Once again demonstrating the curious ability of environmental NGOs to get their press releases reported by the BBC, the corporation has today decided that the big news on the science front are claims issued by a US green group called the World Resources Institute. According to the BBC:
The number of people affected by river flooding worldwide could nearly triple in the next 15 years, analysis shows.
Climate change and population growth are driving the increase, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI).
In the UK, about 76,000 people a year could be at risk of being affected by flooding if defences aren't improved, it says.
Interestingly, there seems to be precious little on the WRI's website about these claims, but it seems that some sort of a press release has been issued, saying outlandish things about future flooding, in order to promote a whizzy new web tool that WRI has developed called Aqueduct.
Looked at this way, the BBC is merely providing advertising services - presumably free - to this particular green group. It wouldn't be the first time the corporation has done this.
Aqueduct turns out to be just an interactive map of river basins, which allows users to click on one and see some projections of how flood risk might (allegedly) change. The projections are of course based on GCMs and, as everyone outside the BBC knows, GCMs are nearly useless for anything to do with rainfall. It's therefore safe to say that this particular online gizmo is a PR tool rather than a scientific one.
This does seem to add weight to my "free advertising" point. Not that this will be of any concern to the BBC, who are, it seems, hard at work trying to ramp up the global warming alarm ahead of Paris. To our friends at the Corporation, a wild press release from a wild green NGO is what they call "a useful lead". Whether there is any science behind it is, frankly, neither here nor there.