[Vision2020] The green hijack of the Met Office is crippling Britain

[Ron Force]

Paul,
You do know that the Daily Telegraph is the UK's equivalent of Fox News? 
Consider the source.

I wonder if climate change would have become a such political football if Al 
Gore hadn't become a spokesperson? Suppose George Bush had...Naaaaaah!

 Ron Force
Moscow Idaho USA




________________________________
From: Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com>
To: Vision2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com>
Sent: Tue, January 4, 2011 11:32:00 AM
Subject: [Vision2020] The green hijack of the Met Office is crippling Britain

There was an article in the Telegraph last week that I think underscores the 
problems that the climate change community has with overconfidence.  I've posted 
that article below.

I think the proponents of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis have been 
suffering from a case of having blinders on.  If you look at the history page on 
the IPCC website (http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization_history.shtml), 
you'll find that their role as they describe it is to "assess on a 
comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical 
and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of 
risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for 
adaptation and mitigation."  Note that their role as they see it is to look at 
human-induced climate change ONLY. 


Dr. Roy Spencer, a climate change "denier" whose blog I often follow, states in 
one blog entry:

"Twice I have testified in congress that unbiased funding on the subject of the 
causes of warming would be much closer to a reality if 50% of that money was 
devoted to finding natural reasons for climate change. Currently, that kind of 
research is almost non-existent."

Anyway, here is the article mentioned in the subject 
(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8223165/The-green-hijack-of-the-Met-Office-is-crippling-Britain.html):


Paul


The green hijack of the Met Office is crippling Britain
The Met Office's commitment to warmist orthodoxy means it drastically 
underestimates the chances of a big freeze, says Christopher Booker By 
Christopher Booker 8:00AM GMT 26 Dec 2010

 
By far the biggest story of recent days, of course, has been the astonishing 
chaos inflicted, to a greater or lesser extent, on all of our lives by the fact 
that we are not only enjoying what is predicted to be the coldest December since 
records began in 1659, but also the harshest of three freezing winters in a row. 
We all know the disaster stories – thousands of motorists trapped for hours on 
paralysed motorways, days of misery at Heathrow, rail passengers marooned in 
unheated carriages for up to 17 hours. But central to all this – as the cry goes 
up: “Why wasn’t Britain better prepared?” – has been the bizarre role of the Met 
Office. 

We might start with the strange affair of the Quarmby Review. Shortly after 
Philip Hammond became Transport Secretary last May, he commissioned David 
Quarmby, a former head of the Strategic Rail Authority, to look into how we 
might avoid a repeat of last winter’s disruption. In July and again in October, 
Mr Quarmby produced two reports on “The Resilience of England’s Transport System 
in Winter”; and at the start of this month, after our first major snowfall, Mr 
Quarmby and two colleagues were asked to produce an “audit” of their earlier 
findings. 

The essence of their message was that they had consulted the Met Office, which 
advised them that, despite two harsh winters in succession, these were “random 
events”, the chances of which, after our long previous run of mild winters, were 
only 20 to one. Similarly, they were told in the summer, the odds against a 
third such winter were still only 20 to one. So it might not be wise to spend 
billions of pounds preparing for another “random event”, when its likelihood was 
so small. Following this logic, if the odds against a hard winter two years ago 
were only 20 to one, it might have been thought that the odds against a third 
such “random event” were not 20 to one but 20 x 20 x 20, or 8,000 to one. 

What seems completely to have passed Mr Quarmby by, however, is the fact that in 
these past three years the Met Office’s forecasting record has become a national 
joke. Ever since it predicted a summer warmer and drier than average in 2007 – 
followed by some of the worst floods in living memory – its forecasts have been 
so unerringly wrong that even the chief adviser to our Transport Secretary might 
have noticed. 

The Met Office’s forecasts of warmer-than-average summers and winters have been 
so consistently at 180 degrees to the truth that, earlier this year, it conceded 
that it was dropping seasonal forecasting. Hence, last week, the Met Office 
issued a categorical denial to the Global Warming Policy Foundation that it had 
made any forecast for this winter. Immediately, however, several blogs, led by 
Autonomous Mind, produced evidence from the Met Office website that in October 
it did indeed publish a forecast for December, January and February. This 
indicated that they would be significantly warmer than last year, and that there 
was only “a very much smaller chance of average or below-average temperatures”. 
So the Met Office has not only been caught out yet again getting it horribly 
wrong (always in the same direction), it was even prepared to deny it had said 
such a thing at all.

The real question, however, is why has the Met Office become so astonishingly 
bad at doing the job for which it is paid nearly £200 million a year – in a way 
which has become so stupendously damaging to our country? 

The answer is that in the past 20 years, as can be seen from its website, the 
Met Office has been hijacked from its proper role to become wholly subservient 
to its obsession with global warming. (At one time it even changed its name to 
the Met Office “for Weather and Climate Change”.) This all began when its 
then-director John Houghton became one of the world’s most influential promoters 
of the warmist gospel. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for setting up 
the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and remained at the top of it 
for 13 years. It was he who, in 1990, launched the Met Office’s Hadley Centre 
for Climate Change, closely linked to the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia 
(CRU), at the centre of last year’s Climategate row, which showed how the little 
group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC had been prepared to bend their 
data and to suppress any dissent from warming orthodoxy. 

The reason why the Met Office gets its forecasts so hopelessly wrong is that 
they are based on those same computer models on which the IPCC itself relies to 
predict the world’s climate in 100 years time. They are programmed on the 
assumption that, as CO2 rises, so temperatures must inexorably follow. For 17 
years this seemed plausible, because the world did appear to be getting warmer. 
We all became familiar with those warmer winters and earlier springs, which the 
warmists were quick to exploit to promote their message – as when Dr David Viner 
of the CRU famously predicted to The Independent in 2000 that “within a few 
years winter snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event”. (Last week, that 
article from 10 years ago was the most viewed item on The Independent’s 
website.) 

But in 2007, the computer models got caught out, failing to predict a temporary 
plunge in global temperatures of 0.7C, more than the net warming of the 20th 
century. Much of the northern hemisphere suffered what was called in North 
America “the winter from hell”. Even though temperatures did rise again, in the 
winter of 2008/9 this happened again, only worse. 

The Met Office simply went into denial. Its senior climate change official, 
Peter Stott, said in March 2009 that the trend towards milder winters was likely 
to continue. There would not be another winter like 1962/3 “for 1,000 years or 
more”. Last winter was colder still. And now we have another even more savage 
“random event”, for which we are even less prepared. (The Taxpayers’ Alliance 
revealed last week that councils have actually ordered less salt this winter 
than last.) 

The consequences of all this are profound. Those who rule over our lives have 
been carried off into a cloud-cuckoo-land for which no one was more responsible 
than the zealots at the Met Office, subordinating all it does to their dotty 
belief system. Significantly, its chairman, Robert Napier, is not a weatherman 
but a “climate activist”, previously head of WWF-UK, one of our leading warmist 
campaigning groups. 

At one end of this colossal diversion of national resources, permeating every 
level of government, we have the hapless Mr Quarmby, who feels obliged to follow 
the Met Office and advise that the present freeze is a “random event” and calls 
for no special responses – with the results we see on every side. At the other, 
fixated by the same belief system, we have our Climate Change Secretary, Chris 
Huhne, hoping we can somehow keep our lights on and our economy running by 
spending hundreds of billions of pounds on thousands more windmills. 

More than once in the past week, as our power stations have been thrashed way 
beyond normal peak power demand, the contribution of wind turbines has been so 
small that it has registered as 0 per cent. (See the website for the New 
Electricity Trading Arrangements: Google “neta electricity summary page”, and 
find the table of “source by fuel type”.) At the heart of all this greenie 
make-believe that has our political class in its thrall has been the hijacking 
of the Met Office from its proper role. It’s no longer just a national joke: it 
is turning into a national catastrophe. 


      
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