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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.<br>
<br>
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
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization_history.shtml">http://www.ipcc.ch/organization/organization_history.shtml</a>), 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 <b>human-induced</b> 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. <br>
<br>
Dr. Roy Spencer, a climate change "denier" whose blog I often follow,
states in one blog entry:<br>
<br>
"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 <em>natural</em> reasons for
climate change. Currently, that kind of research is <em>almost
non-existent</em>."<br>
<br>
Anyway, here is the article mentioned in the subject
(<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8223165/The-green-hijack-of-the-Met-Office-is-crippling-Britain.html">http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8223165/The-green-hijack-of-the-Met-Office-is-crippling-Britain.html</a>):<br>
<br>
Paul<br>
<br>
<div class="storyHead">
<h1>The green hijack of the Met Office is crippling Britain</h1>
<h2>The Met Office's commitment to warmist orthodoxy means it
drastically underestimates the chances of a big freeze, says
Christopher Booker </h2>
</div>
<span class="bylineBody">By <a title="Christopher Booker"
href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/">Christopher
Booker</a></span> <span class="publishedDate">8:00AM GMT 26 Dec 2010<br>
<br>
</span>
<div class="firstPar">
<p>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.
</p>
</div>
<div class="secondPar">
<p>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. </p>
</div>
<div class="thirdPar">
<p>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.
</p>
</div>
<div class="fourthPar">
<p>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. </p>
</div>
<div class="fifthPar">
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<div class="body">
<p>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?
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.)
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.)
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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.
</p>
<p>
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. </p>
</div>
</div>
<br>
<span class="publishedDate"><br>
</span>
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