Friday, August 21st 2026 was a slow news day. You could tell because the BBC’s Radio 4 6 O’Clock News led with the vacuous revelation Harry and Meghan are coming back to the UK. Slightly less uninteresting was the second story, the disastrous case against the Mail and how Harry and his fellow litigants are going to have to pay tens of millions of pounds to the newspaper in compensation.
There were more vacuous revelations to come. The ‘other’ top story was the impending catastrophe promised by the mounting El Niño crisis in the Pacific. The 6 O’Clock News was typical of the corporation’s output for the day. This is how the bulletin flagged up the story in the headlines:
[Announcer] Dire warnings from the Met Office about the effects of what it describes as an unprecedented El Niño event.
Cue then to the Voice of Doom, in this case the obliging Professor Adam Scaife – head of the Met Office’s long-range forecasting and a professor of applied maths at the University of Exeter – who was identified later in the bulletin:
We think that when it peaks in November and December it’s likely to be [a] record event, beyond anything we’ve seen in living memory.
That sort of phrasing, readers may recall, is straight out of the 17th-century playbook of weather catastrophising, as I discussed in a piece for this website in 2024 (’They Were Catastrophising the Climate in the 17th Century‘). Instead of the modern ‘since records began’, Scaife had opted for a version of the 17th Century’s equivalent. Here’s a quote from that piece I wrote:
All summer long there were “so great rains, that produced greater floods than in the memory of man”, wrote John Locke in 1673.
Such methods of emphasising a point are a handy way of terrorising oneself and other people because they evoke a sense of something both unprecedented and terrifying, predicated entirely on the nebulous limits of human memory without even specifying what that amounts to – or doesn’t.
Just look at the BBC’s wording. Not only are there “warnings”, but they are also “dire”. ‘Dire’ comes from the Latin word dirus, which means something ‘awful’ or ‘ominous’. Appropriately enough, it was a word often used by the Romans in a religious context when confronted with a bad omen, either in the form of a natural event or as the result of a sacrifice, such as the examination of the animal victim’s entrails.
There was something overwhelmingly religious about the bulletin’s coverage of the El Niño apocalypse because it served as no more than a harbinger of doom – something that might or might not happen and, even if it does, we are in no position to know exactly what form it will take.
It was ironic, but typical, that a scientist confronted with something he doesn’t know for a fact but is only guessing resorted to religious-style phrasing. This was exactly the sort of behaviour we saw during Covid too. The phenomenon is in fact entirely normal for most human beings. We live in a world of uncertainty and there is a latent desire among all people to believe they live in exceptional times.
