GWPF | 7 Aug 2015
Global Coal Boom Accelerating Despite Obama’s Green Posturing
At the very moment President Obama has decided to shutter America’s coal industry in favor of much more expensive and less efficient “renewable energy,” coal use is surging across the globe. A new study by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences detects an unmistakable “coal renaissance” under way that shows this mineral of fossilized carbon has again become “the most important source of energy-related emissions on the global scale.” Coal is expanding rapidly “not only in China and India but also across a broad range of developing countries — especially poor, fast-growing countries mainly in Asia,” the study finds. Why is coal such a popular energy source now? The NAS study explains that many nations are attracted to “(relatively) low coal prices . .. to satisfy their energy needs.” It also finds “the share of coal in the energy mix indeed has grown faster for countries with higher economic growth.” –Stephan Moore, Investor’s Business Daily, 7 August 2015
As the oceans’ chemistry is altered by rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the response of sea-dwellers such as fish, shellfish and corals is a huge unknown that has implications for fisheries and conservationists alike. But the researchers attempting to find an answer are often failing to properly design and report their experiments, according to an analysis of two decades of literature. The past decade has seen accelerated attempts to predict what these changes in pH will mean for the oceans’ denizens — in particular, through experiments that place organisms in water tanks that mimic future ocean-chemistry scenarios. Yet according to a survey published last month by marine scientist Christopher Cornwall, who studies ocean acidification at the University of Western Australia in Crawley, and ecologist Catriona Hurd of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, most reports of such laboratory experiments either used inappropriate methods or did not report their methods properly. –Daniel Cressey, Nature, 5 August 2015
I used to think there was a consensus among government-funded certified climate scientists, but a new study by Strengers, Verheegen, and Vringer shows even that is not true. The “97% consensus” is now 43%. —Jo Nova, 30 July 2015
Labour would start buying up shares in the “big six” energy companies under a Jeremy Corbyn government until it owned a controlling stake, the party’s leftwing leadership contender has said. Mr Corbyn, whose support has surged during the campaign and is now narrowly the second favourite to win, wants to nationalise British Gas, SSE, Eon, RWE Npower, Scottish Power and EDF, as well as the National Grid. –Kiran Stacey, Financial Times, 7 August 2015
BBC journalists are meant to be impartial, but climate change hack Roger Harrabin is whipping up criticism online among Greens of a programme made by his own employer. Radio 4’s What’s The Point Of… ?, looked at alleged politicisation of the Met Office. The show was made by the Mail’s Quentin Letts. ‘From what I can gather, Comrade Harrabin has blown his top,’ Letts says. ‘All the hot gas he is producing may rupture the ozone layer.’ –Sebastian Shakespeare, Daily Mail 7 August 2015
Climate change is the subject of a complex debate in which, increasingly, experts disagree with each other. So you’d expect the BBC’s ‘Environment and Energy Analyst’, Roger Harrabin, to proceed with caution. Not so. Harrabin is paid by the licence payers. Yet, judging by his Twitter feed, his views are even more partisan than those of Richard Black. When he’s not plugging a Guardian conspiracy theory involving US Republican sceptics and BP, he’s wringing his hands at the cut to wind subsidies or lamenting the lack of civil servants to enforce ‘smarter’ environmental laws. —Damian Thompson, The Spectator, 6 August 2015
Very surprisingly and somewhat boldly, on Wednesday morning Radio 4 put out a programme by the Mail’s Quentin Letts which ran flatly counter to the BBC’s normal party line on one of its very favourite subjects, global warming. Under the title What’s The Point Of The Met Office?, Mr Letts focused on the way our national weather service has long been known to share with the BBC an obsession with climate change. Indeed, the way this has in recent years tended to skew so much of its forecasting has made it something of a national joke. After the programme was broadcast, the heresy of it having included such a dissenting voice as this, speaking in a manner the BBC would never normally dream of allowing on its airwaves, provoked the BBC’s own climate activists to rage in print and on Twitter. –Christopher Booker, Daily Mail, 7 August 2015
1) Global Coal Boom Accelerating Despite Obama’s Green Posturing – Investor’s Business Daily, 7 August 2015
2) Chemical Errors: Crucial Ocean-Acidification Models Come Up Short – Nature, 5 August 2015
3) New Survey: Less Than Half Of Climate Scientists Agree With The IPCC’s Key Claim – Jo Nova, 30 July 2015
4) A Labour Government Under Corbyn Would Nationalise Energy Industry – Financial Times, 7 August 2015
5) Harrabin Explodes As BBC Presenter Mocks Met Office’s Failed Climate Prophecies – The Spectator, 6 August 2015
6) Christopher Booker: The More Money The Met Office Gets, The More Inaccurate Its Doom-Mongering – Daily Mail, 7 August 2015
1) Global Coal Boom Accelerating Despite Obama’s Green Posturing
Investor’s Business Daily, 7 August 2015
Stephan Moore
At the very moment President Obama has decided to shutter America’s coal industry in favor of much more expensive and less efficient “renewable energy,” coal use is surging across the globe.
A new study by the prestigious National Academy of Sciences detects an unmistakable “coal renaissance” under way that shows this mineral of fossilized carbon has again become “the most important source of energy-related emissions on the global scale.”
Coal is expanding rapidly “not only in China and India but also across a broad range of developing countries — especially poor, fast-growing countries mainly in Asia,” the study finds.
Why is coal such a popular energy source now? The NAS study explains that many nations are attracted to “(relatively) low coal prices . .. to satisfy their energy needs.” It also finds “the share of coal in the energy mix indeed has grown faster for countries with higher economic growth.”
In sum, using coal is a stepping stone to prosperity. So much for it being a satanic energy source.
Hardly a day passes without evidence that coal is making a major comeback:
• Some 1,200 coal plants are planned across 59 countries, with about three-quarters in China and India, according to the World Resources Institute.
• Coal use around the world has grown about four times faster than renewables, according to the global energy monitoring publication BP Review of World Energy 2015.
• German coal “will remain a major, and probably the largest, fuel source for power generation for another decade and perhaps longer,” the Financial Times concludes.
• “The U.S. is dropping coal plants at an unprecedented rate, but still nowhere near as quickly as India is adding them,” Bloomberg Business reckons.
“By the end of this year, some 7.5% of the U.S. coal fleet will have disappeared … . But by 2020 India may have built about 2.5 times as much capacity as the U.S. is about to lose.”
Then, of course, there’s the world’s biggest coal addict by far — the People’s Republic of China. According to a 2014 report from Eric Lawson of Princeton University, a leading climate change apocalyptic on the left:
“The reality is that fossil fuels dominate China’s energy landscape, as they do in virtually every other country. And the focus on renewables also hides the fact that China’s reliance upon coal is predicted to keep growing.”
Lawson’s calculations of how coal use is growing in China are jaw-dropping. “From 2010 through 2013, (China) added half the coal generation of the entire U.S. At the peak, from 2005 through 2011, China added roughly two 600-megawatt coal plants a week for seven straight years.
“And according to U.S. government projections, China will add yet another U.S. worth of coal plants over the next 10 years, or the equivalent of a new 600-megawatt plant every 10 days for 10 years.”
All this underscores the foolishness and futility of the Obama climate-change regulations designed to drastically reduce coal production in the U.S. As we use less and the rest of the world uses more, the impact on global temperatures will be very close to zero.
Coal production in the U.S. is much safer and less carbon-intensive (clean coal technologies have reduced pollutants by 30%) than coal from other nations. So Obama’s war on coal may make global warming worse.
Some might say this gesture by the Obama administration to cut off coal production in the U.S. is a useful first step to save the planet. Except this isn’t just a cheap sign of goodwill.
It’s a tremendously expensive gesture that will cost America hundreds of thousands of jobs, raise utility prices by as much as $1,000 per family and reduce GDP by as much half a percentage point a year when we are already barely growing. The poor will be hurt most.
What makes the Obama administration regulations doubly destructive is that the U.S. has more coal than any other nation.
With at least 300 years of supply at a value of trillions of dollars, we are truly the Saudi Arabia of coal. To leave it in the ground would be like Obama telling Nebraska to stop growing corn, Idaho to stop growing potatoes and Silicon Valley to give up on the digital age.
2) Chemical Errors: Crucial Ocean-Acidification Models Come Up Short
Nature, 5 August 2015
Daniel Cressey
As the oceans’ chemistry is altered by rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, the response of sea-dwellers such as fish, shellfish and corals is a huge unknown that has implications for fisheries and conservationists alike. But the researchers attempting to find an answer are often failing to properly design and report their experiments, according to an analysis of two decades of literature.
Oceans absorb much of the CO2 emitted by human activities such as coal burning. This leads to a variety of chemical changes, such as making waters more acidic, which are referred to as ocean acidification.
The United Nations has warned that ocean acidification could cost the global economy US$1 trillion per year by the end of the century, owing to losses in industries such as fisheries and tourism. Oyster fisheries in the United States are estimated to have already lost millions of dollars as a result of poor harvests, which can be partly blamed on ocean acidification.
The past decade has seen accelerated attempts to predict what these changes in pH will mean for the oceans’ denizens — in particular, through experiments that place organisms in water tanks that mimic future ocean-chemistry scenarios.
Yet according to a survey published last month by marine scientist Christopher Cornwall, who studies ocean acidification at the University of Western Australia in Crawley, and ecologist Catriona Hurd of the University of Tasmania in Hobart, Australia, most reports of such laboratory experiments either used inappropriate methods or did not report their methods properly (C. E. Cornwall and C. L. HurdICES J. Mar. Sci. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/icesjms/fsv118; 2015 ).
Cornwall says that the “overwhelming evidence” from such studies of the negative effects of ocean acidification still stands. For example, more-acidic waters slow the growth and worsen the health of many species that build structures such as shells from calcium carbonate. But the pair’s discovery that many of the experiments are problematic makes it difficult to assess accurately the magnitude of effects of ocean acidification, and to combine results from individual experiments to build overall predictions for how the ecosystem as a whole will behave, he says.
The survey, published in the journal ICES Journal of Marine Science, was based on a search of the Scopus database of research papers. Cornwall and Hurd analysed 465 studies published between 1993 and 2014 that manipulated seawater chemistry and found that experiments often failed to implement widely accepted measures to ensure quality.
For instance, to ensure robustness, manipulation studies should use multiple arrays of independent ocean-mimicking tanks. And in experiments that compare sea animals under acidified conditions with controls, these tanks should be randomized to remove bias. But the pair found that in several papers, researchers used one main seawater tank to supply multiple, supposedly independent smaller tanks.
Chemical errors
The researchers also found mistakes in basic chemistry: some authors simply added acid to a tank and ignored other chemical changes that result from the absorption of CO2, such as increased levels of carbonates. Although the frequency of these chemistry errors has dropped since the 2010 publication of an international ‘best practice’ guide for ocean-acidification experiments (seego.nature.com/sp5kgn), the researchers found no evidence for improvements in the design of tank arrays.
3) New Survey: Less Than Half Of Climate Scientists Agree With The IPCC’s Key Claim
Jo Nova, 30 July 2015
I used to think there was a consensus among government-funded certified climate scientists, but a new study by Strengers, Verheegen, and Vringer shows even that is not true.[1] The “97% consensus” is now 43%.
Finally there is a decent survey on the topic, and it shows that less than half of what we would call “climate scientists” who research the topic and for the most part, publish in the peer reviewed literature, would agree with the IPCC’s main conclusions. Only 43% of climate scientists agree with the IPCC “95%” certainty.
More than 1800 international scientists studying various aspects of climate change (including climate physics, climate impacts, and mitigation) responded to the questionnaire. Some 6550 people were invited to participate in this survey, which took place in March and April 2012. Respondents were picked because they had authored articles with the key words ‘global warming’ and/or ‘global climate change’, covering the 1991–2011 period, via the Web of Science, or were included the climate scientist database assembled by Jim Prall, or just by a survey of peer reviewed climate science articles. Prall’s database includes some 200 names that have criticized mainstream science and about half had only published in “gray literature”. (But hey, the IPCC quoted rather a lot of gray literature itself. Donna LaFramboise found 5,587 non peer reviewed articles in AR4.)
Fabius Maximus deserves credit for finding and analyzing the study. He notes that only 64% agreed that man-made CO2 was the main or dominant driver controlling more than half of the temperature rise. But of this group (1,222 scientists), only 797 said it was “virtually certain” or “extremely likely”. That’s just 43% of climate scientists who fully agree with the IPCC statement. This survey directly asks climate scientists, unlike the clumsy versions by John Cook, William Anderegg, or Naomi Oreskes that do keyword surveys of abstracts in papers and try to “guess”.
Fabius Maximus suggests we exclude the “I don’t knows” which brings up the number to 47%. Since these are “climate scientists” I don’t see why those responses should be excluded. An expert saying “I don’t know” on the certainty question is an emphatic disagreement with the IPCC 95% certainty.
The IPCC AR5 Statement:
“It is extremely likely {95%+ certainty} that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. ”
— Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC’s AR5 Working Group I.
…
The researchers acknowledge that skeptics may be slightly over-represented, “it is likely that viewpoints that run counter to the prevailing consensus are somewhat (i.e. by a few percentage points) magnified in our results.” I say, given that skeptics get sacked, rarely get grants to research, and find it harder to get published, they are underrepresented in every way in the “certified” pool of publishing climate scientists. Skeptical scientists, I daresay, would be much less likely to use the keyword phrase “global warming” in the papers they do publish. I imagine it’s easier to get papers published that don’t specifically poke the mainstream buttons.
4) A Labour Government Under Corbyn Would Nationalise Energy Industry
Financial Times, 7 August 2015
Kiran Stacey
Labour would start buying up shares in the “big six” energy companies under a Jeremy Corbyn government until it owned a controlling stake, the party’s leftwing leadership contender has said.
Mr Corbyn, whose support has surged during the campaign and is now narrowly the second favourite to win, wants to nationalise British Gas, SSE, Eon, RWE Npower, Scottish Power and EDF, as well as the National Grid.
Speaking to the charity Greenpeace, he said: “I would want the public ownership of the gas and the National Grid . . . [and] I would personally wish that the big six were under public control, or public ownership in some form.”
Going into detail about how this could be achieved, he said: “You can do it by majority shareholding; you can do it by increased share sales, which are then bought by the government in order to give a controlling interest.”
He admitted the policy would be expensive, but said: “Does it cost? Yes. Is there a return? Yes.” He did not say how this might be achieved with the four suppliers that are owned by larger overseas conglomerates — EDF, Npower, Eon and Scottish Power.
Separately, he told the Financial Times that he did not want national government to control the entire British power supply. But he said: “With a national investment bank, new infrastructure — like energy — should be publicly owned, whether that’s at community, municipal or national level.”
5) Harrabin Explodes As BBC Presenter Mocks Met Office’s Failed Climate Prophecies
The Spectator, 6 August 2015
Damian Thompson
Climate change is the subject of a complex debate in which, increasingly, experts disagree with each other. Nearly all of them believe in man-made global warming, but they’re not sure how bad the problem is or how to tackle it. Meanwhile, the ‘sceptics’ are no longer dominated by scientifically illiterate amateurs. Many of them believe in anthropogenic global warming, though they don’t think it’s happening today.
So you’d expect the BBC’s ‘Environment and Energy Analyst’, Roger Harrabin, to proceed with caution. Not so. Here are two tweets he sent out yesterday (links here and here):
Quentin Letts is the Daily Mail‘s parliamentary sketchwriter and theatre critic, celebrated for his sometimes caustic but more often gentle wit. He also presents a Radio 4 slot called What’s the Point of…? in which – says the Beeb – he ‘casts a critical but amicable eye across institutions at the heart of British life’. His targets, if you can call them that, have included the National Trust, the Methodists and the great British pub. Yesterday he chuckled his way through an episode about the Met Office.
‘Amicable’ is just the right word. Letts spoke to an old farmer with an accent straight out of the Archers who prefers to look at the sky rather than trust the wireless; to Angus MacNeil MP, the SNP chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, whose seafaring constituents would drown if the Met Office gave them bad advice (which it doesn’t); and to retired BBC weatherman John Kettley about the knitted sweaters he was sent by fans.
Letts paid tribute to the secret work the Met Office does in advising the Armed Forces and told us that, whatever you may think, its short-term forecastinghas got better. But he didn’t like its ‘sexed-up press releases’ or nannyish advice to carry an umbrella in case of rain. Still less did he appreciate the apocalyptic warnings to jump into the nearest Ark in the event of flooding.
‘With trepidation’, he tackled the subject of climate change – unavoidably, given the way the Met Office bangs on about it. First he spoke to Labour MP Graham Stringer, a former analytical chemist who sat on the Commons Science and Technology Committee until May and is standing for re-election. Stringer told him that the Met Office’s short-term forecasting was reliable but that its medium- and long-term projections were ‘pretty random’.
The point was reinforced by Peter Lilley MP, a physics graduate who describes himself as a ‘lukewarmist’ – i.e., he thinks CO2 emissions can warm the planet but not by very much. Lilley recalled the 2004 Met Office prediction that temperatures would rise by a catastrophic 0.3°C by 2014. The actual increase? ‘Zilch’, said Lilley. So he’s fed up with Met office lobbyists demanding ‘even more money for even bigger computers so that they can be even more precisely wrong in future’.
Letts asked Helen Chivers, Met Office head of news, about the 2004 global warming prediction. She said that knowledge of earth systems was still evolving ‘and things change over time’. There was no attempt to defend the 0.3 °C prophecy – and Chivers even seemed to agree that the Met Office can be a bit alarmist at times.
The programme’s conclusion was that the Met Office is jolly good at short-term forecasts, saving lives in the process, but that its comically inaccurate attempts to predict climate change are dangerously close to political lobbying. Letts didn’t advocate privatising the outfit, but he didn’t see why the option shouldn’t be discussed. A final trademark chuckle and that was that.
Cue an entirely predictable outburst from The Guardian. Richard Black, director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit and former BBC science correspondent, observed that both Stringer and Lilley are trustees of Lord Lawson’s moderately sceptical Global Warming Policy Foundation. Fair point; perhaps Letts should have made it. But Black’s argument that Radio 4 breached BBC editorial guidelines by interviewing one climate change sceptic (Stringer), one ‘lukewarmist’ (Lilley) and one believer (MacNeil) was a bit rich. Not so long ago the Beeb spewed out ‘warmist’ propaganda as news and treated any dissident as a Right-wing nutjob (unfairly – only some of them were). Still, that’s what you pay for when you buy The Guardian.
Harrabin, on the other hand, is paid by us – the licence payers. And he’s employed by the corporation that made What’s the Point of the Met Office?Yet, judging by his Twitter feed, his views are even more partisan than those of Black. When he’s not plugging a Guardian conspiracy theory involving US Republican sceptics and BP, he’s wringing his hands at the cut to wind subsidies or lamenting the lack of civil servants to enforce ‘smarter’ environmental laws. Also, he feels the need to add ‘@GeorgeMonbiot’ to many of his tweets, so the great man doesn’t miss them.
6) Christopher Booker: The More Money The Met Office Gets, The More Inaccurate Its Doom-Mongering
Daily Mail, 7 August 2015
The performance of the Met Office for which we pay £220 million a year is not just a joke, but a major scandal. And well done the BBC for allowing Quentin Letts, for once, to point this out.
Very surprisingly and somewhat boldly, on Wednesday morning Radio 4 put out a programme by the Mail’s Quentin Letts which ran flatly counter to the BBC’s normal party line on one of its very favourite subjects, global warming.
Under the title What’s The Point Of The Met Office?, Mr Letts focused on the way our national weather service has long been known to share with the BBC an obsession with climate change.
Indeed, the way this has in recent years tended to skew so much of its forecasting —remember the infamous promise of a ‘barbecue summer’ in 2009 just when the rain was set to fall for weeks? — has made it something of a national joke.
One of the guests interviewed by Mr Letts was the veteran Tory politician and climate-change sceptic Peter Lilley, who proceeded to poke fun about how Met Office officials would lobby for ‘more money for bigger computers to be more precisely wrong in future’.
The programme went on to target a particularly scary prediction, first announced by the Met Office in 2007, that the world’s temperature was set to rise from 2004 to 2014 by 0.3c.
That may not sound a lot, but in climate terms it’s a hugely significant increase: in fact, nearly half as much again as had been recorded in the preceding century.
The Met Office was so convinced of its research it produced a glossy brochure — with pictures of black clouds and people in masks (for no apparent reason) — with the portentous title Informing Government Policy Into The Future.
Vicky Pope, the Met Office’s head of climate predictions, said these were ‘very strong statements’ about what would happen in the next ten years.
‘And what happened?’ Mr Letts asked. ‘Zilch,’ said Mr Lilley. ‘Nothing. There was no global warming over the ensuing decade.’ And, indeed, when 2014 arrived, we could see that far from this forecast coming to pass, the temperature trend had not, in fact, risen since 1998.
After the programme was broadcast, the heresy of it having included such a dissenting voice as this, speaking in a manner the BBC would never normally dream of allowing on its airwaves, provoked the BBC’s own climate activists to rage in print and on Twitter.
Hilariously, the BBC’s former environment correspondent Richard Black protested that Mr Letts’s show had breached the BBC’s editorial rules by being so biased — when Mr Black’s own reporting on climate change could scarcely have been more shameless in breaking those same rules for years on end.
We may recall Black’s prediction in 2011 that Arctic ice was vanishing so fast that by the end of this decade it would all be gone, when two years later its volume went back up by 33 per cent in a single bound.
Or how, in 2009, he seemed almost moved to tears as he wrote up a piece on the BBC’s website over the failure of a UN conference to produce the global ‘climate treaty’ he had been promoting for so long.
So was Mr Lilley unfair to the much-vaunted Met Office report? It’s worth having a closer look at the other global-warming predictions made by those wizard computer models — for their claim about the 0.3c temperature rise was just one of a raft of doom-mongering forecasts.
CLAIM: At least three of the years after 2009 would be hotter than 1998.
REALITY: Though the Met Office would eventually claim that two of those years, 2010 and 2014, were warmer than 1998, independent experts soon demonstrated how they could only make such claims by continually ‘adjusting’ their more recent figures upwards from those originally published.
This practice, which has been widely criticised, sees the Met Office revisiting published temperatures without justifying why it is scientifically appropriate.
The Met Office uses what are called ‘surface temperatures’, measured by weather stations on land and sea. Those measured much more comprehensively by satellites still show that 1998 was easily the hottest year on record. Neither 2010 nor 2014 got anywhere near it.
CLAIM: We could look forward to many more extreme heatwaves, like that which had killed ’15,000 people’ across Europe in 2003, just before the Met Office study began.
REALITY: We have yet to see any repetition of that 2003 heatwave, which even at the time other meteorologists said was nothing to do with global warming. It was a natural event caused by an unusual influx of hot air from the Sahara.
CLAIM: We could expect many more ‘extreme weather events’, such as abnormal rainfall.
REALITY: This simply hasn’t happened. Even though the Met Office did all it could to claim the rain that caused last year’s exceptional flooding, particularly in Somerset, was the worst ever recorded, its own records show that far more rain fell between November 1928 and January 1929.
CLAIM: All that mass of ice in Greenland would some time in the future melt, meaning sea levels would rise by more than 20ft and engulf major cities.
REALITY: A recent study of temperatures recorded in Greenland reveals no sign of this happening any time soon. In fact, going way back to 1900, there has been no upward rise in the trend of Greenland’s temperatures at all.
Away from the 2004-14 research, the Met Office gets its forecasts wrong with quite comical consistency.
In 2007, its computer predicted it would be the ‘hottest year ever’, just before global temperatures plummeted by 0.7c. That summer in the UK, it told us, would be ‘drier than average’, just before we experienced some of the worst floods.
Between 2008 and 2010, the computer models repeatedly predicted ‘warmer than average’ winters and ‘hotter and drier summers’ — three years when we had summers that were wetter and cooler than normal, including the ‘barbecue summer’ of 2009.
In October 2010, they predicted our winter would be up to ‘two degrees warmer than average’, just before snow blanketed us in the coldest December since records began in 1659.
In November 2011, the Met Office computer forecast global temperatures rising by 2017 by as much as a staggering 0.5c, a prediction so embarrassingly off-beam that, a year later, it was removed from their website.
In March 2012, it predicted that spring would, yet again, be ‘drier than average’, just before the wettest April on record. In November 2013, the computer predicted Britain’s winter would be ‘drier than usual’ — just before three of the wettest months we have known.
Of course, the main reason the Met Office’s record has been so relentlessly dismal is that, as its 2004 report made clear, its computer models are programmed according to its conviction that the chief factor driving our climate is the steady rise in carbon dioxide (CO2).
Certainly, CO2 levels have continued to rise.
But for 18 years, despite the Met Office’s increasingly desperate attempts to claim otherwise, those cussed temp-eratures have simply refused to rise in tandem, as their computer models predicted they should have done.
What makes this of far more than just academic interest is that the politicians who rule over us not only continue to believe what the Met Office tells them, but rely on it to justify our increasingly catastrophic energy policy.
Remember that Met Office brochure, Informing Government Policy? That is precisely why we are committed to closing all the CO2-emitting coal and gas-fired power stations which supply two-thirds of all our electricity; and to spending billions on windmills and solar panels, which, when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun shine, will not keep our lights on.
