Scientists tricked into believing this lie

'People who were daring to question it didn't get funded'

The climate-change movement is ultimately designed to thin the earth’s population, and the science behind the movement is deeply and deliberately flawed to further a political end, according to climatologist Dr. Tim Ball.

In his new book, “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science,” Ball also lays out how he believes those perpetrating in this massive scientific fraud managed to keep the truth hidden from mainstream scientists and later intimidated most of them to keep them quiet.

Ball is one of the leading voices from the climatology community to loudly condemn the conclusions and tactics of those calling for major public-policy changes to combat the purported threat to the climate posed by human activity.

According to Ball, the motivation for the climate-change movement’s leaders is nothing new. He told Radio America’s Greg Corombos it is the latest incarnation of an effort that goes back to the 19th century writings of Thomas Malthus, who argued that the human population was growing so fast that the earth’s resources could never sustain it. He, therefore, advocated population control to ward off mass disease and starvation.

Malthus and others ultimately identified industrialized nations as the greatest consumer of resources and suggested the advance of industry needed to be stopped. As the years went on, Ball said, the focus narrowed to the fossil fuels powering the economy in advanced nations.

He said that obsession ultimately led the modern-day activists to settle on carbon dioxide as the culprit for the earth’s dangerous climate trends but required an ingenious approach to get the public on board with the idea.

“If you can shut off the flow of fossil fuels, that will stop the engine of those industrialized nations, but people would scream immediately if that happened,” Ball said. “But if you could show that the byproduct of the combustion of that fossil fuel, carbon dioxide, was causing runaway global warming and climate change, then you could use that for a vehicle to introduce legislation to shut down those industrialized nations.

“That’s been the whole driving force of everything Maurice Strong is doing and, of course, underlies what Obama’s pushing,” he said.

Ball sees Maurice Strong as one of the most pivotal figures in the advancement of what he considers the modern-day assault on industrialized nations. He said Strong grew up in a socialist Canadian family and rose to prominence in a way many might not expect.

“He’s a superb organizer of bureaucracies, and he made a lot of money in the industry. That’s the irony of these people like Bill Gates. They get money, and then they’re going to go save the planet,” mused Ball.

Strong ultimately worked his way into becoming the head of the United Nations climate program in the 1980s. That role led to his calling for the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992 and the creation of a larger U.N. vision known as Agenda 21. Later in the 1990s, Strong shepherded the creation of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, where Ball said Strong wielded immense power.

“Strong, in an interview with Elaine Dewar, in a book called ‘Cloak of Green,’ she said what he’s doing is using the United Nations to establish world government and total control,” he said. “When he made the comment to her about how we’ve got to shut down industrialized nations, she said, ‘Why don’t you run for politics?’ He said, ‘You can’t do anything as a politician. I’m going to go to the U.N. and get all the money I want and not be accountable to anybody.’”

Ball said the fix was in from the start and that the IPCC was only tasked with one job, proving that global warming was caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide.

“They did that by directing them to only look at human causes of climate change. Of course, if you don’t know how much natural variability there is, you can’t possibly determine the human portion. They didn’t care about that. They just wanted to be able to say the science is settled, and we’re 95 percent certain that human carbon dioxide is causing global warming. That’s why they picked on CO2, and that was Maurice Strong’s role in it,” he said.

One of the most difficult arguments for the public to believe from climate-change skeptics like Ball is that there was, and continues to be, some grand conspiracy to produce results concluding that human activity is triggering higher carbon dioxide and that urgent actions to curb emissions must be taken.

Ball said the U.N.’s climate panel was very carefully constructed to limit who actually saw the data and who made policy recommendations based on the research. He said the IPCC had three working groups. One did the scientific research that was predestined to show alarming climate change. The second group then projected how the climate would change if new policies weren’t adopted. The third group formulated policies for industrialized nations to follow to avoid the dire predictions.

Ball said the results were an odd combination of admittedly bad science and a tight circle of experts turning out the finished products.

“In Working Group One, they tell you everything that’s wrong with their computer models. They set it all out. They say, ‘Look, we don’t know this. We don’t know that. This is wrong. That’s wrong. But they set up a separate group called the Summary for Policy Makers, which includes politicians and bureaucrats and a few very carefully selected scientists. Most of these were scientists at the Climactic Research Institute (CRU), where all the leaked emails about what they were doing came from,” Ball said.

“They controlled critical chapters (in the IPCC reports). They controlled the chapter on data, and they manipulated the data. They controlled the chapter on paleo-climate data, that is reconstruction of past climates,” he said. “So they set about through that Summary for Policy Makers, creating a completely false image of what their findings were.

“The Summary for Policy Makers, by their own rules, is released before the science report is released and they know that’s going to get media attention.  It says the temperature is going to rise by this much and all of the other nonsense and that is what gets the media headlines.

“Then a few months later they bring out the science report, which of course they know nobody’s going to read,” he said.

“But when you compare the science report with the Summary for Policy Makers, it’s more than the difference of night and day. It’s like two completely different planets. This is done deliberately to deceive,” Ball said. “Everything’s been manipulated to create a completely false and extreme scenario of what their research actually shows.”

Even if Strong and his allies at the U.N. and CRU managed to close ranks in conducting research and presenting the findings, how did such a large consensus of scientists around the world come to agree with the IPCC conclusions if the data is clearly flawed?

Ball said some just don’t understand the science well, and for others the lack of public opposition pretty much boils down to money and power.

“The vast majority of people, and even scientists, they don’t understand climate science. That’s part of the difficulty. They might know their own area of physics or their own area of biology, but they didn’t know what the climate science was, so they just accepted it,” said Ball, noting that the bulk of scientists didn’t examine the science report and merely read through the Summary for Policy Makers.

Ball said another brilliant stroke taken by Strong and the IPCC was to enlist the World Meteorological Organization, or WMO. That group is made up of bureaucrats from every national weather agency. Ball said the WMO then proclaimed the IPCC findings to be national policy in all member nations, and the few political figures who dared to question the findings were dismissed as lacking standing in climate science.

Independent scientists were also silenced because the WMO and its member nations only provided money to scientists who adopted the official line.

“Because all of the national weather agencies were involved in this, then they directed funding only to those researchers that were proving what the IPCC was saying,” Ball said. “As a result, people who were daring to question it didn’t get funded.”

SOURCE




Loss of production tax credits brings big wind chill to the cooling subsidy-dependent market

Unsurprisingly, President Obama didn’t let Congress’s decision to finally end Production Tax Credits (PTCs) let the air out of his breezy wind power subsidy agenda. Speaking at his State of the Union address, he said: “We’ve subsidized oil companies for a century. That’s long enough. It’s time to end the taxpayer giveaways to an industry that rarely has been more profitable, and double down on a clean energy industry that never has been more promising. Pass clean energy tax credits. Create these jobs.”

We can be very certain that Big Wind will be back with gale force attempts to persuade Congress to restore the longstanding PTC ,which was allowed to expire at the end of 2013. This subsidy which has paid producers 2.2 cents per kilowatt-hour for electricity generated was originally pitched as a temporary assistance means to establish a cost-competitive renewable power source. Now, more than 20 years later after having “temporarily” extended the PTC seven times, wind is still substantially more expensive than coal, natural gas, and nuclear power. In fact, taxpayer subsidies can often account for more than one-third of the retail price for electricity.

Between 2009 and 2013, federal revenues lost to wind power developers are estimated to have amounted to about $14 billion, including $6 billion from PTC and another $8 billion from an alternative energy subsidy provided in the Obama stimulus package. Wind and solar each receive more than 50 times more subsidy support per megawatt-hour than conventional coal, and more than 20 times more in terms of average electricity generated by coal and natural gas. According to a 2008 Energy Information Agency (EIA) report, the average 2007 subsidy per megawatt-hour for wind and solar was about $24, compared with an average $1.65 for all others.

Regarding those “Heavily-Subsidized Oil Companies”

Using a very broad definition applied by Oil Change International, the term “subsidies” refers to: “any government action that lowers the cost of fossil fuel energy production, raises the price received by energy producers, or lowers the price paid by consumers.” Yet in one form or another, these same advantages are extended to other industries as well, and often with far more generous benefits.

In reality, oil and gas extraction and refining has already been singled out to receive even fewer tax breaks than other industries. Whereas Section 199 of the “American Job Creation Act of 2004” provides a 9 percent deduction from net income for businesses engaged in “qualified production activities,” oil and gas was penalized and limited to a 6 percent deduction. Meanwhile, many manufacturing industries, including farm equipment, appliances, and pharmaceuticals, take advantage of the full Section 199 deduction. Even highly profitable companies like Microsoft and Apple get those breaks, as do some foreign companies that operate factories in the U.S.

Small independent petroleum producers are eligible for resource depletion allowances which are similar to benefits available for all oil well mineral extraction, timber industries, etc., allowing them to pass the depletion on to individual investors. Large integrated corporations haven’t been eligible for these since the mid-1970s.

Oil and gas companies also receive benefits allowing them to write off drilling expenses in the year incurred rather than capitalizing them and writing them off over several years. This affects only timing of the expenses, not the total amounts. In addition, as with all international companies, they receive a tax credit for taxes paid to foreign nations. The purpose is to provide an offset to foreign taxes, often paid as royalties, so that the companies aren’t taxed twice on the same income.

And What About that Other Tax Money Blowing in the Wind?

A 2013 report titled “Assessing Wind Power Cost Estimates,” published by the Institute for Energy Research, found that the 2012 PTC extension alone cost taxpayers $12 billion. It also stated that details of many other wind power costs go unreported in government-funded study groups such as the Energy Laboratory (NREL). It observes that NREL’s estimates exclude key categories such as the cost of transmission and grid balancing for far-away, intermittent wind sources.

Rather than approaching the cost of wind power from the point of view of the wind project developer, the report author, Dr. Giberson, takes a broader view of the cost of wind power to all Americans, including electricity consumers and taxpayers. Such costs include the expense of transmission expansions needed to develop wind power, other grid integration expenses, and added grid reliability expenses. When these costs are accounted for, adding wind power via the PTC cannot reduce the overall cost of power to the economy — it merely shifts costs to taxpayers.

The PTC wind subsidy also creates an economic market distortion called “negative pricing.” So long as projects generate electricity, even during times when that power isn’t needed, producers still collect the tax credit for every kilowatt-hour they generate. We taxpayers pay for that, as do electricity consumers in the form of price rate adjustments.

And those “Green energy” jobs the President promised in his previous State of the Union Address … how’s that working out so far? Navigant Consulting of Chicago estimated that ending the PTC could ultimately cost 37,000 jobs throughout the wind power industry out of about 75,000 presently existing. So what would savings of those jobs through a PTC extension cost? Comparing the taxpayer costs per job for wind vs. the oil and gas sector, Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Robert Bryce estimates the former to be 15 times more.

Bryce arrived at this number by dividing a PTC $12.18 billion extension by 37,000 jobs purported to be saved per year spread over a decade, amounting to $32,900 per job annually. In contrast, applying March 2012 Congressional Budget Office figures putting tax preferences extended to the fossil fuel sector at a total of about $2.5 billion per year, along with an American Petroleum Institute estimate that the oil and gas sector employs 1.2 million people (not including service stations), that works out to $2,100 per job, per year. And while Bryce admits that this isn’t a perfect apples-to-apples correlation, he believes that it does provide a general sense of comparative tax treatments.

At least one Green energy developer recognizes that these stimulus subsidy programs have a record of doing more harm than good, and he isn’t reluctant to say why. Patrick Jenevein, CEO of the Dallas-based Tang Energy Group, posted a Wall Street Journal article noting that since 2009, wind farm developers like his company have been able to get a cash grant or tax credit covering up to 30 percent of their capital investment in a new project. He argues that as a consequence: “Government subsidies to new wind farms have only made the industry less focused on reducing costs. In turn, the industry produces a product that isn’t as efficient or cheap as it might be if we focused less on working the political system and more on research and development.”

Jenevein points out that: “After the 2009 subsidy became available, wind farms were increasingly built in less-windy locations… The average wind-power project built in 2011 was located in an area with wind conditions 16 percent worse than those of the average… Meanwhile, wind-power prices have increased to an average $54 per megawatt-hour, compared with $37 in 2005.” He continues: “If our communities can’t reasonably afford to purchase and rely upon the wind power we sell, it is difficult to make a moral case for our business, let alone an economic one.”

Important Lessons from Across the Pond

Teachable lessons for America from the Germans are reported by Der Spiegel in an article titled, “Gone With the Wind: Weak Returns Cripple German Renewables.” It emphasizes that rather than returning up to 20 percent annual returns on investment as promised, more often than not such pledges have not only been illusory, but that many of the investors have lost money to boot. Court complaints are mounting from those who haven’t received a dividend disbursement in years, along with investors in wind installations which have gone belly up. Bankruptcies combined with plans recently released by new German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel for a reduction in the guaranteed feed-in tariff are scaring off new money.

Particular concern is focused upon numerous projects that are financed by an investment model known as “closed-end funds” —which typically run for a 20-year period and are restricted to a limited number of investors. While such funds are supposed to guarantee annual dividend payments, about half of Germany’s wind enterprises are in such bad shape that many of those investors may not even recover their initial investments after 20 years. And even if they did, inflation will likely have reduced the value of those paybacks below original investment values.

A ten-year review 170 commercial wind company annual reports conducted by the German Wind Energy Association’s Investment Committee presents a sobering picture. Even if returns were to increase dramatically in the coming years — as a possible result of paying down debts, for example — only those projects in the best locations are likely to prove profitable. One-fifth of those with available annual reports dating back more than ten years haven’t ever paid back dividends exceeding 2 percent. This is all the more remarkable given the substantial government renewable energy subsidies provided over the years.

Writing again in the Wall Street Journal, Robert Bryce provides evidence that Europe’s long green energy romance honeymoon is over. Both the EU and German government announced separately last month that they are rolling back aggressive subsidies and mandates for renewables they simply cannot afford.

Such subsidies which now cost German consumers and industry about $32 billion prompted Minister Gabriel to state that his country is risking “dramatic deindustrialization” if it doesn’t reduce energy costs. After spending more than $100 billion subsidizing renewables since 2000, thanks (or no thanks) to a move away from nuclear power following the 2011 Fukushima disaster, Germany’s coal dependency is increasing. An estimated 7,300 megawatts of new coal plants are planned to be brought on line next year.

In Denmark, the wind investment wonderland, there’s little wonder why residential consumers pay more than three times more for electricity than we Americans do. The Center for European Policy Studies, a Brussels-based think tank, reported that European steelmakers pay twice as much four electricity (and four times more for natural gas) than in the U.S.

Subsidies have also blown ill winds in Spain. The economically ravaged country has already racked up a $35 billion “tariff deficit.”

Let these European experiences provide vital instruction for America. So long as this industry’s survival depends upon preferential government handouts and regulatory mandates, two things are clear. Wind is not a “free” or competitive free market source of energy. It is also not a charity we can continue to afford blow more money into.

SOURCE




Kansas legislature working on resolution declaring Obama climate goals based on false assumptions about manmade CO2

A Kansas House committee is weighing a resolution urging Congress to resist following President Barack Obama's plan for addressing climate change

Members of the House Energy and Environment Committee took nearly two hours of testimony Thursday about the measure. It declares that the federal goals for addressing climate change are based on false assumptions about the role of carbon dioxide and human activity. Supporters point to data suggesting warming is occurring naturally and human influence is overstated.

Environmentalists argue that the resolution is based on bad science and ignores data that emissions and humans are altering sea levels and weather patterns.

The resolution cites Obama's 2013 plan that calls for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions and encourages development of renewable forms of energy.

SOURCE




British environment agency ignores flood danger; Spend hundreds on 'equali-tea' gay awareness mugs... and £30,000 on gay pride marches

The government agency responsible for dealing with floods was last night under pressure to explain why it had spent thousands of pounds on what appeared to be ‘pet projects’  of its chairman Lord Smith.

A Mail on Sunday investigation has established that the Environment Agency, headed by Lord Chris Smith – Britain’s first openly gay Cabinet Minister – spent £639 on mugs promoting gay rights.

The mugs, emblazoned with the slogan ‘Some people are gay. Get over it!’, are thought to have been handed out to staff at the organisation’s headquarters in London and Bristol. The cost of the mugs is enough to buy more than 250 sandbags to protect flood victims’ homes.

It has also emerged that the agency spent £30,000 sponsoring Birmingham’s Gay Pride festival in 2009 and that staff were provided with ‘proud to be at Pride’ T-shirts and banners with the organisation’s logo on at Manchester Gay Pride marches in 2009 and 2007.

The agency even took out a costly half-page advert in the Independent newspaper’s Diversity section to boast about its sponsorship of the Birmingham Gay Pride event in 2009. Lord Smith became EA chairman in 2008.

The revelations come as the agency faces growing criticism of its handling of the flooding crisis. An analysis of the Environment Agency’s spending has uncovered that it spent more than £250,000 from 2011 to mid-2012 on meetings at private venues, despite having more than two dozen offices around the country.

The agency paid £5,439 to Aston Villa Football Club in 2012 for the use of meeting rooms, even though its Villa Park ground is only ten miles away from the organisation’s regional Midlands office.

The Environment Agency would not reveal details of what rooms it hired but Villa Park offers a host of luxurious meeting places including the Holte Suite, which costs £4,500 for a full day, and boasts an ‘elegant ground-floor suite’ which can cater for conference events and ‘sumptuous black-tie dinners’.

Meanwhile, the 1874 suite costs £3,000 for a day and offers views across the pitch as well as two bars and is said to be ideal for ‘stylish receptions, gala dinners and company meetings’.

The EA paid another £4,320 to Fulham Football Club in the same year for meeting rooms, even though the agency’s London offices are based only five miles away from Fulham’s Craven Cottage ground, which boasts a number of upmarket meeting rooms including the Marathonbet Lounge, which overlooks the Thames and is described as ‘ideal for small gatherings and  business events’.

Another £3,892 was paid to Sheffield United FC – recorded under the heading ‘restaurant and bars’ on a list of spending – for meeting rooms at the club’s Bramall Lane ground, despite the Environment Agency having offices little more than three miles away.

An EA spokeswoman said the organisation tried to hold meetings at its own premises, or in other government offices, and used commercial premises only ‘if absolutely necessary’. Referring specifically to the football ground venues, she added: ‘We will have used these premises as they were the best value for money available.’

Last night, Tory MP Ian Liddell-Grainger, whose Bridgwater and West Somerset constituency has been devastated by the floods, reacted with fury to the spending and called for Lord Smith to stand down. He said: ‘It seems like Chris Smith is spending taxpayers’ money on his own pet projects. He has been proven to be wanting at every level dealing with these floods.

‘It was crass stupidity to tell people who are living on flood plains that they’ve got it wrong. Now this shows that he’s actually made silly choices himself to spend hundreds of pounds on mugs and thousands sponsoring a Gay Pride event.

‘It gives no help to people in my constituency. He should go now and not hang around and spend more money on mugs which are not helping any flood victims. The only mug I can think of is Lord Smith. What are people going to think who work on the ground in flooded areas when they find out money is being spent on expensive meetings at football grounds?

‘Sadly, nothing surprises me any more – this agency has a history of excess and a lack of integrity.’

Lord Smith is a keen follower of the arts, having been a former Minister for culture, media and sport and chairman of the Donmar Warehouse theatre in London since 2003. He has also been a board  member for Phonographic Performance Ltd (PPL), an organisation which manages the rights of performers, since 2007.

The Environment Agency has even wasted thousands of pounds paying for meeting rooms that had to be cancelled because staff had to be called away to deal with flooding. From 2011 to mid-2012, the agency has spent £6,621 on cancelled meetings. Of that, £3,276 was because of floods.

As much as £1,188 was spent on one of the cancelled meetings, which was to be hosted at the four-star Royal York hotel but was called off due to flooding. Another £750 was spent on a meeting at Nottingham’s four-star Park Plaza hotel, despite it being cancelled due to flooding. And more than £700 was spent on cancelling a meeting at the four-star  Mercure Hotel in Manchester.

The Environment Agency also spent more than £1,200 on two chairs for employees with ‘health issues to avoid time taken off sick’, £1,056 on 500 pin badges for staff while working on an Olympics project and £900 on free fishing rods to hand out to participants in angling events.

Another £1,134 was spent on a plush dinner at Hotel Du Vin in Bristol for board members of the Environment Agency and Natural England to discuss ‘joint working and collaboration’.

Menus at the hotel’s restaurant offer diners £11.95 pan-roasted scallops for starters, £29 fillet steaks for main, and £7.95 raspberry soufflés. An EA spokeswoman said it no longer provided financial support for Gay Pride events but would not say why, adding: ‘As an employer, the Environment Agency is committed to diversity, and we support this in a number of ways.  ‘We continue to support Pride,  but we no longer provide financial sponsorship.

‘The Environment Agency has an important role to play in raising awareness of flood risk.  ‘We undertake a number of activities to ensure people know they are at risk of flooding, and understand the actions they can take get warnings, and prepare and protect themselves when the worst does happen.'

SOURCE





British High Court judge blocks moves to build huge wind turbine

A High Court judge has blocked a plan to build a huge wind turbine amid an unspoilt historic landscape, in a ruling that will give hope to campaigners nationwide.

The 284ft turbine, which would have been visible from more than three miles, was due to stand in an area of Norfolk countryside dotted with historic churches, a Grade I-listed Jacobean mansion, and a moated 15th century castle.

Although the scheme had been rejected by North Norfolk district council, a planning inspector overturned the decision and gave it the go-ahead – even making the extraordinary suggestion that the giant rotor blades could actually draw tourists to the area.

But High Court judge Robin Purchas yesterday granted a court order to the council quashing the scheme’s approval, saying the inspector failed to give adequate weight to the impact on the landscape and historic buildings.

Landowner David Mack had applied for permission to erect the turbine on his farm at Cromer Ridge, one of the highest points in Norfolk. Mr Mack, who operates Pond Farm under the name Genatec, argued it would generate energy for 665 homes and be ‘a good asset to the community’.

Listed buildings in the magnificent surrounding countryside include the Grade I-listed Barningham Hall, which is of Jacobean origin, the 15th century Baconsthorpe Castle, also Grade I, and four churches listed at Grade II*.

The council, which originally unanimously refused planning permission in August 2012, was outraged when planning inspector Alan Novitzky ruled last April that the huge turbine could be built.

Remarkably, he declared in his decision that the impact of the giant rotor blades in the midst of such beauty ‘would be less than substantial’. And in response to objections that it would deter tourists, he said: ‘For some, a wind turbine provokes interest rather than distaste.’

The local authority immediately launched a High Court appeal and argued that approving the scheme ‘flies in the face of the will of the local community’. The application had generated 1,800 letters and emails, 1,450 of which had been against the turbine plan.

Council members argued that allowing the turbine could open the door to similar future applications, damaging the district’s vital tourism industry.

Yesterday Judge Purchas ruled that the planning inspector did not comply with the planning regulations requiring him to have special regard to the ‘desirability of preserving the settings of listed buildings’. But he added that, had the inspector complied with theses, he could still have come to the same overall decision.

Last night North Norfolk district council leader Tom FitzPatrick welcomed the ruling, saying: ‘While a firm supporter of the economic benefits of off-shore wind energy, the council firmly believes on-shore wind turbines detract from the unique landscape of this beautiful area.’

Member of the No To That Turbine protest group councillor David Ramsbotham said: ‘The decision by the last inspector was disgusting because it did not take into account the views of local people.

‘A turbine would ruin the view for miles around. The tourism industry is vital for north Norfolk as it employs 8,500 people and brings in £400million a year.’

Mr Mack, who is building a 20-acre solar farm next to the proposed turbine site, said: ‘We will carry on fighting to get the turbine. The benefits would far outweigh any impacts.’

SOURCE




No, global warming did NOT cause the storms, says one of the Met Office's most senior experts

Contradicts silly old Slingo

One of the Met Office’s most senior experts yesterday made a dramatic intervention in the climate change debate by insisting there is no link between the storms that have battered Britain and global warming.

Mat Collins, a Professor in climate systems at Exeter University, said the storms have been driven by the jet stream – the high-speed current of air that girdles the globe – which has been ‘stuck’ further south than usual.

Professor Collins told The Mail on Sunday: ‘There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge.’

His statement carries particular significance because he is an internationally acknowledged expert on climate computer models and forecasts, and his university post is jointly funded by the Met Office.

Prof Collins is also a senior adviser – a ‘co-ordinating lead author’ – for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His statement appears to contradict Met Office chief scientist Dame Julia Slingo.

Last weekend, she said ‘all  the evidence suggests that climate change has a role to  play’ in the storms.

Prof Collins made clear that he believes it is likely global warming could lead to higher rainfall totals, because a warmer atmosphere can hold more water. But he said this has nothing to do with the storm conveyor belt.

He said that when the IPCC was compiling its Fifth Assessment Report on climate change last year, it discussed whether warming might affect the jet stream. But, he went on, ‘there was very low confidence that climate change has any effect on the jet stream getting stuck’. In the end, the possibility was not even mentioned in the report.

Prof Collins declined to comment on his difference of opinion with Dame Julia.  Five months ago, in a briefing on the IPCC report to Ministers, Dame Julia conceded the consequence of warming for rainfall ‘is not simulated well’ by climate models – though they are the basis for most of what she and other scientists say about the effects of climate change.

Last April, after the temperature fell to -11C in Aberdeenshire, the coldest April temperature for more than 100 years, Dame Julia said the cold winter and spring might also be due to global warming, because of ice melting in the Arctic.

Meanwhile, the Met Office has continued to issue questionable long-term forecasts. In mid-November, two weeks before the first of the storms, it predicted persistent high pressure for the winter, which was ‘likely to lead to drier-than-normal conditions across the country’.

It added that its models showed the probability of the winter being in the driest of five official categories was 25 per cent. The chances of it being in the wettest category was 15 per cent.

Infamously, in April 2009, the Met Office promised a ‘barbecue summer’ – which then turned out to be a washout. It forecast the winter of 2010 to 2011 would be mild: it was the coldest for 120 years.

In 2007, the Met Office said that globally, the decade 2004-2014 would see warming of 0.3C. In fact, the world has not got any warmer at all in this period.

At the beginning of 13 of the past 14 years, the Met Office has predicted the following 12 months would be significantly warmer than they have been. This, says the sceptic think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation, indicates ‘systemic’ bias.

SOURCE

***************************************

For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

Preserving the graphics:  Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from elsewhere.  But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life -- as little as a week in some cases.  After that they no longer come up.  From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even if they are no longer coming up on this site.  See  here or here

*****************************************