The eco-fascist campaign group Extinction Rebellion tells us there is a ‘climate emergency’. So too do all Britain’s main political parties. So too do UK government bodies such as the Committee on Climate Change and the Environment Agency.
Such disparate groups can’t all be lying to us, surely?
Yes, they can. The evidence can be found in a report for the Global Warming Policy Foundation titled ‘Plus ça change – The UK climate in 2018.’ (There’s also a short video)
It shows that:
- Summers aren’t getting hotter
- UK temperatures have become less extreme
- Except in Scotland, where rainfall has increased, it has not got wetter
- There’s little evidence to show ‘wetter winters’ or ‘drier summers’
- Sea level rise is the same as in the first half of the 20th century, about 1.4 mm a year
- Storms have not become more frequent or stronger
So where, you might reasonably ask, is the truth in a speech given earlier this year by Sir James Bevan, head of the Environment Agency, titled ‘It’s the climate emergency, stupid’?
Global heating is driving more extreme rainfall and rising sea levels, which is putting more people at risk of flooding. It’s driving hotter and drier summers, putting our country – already experiencing water scarcity – at risk of what I call the Jaws of Death: the point twenty or so years out from now where the lines on the graph showing rising water demand and diminishing water supply cross, and we don’t have enough water. Climate change is damaging our air, our water and our soils, as pollution incidents spike in more extreme hot weather. During last summer’s prolonged dry spell, the Environment Agency responded to more than three times the normal amount of environmental incidents: fish kills, fires, water pollution, etc.
And climate change risks undermining our ability to deliver the sustainable growth that people need and demand. That’s because more extreme weather will increasingly damage the inputs and the infrastructure on which our economies depend.
This is bullshit. It’s the kind of mendacious, hysterical tripe you associate with speeches on Revolution Day in banana republics; with Soviet commissars under Stalin announcing yet another year of record grain production; with a Greenpeace workshop on ‘What scary stories can we make up next to frighten the punters with?’
It most definitely is not the sort of thing we ought to be hearing from the head of the Environment Agency under a Conservative government.
Why not? Because it’s simply not true.
The report was produced by our old friend Paul Homewood using data from the UK Met Office’s State of the UK Climate 2018 report and other official sources.
Homewood had to take the figures with a pinch of salt, however, because the UK Met Office has – like the Environment Agency, like so many government departments – long since been captured by the Green Blob.
The UK Met Office routinely exaggerates extreme weather events, which then get bigged up by the BBC and which generate the scare headlines that the Green Blob depends on for its ongoing income stream.
A good example of this official dishonesty was the Met Office’s claim that the summer of 2018 was the equal hottest on record since 1910.
But the Central England Temperature record tells a different story: that the summer of 1976 was 0.5 degrees C hotter than 2018’s, which in turn was only ranked fifth warmest, behind 1826, 1995 and 2003.
These may seem like quibbles: the summer of 2018 was hot, we can agree on that. But precision matters. If you’re going to use temperature data in your propaganda wars and claim recent summers as the “hottest evah” and the evidence doesn’t support this then what you are doing is essentially fraud.
One of the reasons the Met Office can get away with its specious claims — that and the fact that the mainstream media barely does its job — is because its weather station temperature data has been corrupted by the urban heat island effect, giving misleadingly high readings.
Homewood notes:
It is known, for instance, that the Met Office UK series includes a number of sites, such as Heathrow, Kew, Cambridge, Faversham and Motherwell, which are known to be significantly affected by the urban heat island effect, or other siting issues. The UK series is also subject to a constantly changing mix of stations. By contrast, the CET is based on high-quality sites, and has been very carefully corrected over the years to allow for station changes.
Claims of record-breaking wetness – repeated by the MSM ad nauseam every time there’s another flood – are similarly specious.
Homewood writes:
One of the most common claims about climate change is that it is causing more extreme rainfall. It is presented as a ’fact’ whenever there is a flood or untoward event. It was one made again very recently by Sir James Bevan, head of the Environment Agency. However, it is a claim that has no basis in fact, at least as far as the UK is concerned. The EWP series shows that the wettest decade on record was the 1870s, followed by the 1990s, 1920s and 1910s. The data shows no evidence of a wetter climate .
In annual terms, the wettest years were 1872 and 1768.
There has, as everyone knows, been a massive breakdown in trust of ‘official’ sources in the UK – once memorably captured by Michael Gove’s claim that we’ve had enough of ‘experts’.
But, certainly, where environmental issues are concerned, Michael Gove is part of the problem, as indeed is his government and its official agencies.
In response to an entirely fabricated ‘climate emergency’, the government is making plans to take away our petrol- and diesel-powered cars, our gas cookers and our gas-fired boilers, and to railroad us into a Net Zero by 2050 decarbonisation policy which will do immeasurable damage to our freedoms, to the cost of living and to the competitiveness of our economy.
All on the basis of no credible evidence whatsoever.
The climate crisis is a #fakenews crisis.
And in the real world, many if not most people know this. Most of the voters at the Conservative conference do, certainly.
Every time one or other minister starts regurgitating greenie propaganda, they get short shrift from the audience.
Do we not think it’s about time our out-of-touch Establishment got the hint?
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