False claims suggesting that the BBC has been misreporting temperatures in southern Europe have been spreading on social media.
A clip of Neil Oliver, a GB News presenter, accusing the BBC “and others” of “driving fear” by using “supposedly terrifying temperatures”, has been viewed more than two million times.
For the past few weeks, an intense heatwave has been sweeping through parts of southern Europe and north Africa, with extensive wildfires breaking out in Greece, Italy and Algeria - leading to more than 40 deaths.
Speaking about the fires on Rhodes on GB News on Monday, Mr Oliver accused the BBC, and other broadcasters, of trying to “make people terrified of the weather”.
How does anyone maintain even a shred of hope in the face of this rampant bullshittery?
About half of my job is dealing with infrastructure so I fight the second order effects of this every day. That gives me hope, that I am delaying the unavoidable disaster ever so slightly every day. Maybe if I work really hard I can buy the human race a single second.
Also I started a guerrilla gardening group and committing myself to planting on average 3 new plants a day.
All these dumb fucks have to do is actually go outside to prove themselves wrong.
It’s been unseasonably wet and cool in the UK so that’s probably part of why they believe it.
Here in parts of the south USA it’s been a normal summer, getting adequate rain and temps not hitting 100+ like last year as well. So I can see some of the skepticism but the world is fucking huge…If I drive one hour further north or south…the weather has changed…
We’ve been unseasonably mild her in the mid-Atlantic. We’re just getting our first run of 90F/32C+ days this season, whereas we usually see that sometime in June. Seeing what’s going on in the rest of the country I consider us to be damn lucky.
We’ve been getting hammered with rain, though. About 3-4x normal in June.
I can tell you that here in AZ… We’re normal right now. Earlier in the Summer is was SUPER mild. And more wet than normal.
No where near “worst”. I remember a few years back hitting 118 and back in the mid 2000’s hitting 122… This year has been great… We’re already hitting monsoon time, where the humidity kicks the temp down a bit. Then september rolls around and it’ll cool down again.
I’m in SoCal, very mild summer. But I talk to by best friend from HS who lives in Phoenix, and it’s a different story.
I live in Phx area. It’s been stupid mild this year?
Yeah… And?
I can write all sorts of garbage stuff on a blog. It’s not hard to claim that “OH GOD IT’S OVER 110 THAT’S HOT”… when the AVERAGE high for basically the whole month of July is 106.8 degrees.
Look at the actual history data. https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/us/az/phoenix/KPHX
May has been below average… June below average. This July has been a bit warmer than average.
Yeah 110 is warm for phx not hot. When I was a kid Tucson would easily get into the 112-117 range often. Phoenix was always hotter by a few degrees.
That link shows the temperature today is 10 degrees over average. That’s hot. It’s a weird flex to try to claim 115 isn’t hot. Are you a lizard?
Didn’t June break some heat records in the UK? I thought that I had read that. I’m in Southern California and this summer has been super mild.
I’ve watched flat earthers conduct foolproof experiments to prove the earth is flat, then come up with excuses when their experiment fails.
The heat is caused by Jewish space lasers or something.
Mother fucker…I KNEW IT!
All the wokies are woking it up causes it to get hotter
Should just send them to space. So they can see for themselves or just to get rid of them, take your pick.
I was on holiday in southern Europe. I was there at 43° Celsius. I know a person who witnessed 47 more southern. In places where these temperatures have been seen only over the past 10 years
I mean, it’s pretty simple to know the temperature, thermometers exists. Just call someone in southern Europe and ask
I’m not denying there is a heat wave in southern Europe, but where I am in Spain, it was actually hotter last year. I’m enjoy this summer and am usually able to sleep without AC and at the same time I have family outside of the country calling and asking if I am OK because of what they see on the news. There is definitely parts that have it worse than others.
I was in the same place same period of last year and this year was definitely hotter. I grew up there (although I don’t live there anymore), in south of Italy. This year was really bad
Deny, deny, deny. Now climate change deniers are doing that even to observable, recordable phenomena, just to avoid the truth of what is happening. This is what’s stopping progress towards saving our children’s future.
A few goal post moves later: “it’s the liberals that caused this!”
Don’t worry, next year (assuming it’s not another el ninio) they’ll accept this years temps and use it as proof that the climate change is fake since “it’s colder than last year”.
I thought El Nino & El Nina were cyclic & lasted several years each?
La niña
Cycle times can vary from months to years.
removed by mod
We haven’t even begun to see the impact of this year’s el nino event, yet… https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/20/us/2024-hotter-than-2023-el-nino-nasa-climate/index.html
“It’s really only just emerged, and so what we’re seeing is not really due to that El Niño,” Schmidt told reporters. “What we’re seeing is the overall warmth pretty much everywhere – particularly in the oceans. … The reason why we think that’s going to continue is because we continue to put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Until we stop doing that, temperatures will keep on rising.”
…
“We anticipate that 2024 is going to be an even warmer year because we’re going to be starting off with that El Niño event,” Schmidt said. “That will peak towards the end of this year, and how big that is is going to have a big impact on the following year’s statistics.”
Don’t look up
It hurts me that this one turned out to be a farsighted documentation.
I remember being angry at people saying it was “too on the nose.”
The worst was the people who insisted it wasn’t funny enough. I thought it was pretty funny, but was that really the point?
“I’m inadvertently in this movie and I don’t like it”
It’s funny, isn’t it? It’s so “on the nose” and yet perfectly reflects reality.
“Difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to be believable…” and all that
There is something to be said about subtlety in story-telling. When writers tell their message with a sledgehammer, it comes off as unrealistic.
Except in this case it was less a sledgehammer and more a mirror.
It was meant to be a spoof in that it was so on the nose was it not? I enjoyed it with that lense
Not just observable, but directly observable by our own senses.
Mr Oliver accused the BBC, and other broadcasters, of trying to “make people terrified of the weather”.
As we should be. These changes on our planet will be the end of us.
deleted by creator
If these people were on fire and their talking heads told them they weren’t they would say they weren’t.
Are these trolls literally living in their parents’ basements? Like not going outside to notice it is, indeed, hot?
In the UK right now it’s actually cold for July. Overnights going as low as 7-9c in the south and day time max between 16c and 22c. So it might explain it.
So, yeah that’s not the case that they could go outside and see for themselves. Yeah it’s still a stupid conspiracy theory. But, there’s no heatwave in the UK right now.
Its been weirdly very humid though even for the UK. Its cold if you sit still but the moment you get off your ass and do something you start sweating like a pig.
I mean… As indicated by the news it’s a Southern Europe heat wave.
The UK are absolutely not located in the so it h.
But the deniers mentioned in the article are in the UK, hence the relevance
If some dumb fuck can bring a snowball into congress to show global warming isn’t real, then I should be able to bring an air conditioner and say “then what’s this for” and be taken equally as seriously.
This came out 2 days ago:
Koonin finds that daily record high temperatures have not increased over the past 100 years and daily record lows have become less common. This is directly at variance with media headlines.
Although wildfires made headlines this summer, global areas burned by wildfires have shown a downward, rather than an upward, trend. Tornado activity in the United States has declined since 1970.
The media covers climate change as though doomsday is approaching. Bad news sells, and well-funded organizations support the crisis message.
The conservative intellectuals are dedicated to destroying the planet for money. And, with conservative politicians, they have a whole platform for it, Project 2025.
New York University professor Steven Koonin has presented data
Who is also the chief scientist for BP. Just so we’ve got that out there.
in his bestselling book, “Unsettled,” to show that the science is not as settled as many politicians would have us believe.
Which many scientist have indicated is just being contrarian to seek more books and the arguments within the book are easily debunked.
Koonin is a respected academic physicist
Yeah in physics he knows his stuff.
Koonin finds that daily record high temperatures have not increased over the past 100 years and daily record lows have become less common. This is directly at variance with media headlines.
Yes, because his dataset is from the 1990s. There’s zero reason to think any conclusion he has is in step with modern data. His modeling method even pre-date the 90s. Everything he has used to provide argument is not via a method that is modern. His data is right just that is using methods no one uses because it’s wildly inaccurate. So right in this case just means he’s consistently inaccurate. Everyone please refer to your seventh grade science class on the difference between accuracy and consistency.
The media covers climate change as though doomsday is approaching. Bad news sells, and well-funded organizations support the crisis message.
The irony of this statement while completely missing the notion that someone can just say a lot of opposite things to sell a book is… Interesting.
Even if rising “greenhouse gas” emissions were affecting the climate, actions by the United States will not be helpful in the absence of changes by China and India, the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases.
Yes. Let’s not do something because China isn’t doing it. That’s fine argument. You know China isn’t doing human rights so I guess we can nix that here too.
If the United States were to get rid of all fossil fuel emissions, this would only reduce global temperatures by 0.2 degrees Celsius by 2100.
Just FYI, 0.2 is equal to 2,100 Tsar Bombas going off at once. That’s the largest nuclear device ever created by humans. Decreasing 0.2 is like not blowing that many nuclear bombs. 0.2 is super significant. This is what happens when you have some mid-sixty year old economist talking science.
The EPA’s proposed tailpipe and power plant regulations will reduce economic growth by raising energy prices.
Lady, I don’t know if you’ve had a change to exit your private jet, but fuel cost are going up, no matter what. Everyone was like “if you increase minimum wage food prices will go up!” And then we didn’t increase minimum wage and prices still went up. I’m just going say, I don’t think it really fucking matters what we do or don’t do at this point, prices are going up no matter what. I used to buy eggs for fifty-nine cents way back. What happen? I didn’t get any nice shit or saving the planet and eggs are $4, what happened?
Raising the cost of energy at any time is poor economic policy, but especially when economic growth is slow. U.S. annualized gross domestic product growth was 2% in the first quarter of 2023, with data for the second quarter expected on Thursday. It’s summer, but now is not the time for Democrats to use the excuse of climate change to slow the economy further with more regulations.
Well the cost of energy is going up anyway, so it doesn’t matter. And economic growth is slow, because for the last fifteen years its been at breakneck pace. So maybe look a bit more than just a single year for your data points. And also, y’all just hate regulation, that’s what it boils down to. But every time regulations get removed, “Oh no! The Housing Market crashed! The econmy is getting tanked!” There’s just been no demostrated self-restraint so, yeah, nah, I don’t trust you mfers. I think you all need more regulation.
Also, the econmy is going be in more pain later than now if we can’t fucking grow food. I know, none of that is your 65 year old ass’ problem, but I mean people who are 12 right now, might want to eat when they get to their 50s. I know, you’ll be dead and all, so it won’t matter to you, but it kinda of matters to them. So I mean, pardon if we all take your perspective with a nonexistent grain of salt.
It’s hard to overstate how big 0.2 degrees is, for a single countrys change.
That’s 10% of the total expected climate change (assuming we held it to 2°)
Except it’s the Heritage Foundation, which is been manufacturing this bullshit for decades to lawmakers who are currently 70+ years old and wouldn’t know the difference between a telephone operator and a Google search operator if you asked them.
Please link to an archived version of their page or you’re boosting them on Google
Honestly, that’s not a bad thing, imho. If old people come across their “social security/Medicare need to go!” articles, that would benefit all of us.
I know it’s not much to look forward to, but I’m going to enjoy some schadenfreude when conservatives are dying from the same shit that’s killing all of us and they can’t even process what’s happening to them.
Like they did with covid?
Exactly like that.
I have to admit that Trump nearly dying from Covid was pretty hilarious at the time.
deleted by creator
Fuck the heritage foundation
I live in Greece. The past couple of weeks have been really hot. Today we have a significant drop in temperatures, at last.
Mr Oliver needs to get out more.
I also live in Greece. I’m generally pretty resistant to heat, I love the summer, but last week was too much for me. I worked from home to avoid commuting like that, and I constantly felt tired and heavy.
This week seems to be going fine thankfully
GBNews is basically the Fox News of the UK now, arguably worse. We came pretty close to getting it to shut down entirely when we managed to get 100% of advertisers to pull out of it, an honestly massive organising success by us at the time and one I was partly involved with, though we certainly weren’t the only group pushing it we were one of the main ones. This coupled with a very lackluster launch and absolutely abysmal ratings really made it come close to getting shut down.
Sadly they were content to run it at a loss while reshuffling their approach, eventually they bounced back.
I cannot disprove the worldwide claims. But I live in Spain in southern Europe and this past month has been far better than last July was, when we were hitting 38C every day for weeks on end. The heat this summer has been much more punctuated.
38 x 2 = 76
-10%=68.4
Add 32=100.4 degrees F
ok…And your point is?
Theyre just converting the units for people who don’t know Celsius as a baseline. They also just happened to show their work like a homework assignment
deleted by creator
fair enough
That’s why the term global warming is misleading and climate change is a better term. But like you said it’s just that a global average and not just individual places
For god’s sake temperatures above 40 Celsius are dangerous and claims like this will literally kill some people… But again, after everything happening in the last 3-4 years it’s hard to imagine conservatives putting other folks’ health and safety as a priority
Meanwhile in some places there were temperatures statistically impossible to reach…
