BBC refuses to correct blatantly false claims about the storm
By Paul Homewood
The BBC’s Complaints Executive has now responded to my complaint about their fake “fact check”, claiming that “there is evidence that storms are getting stronger“. Not surprisingly, they rejected my complaint without actually addressing the facts I presented.
I won’t go into all the charts and documents that In claims to have – you can read them. This. But I’m going to present this one, summarizing all the major hurricanes around the world. There is no evidence to substantiate the BBC’s claims:
http://tropical.atmos.colostate.edu/Realtime/index.php?arch&loc=global
NOAA confirmed that it could find no trends in major Atlantic hurricanes:
And even the IPCC could find no evidence of a long-term trend in the “intensity-based metrics.”
IPCC AR6
It really should be an open and closed case – the BBC was wrong.
The ECU’s response to my claim consisted mainly of “predictions” and “computer models”, neither of which are proof of anything. They also refer to the IPCC’s claim that rapidly intensifying events have become more frequent. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant if the frequency/incidence of major storms does not increase.
The only actual data they could provide to back up their claims was a 2016 study of hurricanes in the Western Pacific, which the BBC reported:
“Over the past 37 years, storms making landfall in East and Southeast Asia have increased in intensity by 12–15%, with the incidence of Category 4 and 5 storms having doubled or even tripled.”
All is well and good, except that the data record from 1951 shows a marked decrease in hurricanes during the 1970s and 1980s, but no long-term trend:
https://www.jma.go.jp/jma/jma-eng/jma-center/rsmc-hp-pub-eg/climatology.html
In any case, since the global frequency of major hurricanes has not increased since 1980, this increase in storm activity must be matched by a decrease in activity elsewhere.
Even the IPCC did not find it worthwhile to mention the article, instead emphasizing “significant interdecade variation in the Western Pacific“:
IPCC AR6
The ECU ends by saying:
Except that my complaint is not about what “scientists predict”, but the claim that “there is evidence that hurricanes are getting stronger! They did not solve this at all.
Out of names
I also complain about the fact-checking statement that “hurricane season is so busy, they’ve already used up the list [of names] and have to start over.”
I point out that the reason for the need for more names today is because we can observe many storms with satellites, which we were not able to do before, and now many storms other than heat. Zone has been named, which is not used to be practiced. It has nothing to do with more storms becoming more frequent.
The ECU didn’t even bother to address these issues and doubled down by pointing out that “the number of named storms has increased over the past 50 years.”
Obviously viewers will not be fooled by misinformation, despite the fact that most will now believe that storms are becoming more frequent, when they are not!
The handling of this complaint succinctly summarizes everything that is wrong with the BBC’s complaints procedure. The whole system is tortuous, and will continue to be so until it is placed in the hands of a truly independent agency.