The BBC’s El Nino Apocalypse – More Beeb BS
Wed 10:13 am +00:00, 26 Aug 2026
Source: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2026/08/26/the-bbcs-el-nino-apocalypse/
Great article in the Daily Sceptic by Guy de la Bedoyere, who you may recall often appeared on Time Team, as the expert on Roman antiquity:
Friday, August 21st 2026 was a slow news day. You could tell because the BBC’s Radio 4 6 O’Clock News led with the vacuous revelation Harry and Meghan are coming back to the UK. Slightly less uninteresting was the second story, the disastrous case against the Mail and how Harry and his fellow litigants are going to have to pay tens of millions of pounds to the newspaper in compensation.
There were more vacuous revelations to come. The ‘other’ top story was the impending catastrophe promised by the mounting El Niño crisis in the Pacific. The 6 O’Clock News was typical of the corporation’s output for the day. This is how the bulletin flagged up the story in the headlines:
[Announcer] Dire warnings from the Met Office about the effects of what it describes as an unprecedented El Niño event.
Cue then to the Voice of Doom, in this case the obliging Professor Adam Scaife – head of the Met Office’s long-range forecasting and a professor of applied maths at the University of Exeter – who was identified later in the bulletin:
We think that when it peaks in November and December it’s likely to be [a] record event, beyond anything we’ve seen in living memory.
Read the full story here.
The whole segment was filled up absurd scaremongering by the clown, Matt McGrath. Every bit of bad weather connected to El Nino this year is, according to the clown, unprecedented and worse than ever before.
I cant beat Guy’s wonderful appraisal. But there was one bit where McGrath talks about the Indian monsoon:
India, the world’s second-biggest sugar producer, is now importing for the first time in a decade. A weak monsoon has hit production, and prices have jumped 40% in two months.
The effects depend on where you are in the globe. As mentioned, a weaker monsoon in India but for the UK the prediction is for more rain in a wetter, stormier autumn. El Niño is a naturally occurring event and there’s no clear evidence that climate change is making it stronger but it’s arriving in an already warmer world and that, scientists say, is what will sharpen its impacts. But all the extra heat that’s set to release from the ocean into the atmosphere, next year is likely to be the hottest ever recorded.
It is a fact that El Ninos go hand in hand with lower rainfall in India. This year so far, the monsoon has seen rainfall 13% below average:
https://mol.tropmet.res.in/?page_id=912
Anything within 10% of average is regarded as “Normal” anyway, and 13% below average is not an uncommon event, particularly for an El Nino year.
McGrath’s attempt to gaslight by joining the dots – global warming = stronger El Ninos = worse droughts/worse weather – is utterly unscientific.
The worst droughts on record in India were during the Little Ice Age. The 1970s and 80s were also notoriously dry, at a time of global cooling.
The evidence strongly suggests that a warmer global climate, as in the 1920s to 40s, leads to less drought in India. We, of course, can see a similar pattern during the last decade or two.
The changes in weather patterns during El Nino/La Nina phases have nothing to do with sea temperatures per se, which is what McGrath wants you to believe.
They are essentially driven by atmospheric conditions, which themselves are an inherent part of the phenomenon.
As the warm water flows back east during El Nino, it shifts atmospheric convection with it, taking away much of the rainfall from the Indian Ocean.
El Ninos don’t make weather more extreme, or somehow worse. They merely shift weather patterns around.
For instance, they tend to lead to a quiet Atlantic hurricane season. Yet there was no mention on the BBC of the fact that there have been no hurricanes at all so far this summer in the Atlantic – just three tiny tropical storms.
Or the fact that Greenland has not had a summer this year. In its place, there has been massive amounts of snow, with the ice cap growing by 500 Gt in the last year:
