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

[Paul Rumelhart]

Joe Campbell wrote:
> Speaking if which, I still say the anti-climate change rhetoric is 
> much worse than the climate change rhetoric. Yet you (Paul) never 
> mention it.

Because they aren't the ones in a position of power trying to foist some 
kind of carbon credit scheme on us.  Yes, there are plenty of kooks in 
the "climate deniers" camp.  People who have jumped on the political 
bandwagon because it feeds into their prejudices and is another bone of 
contention with their favorite enemies.  I didn't join this camp, I 
simply started looking at things a little closer, without an approved 
list of ideas to follow sanctioned by the IPCC.

>
> Also, you can't draw ANY conclusions from bad rhetoric. It is a 
> fallacy to say "This is an invalid argument, so the conclusion must be 
> false."

Sure.  Even a broken clock is right twice a day.  That doesn't mean that 
I should give any more credence to the truth of a statement arrived at 
through bad rhetoric than I would any other random, unproven statement.

>
> The issue is, given everything we know what is the best course of action?

In my opinion, we've jumped too quickly to the stage where we think we 
have it all figured out.  Which is ludicrous for such a soft and hard to 
pin down field as climatology, where experiments can and probably should 
last decades.  So, I think we should put more money into the "other 
side" of the issue.  That is, what role does natural variation play?  
The climate is effected to X% by CO2.  What about the 100-X% that's 
left?  How big is X, exactly?  This is hard to argue for when asking for 
money, though, because there is no one to blame and no way to fine 
Mother Nature into slowing down on the warming.  We might just learn a 
bit more about climate as a whole, though, if we didn't look at it so 
one-sided.

> Status quo loses when you look at things this way. Changes should be 
> made for economic and environmental reasons. The real debate is how 
> much change, and of what type?

I'm not a big fan of "do something, anything!".  It's just as easy to 
perform the wrong actions as it is to perform the right ones.  We're not 
in danger of death by heat exhaustion in the next few years, so let's 
take the time to do this right.  Let's multiply the number of 
temperature and other sensors world-wide by, say, 5.  Let's get a 
crap-ton more ocean temperature sensors, and lets go out on the ice and 
measure the polar caps precisely.  Antarctica, too, while we're at it.  
Let's get every single temperature station in the world to save their 
raw, unadjusted readings (historical and current) in a place that is 
publicly available.  Lets put CO2 sensors all over the world, in every 
kind of habitat, and let's measure exactly how much CO2 is taken in and 
produced over the year.  Let's use the money that the rich bastards were 
going to use to buy carbon credits to fund it, if we have to.

Every time I look into this closer, I start to see the men behind the 
curtain pulling the levers and pushing the knobs more clearly.

Paul

>
> On Jan 4, 2011, at 4:40 PM, Ron Force <rforce2003 at yahoo.com 
> <mailto:rforce2003 at yahoo.com>> wrote:
>
>> 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 
>> <mailto:godshatter at yahoo.com>>
>> *To:* Vision2020 <vision2020 at moscow.com <mailto: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 
>> <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/> 
>> 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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