Authored by Guy de la Bédoyère via The Daily Sceptic,
Friday, August 21st 2026 was a slow news day. You could tell because the BBC's Radio 4 6 O'Clock News led with the vacuous revelation Harry and Meghan are coming back to the UK. Slightly less uninteresting was the second story, the disastrous case against the Mail and how Harry and his fellow litigants are going to have to pay tens of millions of pounds to the newspaper in compensation.
There were more vacuous revelations to come. The 'other' top story was the impending catastrophe promised by the mounting El Niño crisis in the Pacific. The 6 O'Clock News was typical of the corporation's output for the day.
This is how the bulletin flagged up the story in the headlines:
[Announcer] Dire warnings from the Met Office about the effects of what it describes as an unprecedented El Niño event.
Cue then to the Voice of Doom, in this case the obliging Professor Adam Scaife - head of the Met Office's long-range forecasting and a professor of applied maths at the University of Exeter - who was identified later in the bulletin:
We think that when it peaks in November and December it's likely to be [a] record event, beyond anything we've seen in living memory.
That sort
