IPPR Climate Lies Promoted By BBC And The Guardian

The self-styled “progressive” think tank IPPR has issued a ridiculous alarmist report today, This is a crisis: Facing up to the age of environmental breakdown.

The report recycles various bogus scares and contains obvious falsehoods such as

• Since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times

The IPCC says in AR5 that:

In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.

Unsurprisingly, useful idiots Roger Harrabin and Jonathan Watts have unquestioningly promoted the IPPR’s bullshit, including the blatant lie about floods, for the BBC and the Guardian, without questioning anything or subjecting the report to any kind of fact-check or sanity check.

Here’s another lie from the IPPR report:

Average global surface temperature increases have accelerated, from an average of 0.007 °C per year from 1900–1950 to 0.025 °C from 1998–2016

What is the temperature increase from 1998-2016? According to the Woodforthetrees index, which uses a combination of temperature indices, the linear fit gives a change of 0.15C which is 0.008 °C per year, a third of what the IPPR claim.

Where does the IPPR get their “facts” from? What scientific institution is making these claims? Well, none. Not even a climate scientist. Both the above fake claims seem to come from a document written by an investment fund manager called Jeremy Grantham.

On the Today programme this morning, the bogus report was promoted several times, with Laybourn-Langton given a soft interview by Martha Kearney (who read out the lie about floods) at 6.50 and a discussion including three “experts”, Joanna Haigh, Rick Stafford, and Ottoline Leyser at about 8.45.

Updates:

• Laybourn-Langton now claims that 2005 was a “typo” and that it should have been 1950. That’s not a typo. A typo would be getting one digit wrong. How did they manage to get all 4 digits wrong?
• Even with the date changed to 1950, it’s still nonsense. The claim comes from an article written by non-scientist fat-cat Jeremy Grantham. He claims it comes from something called EM-DAT. But someone who worked on the EMD-DAT database says it can’t be used for trends in numbers of floods.
• Andrew Montford has a report here.
• Paul Homewood has a blog post here.
• I’ve put in a complaint to the BBC (about the false statement read out by Kearney).
• Alex Cull has produced a transcript of that Today programme segment.
• One of the top funders of IPPR is ECF. Guess who funds ECF? Yes, Jeremy Grantham.
• Andy Revkin points out the irony that the IPPR has in the past warned about “climate porn”.

(h/t GWPF)

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