The BBC could have checked Wikipedia for the truth about Cyclone Pam

Christopher Booker, Telegraph

But equally inevitable was that the BBC would get in on the act. Thus Monday’s Today programme wheeled on Professor Tim Palmer, in charge of climate modelling at Oxford University, to confirm President Lonsdale’s worst fears. Such “incredibly intense” category five cyclones, he told John Humphrys, are “exactly the type of cyclone that is predicted by the climate models to increase under climate change, under global warming”.

When Humphrys suggested that we have always had cyclones, Palmer said that recent examples have seen “wind gusts that have never been measured before, 200-mile-an-hour winds”. When Humphrys asked him to confirm that they were indeed unprecedented, Palmer repeated that “these things have never been seen”.

Had Humphrys or the programme’s researchers spent a couple of minutes on Google, they might have seen from Wikipedia that the South Pacific has seen no fewer than 10 Category Five cyclones in the past twenty years alone. Paul Homewood was soon able to report on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog that, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Pam’s measured wind speed was only 165mph. Of the five top South Pacific cyclones since 1989, this ranked it as only the equal fourth strongest: behind Orson and Monica, which hit the Australian coast in 1989 and 2006 with wind speeds of 180mph. This was also equalled by Zoe, which hit Vanuatu in 2002.