BBC Fact-Checking Show More or Less Gets its Climate Facts Wrong Again

The BBC More or Less statistics programme is one of the last remaining Radio 4 programmes worth a listen. It tries to dispassionately analyse the data behind often narrative-driven and politicised claims. Except when it comes to climate change and Net Zero of course. Here it is seemingly bound by the BBC’s weird view of ‘settled’ science which gives alarmists and activists a free broadcast pass to create mass climate psychosis. Case in point, a recent cringe-inducing ‘why are you so very wonderful’  interview with the Green Blob-funded Attribution Queen Professor Friederike Otto.

Presenter Tim Harford set the ball rolling with a suggestion that the British weather is getting “downright weird”. This seems to refer to the fact that days can sometimes be sunny, sometimes sodden, sometimes on the same day. These factual burdens might be considered obvious to anyone who has bravely lived for more than six months in the British Isles. Otto of course was delighted to run with the Guardianista “weird” tag, suggesting that some colleagues do actually call it “global weirding”. Particularly colleagues who like herself try to second guess the chaotic atmosphere with computer models producing pseudoscientific, lawfare-ready climate Armageddon nonsense, it might be said.

No attempt was made to question Otto’s bonkers claim that “every time it rains now, it rains more than it would have without climate change”. Not in Scotland, Harford might have noted, the rainiest country in the United Kingdom. As the Met Office graph below shows, the amount of Scottish rainfall has flatlined for about 40 years.

Over in Northern Ireland, the flat line has been holding steady for 25 years, while in England, cyclical rainfall amounts have recovered to 1870s levels. Not much sign of humans fiddling with the weather with regard to these ones, Harford did not point out.

On a global level, rainfall totals do not seem to have changed much.  A recent paper found little overall change in the Amazon over the last 300 years. In 2022, a group of Italian scientists led by Professor Gianluca Alimonti consulted widely available data and found that rainfall intensity and frequency had remained stationary worldwide, with no sign of a significant rise in flood magnitude.

The Alimonti findings were eventually retracted by Nature after a gang of activists – including, no prizes for guessing, F. Otto – said it that it should never have been published. Otto claimed that the scientists were not operating in “good faith” and “if the journal cares about science it should withdraw it loudly and publicly, saying that it should never have been published”. There are lots of stats in this infamously retracted work, including those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a biased body, but one nevertheless that currently observes little recent change in most extreme weather events. But, it seems, none of these stats interest More or Less.

Global temperatures have risen by 1.6°C since pre-industrial times, stated Otto, a claim that seems to reply on picking a recent high point that is now rapidly falling, unreliable temperature measurements and seemingly adding some extra for luck. Even the UK Met Office – activist-central for the Net Zero fantasy – estimates that long-term warming averaged over decades is around 1.3°C. In fact, unnatural urban heat corruption and regular additions of warming on a retrospective basis probably mean the true figure is more like 1°C. Try as it might, the Met Office cannot get anywhere near 1.6°C. Its imaginative 20-year average from 2015-2034 that cherry picks a strong El Niño spike in 2015 and estimates/invents temperature figures going forward a decade can only get to warming of 1.4°C.

Perhaps one day More or Less can get around to investigating the moveable feast that is global temperature calculation. Good luck on that one –  there are more fiddles in this particular branch of climate science than can be found at the Come all ye Fiddlers Night at the Fiddlers Arms in Fiddlington-on-Sea.

More or Less has past form in listening reverently to activists cherry-picking data to push a narrative. In 2024, a short World Service edition noted that the Daily Sceptic had reported sea ice in the Arctic had soared to its highest extent for 21 years on January 8th of that year. A claim of “cherry-picking” appeared even though the rest of the article considered the short and long-term trends. The BBC consulted Professor Julienne Stroeve, an ‘Earth Scientist’ from UCL, who noted that the long-term decline from 1979 was easy to see. Just as easy to see was the flatlining of the sea ice extent over the last 20 years. In fact, using a four-year average, the trend has been slightly upwards over the last few years. Perish reporting the thought that 1979 was an obvious cyclical high, with lower sea ice in the decades before. Ignoring or downplaying all this plays into a favoured narrative, peddled by everyone from Al Gore to David Attenborough, that the summer sea ice is about to disappear in the northern polar regions.

If More or Less is going to brave the politically treacherous waters of climate change science, it needs to up its game, start examining all the data and stop giving an easy, unquestioning ride to those with an obvious Net Zero fantasy narrative to promote.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.