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?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m00049b1/climate-change-the-facts
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”
.
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.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00704-026-06200-3
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.
As for hurricanes, there continues to be no trend in major hurricane activity:
https://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?arch&loc=global
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.
https://thredds.geus.dk/thredds/catalog/MassBalance/catalog.html
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:
https://www.nifc.gov/fire-information/statistics/wildfires
Meanwhile, wildfire acreage has been declining around the Mediterranean.
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:
As we have no control over climate, which is influenced principally by insolation (solar energy input), ocean temperature, and cloud cover, it is important to point out that there are about 50 other factors involved. To pretend CO2 controls climate is the same as claiming the Tooth Fairy controls climate. There is no such thing as a greenhouse effect on Earth and no such thing as greenhouse gases (no gas at any concentration in the atmosphere can warm Earth’s surface).This is cobbled up junk science, based on Arrhenius’s failed hypothesis in the 1890s, to serve the political and power goals of Agenda 21 and the globalists.
changes in solar energy input are not responsible for the ongoing global warming. You are misinformed
David Attenborough — The Thing That Will Not Die:-(
As if Attenborough actually researches and writes all this bills hit.
He’s just been a useful carnival barker for the grifters pulling the agw puppet strings.
“Attenborough … won a scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, in 1945 to study geology and zoology, was a member of the undergraduate Sedgwick Club and obtained a degree in natural sciences.”
“In 1952, he joined the BBC full-time… he became a producer for the Talks department, which handled all non-fiction broadcasts. His early projects included the quiz show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? and Song Hunter, a series about folk music”
“In 2019, Attenborough narrated Our Planet, an eight-part documentary series, for Netflix…. this series emphasized the destructive role of human activities”
“Attenborough has linked anthropogenic effects on the environment with human population growth. He has attracted criticism for his views on human overpopulation and human population control. He is a patron of Population Matters, a UK charity advocating for family planning”
I know Attenborough as the Winnie the Pooh voice that narrates nature shows. Reading Wikipedia I get the impression of a contemporary anti-human liberal corporatist who kept playing the character he built around himself to collect revenue.
See my comment below
Deniers wishing death for someone. Deniers are terrible people
“so small as to be inconsequential or statistically significant.”
Insignificant?
Language arts.
Parse the sentence.
“so small as to be:”
“inconsequential”
or
(so small as to be)
“statistically significant.”
I have no clue what you’re trying to say here.
“Don’t confuse me with the facts, my mind is made up.”
But let’s give Sir Attenborough a break . . . he celebrated his 100th birthday on May 8, 2026, so very likely doesn’t remember what he said back in 2019.
If he is 100 years old, I have to ask “What mind?” Mom is 94 and she doesn’t have one either.
Dang, William Shatner is only 90.
But he also deserves some respect.
100 years old , yet able to push a walrus over the edge.
If I had Attenborough following me around and lecturing me all the time, I’d think about jumping as well.
And he’d then blame global warming.
My grandfather died at 101 and 1/2 and he was still very sharp until the end. Maybe a 10% drop in a few things, but he still functioned mentally the same as ever!
I think that is wonderful! I wish mom had been able to maintain her brain health, but she is just like her mother just more than 10 years older so I shouldn’t complain.
That could be viewed in this light –
Sidney Hook on Bertrand Russell
“What did Russell believe? You tell me the year and I’ll tell you what he believed”
Going by current forecasts there’s a high probability the UK 1922&44 32.8C May record will fall within a week.
Nice little 100th Birthday present.
I noticed on the local weather station that high temp records for the past few days here seemed to be from the 1890’s. But Alberta is only about 2 1/2 times the area of the UK so I suppose that high temp was probably a local anomaly type of thing, probably quite unlike the UK 1922 and 1944 records……/s
Yeah, but temperature records only count if they’re in the last 20 years
And measured near air-conditioning outlets over tarmac.
Or near jet engine exhausts.
To paraphrase the Mexican bandit in the film The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, “Facts? We ain’t got no facts! We don’t need no facts! I don’t have to show you any stinking facts!”
Fact is he was treated unfairly: Others got Nobel Peace Prizes and Oscars for the same set of lies.
Maybe they thought “We gave Richard 2 for Crocodile Ghandi.
That’s more than enough for a family of comedians “
What I fear is that, when confronted with its contradictions, orthodoxy will retreat into even greater radicalism. We saw this during Climategate. Wounded pride can produce catastrophes. In this case, any discussion became completely impossible, and the “consensus” sealed itself off hermetically. The result was a perfectly circular transmission of ideas, with catastrophism feeding catastrophism and producing increasingly fanciful apocalyptic stories, yet with formidable media effectiveness. I do not know what will emerge from the IPCC’s seventh report. One should be careful not to be overly optimistic. RCP8.5 (which would make a great name for a Terminator) may well have been rejected, but alarmists look down at you saying that this is thanks to “the proper functioning of science,” even though the flaws in this emissions scenario had been pointed out years before it was withdrawn. Eco-anxiety developed slowly and caused the damage we now know.
It no longer matters that we are not heading toward 4 or 5 degrees of warming (even though such a trajectory was always impossible), because 2.5 or 3 degrees more since 1850 already represents a terrible catastrophe. In terms of scientific communication, we have therefore moved from Hell on Earth to Gehenna.
Today, in the “global warming” section of Charlie Hebdo (if that name means anything to some of you, the editorial staff of this newspaper were victims of an Islamist terrorist attack on January 7, 2015), I read that the 2026 El Niño phenomenon, called “Godzilla,” had “now reached a global scale.”
A phenomenon that has always had consequences all over the world now has global consequences. Incredible, but true.
All they have is a dead horse and they must keep beating it, that is all they have. CAGW was their biggest cudgel to beat money out of others, it gained them so much fame and fortune, it is all they have and all they know, they will not let go of it.
“Global” is just a string of letters, no longer a meaningful term, useful to those who specialize in miscommunication and understand how to pervert clear language to trick the unwary.
Just another useful idiot to sow propaganda. They obviously do it for the notoriety and aggrandizement. Despite the facts they’ll take the narrative to their graves.
Attenborough is not a useful idiot, he’s a full blown Neo-Malthusian
The real mystery in this case is how so many people still Believe in this scam – in spite of repeated doom saying – we hav five, maybe ten years to do something about it. Furthermore – what a hubris to think that we can control such big forces of nature controlling the climate!”
It is always 5-10 years in the future. Moving goal posts.
We have seen this for over half a century.
We live in a global climate of “Trans-Reality Activists (aka climate alarmism).
There’s no fool like an old climate fool.
He blatantly lied about the walrus and refused to apologise.
That’s what passes for a national treasure, now.
He has long made it clear that he prefers animals to people and expressed desire to see fewer of the latter around.
That’s what passes for a national treasure, now.
He’ll soon be a buried national treasure.
The weeping and wailing will start and then they’ll be protests by the far-left until we get another day off for Attenborough Day.
(Do I sound callous and bitter when I mention Attenborough? I hope so, growing up, he was my childhood hero)
There are many young fools that rival him.
More produced by our “modern” education system each year.
Sir David should have stuck to things in which he had some competency. First made famous by “Life on Earth”, his best being (in my opinion) Blue Planet. A good naturalist and film maker, not a climatologist. Associating with Michael Mann is not a good look.
His co-traveler David Suzuki is getting a 90th birthday bash in Vancouver soon.
Guests of honor –
Al Gore and Hanoi Hanna aka Jane Fonda.
Maybe the MC will ask them all to recite.all the agw predictions that have materialized?
That’s gonna be a short recital
Does VC ever get snow in June?
It will this year.
gets snow JOBS all the time
Just a gentle reminder that Attenborough is Patron Saint of the Neo-Malthusian group Population Matters along with Packham and others. Population Matters are fully committed to reduce the human population – one way or another.
Of course, this is yet another thing the BBC turn a blind eye to – I wonder why?
The only thing that has transpired over the past half century is the proliferation of digital communications. Media went from paper to the internet vastly increasing audience access.
Social media has demonstratedly shown how to amplify any message and as we all know, alarmism garners hits.
Oh goody, Homewood again.
Let’s see ifwhat the old rascal says holds up ….
“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.”
Ah – the old “The US is the world” thing
https://www.preventionweb.net/news/concurrent-heat-waves-becoming-more-frequent
The UK:
The World:
“The IPCC admitted that it could detect very little change in storms, floods, droughts, hurricanes or sea level rise.”
Oh yeah?
Google AI:
“have The IPCC said that it could detect very little change in sea level rise”.
No, the IPCC has not said that it could detect very little change in sea level rise. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated the exact opposite: global sea level rise is rapidly accelerating and has risen more in the last century than in any century in at least the past 3,000 years.”
NB Global SL rise is not represented of one coastal tide-gauge or even many. Sat. measurement is required.
Droughts:
“Sticking with the US, it clear that Mann’s claims of worsening droughts were just a lie:”
Oh, of course – if not in the US, it’s not happening (again).
AI:
“Have The IPCC said that it could detect very little change in drought
Yes, but with crucial scientific nuance: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated that changes in meteorological and agricultural droughts are not statistically significant on a global scale, meaning they have “low confidence” in detecting clear, long-term global drought trends amid the noise of natural climate variability. However, the IPCC emphasizes that drought has significantly increased in specific regions, such as the Mediterranean and parts of Africa.“
https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/global-drought-outlook_d492583a-en/full-report/towards-a-drier-world_6f10e2e5.html
“Share of global land area affected by droughts (1900-2020)”
Trends in global precipitation, temperature, and potential evaporation rates (1900-2020)
Hurricanes:
AI:
“what does the IPCC say about the expected trend in atlantic hurricanes
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6), the total number of Atlantic hurricanes is not expected to increase, but the storms that do form will become significantly more intense, destructive, and rainier “
Wildfires:
AI:
“Global trend in the number of wildfires
Globally, the total annual number of wildfires and the overall burned area have declined by roughly 25% over the past two decades. However, this overarching metric masks a dangerous divergence: while agricultural expansion has heavily fragmented and reduced fires in African grasslands and savannas, extreme, destructive, and high-intensity forest fires have more than doubled over the same period.”
Tornadoes;
AI:
“Why has the strength of us tornadoes decreased
The observed decrease in the strength of US tornadoes—particularly the absence of top-tier EF5 tornadoes since 2013—is primarily caused by stricter damage-rating standards and a climate-driven reduction in vertical wind shear. Meteorologists stress that tornadoes themselves may not actually be getting weaker. Instead, changes in how they are measured and where they form alter the data.”
“No, the IPCC has not said that it could detect very little change in sea level rise. In fact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated the exact opposite: global sea level rise is rapidly accelerating”
Please quote the actual source (IPCC report not AI).
In fact, there is no significant acceleration at any tide gauge..
The acceleration in the satellite data comes from data adjustment…
… just like much of the warming.
And as for hurricanes.. From Nature 2022
(location of images adjusted from original, to display across page)
I saw Google AI and quit reading.
Why? Google has committed to promoting climate alarmism and demoting any opposition.
They reacched an agreement with the UN a few years back.
One can find anything to support any side of a controversial topic on the internet. So pick and choose to prove your point of view.
How the tables have turned. Homewood’s primary source was the IPCC report. Yours was AI. Who’s the denier now?
This from a Met-Office data creationist that thinks class 4,5 site and airports are suitable for “climate measurements”
NOTHING in the way of temperature measurements for the UK is remotely “scientific”
Your last graph is a total load of bollocks.. measured nowhere in a scientific manner, and fabricated from NON-data.
It bears no resemblance to any individual reasonable temperature measurement anywhere in the world.
It combines sparce heavily urban affected and airport 2m temperature with basically non-existent ocean measurements made using a bucket at ultra-sparce random locations.
It is the very epitome of ANTI-SCIENCE.
Show us where ocean temperatures were measured in 1920, 1950, 1980 etc.. even Phil Jones said the data from the southern ocean was “mostly made up”
Only person putting forward BOGUS data is AB. !!
Global max temps starts in 1950 (beginning of new Ice Age scare).. why not include 1930, 1940?
NOAA data shows basically no change in global drought to 2017
https://ibb.co/0yGVq1RV
ps.. and why show ANY of the oceans, until you can show where they were actually measured in a scientifically consistent manner.
Ah yes, good old Banton, who believes the Earth should be static, unchanging, and that it was before nasty old humans arrived.
I doubted that serious scientists would use adjectives like “rapidly”, so checked with the original source … rather than blindly believing that an AI (/ LLM) is not “hallucinating”.
The last two paragraphs of section 2.3.3.3, “Sea Level”, on page 355 of the AR6 WG-I report :
NB : Doing a quadratic fit to any time-series dataset will give you an “acceleration” viz :
y = Ax² + Bx + C, “acceleration” = 2A.
Calling an “acceleration” of 5 microns per year, per year “rapid” … or even “robust” … is, IMNSHO, an egregious abuse of the English language.
Note also that the calculation of the “acceleration” for the satellite data is limited to 25 years. The minimum period for something to be considered as “climate” is by default thirty years (the WMO definition).
The IPCC did not say SLR “is” accelerating “rapidly”. Even the satellite data for the (very) limited period of 1993-2018 only managed to reach “0.094 millimetres per year, per year”.
From the IPCC AR6 WG-I assessment report, adding one more sentence to the extract your AI “summarised”.
From the middle of section 11.7.1.5, “Projections” [ of future TCs / Tropical Cyclones ], on page 1591 :
NB : “Are projected to in a computer simulation” does not equal “will”.
How can those (purely hypothetical / modelled) future hurricanes be “more destructive” if they never make landfall ?
Yeah, next time maybe he should do a little research.
Attenborough’s natural sciences degree is basically a bullshit degree because it is a smattering of part degrees rather than a single in depth subject.
He is a clever broadcaster and activist but not a scientist. The BBC had another broadcaster called David Bellamy who was a scientist with a degree in botany but he called out the climate scare as a scam so the BBC dropped him.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fallen-Icon-Attenborough-Walrus-Deception/dp/0991796691/ref=sr_1_1?crid=EYNZZPO5Q2G3&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Dmy9FOYnoZg7LHw3WVFEhfnpgU2DF5L-oQG7Ty4iGcQ1IxmyT2g8UFJQlff43gcgnEDW8zPAQIE85skl9l9Hyxt1snAVKJ23lv6283xzLhbe85buQ1stdwqmWRWVMdgfMfxkwzC_d1xPaE6UKRDGKWSqn_vbXhGPgX5VO-xb7Z875pNy2OrVovDfrVF3o5NzWPeIgfiSoKuIohZrn2ua8u8FTiO6LFOXE5yLiH9VJrw.t6up7GrkKi4JTQZyABfL_sxEDKXErLvw37GDP1SG_SU&dib_tag=se&keywords=fallen+icon&qid=1779396177&sprefix=fallen+icon%2Caps%2C175&sr=8-1
Despite his reputation in other areas of science and the environment, Attenborough is just in the same climate alarmist category as David Suzuki, Al Gore and all the rest of the con-artists seeking to profit from making a big deal out of nothing more than the usual weather fluctuations we all experience annually. The best bet is to just ignore their rantings which have been proven to be either exaggerations or outright inaccuracies.
It appears that Sir Attenborough deserves his own section in “Failed Predictions.”
It could be a ‘twofer’ if you list his and Mann’s prognostications together…
The more important aspect is the “negative thinning” occurring over most of the Greenland above 2300m:
essd-17-3047-2025-f18-web.png (1892×1475)
The fact that increasing elevation is described as negative thinning gives a clue to the intended lie that this tries to convey.
The important point here is that whatever weather and climate are doing CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by man has damn little to do with it.
“All of this is happening far faster than many of us thought possible”
All of what ? Absolutely and positively NOTHING.
How ridiculous. You show a graphic for one spot in the UK and claim it represents all of sea level rise. How can anyone be dumb enough to believe the nonsense written
Hm, do you also believe the water level in your bathtub differs from end to end?
Note: One point is only representative if land subsidence and rise – at the measuring point – is ruled out. (It’s obvious, but it seems Eric Flesch is “special”.