From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

Attenborough’s “Climate Change- The Facts” was aired in 2019. How do his claims of climate doom look now, seven years on?

At the start of the broadcast, Attenborough states:

“Right now we are facing our greatest threat in thousands of years – climate change”

“What we’re doing right now is we’re so rapidly changing the climate, for the first time in the world’s history people can see the impact of climate change”

“Greater storms, greater floods, greater heatwaves, extreme sea level rise”

“All of this is happening far faster than many of us thought possible”

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Seven years on, how are those claims looking now?

Let’s begin therefore with the IPCC’s AR6, published three years ago.

The IPCC reviews thousands of scientific studies, and naturally there are all sorts of minor climate changes and trends around the world over time.. Many depend on the time scales used and disappear over longer periods, many are merely regional variations, many are beneficial and many are so small as to be inconsequential or statistically significant.

To sort out the chaff, the IPCC attempts to identify and evaluate climatic-impact drivers, defined as  physical climate system conditions (e.g., means, events, or extremes) that directly affect elements of society or ecosystems:

The IPCC admitted that it could detect very little change in these CIDs, other than increases in extreme heat, offset by a reduction in cold extremes.

They could find no evidence of trends in storms, floods, droughts, hurricanes or sea level rise.

This, of course, makes a nonsense of Attenborough’s claim that:

What we’re doing right now is we’re so rapidly changing the climate, for the first time in the world’s history people can see the impact of climate change”

“Greater storms, greater floods, greater heatwaves, extreme sea level rise”

“All of this is happening far faster than many of us thought possible

On the contrary, if anything at all is happening, it is happening so slowly and imperceptibly that even the IPCC cannot measure it.

Let’s look at some of the specific claims made on the programme:

Heatwaves and Droughts

Peter Stott – “It’s having a dramatic effect on our weather” “The frequency of extreme temperatures is increasing”

Michael Mann – “You’re going to get more frequent and intense heatwaves. You’re going to get worse drought”

A new study this year confirms that heatwaves used to be much more severe in the past in the US– but also noticeably that cold waves have also become much less extreme.

Global warming, it appears, does not make temperatures more extreme, as the Met Office’s Peter Stott would like you to believe. It actually makes them less extreme.

Sticking with the US, it clear that Mann’s claims of worsening droughts were just a lie:

Storms and Floods

Michael Mann – “You’re going to get more rainfall, more superstorms, worse flooding. We’re seeing the effects of climate change now play out in real time”

Rainfall is not increasing, nor is the incidence of extreme rainfall. We are certainly “seeing” anything of the sort.

As for “superstorms”, they are a figment of Mr Mann’s fevered imagination; the frequency of EF-3+ tornadoes has fallen sharply in the last decade or so. It is thirteen years since the Moore tornado, the last EF-5 to have taken place. That is by far the longest such period on record.

Tornado Review 2024

As for hurricanes, there continues to be no trend in major hurricane activity:

Greenland Ice Sheet

Attenborough told us that ice loss in Greenland was “worse than expected”

Yet another lie, I am afraid.

Annual ice loss has actually been reducing since 2012; losses are at a similar level to the 1920-40 period and are consistent with the natural recovery from Little Ice Age ice maximums.

Wildfires

David Attenborough – “As temperatures rise, the threats we face multiply. Last year saw record breaking wildfires take hold across the globe. “

Michael Mann – “We’ve seen wildfires break out in Greece, even in the Arctic. We’ve seen a tripling of the extent of wildfire in the western US”

Nice scare stories, but baseless yet again.

US wildfire acreage shows no increasing trend, nor the tripling claimed by the unreliable Mann nationally or regionally:

Meanwhile, wildfire acreage has been declining around the Mediterranean.

Wilfires Below Average Last Year–Met Office Says Global Warming Has Made Them Worse!

Sea Levels

Attenborough – “rising seas are already displacing hundreds of thousands of people from already vulnerable coastal areas.”

An outright lie, of course. As for his “extreme sea level rise”, the data shows seas are still rising at the same slow pace as they were a century ago.

Corals

Attenborough –“In the last three years, repeated heat stress has caused a third of the world’s corals to first bleach, and then die”

Perhaps next time, David Attenborough might check the actual data with reef experts such as Peter Ridd: