Aletho News

BBC’s Fake Wildfire Claims

By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | January 30, 2025

The climate establishment are going to great lengths to blame the Los Angeles fires on global warming.

One attempt has already bitten the dust, with claims of increasing winter droughts contradicted by the real world data.

So another team of so-called scientists have come up with an even more ridiculous idea – that it is now both to wet and too dry in California.

The BBC report:

Climate change has made the grasses and shrubs that are fuelling the Los Angeles fires more vulnerable to burning, scientists say.

Rapid swings between dry and wet conditions in the region in recent years have created a massive amount of tinder-dry vegetation that is ready to ignite.

Decades of drought in California were followed by extremely heavy rainfall for two years in 2022 and 2023, but that then flipped again to very dry conditions in the autumn and winter of 2024.

“Scientists” say in a new study, external that climate change has boosted what they call these “whiplash” conditions globally by 31-66% since the middle of the 20th Century.

“This whiplash sequence in California has increased fire risk twofold,” said lead author Daniel Swain from UCLA.

“First, by greatly increasing the growth of flammable grass and brush in the months leading up to fire season, and then by drying it out to exceptionally high levels with the extreme dryness and warmth that followed.”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c0ewe4p9128o

Once again though the actual data shows the new study to be just as fake as the previous one. Most of California’s rain comes in the winter half, October to March; the last two years have been wetter than average, but no more so than many other years on record:

The same applies to the South Coast Drainage Division, which includes Los Angeles:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/national/time-series

Neither is there any evidence of bigger swings from year to year.

Patrick Brown of the Breakthrough Institute has written a full scientific rebuttal here, which demolishes this latest fake science.

This is his summary:

Summary

So, let’s recap. At the annual timescale that is most relevant to the Los Angeles fires…

• • Figure 1: There is no clear increase in overall whiplash occurrence or wet-to-dry whiplash occurrence in Los Angeles in the premiere observational dataset (ERA5) using data directly from Swain et al. (2025).
  • Figure 2: There is no clear increase in overall whiplash occurrence or wet-to-dry whiplash occurrence over southern California in the premiere observational dataset (ERA5) using data directly from Swain et al. (2025).
  • Figure 3: There is a long-term decrease in whiplash events globally over land (where it matters) in the premiere observational dataset (ERA5) using data directly from Swain et al. (2025).
  • Figure 5: There is no increase in the variability (standard deviation) of annual SPEI either for all months or centered on January) in the Los Angeles grid point using the pre-existing standard SPEI dataset.
  • Figure 6: There has been a decrease in the variability (standard deviation) of SPEI over global land since the 1980s using the pre-existing standard SPEI dataset.
  • Figure 7: There is no agreement on the direction of change (if any) in annual precipitation variability (standard deviation) over the Los Angeles area across eight different precipitation datasets.
  • Figures 8 and 9: There is no agreement on the direction of change (if any) in annual precipitation variability (standard deviation) globally across eight different precipitation datasets.

While “climate whiplash events” may be increasing in frequency under most of the very specific, selected definitions used and datasets investigated in Swain et al. (2025), the general idea that annual precipitation (or more generally, the water cycle, which includes evaporation) is becoming dramatically more variable is not supported when a broader set of datasets and definitions are used.

Would a reader of Swain et al. (2025), or especially its coverage, have any idea about the weakness of its broader conclusions or the lack of robustness of its results to different definitions and datasets? Almost certainly not, and I contend that this is a major problem for public understanding and trust in climate science.

Why don’t we see a robust increase in water cycle variability given the strong theory underpinning “wet gets wetter, dry gets drier”? For one thing, the theoretical size of the effect is known to be quite small relative to natural, unforced variability, making it inherently difficult to detect. For example, we see in Figure 7 above that year-to-year rainfall in Los Angeles naturally varies by as much as 300%, yet the signal we are looking for is one to two orders of magnitude less than this. It is also apparently the case that observational uncertainty is larger than the signal (or there would not be such disagreement between datasets). Physically, perhaps increasing mean precipitation is offsetting the increase in calculated evaporation in the SPEI index, reducing its variability. Maybe reduced temperature variability (via arctic amplification) is reducing calculated evaporation variability.

I don’t know the full answer, but these would be great research questions to identify and outline in a Nature review like Swain et al. (2025). Unfortunately, Swain et al. (2025) missed this opportunity because the paper seemed so focused on assembling evidence in favor of increasing water cycle variability that contradictory evidence was never presented or seriously grappled with.

My main discomfort with Swain et al. (2025) and its rollout is that it appears that the primary goal was to create and disseminate the “climate whiplash” meme rather than conduct a truly rigorous evaluation of the evidence, including countervailing evidence. Ultimately, this makes the research a much larger advance in marketing than an advance in science.

https://www.breakthroughjournal.org/p/how-much-did-increasing-climate-whiplash

Of course, studies like Swain’s are not intended to be serious science; they are written to generate headlines.

And the climate industry is now highly organised to ensure that theses fake studies are disseminated worldwide via a corrupt media.

February 9, 2025 - Posted by aletho | Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | BBC