BBC’s Hurricane Scam
The BBC’s Executive Complaints Unit (ECU) has now lost all credibility and is no longer fit for purpose.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-42251921
You will recall that at the end of last year’s Atlantic hurricane season, the BBC published the above chart, as part of a long propaganda article based on the contention that climate change is making hurricanes more powerful.
NOAA of course are absolutely clear that they are not:
The ECU have now responded and rejected my complaint that their chart was grossly misleading, as it compared data from the pre-satellite era with today. NOAA have always emphasised that you should not do that, as many hurricanes were simply not spotted in those earlier days.
The ECU however are not interested in facts or what actual hurricane experts have to say about the matter. All they are interested in is “justifying” the BBC’s propaganda, no matter how fallacious it is.
This is their reply to me:
The graphic showed recorded data from the US National Hurricane Center, which is part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). As you have pointed out, experts who have studied tropical cyclones, including Atlantic hurricanes, recognise it is difficult to identify any trends from the early 20th century with confidence because of the limitations of observed data.
However the graphic did make it clear “Storm frequencies and intensities are less certain further back in time” and so readers would have been aware of the potential limitations of the data from the National Hurricane Center.
It would, in my judgement, have added to the audience’s understanding if the reasons for the limitations had been explained but I do not believe the way the data was presented would have misled readers in any significant way when judged in the context of the article as a whole. The article made it clear, as set out above, what experts believe can reasonably be inferred from the available data but also explained where there is doubt.
It said, for example, “Assessing the precise influence of climate change on individual tropical cyclones can be challenging due to the complexity of these storm systems”. The absence of a more detailed explanation of the limitations of historic data about tropical cyclones would not have left readers with a misleading impression of what organisations such as the IPCC believe in answer to the question posed in the headline to the article “How is climate change affecting hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones?”.
That, I have to say, is utter bilge.
You do not publish any information that you know full well to be wrong, whether or not you add some small print saying “Storm frequencies and intensities are less certain further back in time”. To do so is grossly dishonest – some might say fraudulent. After all, the BBC knew that most readers would either not notice the small print or ignore it. A business certainly would never get away with such a misleading presentation, which conflated two totally different sets of data.
According to the BBC, there never used to be any hurricanes out in the middle of the Atlantic!
Moreover the ECU completely ignored NOAA’s emphatic conclusion that hurricanes are not getting stronger, a copy of which I had included in my complaint. Nowhere in their response did they even mention it, never mind explain why the BBC’s Climate Reporter came to different conclusions.
The author of the article, Mark Poynting has zero qualifications or experience in hurricane science, and has only been working at the BBC for two years after leaving University in 2022. Clearly he has no understanding of the subject. Which makes it even more astonishing that the article included contributions from NOAA or their US Hurricane Research Division, acknowledged to be the leading authority on Atlantic hurricanes. Nor were there any comments or references to any hurricane scientists.
Instead there were a few cherry picked quotes from the IPCC and the usual computer model studies, none of which addressed the specific issue I raised.
The ECU is of course part of the BBC, who are in effect marking their own homework. Until a genuinely independent complaints unit is set up, this farce will carry on.
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Ken Hughes
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But why would they allow a new “genuinely independent complaints unit” when the existing one is captured by the globalist’s agenda and does their job for them very nicely thank you?
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