by Andrew Montford, April 23, 2019 in GWPF

Extinction Rebellion seem to be everywhere at the moment. And everywhere their story is the same. We are in the middle of a climate catastrophe. As the Huffington Post put it,

Human-caused climate change is driving sea-level rise, drought, extreme weather and a biodiversity crisis that scientists have declared Earth’s sixth mass extinction event. As many as 150 species die off each day.

Scary eh? Surely that’s enough to justify the odd street protest?

It was therefore interesting to see read some remarks from Richard Betts today. Professor Betts is the head of climate impacts at the Met Office, so his views in this area carry a certain amount of weight. Asked what he thought were the top three negative impacts of climate change that have “absolutely started”, he replied:

• Sea level rise
• Increasing risk of high temperatures
• Changes in phenology and distribution for numerous species

This left me agog. There was nothing about drought or hurricanes or any of the other manifestations of extreme weather that are said to be afflicting us; nothing about floods, or typhoons, or desertification or crashing crop yields or climate refugees, mass extinctions, skydiving walruses and any of the thousand and one tall tales that climate activists spin and the media faithfully repeat every day. The contrast between this take on currently observed negative impacts and David Attenborough’s risible Climate Change: the Facts programme last week is startling. The take home message is that most of what the “national treasure” told viewers about climate change was grubby insinuation rather than fact: less to do with science than with the BBC’s ongoing eco-campaign.

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