By Paul Homewood
Booker has his regular blackthorn winter report this week, but has a dig at that woefully misleading BBC programme, Costing the Earth:
After we outsourced our weather to the Sahara for those few days of unusual warmth, vivid splashes of white along our Somerset hedgerows last week coincided with that familiar chill known to countryfolk as the “blackthorn winter”. Along with this year’s wonderful shows of primroses and dog violets, these signs of spring have all come at what, from many decades of observation, I think of as their “normal” time, with blackthorn usually flowering in the last 10 days of April.
This might come as a surprise to anyone who heard a recent edition of that drearily climate-change obsessed programme Costing The Earth on BBC Radio 4, which assured us that springs are now coming an average of “26 days” earlier than they did 10 years ago. Its young presenter told us that she had certainly noticed this herself, and babbled on about the (non- existent) increase in “extreme weather events”, and how this had led to the increasing rarity of certain butterflies, such as the pearl-bordered fritillary, which I have seen in tragic decline over 50 years, for reasons that have nothing to do with global warming.
Certainly there have been dramatic fluctuations, as in one year when “may blossom” on hawthorns, normally out in late May, appeared in mid-April. But fortunately Paul Homewood, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, has been able to produce proper scientific evidence to tell us what has really been happening to our springs. His graphs, based on the Central England Temperature record, show that, since around 1990, despite those fluctuations, spring temperatures have averaged out to show no rising or falling trend at all.
This claim that springs are now arriving a month early is just what Costing the Earth always is: the BBC’s usual climate change hogwash.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/28/bbc-talking-nonsense-spring-isnt-coming-earlier-always-does/
