The BBC Promotes Bad Science About Heat, Floods, Drought, and Wildfires
By
Linnea Lueken
May 2, 2024
A recent BBC article, titled “How climate change worsens heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, and floods,” claims that climate change is linked to four types of extreme weather, specifically claiming it causes: extreme rainfall, worse heatwaves, longer droughts, and more wildfires. Widely available data proves these claims are false. The “evidence” given by the BBC is not evidence at all, as it eschews real world measurements for model outputs and predictions from a single climate activist organization.
The first section of the BBC’s report is dedicated to the idea that climate change causes more extreme rainfall. The BBC presents a very simplistic vision of how the precipitation is related to average temperature, claiming that warmer air can hold more moisture, and therefore heavier rainfall. While the basic physics here is accurate, the atmosphere is more complex than that in reality.
For this section, they relied not on available data, even from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which show no evidence of increasing intensity of rainfall, but rather the BBC solely referenced counterfactual modelling produced by the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group. Climate Realism very recently explained why, contrary to the BBC’s insistence, attribution modelling is not evidence for climate change’s impact on flooding like that which was recently seen in Dubai.
In that same post, I pointed out that the IPCC does not admit to finding any evidence at all of climate change’s impact on heavy precipitation. (See figure below)
https://climaterealism.com/2024/05/the-bbc-promotes-bad-science-about-heat-floods-drought-and-wildfires/
