Panorama aired the disgraced BBC Climate Editor Justin Rowlatt’s latest barrel of climate hogwash this week. It’s title, Fire and Floods: Our Extreme Weather, probably tells you all you need to know – half the country is underwater, and the other half aflame, you might think from the introduction.
It is not long since Rowlatt’s previous outing on Panorama was found by the BBC Executive Complaints Unit to have contained not one but two serious misstatements of fact.
With COP31 here, the BBC of course had to do its bit to persuade the world and its aunt that we must drag society back to the Middle Ages. And what better way than to tell us we will either drown or fry if we don’t.
Rowlatt began by harking back to the summer of 1976, which he said was a freak event. (It was not – it was nearly as hot the year before, and there have been plenty of other hot summers at home in the past, like 1911 and 1947.)
But this opening gambit highlights a flaw running through the whole programme, namely conflation of weather and climate. Hot summers occur when the weather is predominantly dry and sunny, just as it was this year and just as it was in 1976.
A sunny summer is a weather phenomenon, not a climatic one. Fossil fuels don’t make it sunnier.
