The Future Is White At The BBC But Climate Change Is 'Inherently Racist'

No, seriously. This is not sarcasm. Tune into BBC Future; do not adjust your TV. Do double-check your TV Licence direct debit though - just to convince yourself that you are actually paying for this. So what is BBC Future all about then?

We believe in truth, facts, and science. We take the time to think. And we don't accept — we ask why.

Aww, isn’t that nice? They believe in truth, facts and science. Brilliant. Except truth, facts and science do not require belief - unlike God. They require only honest observation and critical appraisal to verify to the best of one’s ability that they are indeed the facts which might reasonably approximate to the truth and that science does indeed plausibly explain those facts. Of course, if you can’t, or won’t do this, then you do need belief - the belief in ‘experts’. But then, if that was the case, then you would just accept, without asking why, which is what BBC Future insist they don’t do! So they directly contradict themselves in their boastful blurb.

We look for answers to the issues facing the world in science. You’ll find stories here on almost every topic that matters. Psychology. Food. Climate change. Health. Social trends. Technology.

What links them all is our approach. Through evidence-based analysis, original thinking, and powerful storytelling, we shine a light on the hidden ways that the world is changing – and provide solutions for how to navigate it. Energised by the everyday, we think no topic is too small to be fascinating. Inspired by obstacles, we believe no subject is too overwhelming to tackle.

Bear these boasts in mind when considering the following BBC Future article on climate change:

Why climate change is inherently racist

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it was the city's black neighbourhoods that bore the brunt of the storm. Twelve years later, it was the black districts of Houston that took the full force of Hurricane Harvey. In both cases, natural disasters compounded issues in neighbourhoods that were already stretched.  

Climate change and racism are two of the biggest challenges of the 21st Century. They are also strongly intertwined. There is a stark divide between who has caused climate change and who is suffering its effects. People of colour across the Global South are those who will be most affected by the climate crisis, even though their carbon footprints are generally very low. Similar racial divides exist within nations too, due to profound structural inequalities laid down by a long legacy of unequal power relationships.

Zambia clearly demonstrates this injustice of climate change. Average carbon footprints in Zambia are very low, coming in at just 0.36 tonnes per person per year – less than one-tenth of the UK average. Nevertheless, the country is facing environmental disaster, including a prolonged drought which left over a million people in need of food assistance in 2021.

"Zambia has been experiencing the negative impact of climate variability and change for the last three decades," says Zambian climate scientist Mulako Kabisa. "The biggest impact has been increased temperature and reduced rainfall, resulting in climate shocks that include droughts and floods."

These changes in rainfall and temperature have resulted in crop failure, livestock deaths and reduced the country's GDP, she adds. "Droughts in particular have led to livelihood loss for the smallholder-dominated agricultural sector, because production is dependent on availability of adequate rain."

‘Evidence based analysis’? No, this is a masterclass in deceptive mixed message reporting and the deliberate obfuscation or ignorance of relevant facts. In this respect, the BBC does at least live up to part of their boast: ‘evidence-based analysis, original thinking, and powerful storytelling’. This is great story-telling, but certainly not original thinking (similar messaging re. ‘climate justice’ is repeated ad nauseum throughout the left wing media) and it bears little resemblance to an ‘evidence-based analysis’, as we shall see.

The evidence part of this analysis consists entirely of the unremarkable observation that poorer communities tend to be disproportionately affected by extreme weather events, in particular severe flooding, and that poorer communities, in both the global north and the global south, tend to be populated by people who are non-white. They got that right, but it’s got sod all to do with climate change per se being inherently racist.

This is just a repetition of the all too familiar message that wealth tends to be concentrated in countries whose populations are predominantly white and, within those countries, in communities which are also predominantly white. At least, that’s how it used to be: wealth is now increasingly concentrated into the hands of an elitist globalist few (who also happen to be predominantly white). In other words, billionaire whites have been hoovering up wealth at an alarming rate in the last few years and the victims of that recent cash grab have been whites and blacks. What this means is that relatively wealthy white populations are becoming poorer and the predominantly non-white ‘global south’ is sliding into extreme poverty, with all the inherent dangers which that poses. What it also means is that poorer white communities are also disproportionately affected by this money and power grab. Is this racist? No, it just means the globalist elite are robbing all people equally, but because the Third World and poorer communities in general didn’t start off equal in the first place, they are going to suffer more. So also with ‘climate change’. We can debate the causes of these inequalities until the cows come home but what we cannot do is label bad weather as ‘inherently racist’!

The personnel profile of BBC Future looks inherently racist to me. Hmm, maybe it’s my poor eyesight, but I can’t see much diversity there, can you?

This privileged group of presumably middle class white people are pontificating to the rest of us not so privileged black, brown and white people that climate change is inherently racist against non-whites, even though its mitigation in the form of a retrogressive top down imposed net zero agenda is not, because ultimately, it’s going to affect all humans on this planet, very badly. I don’t know about you, but I’m personally sick of being patronised and spoke down to by these hypocritical, scientifically and historically illiterate meddlesome left wing eco-freaks and Marxists at the BBC and elsewhere. Just who the hell do they think they are? The self-appointed governors of our future is who.

So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty of actual climate change shall we. The one indisputable fact is that, since the 1970s, for whatever reason, the world has warmed fairly rapidly, after having cooled fairly rapidly from the mid 1940s to the 60s and 70s. It’s also true to say that, for whatever reason, the world has warmed generally since the end of the Little Ice Age around the middle of the 19th century. Climate activists tell you it’s your fault and ‘climate justice’ activists point to white people and say it’s their fault (and that of their ancestors) for having the temerity to initiate firstly, national industrial revolutions, which lifted their populations out of poverty, and subsequent to that, an unequally spread global industrial revolution which resulted in billions of people (of all races) being propelled out of extreme poverty. Climate zealots wish to reverse this process.

We can all agree that the Industrial Revolution kicked off in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and from there, spread globally. More particularly, Great Britain, which had an empire in those days, initiated this global industrial revolution - which is presumably why us Brits are being punished by a net zero agenda which is being imposed harder and faster than almost anywhere else in the world. So if ‘climate change’ is inherently racist, we would expect Europe and the global north to be getting off lightly whilst the global south suffers terribly no? Oh dear, this is where the ‘evidence-based analysis’ starts to break down, because, according to climate change zealots themselves, Europe has been heating at twice the global average since 1991. Oops.

It’s not just a case of simple temperature rises either, it’s also a case of worsening impacts according to Climate Alarmist HQ The Guardian. Europeans (the same pesky white Europeans who allegedly caused all this chaos in the first place) are suffering disproportionately from extreme weather events, especially heatwaves and flooding. Stick that in your ‘climate justice’ pipe and smoke it BBC Future!

Temperatures in Europe have increased at more than twice the global average in the last 30 years, according to a report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The effects of this warming are already being seen, with droughts, wildfires and ice melts taking place across the continent. The European State of the Climate report, produced with the EU’s Copernicus service, warns that as the warming trend continues, exceptional heat, wildfires, floods and other climate breakdown outcomes will affect society, economies and ecosystems.

From 1991 to 2021, temperatures in Europe have warmed at an average rate of about 0.5C a decade. This has had physical results: Alpine glaciers lost 30 metres in ice thickness between 1997 and 2021, while the Greenland ice sheet has also been melting, contributing to sea level rise. In summer 2021, Greenland had its first ever recorded rainfall at its highest point, Summit station.

Human life has been lost as a result of the extreme weather events. The report says that in 2021, high impact weather and climate events – 84% of which were floods and storms – led to hundreds of fatalities, directly affected more than 500,000 people, and caused economic damages exceeding $50bn.

“Europe presents a live picture of a warming world and reminds us that even well-prepared societies are not safe from impacts of extreme weather events,” said the WMO secretary general, Prof Petteri Taalas. “This year, like 2021, large parts of Europe have been affected by extensive heatwaves and drought, fuelling wildfires. In 2021, exceptional floods caused death and devastation.”

What could be the cause of this extreme weather trend in Europe I wonder? ‘It’s climate change innit’ intone the scientifically and factually challenged eco-zealots and neo-Malthusian climate justice warriors in perfect unison. But is it? No, as it turns out. The proximate cause is a shifting jet stream according to recent research:

Accelerated western European heatwave trends linked to more-persistent double jets over Eurasia

Persistent heat extremes can have severe impacts on ecosystems and societies, including excess mortality, wildfires, and harvest failures. Here we identify Europe as a heatwave hotspot, exhibiting upward trends that are three-to-four times faster compared to the rest of the northern midlatitudes over the past 42 years. This accelerated trend is linked to atmospheric dynamical changes via an increase in the frequency and persistence of double jet stream states over Eurasia. We find that double jet occurrences are particularly important for western European heatwaves, explaining up to 35% of temperature variability. The upward trend in the persistence of double jet events explains almost all of the accelerated heatwave trend in western Europe, and about 30% of it over the extended European region. Those findings provide evidence that in addition to thermodynamical drivers, atmospheric dynamical changes have contributed to the increased rate of European heatwaves, with implications for risk management and potential adaptation strategies.

So, in Western Europe, the place responsible for starting the Industrial and Economic Revolution, powered by the exploitation of fossil fuels to provide cheap, reliable, abundant energy, it’s the jet stream which is entirely responsible for the trends in extreme weather and not climate change!