Aletho News

The climate scaremongers: Extreme weather, 1961 style

By Paul Homewood | TCW Defending Freedom | January 7, 2022

FOR several years the public have been bombarded with threats of extreme weather to brainwash them about the dangers of climate change. Every bit of bad weather is relayed by the 24/7 media, which naturally has the effect of making the public believe ‘things are getting worse’. This is then backed up by repeated claims that global warming is to blame, making such events more frequent and more severe.

As part of this propaganda onslaught, the BBC has been broadcasting a monthly Climate Check video for the last couple of years, usually presented by weatherman Ben Rich, who they hope will give a flavour of authenticity. Last month’s edition was a summary of 2021. According to the introduction: ‘Fires, floods, heatwaves and drought – 2021 has been another year of remarkable extremes around the world.’

The video then goes on to cover a heatwave in Canada, floods in Canada, Germany, China, India and Australia, Hurricane Ida, wildfires in Greece and a drought in East Africa. None of these were unprecedented, yet there was the usual sloppy assertion that global warming is making all these types of events worse. No evidence or data is given to back up these absurd claims, which are purely derived from computer models sexed up by alarmist scientists.

Is our weather really any worse than in the past? Recently I looked back at the world’s weather 50 years ago, in 1971. The weather that year was every bit as bad as anything seen either this year or in the recent past.

Was 1971 exceptional? Let’s go back to 1961 for another viewpoint.

It’s ironic that Ben Rich began last month’s report by saying ‘If anywhere in the world sums up a year of extreme weather, it’s Canada’, because he could have said exactly the same if he had been doing his Climate Check 60 years ago.

The drought that summer on the Canadian prairies was reckoned at the time to be even worse than the dustbowl years of the 1930s. Many places had received no proper rainfall for a year and a half, and harvests were devastated, as this CBC video describes.

Wildfires burned millions of acres across much of Canada in what was called at the time ‘The Angriest Summer’.

To cap it off, flash floods killed a family of five in Timmins, Ontario in August, following six inches of rain in 12 hours.

Catastrophic floods hit many other parts of the world that year. New South Wales suffered some of the worst floods in its history in November 1961, probably only surpassed by the ones in 1900. The Nepean Times reported: ‘During a week of rain in which 474mm of rain were recorded at the post office, Penrith received half its annual rainfall on two days.’

In the very same week, the BBC was reporting on flood-stricken Somalia: ‘Unconfirmed reports put the number of homeless at 300,000 . . . The Prime Minister said nearly all Somalia’s food crops have been destroyed, and said food will have to be found for about 600,000 people for eight months, until the next harvest.’

The USA was also badly affected by flooding in 1961. ‘Widespread, prolonged and disastrous’ floods hit Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama in February and March, followed by the Midwest in May, and Idaho in June. The most tragic flood of the year was in July in Charleston, West Virginia when a small area cloudburst flood caused 22 deaths. Severe flooding also occurred in December in Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama.

The worst floods that year in the USA were brought by Hurricane Carla in September, a Cat 4 storm with winds of 170mph, which left a trail of devastation from Texas to Illinois, including 34 dead, 1,900 homes destroyed and a record number of tornadoes.

The Atlantic hurricane season in 1961 saw two in the most powerful Category 5, Esther and Hattie, making it one of only seven Atlantic hurricane seasons to feature multiple Category 5 hurricanes in one season. Hattie devastated Belize City, damaging 70 per cent of the buildings. The damage was so severe that the government relocated inland to a new city, Belmopan.

1961 was certainly not an exceptional year and history is littered with weather disasters like these. The idea that today’s weather is any more ‘remarkable’ or ‘extreme’ is not only ridiculous, it has no basis in fact. But Ben Rich has no intention of presenting an objective account of the weather last year. His final statement gives the game away: ‘2021 has brought into sharp focus the impact that severe weather is having on peoples around the world. Limiting the rise in global temperatures to 1.5C was at the top of the agenda at COP26 in Glasgow, with scientists urging world leaders to commit to cutting greenhouse gases to stave off a climate catastrophe.’

There is just one purpose in all of this: to brainwash the public into accepting the UN’s climate agenda.

Making it up as you go along

You might have thought that when the head of the Environment Agency was giving a speech on climate change to the Royal Society he would check his facts first. Not Sir James Bevan.

The agency’s chief executive recently stood up to give a talk ludicrously titled ‘Drought risk in the Anthropocene: from the Jaws of Death to the Waters of Life’. In an attempt to show that climate change was making floods worse, he made the claim that ‘in England, three of the five wettest winters on record have happened in the last eight years’. However according to the Met Office only one of the five has occurred in that period, in 2013/14. The other four were 1876/77, 1914/15, 1989/90 and 1994/95.

Bevan also claimed that winters are wetter than in the past on average, but they were just as wet in the early 1900s.

UK Met Office

He went on to warn that climate change was making our summers drier, increasing the risk of drought. As you have probably guessed by now, summers in England are not becoming drier, or for that matter wetter. They are no different from summers in the past!

UK Met Office

Bevan worked as a diplomat all his career prior to joining the Environment Agency in 2015. His ignorant speech makes his lack of qualifications for his job glaringly obvious.

Landscapes will be altered for ever, warns National Trust!

Not to be outdone by the Environment Agency, the National Trust has just published its annual Weather and Wildlife Review. As you would expect from an organisation taken over by the far Left years ago, it carries apocalyptic warnings about the so-called climate crisis.

The report begins: ‘The climate crisis presented serious challenges for nature across the UK this year. A warm winter, low levels of rain and gale-force winds all contributed to various natural disasters, causing devastation across precious landscapes and affecting the wildlife they support.’

As usual they confuse ‘weather’ with ‘climate’.

According to the BBC, the report warns that some of the landscapes under the Trust’s control are being altered for ever as climate change makes some forms of extreme weather the new normal.

Yes, the same landscapes which have remained largely unaltered for thousands of years, other than by mankind: through the warmth of the Middle Ages and the cold of the Little Ice Age, and many other previous climate cycles, and through the huge differences which we see from year to year. Do the National Trust think we are all a bunch of idiots?

And their evidence for this absurd claim?

1)    Moorland fires, due to dry springs caused by climate change.

Only one slight problem though. Our springs are not getting drier, or for that matter wetter:

2)    Ash dieback – caused by ‘warmer/wetter winters’

Climate has nothing whatsoever to do with dieback, a disease caused by fungal infestation. It has been spreading rapidly across Europe since its introduction about 30 years ago from eastern Asia. It thrives in all climates – warm, cold, wet and dry.

3)    Stormy weather

Storms have blown down trees since time immemorial. But just because the Met Office now give them silly names, the National Trust think they must be getting worse. In fact, the opposite is true, as Met Office data clearly proves:

Incredibly their report ends:

Isn’t it time they concentrated on their real job instead?

January 7, 2022 - Posted by aletho | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | BBC