BBC GETS IT WRONG AGAIN ON GLOBAL WARMING
From the Global Warming Policy Foundation
London, 24 January: The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has lodged a new complaint to the BBC about its misleading reporting on global warming.
The BBC’s News at Ten programme on the 18th of January 2018 contained two factual errors in its report of the global temperature of 2017.
The errors were in the cue to the report by Roger Harrabin, and in the report itself.
The newsreader, Huw Edwards, said that 2017 was “the hottest year on record,” insinuating that global temperatures have continued to rise last year.
This is untrue. In reality, global temperatures have declined in the last 12 months. According to the Met Office, 2017 was the third warmest year on record.
In his report Roger Harrabin said, “2017 had no heating from El Niño.”
This is also untrue.
El Niño warming was evident during eleven weeks in the spring and summer of 2017, pushing global temperatures up accordingly.
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) there were El Niño “conditions” for nearly three months in 2017, but they did not lead to an El Niño “event.” A formal El Niño event was not declared because the El Niño heating did not continue for five consecutive three-month periods.
It is therefore untrue to say that “2017 had no heating from El Niño.”
“These are two factual errors that should be acknowledged with an on-air apology and a correction on the BBC’s Corrections and Clarifications page,” GWPF director Dr Benny Peiser said.
GWPF letter to the BBC (PDF)
As reported previously, NASA GISS says 2017 was the second warmest year and NOAA says it was the third warmest year.
Until circa 2008, I’d simply accepted all the media reports that every year was always hotter and would get worse. Then while watching BBC World Service, there was Roger, quoting the WMO as saying there had been no rise in world temperatures since 1999. This was a revelation. And then I saw his story was taken down from the BBC website (not before I had saved it); then it went up again, but leaving out the no-warming parts. And then I saw that Greenpeace and friends had gone to the BBC in outrage at the story. Roger was off air for two weeks, and has never erred since.
A bit off topic but I woke up today in Melbourne Australia, put on the TV and the Weather report is as follows:
Paraphrase “…the Heatwave continues (day 6) for South Eastern Australia..”.
Facts – Brisbane 31C, Sydney 27C, Canberra 33C, Melbourne 27C, Hobart 27C, Adelaide 35C. These are not heatwave temperatures as I have always understood them and as they have been reported in the past. I always was told 5 days over 39C was a heatwave.
But they are clever and now cherry pick inland sites to create the impression
“…..another scorcher for Sydney…” yes at Penrith (an outer suburb) 37C.
This is why the battle is far from over because the heatwave headline is the banner but the discussion is buried in the minutiae.
Bye the way it is Summer here!!!!
I thought I had better check on what a heatwave was in the modern idiom.
The BoM “…..A heatwave is now defined by three or more days of unusually high maximum and minimum temperatures in any area…” and what is more there are now three categories – Standard, Severe and Extreme.
Here I was wondering where our taxes went.
Three hot days in a row – really? On this definition we have had a heatwave almost every year I can remember over two Climate periods.
From my point of view this is just another way of keeping the fear factor up.
Brings to mind the old adage that a lie goes halfway around the world while the truth is getting its shoes on. These people know that they are lying and don’t care as the public never hear about these corrections and absorb the lie as fact.
I was watching the BBC when this item first came out. The lady (not Harrabin) said, “2017 was the warmest non-El Niño year on record.”
To me that meant she was saying 2017 was the second warmest year, possibly the third warmest behind 1997 but she made no elaboration. It seems Harrabin simply dropped the qualifier. Judging by the BBC’s own content, his statement warrants correction.
You’ll receive the coldest of replies from the Beeb…
yawn. can someone tell me a time in the past 2 billion years when climate didn’t change?!!!
news flash!! taxes will increase!! climate will change! sun will come up in morning.
the headlines we never see: government to slash taxes 75% for the average person. winter cancelled by global warming. co2 prevents ice age.
Roger Harrabin is a travesty of a journalist. Even I complained to the BBC about him once. Last year saw him interview California’s Jerry Brown. It was the most obsequious interview ever. Harrabin did not ask him a single difficult question. Nothing about the millions of dollars taken by Californian Democrats from natural gas and fracking interests to enact legislation for them. Harrabin portrayed Brown as some kind of Knight in Green Armour, slaying the Black dragons of fossil fuel. Nothing about California’s high electricity prices, large imports of electricity from other states, mismanagement of woods and forests which encouraged forest fires, …
I believe that NOAA:s El Niño definition is that its index has to be above 0,5 C for three months in a row and that was not the case in 2017. You used NOAA:data so I guess their definition will do.
Typical propaganda move. Make a false headline claim/lie ….. drop the bomb so to speak….. and your job is done.
It’s time for the BBC to start self-funding rather than taxing the TV owners. Once upon a time the BBC was reasonable sound! But today it’s a political mouth piece.
It’s the BBC
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/artwork/logo-fun/bbc-greenpeace-med.gif
I recommend to accept this simple fac that the year 2017 was not an EL Nino year according to its common specification. Here is an evidence:
This was not an usual ENSO event, because there was no La NIna. This has happened twice before: 57-58 and 91-92. I believe that the next 2-3 years are very important, because the Sun activity is going downwards and also the 60 years Astronomical Harmonic Resonance peak starts to weaken. Skeptics will not win this battle by dynying facts like AGW fans. Keep the head cool. The cooling will come in time.
Dr. Antero Ollila
Dr Antero Ollila
As someone who has monitored ENSO pretty much on a weekly basis for over a decade …I respectfully disagree with your statement.
There are two things that stand out about your ONI graph. One is that the best measure of the state of ENSO is the MEI not the ONI index as this takes into account many other factors that are affected by ENSO.
And second is your ONI graph shows that the 2015-17 El Nino was the strongest in modern times. There is no way it was stronger than either 97-98 or 82-83 Ninos and this was reflected in many global observations as well. The ONI shows a bias towards the Nino 4 region. The region comparison below shows that NIno 2015-17 was only stronger in the Nino 4 region which is not where the main Nino variability exists. The Nino 2015-17 was a very western located warm anomaly unlike 97-98 and 1982-83 which were very much closer to the Americas and where Nino’s have the greatest atmospheric impact.
http://ggweather.com/enso/compare/monthly4.png
http://ggweather.com/enso/compare/monthly34.png
http://ggweather.com/enso/compare/monthly3.png
http://ggweather.com/enso/compare/monthly12.png
As this site shows
http://ggweather.com/enso/compare/
in nearly all major categories the 2015-17 Nino was not exceptional compared to previous events.
SST maps also show that the first half of 2017 saw basin wide warmer than normal SSTs across the tropical Pacific. It was only in the second half of 2017 that SST shows a more La Nina like cool eastern tropical Pacific type pattern. Therefore it was quite reasonable for that first half of 2017 showed residual Nino warming especially as it extended into all tropical Ocean basins.
These ENSO indexes have their limitations because each and every ENSO event is different, but ONI index is particularly poor and one wonders if there has been a bit of adjustment of weightings to make the 2015-17 Nino seem the strongest ever…because most other metrics say otherwise.
April 2017
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2017/anomnight.4.13.2017.gif
June 2017
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2017/anomnight.6.15.2017.gif
Nov 2017
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2017/anomnight.11.30.2017.gif
\\The newsreader, Huw Edwards, said that 2017 was “the hottest year on record,” //
Yep I was with my aged parents, when that came on
..we absorbed their wacky message and quickly changed channel.
But how many unenlightened were brainwashed.
See the brainwashing msg BBC-Earth tweeted
https://twitter.com/BBCEarth/status/954688754840678400
A bit of spin from your mates at UEA
By searching Twitter with the BBC story URL
I see hundreds of retweets of the story
(maybe a tool like tweet desk would tell me how many ..I’m guessing 200 or 500 or 1000)
https://twitter.com/SustainableUEA/status/954325321913962496
For the record Newssniffer shows zero stealth edits</a for that Harra story.
That is quite unusual, cos BBC usually secretly refines the narrative throughout the day.
Maybe this story was very well prepared in the first place ?
The BBC is now promoting the latest environmental “Armageddon” scare story from the likes of Greenpeace – plastic. It started with Blue Planet II and it is now pursuing an activist stance against plastic, primarily this morning in the form of discarded plastic water bottles. It has been pursuing this story for several weeks now, in both national and local programming and news. It has covered plastic bottles in the sea and this morning in the River Avon near Bristol.
The language is clearly lifted from environmental propaganda and is intended to be worrying and inflammatory. In the talk of plastic bottles they are described as “pollution” and they want them banned. This is a classic corruption of the English language to create an alarmist narrative (those opposing smacking children re-label it as “hitting” children; or describing abuse victims as “survivors”). The use of “pollution” is a similar environmental activist tactic as the use of the word “chemical” to describe things. The latter term is used deliberately because it has negative connotations to many people. Basically it is propaganda.
In my (slightly) old fashioned view of English, a pollutant is something disseminated in water or air and is poisonous. So pollutants such as detergents in a river can kill fish for example.
What the Environmental organisations and the BBC are calling “pollution” is in fact good old-fashioned Litter:
Rubbish such as paper, cans, and bottles left lying in an open or public place. So the call should be to clean it up and dispose of it properly, not necessarily to ban it. Unless of course you have an underlying agenda. And that’s why you corrupt the English language to make things more scary and you get your real objective implemented – banning plastics. Surely not a coincidence that they come from evil fossil fuels?
The question one should ask of the BBC is are they complicit in this, or just idiots? Neither possibility is edifying or attractive.
sorry mods forgot the italic closing / after the word poisonous! Appreciate if you could edit…
Read the propaganda bureau book, based on mr harrabin.
Give you all you need to know about the man and his myths.
No doughy the retraction will be at 3am on the bbc.