Complaining To The BBC About Their Hurricane Melissa Coverage
You will recall I complained a few weeks ago to the BBC about this fake claim about very intense hurricanes
On October 28th, their website said:
Source: bbc.co.uk/news
I have now had their initial response:
Thank you for contacting us about, ‘Is Hurricane Melissa more intense due to climate change?’
We acknowledge some readers may disagree with aspects of this report however weather presenter Sarah Keith-Lucas was highlighting that the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest assessment indicates “the proportion of Category 4–5 Tropical Cyclones will very likely increase globally with warming”.
And that’s it!
Notice they can’t even get the name of the IPCC correct!
Since when is a forecast of what might happen in future evidence of what is happening now?
I have resubmitted the complaint to Stage 2, as follows:
Your response quotes the IPCC: “the proportion of Category 4–5 Tropical Cyclones will very likely increase globally with warming”
I am sure Sarah Keith-Lucas appreciates that predictions about what might happen in future are not evidence that they already are!
So I can only quote again what the acknowledged leading experts on Atlantic hurricanes NOAA say about what is happening:
“There is no strong evidence of century-scale increasing trends in U.S. landfalling hurricanes or major hurricanes. Similarly for Atlantic basin-wide hurricane frequency (after adjusting for changing observing capabilities over time), there is no strong evidence for an increase since the late 1800s in hurricanes, major hurricanes, or the proportion of hurricanes that reach major hurricane intensity”
I believe I originally omitted the link to that quote, which is here:
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/That report in November 2024 also includes these relevant statements:
“Concerning Atlantic basin-wide major (Category 3-5) hurricanes, Vecchi et al. (2021) conclude that their counts also show little evidence of a long-term increase (since the 1880s) after accounting for changes in observing system capabilities; they also show that U.S. landfalling major hurricanes (with no adjustment) have no significant increasing trend since the late 1800s.”
And:
“As far as Category 4-5 intensity storms, basin-wide unadjusted storm counts show a pronounced increase since the mid-1940s (Bender et al., 2010), but those authors cautioned that the data from such earlier decades needs to be carefully assessed for data inhomogeneity problems before such trends can be accepted as reliable.”Another study be Vecchi et al states:
“After homogenization, increases in basin-wide hurricane and major hurricane activity since the 1970s are not part of a century-scale increase, but a recovery from a deep minimum in the 1960s–1980s“
I then ran over the word limit!
But I think they have got the message.
See more here notalotofpeopleknowthat
Header image: PKpng
Bold emphasis added