrees index, which uses a combination of temperature indices, the linear fit gives a change of 0.15C which is 0.008 °C per year, a third of what the IPPR claim.
Where does the IPPR get their “facts” from? What scientific institution is making these claims? Well, none. Not even a climate scientist. Both the above fake claims seem to come from a document written by an investment fund manager called Jeremy Grantham.
On the Today programme this morning, the bogus report was promoted several times, with Laybourn-Langton given a soft interview by Martha Kearney (who read out the lie about floods) at 6.50 and a discussion including three “experts”, Joanna Haigh, Rick Stafford and Ottoline Leyser at about 8.45.
Updates:
- Laybourn-Langton now claims that the 2005 was a “typo” and that it should have been 1950. That’s not a typo. A typo would be getting one digit wrong. How did they manage to get all 4 digits wrong?
- Even with the date changed to 1950, it’s still nonsense. The claim comes from an article written by non-scientist fat-cat Jeremy Grantham. He claims it comes from something called EM-DAT. But someone who worked on the EMD-DAT database says it can’t be used for trends in numbers of floods.
- Andrew Montford has a report here.
- Paul Homewood has a blog post here.
- I’ve put in a complaint to the BBC (about the false statement read out by Kearney).
- Alex Cull has produced a transcript of that Today programme segment.
- One of the top funders of IPPR is ECF. Guess who funds ECF? Yes, Jeremy Grantham.
- Andy Revkin points out the irony that the IPPR has in the past warned about “climate porn”.
- Kevin Marshall has a blog post looking into the bogus claims about temperature trends and flooding.
Climate Scepticism 
Never expect any questioning of the science by non-scientist Harrabin. Don’t expect any mention of the fact that the IPPR is a socialist propaganda organisation.
“Is that true or did you hear it on the BBC?”
LikeLike
I look forward to Steve Mosher setting them straight.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The EM-DAT database was also the source of misleading report graphs a report last year from the “Global Commission on the Economy and Climate”, which Ben Pile covered here at cliscep.
https://cliscep.com/2018/09/06/misleading-figures-behind-the-new-climate-economy/
LikeLike
The report is worth downloading and reading in full.
Click to access risk-and-environmentfeb19.pdf
It’s less than thirty pages of actual text. Most of the numerous footnotes come from blogs (e.g. deSmog) and newspaper articles. The author Laurie Laybourn-Langton (or LOL for short) has an MPhil in Economics from Oxford University and a BSc in Physics from Exeter, and he’s worked for Lord Skidelsky, (who is no idiot, I believe.) LOL is also Director of the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change and Co-Chair of Trustees of Rethinking Economics. (Why don’t these experts just skip their boring BScs and Mphils and go straight for the PhD in Musical Chairmanship?)
The gist of rthe report is that if you just think about climate, you get too rosy a view of our future. You’ve got to factor in biodiversity, soil degradation, ocean acidity etc., in order to get a true picture of the world as seen by the Labour Party’s favourite think tank. The “facts” asserted about these three subjects look even more outrageous than those cited by Paul above.
“More than 75 per cent of the Earth’s land is substantially degraded.”
I’d wager that more than 75 per cent of the Earth’s land has never been trodden by man, but what do I know?
LikeLiked by 3 people
I also had a look at the EM-DAT database figures for climate type disasters. It was only between 1970s and the 1990s that standardized reporting of natural disasters became widespread. Widely reported major disasters before 1950 from Western countries are mostly included. But big disasters from developing countries could be missed. For instance, Wikipedia’s “Ten deadliest natural disasters since 1900” has at No.1 the 1931 China floods with 1-4 million deaths. It is not present in the EM-DAT database..
https://manicbeancounter.com/2018/09/12/increasing-extreme-weather-events/
LikeLiked by 1 person
There’s a full transcript of this morning’s interview, here:
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/2019/20190212_r4
“It’s not just that we are disrupting the climate system, we are also degrading our soil, we are damaging the oceans, we are destroying species. This is happening at an unprecedented rate, in some cases faster than at any point in human history, in other cases more than in millions and millions of years, and the consequences of this are far more serious than are recognised in those debates.”
Listening to it I couldn’t decide whether it was just “millions and millions” or “millions and billions” (oh, my!)
Maybe it was “billions and trillions”…
LikeLiked by 5 people
Geoff,
You are quite right in suggesting people read the report.
From Page 13
The Grantham 2018 does not refer to one of the Grantham Institutes but to Jeremy Grantham himself. A paper The Race of Our Lives Revisited.
Exhibit 2 gives the 0.025 °C per year. It uses data from NASA GISS.
The Sks trend calculator for GISTEMP gives
1900 to 1958 – 0.066 ±0.112 °C/decade
1958 to 2016 – 0.150 ±0.112 °C/decade
1998 to 2016 – 0.139 ±0.112 °C/decade
Jeremy Grantham seems to have made a typo, and IPPR have not checked the data before repeating the error.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Current extinction rates are unseen since the extinction of the dinosaurs”
Last time I checked, the K-T boundary extinction 66 million years ago resulted in the abrupt disappearance of 80% of all animal species. Are we there yet?
“Some aspects of change are progressing at paces not seen in hundreds of thousands, millions, or billions of years, or at all in Earth’s history.”
LOL.
LikeLiked by 1 person
When the tide turns against these shyster fearongering scammers, they will fall like a house of cheap cards.
The flat out fabricated nonsensical untruths the consensus boosters produce is as huge as it is devoid of facts.
LikeLike
Montford has just retweeted someone who spotted the first basic errors in the new Sydney Uni insect paper
LikeLike
Jaime @ 9.32 pm
I thought that climate change since the end of the last ice age saw the extinction of many species, such as the saber tooth tiger, giant ground sloths and the mammoth. Then in the last few hundred years were extinctions caused by humans, such as the dodo and the great auk.
LikeLike
LOL has apparently moved on from Labour’s pet think tank to the Health and Efficiency Alliance outfit (remember their magazines on the top shelf? Dr Victoria Bateman does) http://www.ukhealthalliance.org/laybourn-langton/
But let’s look at some of the claims in the IPPR report (as Manic and Alex have already done I see):
P9
But the 11,700 years in figure 1.1 are squashed into 1 cm on my screen. It is impossible to see whether the wobble of approx 0.01deltaT (whassat?) in the graph is averaged over months, years or centuries. Someone with a degree in physics should realise that this makes a difference. The reference is to an article by Rockström et al 2009 (but the graph isn’t there) adapted from a chapter in a book by Young and Steffen 2009, but that would cost me 30 euros to consult.
P12
and by 2018 they’d dropped a half a degree so they’re only half a degree above pre-industrial temperatures.
but on current temperature trends, minus 6°C of cooling is likely to be reached as early as 2030.
My figures are as stupid as theirs, but no stupider.
The reference doesn’t exist in the notes. It’s to this document
Click to access cbd-report-2010-en.pdf
which is a United Nations Environmental Programme brochure celebrating International Biodiversity Year which I highly recommend. It’s mostly colour photos, e.g. of:
Cherry blossom
A wading bird
Ahmed Djoghlaf executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity
Japan’s Minister of the environment, Ryu Matsumoto, and Ahmed Djoghlaf, CBD executive Secretary, celebrate the successful conclusion of COP 10 in Nagoya, Japan
A bird (Stockbyte/Thinkstock)
A ladybird
Four children
Launch of the International year of Biodiversity in Germany (six men in suits)
Launch of the International year of Biodiversity in Brazil
Launch of the International year of Biodiversity in China
A man waving a flag with the IYB logo on top of the Brandberg in Namibia
Launch of the International Year of Biodiversity in North America (5 men and 3 women in suits)
Ahmed Djoghlaf meeting with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York
The UN General Assembly convening a high-level meeting at its 65th session
The City of Montreal marked the international year of Biodiversity with a floral display
Celebrating the IYB in the Bermuda aquarium Museum and Zoo
Photo of stamps issued to mark the International Year of Biodiversity
In Uruguay, even four-legged participants helped celebrate IYB (picture of a deer)
Celebrating IDB in Oman (people in t shirts looking happy)
and so on…
Don’t think I’m stopping there because it’s boring. Oh no. There’s also:
and
(I vaguely remember this one because I wrote a post about it. The plants, put in place by some mad Englishwoman, cost hundreds of thousands of euros and used up half her budget.) She was sacked and went on to become vice something at the UN.
Important people with M Phils from Oxford write their wisdom on brochures printed on glossy paper, quoting reports from the United Nations on even glossier paper, illuminated with illustrations produced at enormous cost by specialised agencies like Stockbyte and Thinkstock. And they’re quoted by serious writers in serious media as proposing policies to be adopted by political parties as the programme for government of some of the most powerful countries on the planet (but not the most powerful, thanks be to Trump, Xi and Putin.)
This is insane.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Jeremy Grantham’s paper is also the source of the claim
Specifically, it is Exhibit 7
The 15 times Floods increase for 2001-2017 compared to 1950-1966.
The 20 times “Extreme Temperature Events” increase is for 1996-2017 compared to 1950-1972.
The 7 times “Wildfires” increase is for 1984-2017 compared to 1950-1983.
Am I alone in thinking there is something a bit odd in the statement about being from 1950.
In a previous comment, I mentioned Ben Pile’s post of 06 Sep 2018 on the New Climate Economy Report. The key graphic is below. Notice any similarities?
LikeLike
From the GWPF link –
“It’s not as if this problem hasn’t arisen before. As Roger Pielke Jr, an expert on natural disasters, pointed out, Al Gore had also got into trouble ten years ago when he cited figures from the Louvain database. He had been forced to issue a correction”
what is the “Louvain database” ?
after googling i’m confused.com
LikeLike
Manic, the late Pleistocene extinction of megafauna coincided with the inception of that supposed halcyon period of environmental/climatological stability, the Holocene. Perhaps now that we’ve ended the Horrible Holocene which wiped them out, the sabre-tooth tigers, mastodons, woolly rhinos and friends (or their modern equivalents) will make an evolutionary comeback! You never know.
LikeLike
It’s a strange coincidence, isn’t it Manic, that the source of most of their “facts” about climate is the man who pays their salaries.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Paul Matthews, does Grantham normally write such rubbish or does he get an overpaid expert to do it for him?
LikeLike
Close to my heart this one. The BBC is now promoting the idea that the domestic pooch is contributing to the Sixth Mass Extinction. They report that feral dogs are ‘harrassing’ and preying upon wildlife in parts of Asia, Central and South America, the Caribbean and Oceania. Feral dogs are not domestic dogs; they are abandoned and neglected domestic dogs and their offspring, and generally unable to fend for themselves, live in and around human settlements and, believe me, are far more ‘harrassed’ by local people than they ‘harrass’ local wildlife. Then comes this absurd statement:
In Europe, experts say, the problem is a bit different. They are worried that feral and free ranging dogs are interbreeding with wolves. “And that poses a threat to wolves,” says Moritz Klose, from WWF.
“If this continues to grow, we will lose the purity of our wolves’ genes.”
The WWF want to preserve the Wolf Master Race, even though dogs ARE domesticated wolves!
“Recently I attended a canine genetics workshop at Texas A & M University in which it was further emphasized that there is no biochemical genetic test that can even distinguish wolves from domestic dogs. “….I would taxonomically identify all wolves, wolf hybrids and domestic dogs as the species Canis lupus. Technically, the domestic dog and wolf hybrids should be designated as the sub-species “domesticus”. I. Lehr Brisbin, Jr., Research Professor, Savannah River Ecology Laboratory, The University of Georgia. Letter, 30, Jan. 1990
Wolf-dog hybrids in the States are remarkably more resilient and successful than ‘pure’ wolves; proof that they are genetically superior and able to adapt to a changing world. Also, tell me again why dogs are a threat to European wolves:
Despite global opposition, the survival of Norway’s endangered population of wolves is once again being threatened. Plans to allow the mass killing of the country’s 60 remaining wolves spells out certain extinction for the species.
https://secure2.convio.net/ida/site/Advocacy;jsessionid=00000000.app203b?pagename=homepage&page=UserAction&id=3269&autologin=true&AddInterest=1022&NONCE_TOKEN=8F259258322AC1AB1BC4B1F3781B12A1
LikeLiked by 1 person
Geoff, that CBD document appears to be part of a whole suite, other parts of which it references, for instance the snippets in the side margins like this one from page 40:
‘Fact
Species which have been assessed for extinction risk are on average moving closer to extinction. Amphibians face the greatest risk and coral species are deteriorating most rapidly in status. Nearly a quarter of plant species are estimated to be threatened with extinction. (Global Biodiversity Outlook 3)’
…where ‘Global Biodiversity Outlook 3’ is another part of the suite, see here: https://www.cbd.int/gbo3/
and chasing that down further to the ‘Biodiversity in 2010’ page, at https://www.cbd.int/gbo3/?pub=6667§ion=6691 yields various more specific statements, with numbers, for instance:
The population of wild vertebrate species fell by an average of nearly one- third (31%) globally between 1970 and 2006, with the decline especially severe in the tropics (59%) and in freshwater ecosystems (41%).
and:
Species in all groups with known trends are, on average, being driven closer to extinction, with amphibians facing the greatest risk and warm water reef-building corals showing the most rapid deterioration in status. Among selected vertebrate, invertebrate and plant groups, between 12% and 55% of species are currently threatened with extinction. Species of birds and mammals used for food and medicine are on average facing a greater extinction risk than those not used for such purposes. Preliminary assessments suggest that 23% of plant species are threatened.
As far as I can see, all these numbers in turn seem to come from a set of embedded graphs that have only 2 sources, one being ‘the Living Plant Index’ from ‘WWF/ Zoological Society of London’, and all the others being ‘IUCN’, which I presume is this: https://www.iucn.org/
While there’s a ton of stuff at the IUCN and a search box to trawl it with, these specific graphs seem to be too old to have survived at the site as far as I can tell, though for instance ‘Figure 3’ seems to have come from the ‘Global figures for 2009 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species’, as the numbers match up, see here:
https://www.iucn.org/content/extinction-crisis-continues-apace
Would take a fair effort to chase down where all these numbers came from, but there is quite a lot of detailed papers, for instance this one supporting the conservation status on medicinal plants, which is part of the figures: https://portals.iucn.org/library/sites/library/files/documents/RL-4-018.pdf
No idea how valid or otherwise are the assumptions going into this, although it seems that detail / caveats / context get lost as one rises up the chain. But even when all the right papers are identified, it would take a lot of work to bottom them out I think (and way outside my scope to do so 0: )
LikeLike
Paul @ 12.02am,
I was not aware that Jeremy Grantham funded IPPR.
From there website, the major donors in 2017 were
https://www.ippr.org/about/how-we-are-funded
£50,001 – £250,000
City of London Corporation
ECF
Friends Provident Foundation
John Mills
KPMG
Martin Taylor
Northern Power Grid
Paul Hamlyn Foundation
Stephen Peel
Trust for London
From Bloomberg, “Currently he and his wife, Hanne, are giving more than $30 million a year to eight large nonprofits and about 30 smaller ones.”
Grantham now wants to give away 98% of his $1 billion fortune to the cause.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-01-17/jeremy-grantham-s-1-billion-plan-to-fight-climate-change
LikeLike
“an investment fund manager called Jeremy Grantham.”
He founded the Grantham Institutes in 2008, that’s a long time to be exposed to people like Bob Ward and Nick Stern. He now thinks he’s a climate scientist like wot they are.
He funds WWF-US and Environmental Defense in the States and has the CEO’s of each on his Grantham Advisory Board.
LikeLike
Manic, IPPR is funded by ECF which is funded by Grantham, see links in bullet point update.
LikeLike
From my comment at https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/bbc-repeat-fake-disaster-claims/
“In 2006, IPPR issued a report called “Warm Words: How are we telling the climate story and can we tell it better?” https://www.ippr.org/publications/warm-wordshow-are-we-telling-the-climate-story-and-can-we-tell-it-better
Treating climate change as beyond argument:
“Much of the noise in the climate change discourse comes from argument and counter-argument, and it is our recommendation that, at least for popular communications, interested agencies now need to treat the argument as having been won.
This means simply behaving as if climate change exists and is real, and that individual actions are effective. The ‘facts’ need to be treated as being so taken-for-granted that they need not be spoken.
The certainty of the Government’s new climate-change slogan – ‘Together this generation will tackle climate change’ (Defra 2006) – gives an example of this approach. It constructs, rather than claims, its own factuality.”
The strategy has been a success, climate change is indeed treated as beyond argument. “Behaving as if climate change exists” epitomises the media approach, not just the BBC, but globally.
As an aside, Labour’s David Miliband was a Research Fellow at IPPR in the 90’s. As Environment Minister he gave the Audit Commission annual lecture, 19 July 2006: https://www.flemingpolicycentre.org.uk/DavidMiliband.pdf
“So the science is increasingly stark. The potential to solve climate change is increasingly in our hands. Public awareness and concern has never been higher. The challenge is to translate awareness into action.
This requires all the familiar tools of behaviour change – information, incentives,role models and making change as convenient as possible. But it requires more than that. If citizens, businesses and nations are to change their behaviour, they must be confident that their actions will be reciprocated.
Citizens need to know their neighbours are committed and that together their actions will have critical mass. Business need to know that the bar is being raised, but it is being raised for all businesses. Nations need to know that others will follow suit.”
He is currently based in New York as head of the International Rescue Committee, https://www.rescue.org/board-and-overseers, but found time to weigh in on Brexit:
https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/david-miliband-brexit-jeremy-corbyn-14654820
LikeLiked by 1 person
Manic. See…
I think the omnipresence of Stern is of no lesser consequence. Grantham can waste his money as he pleases. Even a billion is only enough to fuel the green movement for a year.
And it looks like they are making big mistakes at the moment, grasping at anything they can get, including dragging Rachel Carson’s corpse back from the 1960s.
The IPPR got a sheer idiot to produce the report. The NCE report was apparently written by no sharper a mind. The billionaire himself seems to be something of a dullard — he’s the private backer of the privately-funded wing of the UK’s main climate ‘academic’ research unit (the CCCEP), but even Mark Lynas admitted that he’s a loon, and not to be trusted. Lynas claims in response that the IPCC should be quoted, not billionaires that have gone off-reservation… But we should make the point that the claims make headlines, all the same, and that the institutions involved in the production, reproduction and interpretation of fake facts are indistinct from the fake facts…
LikeLiked by 2 people
IPPR is just the climate obsessed face of “the big lie”.
They are implicitly encouraging “climate communicators” to lie repeatedly until their point of view is the only acceptable perspective.
And Grantham, like Steyer in the US has made billions in the process.
LikeLike
Paul,
Just to confirm what I said on Twitter a short while ago.
The Jeremy Grantham Exhibit 2graphic of Gistemp trends are as follows
1900 to 1958 – 0.007 °C/year
1958 to 2016 – 0.015 °C/year
1998 to 2016 – 0.025 °C/year
Using the Sks trend calculator for Gistemp I get the following figures.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
1900 to 1958 – 0.066 ±0.024 °C/decade
1958 to 2016 – 0.150 ±0.022 °C/decade
1998 to 2016 – 0.139 ±0.112 °C/decade
For 1998-2016 the range of uncertainty is 0.003 to 0.025 °C/year.
It would appear that the 1900 to 1958 & 1958 to 2016 warming rates are as from the trend calculator, whilst the 1998 to 2016 warming rate of 0.025 °C/year is at the top end of the 2σ uncertainty range.
https://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
Credit for spotting this plausible explanation should go to Mike Jackson.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2019/02/12/bbc-repeat-fake-disaster-claims/#comment-129139
LikeLike
ben pile, don’t let the climate scammers infuriate you so much that your excellent prose is reduced to their level.
LikeLike
How so, Hunter?
It is striking that the current phase of alarmism is authored by quite slow people. The only activists currently on the street are school children. There has been an explosion of nonsense, but it seems to be something of a busted flush at least intellectually… We’ll see how much of it sticks.
LikeLike
‘You can trust the BBC’ – to churn out fake climate news.
LikeLike
Speaking of the Grantham Institute.. Guess who is speaking there next week…..
“Post-Truth”: What, Why, and How Do We Respond? | Stephan Lewandowsky FAcSS
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/post-truth-what-why-and-how-do-we-respond-stephan-lewandowsky-facss-tickets-55150452488
In this seminar, Professor Lewandowsky explores the implications of the growing abundance of misinformation in the public sphere, how it influences people and how to counter it. He argues that misinformation in the post-truth era can no longer be considered a localized “error” that can be corrected with appropriate communication tools. Instead, he suggests that responses to the post-truth era must include technological solutions that incorporate psychological principles, an interdisciplinary approach that we describe as “technocognition”.
———
which sounds a bit ominous. ie tech censorship of social media?
LikeLiked by 3 people
What we need is a lot more good old fashioned responses to lies, propaganda and censorship, the age old tricks employed by fascists, socialists, Marxists and now Green fanatics and globalists to impose their malign political projects upon society. Modern technology and the world wide web can help do that. They know it. That’s why they’re trying hard to shut down dissent online.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Barry, how appropriate. One expert at producing misinformation talking to an institute that produces misinformation.
Jaime – as you found out the hard way 😦
But twitter is a level playing field, which is good for sceptics. Charlatans like Lewandowsky, Mann and Hayhoe lose on a level playing field, so have to resort to blocking.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Lewandowsky should start at home. The certainty of imminent global catastrophe he so avidly supports and indeed spouts, satisfies all his own criteria for misinformation and its accompanying propagation modes and biases, not to mention isn’t even supported by the mainstream science. Of course, latterly, he claims that the whole of mainstream science is not only fragile to hi-jack, but actually has been hi-jacked, by pesky pause memes and other devices undermining the certainty. Correct principle, wrong direction.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Perhaps Steve could be Skyped I to Lewandowsky’s lecture to show him how bad his take on the sciencey claptrap is.
LikeLike
Paul:
That’s a very interesting para. I like how it ends!
I don’t think Twitter is anything like a level playing field. But on climate issues it’s better than The Nonversation, say. Hmm.
LikeLike
Always this:
“Now that the kids are adults and scattered across three continents life is no longer a circus but a never-ending series of airline tickets.” – Stephan Lewandowsky
https://royalsociety.org/topics-policy/diversity-in-science/parent-carer-scientist/stephan-lewandowsky/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI4OaN7uW64AIV4bftCh0ssgcTEAAYASAAEgLztPD_BwE
a huge carbon footprint is good for me, but not for thee.
LikeLike
Paul.
“Charlatans like Lewandowsky, Mann and Hayhoe lose on a level playing field, so have to resort to blocking”‘.
From the bleachers looking down, I see little sign of their “losing”, or if they are, we should learn how to achieve the same perks as they from their “poor” performance.
LikeLiked by 2 people
On Twitter as a level playing field:
https://failedevolution.blogspot.com/2019/02/twitter-takes-down-hundreds-of-accounts.html?spref=gp
“Big company bans government from influencing its citizens.” That should please Libertarians.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pretty sure that Twitter are breaking the laws under which they operate. They claim the legal protections of a public platform and yet exert ever increasing amounts of editorial power over what can and can’t be published.
LikeLike
Although I still haven’t had a reply from the BBC about my complaint, the More or Less programme had an item debunking the fake claims of the IPPR, and interviewing Mark Lynas about it. I’ll do a new post on this.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0002hyq
LikeLike
As usual, the mundane truth is far, far less exciting and much less cause for alarm than the extremist propaganda put out by climate activists. This study updates progress on extreme weather since SREX and AR5. Using an index denoted TX90p Ann (defined as the % of time annually that temperatures exceed the 90% percentile), they demonstrate that TX90p has increased from about 11.5% in 1950 to – wait for it – 15% in 2014. That’s a ‘massive’ increase of 30%, which is slightly different from the 20x increase in frequency of extreme temperature events quoted by IPPR! The study also says:
The Grand Challenge suggests that the current suite of climate extremes datasets is inadequate to
properly assess climate variability and change and to provide the required underpinning for detection and attribution studies and climate model evaluation.This is due to data limitations (in time and space), differences in how extremes are defined, the spatial representativeness of point-based measurements, scaling issues between observations and climate models and uncertainties in variable estimates from satellite retrievals.
LikeLike
Paul, just to say there’s now a transcript of Friday’s More or Less programme, with the interview with Mark Lynas:
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/2019/20190215_ml
LikeLiked by 1 person