Climate Realists

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“Why did we slide into chaos?” asks the front page of today’s Telegraph. It was prompted by the wrath of Transport Secretary Philip Hammond who apparently can’t understand why it is that Britain has been caught out - yet again - by snowy weather.

“There are lessons to be learnt from our performance in every bout of bad weather and it is important that we learn those now,” he says.

All right, Phil. Your wish is my command. For considerably less than you paid the RAC’s David Quarmby last month for a review of weather-related transport policy, I can tell you what the problem is: “The Met Office”.

As the good Dr North reminds us, as recently as late October the Met Office was predicting that we should expect an “unusually dry and mild winter”. This was news to every independent weather forecaster in the world from Joe Bastardi to Piers Corbyn who have been predicting a harsh winter for months.

But the Met Office of course knew better thanks to its spiffy new 33 million pound IBM supercomputer (90 per cent funded, of course, by the taxpayer) whose precognitive powers are so great, it is said that on a good day with a fair wind behind it and can very nearly match the track record of the dead celebrity Paul the Octopus. And of course, it’s this very same computer which is responsible for so many of the “projections” - not even “predictions”, note, but “projections” - of Anthropogenic Climate Doom so lovingly detailed on its taxpayer-funded website.

Why then, does the government go on relying on the services of this risible outfit? How come when the Met Office’s spokeswoman Vicky Pope pops up yet again to reassure us that this Siberian winter is a case of “weather not climate” does anyone still take her seriously?

Really, this is one for the psychiatrists, rather than me, but in it a nutshell it’s a case of cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is when all the evidence of your senses and intellect tell you one thing; but your brain stubbornly insists the truth is otherwise.

So, for example, it’s snowing heavily outside; the country is in chaos; independent weather forecasters are predicting dreadful winters for many years to come; global warming stopped in 1998 even as CO2 emissions continued to rise; the Climategate emails reveal the scientists at the very heart of the IPCC to be corrupt and mendacious; wind farms and solar farms are an excedingly inefficient way of producing energy and have wreaked serious economic damage on all countries (Denmark, Spain, Germany) that have tried introducing them on a massive scale.

Yet still you go on insisting that: the snow is a temporary blip ("weather not climate"), AGW remains a serious threat - as the majority of the most distinguished and reliable scientific “experts” testify; green jobs are the future and the drive for renewables can only do Britain the power of good.

Well, cognitive dissonance is the polite way of putting it. I’d call it sheer and utter bloody madness.

So does Joe Bastardi:

“The shiver that is hitting is similar to the opening of January last year world wide, where major cold shots engulfed the far east, the eastern US and Europe. That these are growing more pronounced is no accident, and the climate people arguing for reduction of greenhouse gasses are acting like spoiled children when they claim what ever happens means they are right. I wish I had their job. When I am wrong, in what I do in the private sector, the ramifications are people will cancel their contract if they feel I am wrong enough of the time to lose them money… By the way, its what I love about competition and capitalism..it forces those that wish to excel to compete.. Imagine if your favorite football team was forced to “redistribute goals” based on some fictional rule that said that it wasn’t fair to score more than the other team.

I get nuts about this stuff.”

Don’t worry, Joe, you’re not the only one.

See more here.