Millimetres From Disaster – An Update
What’s changed?
Posted on 29 Sep 24
by Mark Hodgson
Over three years ago (on 29th July 2021) Millimetres From Disaster saw the light of day here at Cliscep. It was a bit of a mickey-take about a scare-mongering BBC article bearing the title “What will climate change look like near me”. In it I pointed out that inputting my post code produced a series of distinctly non-scary results regarding the BBC’s prognostications for the climate where I live if global temperatures increased by 2C or by 4C.
I had completely forgotten about it until I noticed an article in the Guardian (or, given the fact that it appeared today, a Sunday, perhaps the Observer) titled “The UK will get hotter and drier for plants… except in Manchester”. This reminded me about the BBC article and my observations on it, and I wondered if it still exists.
It does, but something strange has happened. Apart from being padded out to try to increase its scariness, quite a lot has changed. Three years ago I was told that “[t]he hottest summer day of the past 30 years near you was 29.7C”. Today I find that the 30 year timescale referred to is no longer the last 30 years, but is instead the 30 years from 1991-2021. During this period apparently the hottest summer day near me was 29.4C, so 0.3C less than the temperature suggested when I looked three years ago. The discrepancy may only be small, but it is real. It can’t be explained by reference to different timescales, because effectively “the past 30 years” when I looked in 2021 and the 30 years from 1991-2021 are the same. So did the BBC get it wrong three years ago, or are they getting it wrong now?
https://cliscep.com/2024/09/29/millimetres-from-disaster-an-update/
