I sat tight and braced myself for the worst this morning — not high winds but for the Today programme to blame storm Eunice on climate change. Sure enough, at a quarter past eight, it didn’t disappoint. While a report acknowledged that it was not possible to blame specific weather events on climate change, Baroness Brown, who sits on the government’s climate change committee, was hauled on the show to explore the link between ‘extreme weather’ and climate change. She suggested that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would be producing a very frightening report on it soon.
The use of the generalised term ‘extreme weather’ — i.e. without including the words ‘wind’ or ‘storm’ — was interesting because on these particular forms of extreme weather the evidence presented by the IPCC points in exactly the opposite direction: the latitudes in which Britain sits are experiencing fewer intense storms and indeed lighter winds generally:
Over the northern hemisphere there is high agreement among reanalyses that the number of cyclones with low central pressures (less than 970 hPa) has decreased in summer and winter during the period 1979-2010.
The idea that Britain is being battered by ever-greater storms as a result of man-made climate change seems to have become pervasive
It cites a study that found that the number of storms over the Arctic and North Atlantic with a central pressure of less than 960 hPa rose between 1979 and 1990 but fell in the two decades following.
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in