 This series deals with climate change alarmism and climate change realism and it's designed to remove a lot of the confusion. We're going to start right at the very beginning by asking what is the difference between weather and climate? Weather as we know can be sunny, rainy, windy, snowy or even stormy. In fact as we know in the UK you can have many of these together but such events are weather. They are not climate so what's the difference? Well climate is not weather over a week or a year or a decade. At the very least it is weather over a 30 year period. Preferably longer but that is the minimum. So let us take a graph of the hottest days since the late 1800s and have a look at that in terms of climate. So this graph covers about 120 years so at the most we could fit in four points on it. That's about it in terms of climate. Well there's clearly a warming trend since the Lysage and right until the mid 1930s when we experienced the hottest period that we've seen in recent history. Much hotter than anything we've had since but that is the sort of trend and it's only approximate for that period. Now the next period was a cooling period and this cooling period really carried on until about 1979 and in the 1970s early 1970s that's when people were predicting an ice age. But when it started to warm up to 1979 and there was no sign of an ice age we had the age of global warming. In the next phase when global warming as they predicted failed to materialize we have the climate change phase but that was quite short relatively and now we've entered the extreme weather phase. These are the phases of climate alarmism but we'll be going to that in much more detail and much more scientifically later. What I'm trying to show here is just what climate is in relation to this record. So you can see even with a period of 30 years it's quite difficult to place average points on the different parts of it so as to give an overall impression of climate. So let's take a closer look at another data set from the UK simply the measured temperatures. The orange lines are the maximum temperatures and you'd see there's very little variation overall as a trend. But take a look at the green lines they're the lowest temperatures and again not much variation. There is of course a slight natural increase in the average temperature since the 1880s and it wasn't until the 1970s by the way that man started shoving in significant quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere. So any growth from the little ice age period into the 20th century was perfectly natural. And before we leave this graph just take a look at this bottom red line that is the actual change over time. That is actually showing the change in the temperature in terms of climate over the time. And as you can see here it's just a few degrees if that. Now if I were to show this graph with a different vertical axis so instead of saying 0 to 100 degrees Fahrenheit I showed it with say 0 to 4. The effect will look much more dramatic. So by looking at this graph in terms of climate it's the red line that matters here and the red line shows the actual climate change in temperature. And also when you're looking at alarmist graphs please be aware of the scale they use on that vertical axis. Now looking at climate over an even longer period. The central England temperatures these are the longest direct measurement of temperatures in the world and they date back to the 1600s. So guess the hottest two summers in that entire 367 year history. 1826 was the second hottest but 1976 just pipped it. And by the way by 1976 mankind hadn't pumped too much CO2 into the atmosphere and there was even an ice age scare underway. So now for the two coldest winters. Well 1740 really pips it here by a good margin. That was of course in the little ice age so one would expect it to be much colder. But the next to it was 1963. So what can we gain from climate with this? Well certainly since 1880 as you can see from the summer graph here there has been a warming. And that's also reflected in the winter graph where there has been a warming. Mind you that 1963 period stands out but that's just weather. Look at the coldest spell of all and that was way back in the 1700s. It was called the Great Frost and caused a huge recession. Well so far I've shown that weather is not climate. Further I've tried to show you that when you use weather over a period of say even 30 years which gives you a single point at the best on climate such as after the Second World War when the weather cooled and we predicted ice ages. That is wrong. You need a long term data set to predict climate. But at this point we will digress a little bit to deal with extreme weather alarmism. Because the use of extreme weather alarmism is simply so wrong it is using weather events to scare people about climate change. Well brace yourselves because the UK could have the hottest ever day today. It's been the hottest July day on record here in the United Kingdom. We all know that it's hot but it is getting hotter. It's been a very hot day of course. We've had a lot of hot weather of course. This is extreme heat. This weltering heat wave with the mercury reaching 37.7 degrees Celsius. It's also the hottest day of the year so far. Well it follows a similarly extreme heat wave in Europe in June. Weather experts have said today this all bears the hallmark of climate change so will Boris Johnson's vision for Britain include bolder commitments on the environment. This is typical media bias trying to link a single day's temperature to climate change. So let's take a look now at the actual facts. In fact let's compare that month of July 2019 to the whole of the summer in 1826. The mean temperature for the whole of the summer in 1826 was much hotter than the whole of July in 2019. But incredibly the BBC almost banned climate realists. You do not need a climate realist to balance the other side. And basically the instruction is that you can just let rip on all the climate alarmism without any balance at all. But if you do have to have a climate realist on make sure there's a knowledgeable person on the other side to counter it. This is extreme BBC bias. The term denier is implying you are denying the truth. It's already made up its mind you are in denial. A bit reminiscent of three or four hundred years ago when people who denied the truth used to get burnt at the stake. Such terms have no place in science and certainly not in an organisation meant to be unbiased. So we'll now take a look at other extreme weather claims. There are many reports on this but I've chosen this one by Ralph Alexander. And you yourself can look this up on the internet and check out the backgrounds to each graph. Let's first take a look at really hot weather in the USA. The USA is the best temperature records in the world. Maybe not in terms of length going back but in terms of width and quality. And of course the extremes here were in the mid 1930s when they had the dust bowl in America. So historically with all sorts of articles and with the science we can see we had the hottest temperatures. But not satisfied with that the alarmists have actually changed historic data. But that's to be dealt with in another episode of this series. For now let's take a look at some other extremes. Whenever we see a catastrophic storm like Hurricane Harvey we have to ask if it has anything to do with man-made climate change. Would climate change be fueling the history-making nature of this storm? We know that humanity's carbon footprint has shifted the baseline conditions of the climate. You must have all seen many reports like this. Just taking hurricanes here they actually end up blaming climate change for it. Not only that man-made climate change for it. So let's take a look at some facts. So when it comes to hurricanes it was the 1870s and 80s that were worse than today. Far more extreme than today. Again looking worldwide at tropical cyclones we find of anything there's a slight reduction in them. Yet if you were to listen to the alarmists every hurricane is a foreboding thing caused by man-made climate change. And in fact of course all the climate models show that the heating would take place towards the poles not in the tropics. And the job of hurricanes is to distribute heat from the tropics up to the poles. And the less difference in heat there is between the tropics and the poles the less hurricanes are needed to do the balancing. So if anything if the earth warms there will be less hurricanes not more. And that is the evidence here. At the rate we're pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere average temperatures will continue to rise through the century. That means some regions will have too much water others will be left dry. Life will get harder for many but especially for the poor. So there we are droughts and floods. So again let's look at the evidence. And when it comes to droughts it's the 1930s again that were by far the worst. And this wasn't just in the USA there are many research papers showing this was a worldwide event. And as with the green graph here the floods the wet periods are not in any way unusual today. With fire seasons growing longer and more intense as a result of climate change. Fires are now a more part of our ordinary experience. The predictions that things would get drier and hotter are occurring. It just amazes me how politicians can repeat this misinformation day after day blaming climate change. Just look at this graph. Just look how much wildfires there were in the past compared to today. It's a total fallacy that's being propagated here. Extreme weather cannot be blamed on climate change. You would have to show a pattern over the long term in order to do that. So let's now complete this episode of fundamentals by looking at the scientific process and how it applies to climate alarmists. Science is simply about trying to work out how the world works. And it begins with a question. You ask yourself a question and that begins to intrigue you. So after that you do some research into this question. See what others have done. See what others have found out about what you're thinking about. When you're satisfied that the research does not answer your question and there's a need to find out more. You develop the hypothesis, the idea that you're going to test against the real world. This is where you experiment. You are testing your idea, your hypothesis against the real world. Because unless it can survive against the real world you have to stop there. It is critical in this stage of experimenting that you test for the negatives. You try to prove your hypothesis wrong. That is absolutely critical. But if it passes everything well then you can form a conclusion. But all is by no means over yet. You now have to publish. And therefore by doing that you're exposing your conclusion to the world. Normally similar people to you. People in the field who understand it. But it can be challenged by anybody. For people to check your work of course you must publish your mythology as well as your data. That's so others can check and verify or disprove your work. Then with others checking your work and approving of it you have success. But the alternative is they disprove it. You have failure. But that failure is not really failure because even failing is good in science because it furthers the boundaries. It disproves something and it is very important that people put the science above their own feelings. That is what a scientist should do. Just follow the path to the truth. So why am I telling you all this? Well believe it or not. It's because climate alarmists often do not obey these rules of science. And in fact the most famous graph in the entire world of climate alarmism the hockey stick. Dr Mann who produced it refused to publish the data and the mythology so it could be properly checked. But much worse than that. These days as a climate scientist or any other scientist if you speak out and tell the truth about climate alarmism you probably will lose your job, your career, your mortgage, your house etc. We now have a system where the people who call themselves scientists are disobeying the most fundamental rules of science and in my book do not deserve the title scientist. We will be dealing with this in much more detail in a later episode.