BBC Lie About Hurricane Melissa – Watts Up With That?

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

While we wait for daylight to assess the damage from Hurricane Melissa, I am not going to let this outright lie from the BBC to pass without comment:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cvgvexdjp1xt?post=asset%3A83998b52-4696-491d-a219-a0d877edc50a#post

This appeared on the BBC Live commentary soon after landfall, and has been linked to several times in latter updates.

This is the comment I refer to:

The frequency of very intense hurricanes such as Melissa is increasing

This simply is not true.

It is impossible to accurately compare hurricane data today with pre-satellite events, when many mid-ocean hurricanes were missed.

But, as hurricane experts continually point out, you can measure trends with land falling storms, which did not need satellites or hurricane hunter aircraft to record them.

Below is NOAA’s assessment of all Atlantic hurricanes which made landfall as Cat 5s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hurricanes

I fail to see any evidence to support the BBC’s claim. Including Melissa, there have been seven such hurricanes Andrew in 1992. Since the first in 1924, there have been 20 in all.

Remember too that NOAA have repeatedly maintained that there is “no strong evidence of century scale increasing trends” in the frequency of major hurricanes:

https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes

It is contemptible that the BBC should deliberately to ply global warming propaganda when a hurricane is in the middle of devastating a country. It is even worse when they don’t even get their facts right.

CORRECTION

I have corrected the number of hurricanes since 1992 to seven from five