Complaint
A viewer complained that an item in the programme was alarmist and misleading in linking a 48-hour heatwave in July to climate change, maintaining that it had βnothing whatsoever to do with our ever-changing climate, but was the result of a weather-related phenomenon, caused by the Jet Stream splitting into twoβ¦conveying vast amounts of heat directly from North Africaβ.Β The ECU considered the complaint in the light of the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔβs editorial standards of accuracy.
Outcome
The ECU noted a contribution to the item from Climate scientist Fredi Otto, in which he said βThe cause of this particular heatwave is two-fold. Itβs a combination of the chaotic natural variability of the weather and human-induced climate change. So we are having the weather conditions that lead to heatwaves, bringing hot air from Spain and Portugal to the UK, but we have also been burning fossil fuels for over a century. We have over 1.2 degrees of global warming which means hotter temperatures than we used to have at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and that means that this heatwave is a lot hotter than it would have been without climate changeβ. Β In a context where the vast majority of scientific opinion is to the effect that the global climate is changing and the change is predominantly human-induced, and even allowing for the difficulty of establishing a direct causal link between climate change and particular weather events, this seemed to the ECU sufficient to meet the ΒιΆΉΤΌΕΔβs standards of accuracy.
Not upheld