Questioning the Climate Change Establishment

Jules Wright

A pithy observation; and one many can identify with.Parades and rain spring to mind. As do bonfires and pi55ing.

Hawkeye

In future the famous "trick" used by the warmists will be extended and only summer temperatures will count in the temperature record to ensure that "right result" is arrived at.

Rory the Deplorable

As Mr Nelson articulated so eloquently just before Christmas, if we are going to pay extra tax to combat, so called man-made climate change, it is only democratic to openly debate the issues. (Assuming democracy still exists, of course).

Jack Dawson

Perhaps this is the start of global cooling, as predicted in the 1970s.

Kcid21

"The Arctic ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway.

Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone. Exploration expeditions report that scarcely any ice has been met with as far north as 81 degrees 29 minutes. Soundings to a depth of 3,100 meters showed the gulf stream still very warm.

Great masses of ice have been replaced by moraines of earth and stones, the report continued, while at many points well known glaciers have entirely disappeared. Very few seals and no white fish are found in the eastern Arctic, while vast shoals of herring and smelts, which have never before ventured so far north, are being encountered in the old seal fishing grounds."

source: Monthly Weather Review for November 1922

In case the link above doesn't work

Frank S

I think we need an enquiry into the possible corruption of the Met Office. In particular, the impact of religious mystic John Houghton, and NGO activist Robert Napier who took over the Met Office after converting the World Wildlife Fund into a body less concerned with wildlife and more concerned with carbon dioxide campaigning. I note that the Met Office is also failing to do the job for which it was set up, and is being paid for. Useful summary on climate variation here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704905704574622643206570348.html

John Levett

And don't forget that only a few weeks ago, the Met Office was telling us that we were most likely to have a mild winter. Nor should we forget, particularly now that the warmists are telling us that our current weather is caused by global warming (!), that we have been regularly advised in the past few years that snow is a thing of the past.

Immediately after the CRU leak I sent my Tory MP a letter demanding a proper investigation and suggesting a re-think of CP climate policy. I've still not had a reply. Ain't democracy great?

Dixon

So this is "weather" not "climate". True. Far enough.

But would the same mouthpieces admit that the same as true of every "phew wot a scorcher"?

But theres something worse in store than that bit of assymetric elision. It is that kids are being so uniformly told that this, that or any other unfortunate weather is a result of "climate change" that, I bet you money, in a generation, it will be widely believed that there never was such a thing as bad weather until Human activity caused it.

Augustus

The word 'climate' is now etched in everyone's brain. Even
those who aren't convinced there's a man-made catastrophe in the making can't get that word out of their consciousness.
Flying-climate. Holiday-climate.
Meat-climate. Heating-climate. Driving-climate. One is brain-washed with it all the time. This aggressive propaganda pollutes one's daily life, one's well-being, one's very existence. Even children are made fearful and loaded with guilt and have nightmares because of it. Just as sex was associated with aids, so all life's pathways are now infected by climate. That's the real climate crime.

toby michael fish forward

Very cold winters: 1947, 1963, 1981, 2010.
Intervals? 16 years, 18 years, 19 years.
Conclusion? Every so often we have a very cold winter.

Thomas Fuller

Mr L, I have always been sceptical of those wearing tinfoil hats, but I have just watched a film called "The Fall of the Republic", by Alex Jones (it's on YouTube) which may shed light on this matter. Since it was not made by the BBC, neither Marcus Brigstocke nor Stephen Fry appears in it, but don't let that put you off.

Coeur de Seacole Lion

Boring, but my fruit cage has collapsed. Built by me in 1970. So that's worst for 40 years.

Unwise Ernie

toby is there an equivalent for hot summers?

David Ossitt

On Radio 4 this morning the excellent Melvyn Bragg’s program In Our Time was discussing climate change, a woman scientist was adamant that this was caused by man, when Melvyn quite reasonably stated that some might disagree, she slammed him down by stating that those who argued against were not only wrong but should not hold a contrary opinion, and that we all needed to be converted to the truth.

It is getting to be rather frightening; if we hold different opinions we must retract, it will soon be like the Spanish Inquisition, all of us who have different thoughts, will like the heretics, be hunted down.

Dirty Euro

Rod Liddle I think Marcus Brigstocke is funny and politically correct too. A tough thing it todays era of racism abuse and swearing at old men (hey enough about my private life). You insult him because he is left wing, even though you are. Stop sucking up to the right. Or perhaps you are preparing them for a devastating counter attack. Now they tory trolls have their trousers down you take your scissors out and cut it off.

Baron

we humans relate to the Universe as an ant’s nest does to the world’s rainforests. Our planet is but a infinitesimal part of the clocking of the Universe, and the climate here (temperature, rainfall and stuff) are most likely influenced by laws of which we aren’t even aware.

To think that we have the capacity to run Nature doesn’t border on the insane, it reaches far beyond. The Red Bolsheviks Menace of the East set out to ‘command the rains and winds’, and a fat lot of good did it do them.

The problem is that whilst the cooling goes on and the half-blind scientists argue, the politicians will not let go of the warming idiocy. We are truly stuck unless the Chinese stick to their common sense position, and the rest of the charade crumbles.

David Ossitt

Dirty Euro
January 7th, 2010 5:16pm

"Rod Liddle I think Marcus Brigstocke is funny and politically correct too"

You are on the wrong thread, this is not the one where we are all giving Marcus (the not so funny) Brigstocke a good kicking.

Tim Duckworth

I think that all candidates in the forthcoming General Election should read Christopher Booker's latest book on GW. Not a few inconvenient truths for the "settled scientists" It certainly IS cold though.

Mick J

David Ossitt
"Melvyn quite reasonably stated that some might disagree, she slammed him down by stating that those who argued against were not only wrong but should not hold a contrary opinion, and that we all needed to be converted to the truth."

A sniff of re-education camps and also how many scientists in the early 20c were advocates of eugenics until the Nazis gave the idea a bad name.
Michael Crichton RIP wrote a number of articles about this and drew analogies with the politicised science of climate change.

Viktor

Man influences his environment, full stop. Whether the climate is warming or cooling, it's a good idea to clean up our lifestyle, create a world with less pollution and wean ourselves off fossil fuels. Both to think and to argue that all this 1) can be done in a reasonably short time 2) will have a significant impact on climate process, is simply crazytalk.

JohnBUK

Hold on! Just watched the report on 10pm BBC News. Apparently the snow now is "weather", whereas "Climate" is what happens over a 30 year cycle and so it doesn't matter what the "weather" is like this month, last month or next month. And over the 30 year period it is getting warmer - so there nah, nah nah nah nah!
Settled see!

Tim Ottevanger

Liddle confuses weather (what we have today) with climate (what we have had over several decades. This winter's weather does not contradict the trend in our climate, which has shown an increase in average temperatures over several decades.

kein

thank god we are going to freeze to death so we won't have to survive global warming

Geoffrey Cousens

British astro phisyisist Piers Corbin accuratly forcast this weather in late November using new scientific methods relying on sun spot activity.He has a 90% accuracy record!Weather Action.com.Happy new year from Australia!;Geoffrey Cousens.

Bibes

I do get annoyed by the ignorance of some of those who are sceptical about man made global warming and whose comments thereby feeds the pro-lobby with ammunition which can be used to criticise them as being merely "sceptics” or "Flat Earthers"

The most recent example of this was the egregious performance of Melanie Phillips on BBC's Question Time a month or so ago and another was an appallingly written front page article in the Daily Express some two odd months ago entitled "100 Reasons Why Global Warming is a Myth" or some such.

Melanie P exposed the release of emails by the East Anglia Met office before it had become common currency, failed to nail the real point of it and was laughed out of the studio.

The Express article was clearly written by a junior (and not very good) journalist who clearly had little understanding of the science behind the subject and merely rattled of 100 points clearly lifted from a clumsy Google search and in doing so, repeated many points twice, and came up with others that were irrelevant to the actual title of the article.

If I was in the “pro” lobby, I would have leapt for joy and the banal and amateurish nature of it and revelled in destroying many of the so called “facts” as laid out.

If you really want to read an authoritative book on the subject, read Ian Plimer’s book “Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: the missing science”.

He is Professor at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide and Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

He is already fending off McCarthyist attacks by the pro-lobby and is a brave man.

The book is packed with research references and although heavily detailed, offers a fantastic insight into the subject.

If you are doubtful about anthropogenic warming, read it and ingest it. For those doubters who can’t be bothered to really research the subject, it would be much better if you shut up until you do!

Blowing hot and cold

You seem to be confusing "Weather" and "Climate"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate

Cynthia Morton

For gods sake people. Think of it as "climate change" seeing as the term "global warming" is confusing you all. Weather conditions are getting more irate, unpredictable and worse. Hence summers being warmer than they have been in recent times, and winters colder than they have been in recent times. CLIMATE CHANGE!! Got it, that might be easier for this CLOD to understand.

Tim Ottevanger

Bibes is half right and half wrong. Yes, Melanie Phillips performed stupidly on Question Time, her first mistake being to attack the audience before it had even reacted to her answer to the first question. She knows how to alienate people.

As for the Daily Express article, who takes that rag seriously anyway? It is obsessed with Princess Diana, immigration and now global warming but is a farrago of prejudice and ignorance.

But as for Bibes’ championing of Prof. Plimer, he may be a professor but he is outnumbered in the analysis of global warming by countless others who are at least as well qualified to hold a scientific opinion on the matter. The vast majority of climate scientists hold views opposite to his. Can they all be wrong?

John Thomas

Apparently when it is cold, this is merely weather, not climate - different thing entirely. When it is hot, this is indeed climate, AGW, not just simply weather; no doubt Marcus Brigkstocke will confirm this (you can see I've been reading posts on the net from devout members of the Church of Climatology).

Marbury

When people climate experts talk about "the hottest years ever" they're referring to the GLOBAL climate, not the winter in Britain, for Gawd's sake.

Anne Wotana Kaye 1

What a horrible cottage industry has sprung up. It seems a perfect occupation for the lunatic left, and should keep them in hefty salaries until a new fad comes along. Ban the horrible term Carbon FootStep, might as well have the FLATus World.

Sean

Global warming refers to temperatures increasing across the planet.

A cold snap in the UK refers to snow in a country.

Planet = big
Country = small

If you don't believe me you can check a map if you want.

Old Slaughter

I am so very happy. I thought I was alone in thinking him a ghastly turd.

Periston

Dirty Euro - Marcus Brigstock is about as funny as an aneurysm. Stop talking crap. And describing him as funny BECAUSE he is politically correct? When will you bloody lefties learn the normal amoong us are sick and tired of political correctness. Marcus Brigstock is an arse and quite frankly, so are you.

Jack Mildam

A cold snap in some places in the northern hemisphere and you're already crowing that 2010 won't be one of the hottest years on record?! The depths of scientific illiteracy never ceases to amaze.

Here's a simple graphic that might help some of you grasp what is happening: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/8446278.stm

The Spectator: rapidly becoming the UK's very own Fox News!

P.S. You do know that 2009 was likely 4th hottest year on record (NASA figures). 2005 was the hottest then 2007 then 1998. Which part of that does not give you a clue that the planet is heating?

Bibes

Tim Ottevanger’s comments about Daily Express are quite correct, although perhaps unnecessary, as this is a Spectator blog and therefore such a view will be held by most participants.

However, his sweet turn of phrase and effected worldly confidence in boldly condemning the Express is not reflected in the juxtaposition of his surprising naivety which can be gleaned from his further comments where he admits to having fallen for the ridiculous myth of “scientific consensus” on anthropogenic climate change.

Even if there were consensus, a science where a majority of votes by “pro-climateers” determines scientific truth is not science at all.

It is politics.

And at the moment, any scientist who bravely puts his head above the parapet in this debate questioning any aspect of this apparent “consensus” is viciously attacked by carping ascientific unelected political pressure groups.

The Russian Academy of Sciences Institute of Ocean Studies disagrees with this “consensus”. 32,000 US scientists have signed the Oregon Petition which expresses serious doubt about the major conclusion of the IPCC. The US Academy of Science has chosen not signed up to the Royal Society’s alarmist manifesto on climate change.

Social Scientist Naomi Oreskes claimed in the "Science" journal that a web search of the ISI Knowledge Database produced 928 articles in support of this “consensus”.

When social scientist Benny Pester tried to validate this claim, she found that only 13 of the 928 articles explicitly supported the "consensus" view with some papers actually opposing it.

As Plimer puts it, science only progresses by continuously questioning existing orthodoxy, not by aggressively quashing and silencing any challenges to it. Unless dogma and orthodoxy are challenged, we end up in a world of superstition and authoritarianism.

In other words, the world we are in right now.

Tim Ottevanger

Bibes quotes Plimer saying that science progresses through the questioning of orthodoxies. But s/he claims there are so many scientists questioning AGW that one wonders which is the orthodoxy. Presumably s/he would like his/her view to be the prevailing one, thus it would be an orthodoxy which must be questioned. Would s/he then question it? Somehow I don’t think so!

James Murphy

Actually I've got news for all those meteorological bullshitters, and those feeble-minded enough to be bamboozled by their pompous semantics : weather IS the same as climate. The words - and thus the statistical implications - are interchangeable. A country's CLIMATE is synonymous with the WEATHER it typically gets over the year. I.e., the Mediterranean summer weather/climate is generally warm and dry. The WEATHER is precisely what makes up a CLIMATE dummies! Talk about getting lost in a thicket of language! But then the PC brigade have been planting their thorns for decades now: no wonder Jo Public can't put one foot in front of the other without being pricked to death.

Bibes

Tim - that’s the point - but it's an enforced orthodoxy. It has the backing of Governments and powerful lobby groups who adopt a McCarthyist approach to those who dare question it.

All you have to do is observe what happens to those who question it.

It is no coincidence that the big name contrarians are those who having spent a lifetime in science, now no longer rely on research funds for professional advancement. They don't have to toe the party line.

No funding is given to contrarians and Government funded research showing the "wrong" result has been literally censored in the past. Certainly, research that shows evidence to the contrary fails either to get published, and if it is, gets no press coverage.

The German Federal Government’s Dept. for Geological and Mineral Resources and Research in Hanover, supported by the Lower Saxony’s state body for primary industry research and the Hanover Institute for Geology, produced a book in 2000 entitled “Klimafakten: die Rubblick - Ein Schlussel fur die Zunkunft”

It concluded that there was nothing extraordinary about modern times and that CO2 did not drive climate but that it was other factors (sun, orbit, tectonics etc.)

It caused a political storm as it didn’t fit into the German Socialist Government’s party line. The book was criticised by the Minister for Environment (who had funded it) and despite being a best seller but has never been reprinted. It has in effect been banned.

If there was free and open debate on this subject, your point would be valid. But there isn't and so it isn't.

Ricky

toby michael fish forward
January 7th, 2010 3:16pm

The pattern you refer to fits quite neatly with sun spot activity - the real cause of climate change. About every 16-19 years the northern hemisphere is affected by this distinct change in solar activity.

The Watermelon Movement (Red on the inside, Green on the outside) are using the Carbon Religious Movement to control and intimidate that most hated pariah of the Left - human beings.

Jeremy Hayes

'How does this square with last year’s prediction... that 2010 was going to be the hottest year on record?'

Er.. it's the second week of January, dimwit.

God help the Independent.

Coeur de Seacole Lion

Er, I heard on R4 this am that Mexico is having the coldest winter for 40 years.

Adrian Bunting

Idiot, its not the same people doing long range climate predictions as do short term weather predictions. Get some facts first and then discuss.

burt

when did you become such an arsehole?

Floyd

It would be wrong to say that a warm winter in the UK would on its own be indicative of climate change. Since the weather is very cold in the UK now, it would have been wrong to predict a warm winter.
But so what? The concern of 'the climate change establishment' (which I assume means people who take climate change seriously) is based on far more serious long-term information than that. If you were capable of more than cheap shots, you'd check it out.
yours from Australia where it feels as though we are going to burn to a crisp - still, we'll get some rain this weekend, so everything must be alright eh?

john holland

Why do none of you admit that, as a clearly pretty much scientifically illiterate bunch, your choice to believe a theory proposed by a minority of scientists over the majority must, by definition, be basing that on political and personal motives.After all, you don't pride yourselves on deciding that quantum physics is a load of cobblers. And science doesn't progress by "questioning orthodoxies", it progresses by trying to arrive at a true understanding of nature.

James Hodson

I infer from Viktor's comment on 7 Jan that he believes that anti-AGW people (like me) don't worry about trying "create a world with less pollution". That, at least for me, is just not true. However, when CO2 is defined as a pollutant, I have to worry.

Bibes mentions Melanie Phillips on Question Time last year. The most scary thing on that programme was the 'group think' giggling response to Phillips's comments.

The audience should possibly have taken some more Soma, just to put themselves out of their own self-induced misery.

Whatever to the idea of science, on principle, never being settled?

James Hodson

Viktor mentions "crazytalk".

Iron Maiden once sang:

Can it be that there's some sort of error?
Hard to stop the surmounting terror
Is it really the end not some crazy dream?

It could well be, Viktor.

James Hodson

Bibes,

Unfortunately, Prof. Ian Plimer’s book “Heaven and Earth. Global Warming: the missing science” is not the easiest book to "digest".

I finished reading it recently.

I must say that he included too much of the missing science to make for an easy read. There was too much info and way too many references for the casual anti-AGWer.

Sabine

What do you think will happen in the UK within the next 50 years? Please follow this link if you have time to take part in a short independent study & you live in the UK.

http://www.psy.plymouth.ac.uk/onlineresearch/opsec/