Ian Wishart: How is Jacinda Ardern so sure about the impending climate disaster?

Ardern – tipped as a probable candidate for the UN’s top job in the new unauthorised biography, Jacinda: The Untold Stories – was being interviewed by BBC’s Ione Wells at the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, when she was asked about how to get urgency across as a leader in the face of public backlash:

Pee Kay: How Much of Climate Change is Man-Made?

Last week most of the world would have seen, read and heard the news reports of Hurricane Melissa, reportedly one of the strongest Atlantic born hurricanes observed since record-keeping began.

Melissa was listed as a category 5 hurricane. Based on a storms sustained wind speeds, that is the highest on the hurricane measuring scale.

Chris Morrison: Climate Bombshell - New Evidence Reveals 30 Year Global Drop in Hurricane Frequency and Power

Last month a small but powerful cyclone named Chido made landfall in Mayotte before sweeping into Mozambique, causing considerable damage and leading to the loss of around 100 lives. Days after the tragedy, the Green Blob-funded Carbon Brief noted that scientists have “long suggested” that climate change is making cyclones worse in the region, while Blob-funded World Weather Attribution (WWA) at Imperial College London made a near-instant and curiously precise estimate that a Chido-like cyclone was about 40% more likely to happen in 2024 than during the pre-industrial age.

Matt Ridley: Hurricanes happen

As Hurricane Irma batters Florida, with Anguilla, Barbuda and Cuba clearing up and Houston drying out after Harvey, it is reasonable to ask whether such tropical cyclones are getting more frequent or fiercer.

The answer to the first question is easy: no. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change put it recently: “Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century.”