BBC claims climate change is happening faster than predicted

Written by Andy Rowlands on September 20, 2019. Posted in Current News

Earlier this week, the BBC ran an article on their website that claimed climate change is happening faster than expected, and it’s ‘scary’.

Professor David King, former UK Chief Scientist, said extreme weather events are happening faster than predicted, which scares him, poor man.

I should perhaps note that in May 2004, during his time as UK Chief Scientist, David King said ‘a few breeding couples’ would need to move to Antarctica to survive ‘the coming global climate catastrophe which would wipe out the rest of Mankind’.

Well, it’s now 19 years later and there’s no sign of his climate catastrophe.

The article goes on to say that extreme weather events are increasing due to the warming climate, and that warming is our fault. The full article can be seen here.

Now, as any meteorologist worth his salt knows, storms are created by the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics. I am not a meteorologist, so to be absolutely certain, in early September, I emailed Dr Tim Ball to ask him whether storms will increase in a warming atmosphere as the IPCC claims –

“I don’t know whether this is your field as such, but as I understand it, storms are produced because of the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics, and if the world warms, that temperature difference is reduced as the poles warm faster than the tropics, so less storms are produced, and those that do form are less intense, apart from the odd rogue one.

If that’s right, then if the world cools, as appears to be happening as we enter the solar minimum, that temperature difference increases as the poles cool quicker than the tropics, so more storms are produced, and they are more intense?”

He replied the same day:-

“Your comment is correct as it applies to most storms. They occur along the boundary between the cold air dome over the polar regions and the warm tropical air of the atmosphere. This is generally known as the Polar Front and occupies the middle latitudes between 30° and 65°. The only storms that form differently begin close to the equator as a line of thunderstorms known as an Easterly Wave. They remain in a line until they move outside of 8° of the equator. This is because Coriolis Force is too weak in that latitude zone each side of the equator to form the spinning motion necessary for a storm to intensify. Once Coriolis Force is adequate the line of thunderstorms forms a circle with an area of high pressure at the centre, this area of clear skies at the centre of a hurricane is known as the eye.

As you correctly note, the intensity of the storm is determined by the temperature difference across that Polar Front. Also, as you correctly note the IPCC claim storms will increase in numbers and intensity with global warming. In fact, there is more warming in the polar region. This will reduce the temperature difference and thus the number and intensity of storms.”

Dr Ball had previously said:

“…the reduced temperature difference between the poles and lower latitude regions would reduce extreme weather events, not intensify them, as climate campaigners claim. After all, weather and extreme weather events are driven by the temperature gradient between latitudes. A warming Arctic would result in less intense cold outbreaks and a lesser intrusion of cold artic air colliding with warm moist air in warmer regions. Once again, climate alarmists have their science backwards.

The Jet Stream is a thin band of strong winds that flow rapidly around the planet from west to east at approximately 10 km altitude. The Jet Stream divides warm air masses, typically found at low latitudes towards the tropics, from cold air masses, usually found at high latitudes near the poles.

However, a very wavy jet stream, as we are experiencing now (and have many times in the past), allows frigid Arctic air to move south to normally warmer latitudes and warm tropical air to push into Polar latitudes. The result is an increase in extreme weather events, including the cold outbreaks in the USA. It has nothing to do with global warming. In fact, the most common cause of a wavy Jet Stream is global cooling. History shows that severe weather increases with a cooling world, not a warming one.”

This is borne out in the illustration below from Dr Ryan Maue. You can see how tropical storms and hurricanes increased slightly during the late 1980s and 1990s, and since the temperature ‘pause’ began in 1998, have declined, and there are significantly less now than in 1971.

The BBC article then turned to melting Arctic ice, which it says, is vanishing faster than expected. I don’t think anyone disagrees the Arctic is losing ice, it has been doing that virtually continuously over the last 20,000 years as the world continues to recover from the last ice age. However, the rate of ice loss is not accelerating.

The graph above from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows Arctic ice loss between 1979 & 2019. There is no acceleration in the rate of ice loss.

The illustration above from the Danish Meteorological Institute, which closely monitors polar ice, shows that during the winter of 2018-19, the sea ice volume was the highest of the preceding 16 years, beating the previous ‘record holder’ in 2009, yet the alarmists stubbornly maintain Arctic sea ice loss is accelerating.

The image above was created by the NSIDC on 12^th January 2019, and you can see the ice extent is only fractionally below the 1981-2010 mean.

If you click on the weblink below, you will see the Danish Meteorological Institute’s record of Arctic temperatures going back to 1958, and this year the summer melt season temperature was if anything slightly below average, and is now heading back down into the winter temperatures of around -30C. The green curve is the average temperature between 1958 & 2002, and the blue line represents zero C. The temperature scale is shown in degrees Kelvin. Summer melt season temperatures hover around two degrees C.

http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php

The article continued with “We tested Prof King’s views with the main authors of the authoritative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), published in 2014. The consensus among those who replied was that climate models had accurately forecast the rise in global mean temperature.”

So we’re back to consensus science again. This ‘consensus’ is wrong, but the IPCC ‘main authors’ are hardly likely to say anything that disagrees with the IPCC report, as that would jeopardise their lucrative careers. As I showed in my previous article about computer modelling of future climate, the model predictions are now showing up to six times as much warming as is being observed, so how people can continue to claim these models are accurately predicting temperatures frankly escapes me.

Next are claims of record ice melt in Greenland and Antarctica, neither of which is true.

The NSIDC graph above shows a very slight increase in the amount of Antarctic ice between 1979 & the winter of 2018. The slight decrease for 2018 is not enough to turn the slight average positive trend into a negative trend.

I recently became acquainted with David Finch, a retired former Principal Scientific Officer with the government’s Dept of the Environment, and he has revealed himself to be a superb number-cruncher. He recently described the climate data tampering as “scientific fraud of the highest order”. I told him of the BBC webpost this article refers to, and he commented yesterday:-

“I have analysed all 174,030 data records from all 39 GHCN-D stations within the Antarctic Circle to produce this slide of the highest temperatures ever recorded by location.

The Antarctic coast nudges above freezing in the seasonal melt whereby 80{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of coastal and sea ice is lost each year. The highest temperature in this region to date is 14.3°C, which was recorded at Base San Martin on 11th February 2005. Trend analysis reveals there has been no change in maximum temperatures recorded at coastal stations since 1970 (OLSR: p=0.826, n=50).

Seasonal coastal warming sits in stark contrast to the incredibly bleak deep interior, which rose to an all-time record breaking -13.2°C at Vostok on 19th December 2010. Last year the highest temperature recorded at Vostok was -39.8°C on 27th October. Your deep freeze is likely chugging along at -20°C and is warm in comparison!

Unless the laws of physics change there is no way the Antarctic interior is going to melt, and the coastal regions will continue to gain and lose ice in the seasonal melt each year.

What the eco-minded press are doing is using the fact that Antarctica naturally loses 80{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of its sea and coastal ice in the seasonal melt each and every year then claiming that the continent as a whole is melting. I think it fair to say that this is not just fraudulent but tantamount to criminal intent to induce emotional suffering in the many who naïvely consume the mainstream media.” (emphasis added)

He produced the graph below showing the data he looked at. The gaps represent those times when the outposts were not manned, so no readings were taken.

David also produced a graph of average minimum temperatures for the Antarctic, shown below

To get the temperature in Antarctica up to the point all the ice would melt would require an increase approaching 70 degrees C, which would make the rest of the planet uninhabitable.

The illustration below was prepared by Rutgers University Global Snow Laboratory for the period 1972 – 2018, and shows the average amount of Greenland ice has remained virtually unchanged at 25 million square kilometers.

The BBC article admits:

“With some phenomena such as droughts and floods there was no clear evidence yet of any involvement from climate change, and it was impossible to be sure that the slow progress of Dorian was caused by climate change”, but then immediately contradicts itself with “What is the likelihood that (Dorian) is a climate change event? I’m going to say ‘very high’. I can’t say that with 100{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} certainty, but what I can say is that the energy from the hurricane comes from the warm ocean and if that ocean gets warmer we must expect more energy in hurricanes.”

Once again the so-called ‘experts’ and media are getting the facts completely backwards, either through incompetency, or in the case of the BBC, because they have been leaned on to produce data in support of the human-caused climate agenda.

In a warmer climate, fewer storms are produced, and those that are, are less intense, because of the reduction of the temperature difference between the poles and the tropics discussed above. In a cooler climate, like the one we seem to be entering now with the onset of the solar minimum, more storms will be produced, and those that are, are likely to be more intense.

Of course, with more storms, the alarmists will say climate change is increasing still further, and will still probably blame it on global warming, even when it becomes obvious to everyone the world is cooling. That is the genius of using the term ‘climate change’, as they can now blame every unusual weather event on it, and it’s virtually impossible to refute.

PRINCIPIA SCIENTIFIC INTERNATIONAL, legally registered in the UK as a company incorporated for charitable purposes. Head Office: 27 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AX. 

Please DONATE TODAY To Help Our Non-Profit Mission To Defend The Scientific Method.

Trackback from your site.