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

[Paul Rumelhart]

It's not like I'm tearing through intricately detailed publications 
looking for anything at all that might be wrong with their rock solid 
research, finding maybe one in a dozen spelled something wrong.

Looking at an increase in CO2 from 280 to around 390 ppm made me wonder 
how big of an effect that could actually have.  I mean, for each million 
particles of air, we're throwing out 110 nitrogen molecules (dropping it 
from 780900 to 779790 or whatever) and adding in 110 CO2 ones.  That 
lead me to look at greenhouses.

Learning about the greenhouse effect as a practical thing (i.e. how does 
an actual greenhouse heat up it's air), the glass holding the air in 
place does far more than CO2 does to warm it.

Of course, it's a big planet, and small changes over time can affect 
climate.  How do they compare to natural processes, still not 
understood?  We're coming out of an Ice Age, and locally we are 
recovering from the Little Ice Age (at least we were, until they tried 
to get rid of the LIA and the Medieval Warm Period with their Hockey 
Stick).  CO2 is probably helping this along, but how much?  Nobody seems 
to know, because nobody is looking at natural processes with the same 
fervor they are looking at CO2.

Looking into global climate models made me immediately skeptical for a 
variety of reasons about their conclusions.  It turns out they aren't 
trying to model the physics and seeing how close it matches the real 
world, they are assuming that global warming is happening and are 
modeling scenarios based on that assumption.  All these models are 
worthless, because they don't model clouds, which have much more of an 
effect than CO2 does.

Looking at the temperature record led me to surfacestations.org which 
showed me that quality control is not their highest priority.  
Continually watching historical measurements be adjusted every fricking 
month made some alarms go off.  No where can you find the original data, 
before any adjustments, nor can you find anything about how they are 
doing their adjustments.  What procedure are they using?  What 
experiments have they conducted to verify them?  All I see is a slow 
movement towards increasing the recent temps and downplaying any earlier 
higher temps.  It's crazy.

Looking for quantified amounts declaring what CO2 increases will bring 
led me to the IPCC's own numbers.  Given no feedbacks, expect an 
increase of about 1.2C for a doubling of CO2 from pre-industrial times.  
So how do we get those catastrophic scenarios?  Assume massive positive 
feedbacks.  More and more research is coming in from the field showing 
smaller positive or negative feedbacks in nature on-going, but does that 
get the climate modelers to change their model inputs?  No.

I could go on, but what's the point?  You choose to believe some guy in 
a white smock that has "scientist" emblazoned on his lapel.  Hell, there 
are very few people out there that even have a bachelor's degree in 
climate science, because it's so new of a field.

In answer to your question about what's different about climate as 
compared to medicine, car mechanics, etc, here is what is different:

Climate, by definition, requires decades of measurements just to get a 
baseline.  It's similar to the geological sciences in this regard.  It's 
horribly complex, because it's basically the aggregate of weather, which 
is the field that inspired the development of chaos mathematics.  So 
many things are affected by so many other things that modeling it 
reliably is still a few decades off.  You can't easily do experiments in 
the climate sciences that can really be finished before your career is 
over, especially if you are incorporating new measurements that have no 
history before-hand.  Pharmaceutical researchers might have to wait a 
few years for the results of a study.  Car mechanics can take the damn 
thing apart and physically see what is happening.  Climate scientists 
might have to wait decades for their results to come back.  That's why 
they rely on modeling so much - without a time machine, your options are 
greatly limited.  Also, climate science is young.  Almost nobody was 
doing it before the 1970's.  That's around 40 years in a science that 
measures things on decadal time scales.

So, with the money-changers frothing at the mouth over a carbon credit 
scheme and politicians looking for any excuse to take over control of 
how much energy people use, I don't think that "trust us, we're 
scientists" is a reasonable approach to take at this point in time.

Not that I expect anyone to agree with me.

Paul

Joe Campbell wrote:
> The man point is if you apply this same level of skepticism toward anything, it will lose. We can't know anything for certain. If certainty is the standard, you shouldn't believe anything. End if story.
>
> It's the perfect approach for maintaining irrational beliefs that can't be sustained with a more realistic method, one that asks which among a set of options is best. (On this matter, check out Wilson's own skeptically inspired epistemology.)
>
> Nonetheless not all beliefs are equal. So pardon me if, in the case of empirical beliefs, I side with the folks who are in the best position to know: the scientists who are trained to study climate. Pardon me if I ignore your misuse of skeptical reasoning since it would undermine anything you had to offer as well.
>
> My method, on the other hand, works for you too when it comes to medicine, car mechanics, and most other areas. If there is something different about the climate you've been unsuccessful in showing what it is. What is it?
>
> In matters empirical, our best bet is to listen to those with the most training. Not perfect, as you'll continue to note, but reasonable.
>
>
>
> On Jan 4, 2011, at 9:30 PM, Paul Rumelhart <godshatter at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
>   
>> 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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