By Peter Foster, Financial Post

After predicting a mild winter, the British weather service is profoundly ­embarrassed by the current deep freeze

Let’s hope Santa isn’t relying on weather forecasts from the U.K. Met Office. The British deep freeze of recent weeks (which has also immobilized much of continental Europe) is profoundly embarrassing for the official forecaster. Just two months ago it projected a milder than usual winter.

This debacle is more than merely embarrassing. The Met Office is front and centre in rationalizing the British government’s commitment to fight catastrophic man-made global warming with more and bigger bureaucracy, so its conspicuous errors raise yet more questions about that “settled” science.

When you’re making confident global projections for the year 2100, you can only be contradicted on the basis of alternative hypotheses, of which the vast majority of people have no comprehension. But pretty much anybody can look out of the window and tell the difference between light drizzle and a snowbank. Moreover, private forecasters strongly disagreed with the Met Office’s winter projections as soon as they were made (which should add fuel to calls for the organization’s privatization).

Yesterday, the British-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, one of the world’s leading advocates for climate objectivity, called on the U.K. government to set up an independent inquiry into the Met Office’s failures. It also wants an examination of the institution’s politicization, although that is hardly likely to come from the very government that is manipulating it. Still, bias can be expensive. Dr. Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, noted that the price tag on the country’s unpreparedness for this winter could reach $15-billion.

At the recent Cancun climate meetings, the Met Office presented a study suggesting that the outlook for global climate was, on balance, worse than projected in the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Given its short-range accuracy, this forecast might be taken with a pinch of road salt, or a tot of de-icing fluid.

Significantly, the Met Office is closely associated with the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, home of Climategate. Both organizations are deeply involved with the IPCC. When it comes to the CRU’s crystal ball, one of its official declared a decade ago: “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.” No danger of that for little Britons this year.

The Met’s blunder follows similar cockups last year and the year before. In February, Met Office scientist Peter Stott declared that 2009 was an anomaly, and that milder and wetter winters were now - for sure - to be expected. He suggested that exceptionally cold British winters such as the one that occurred in 1962-63 were now expected to occur “about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850.” Now, the Met Office is admitting that the current December may be the coldest in Britain in the past 100 years.

No doubt the warmist crowd will be quick to express outrage at this blatant confusion of global climate with local weather, but that won’t wash. The Met makes its short-term forecasts on the basis of the same brand of massive computer power and Rube Goldberg modelling used to project the global climate. The suggestion that forecasting the climate is easier than forecasting the weather comes into the same category as acknowledging that governments couldn’t run a lemonade stand, but then believing that they can “manage” an economy.

Confusing weather with climate isn’t always condemned by alarmists. In March, Al Gore deemed it disgraceful that “deniers” dared to suggest that North America’s East Coast Snowmageddon in any way undermined the Inconvenient Truth of man-made global warming. More snow was obviously due to man. The very next day, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell declared that the lack of snow at the Vancouver Olympics was due to...man-made global warming.

Another example of one-way theory was provided three months later by climatologist Michael Mann, concoctor of the infamous “Hockey Stick” graph, and one of the reluctant stars of the Climategate emails. In an interview, Mr. Mann claimed that the then current North American heat wave was clear evidence of hand of man. So you see the principle: If it supports the warmist cause, it’s climate; if it doesn’t, it’s just weather.

The Met’s red face comes at the end of a very bad year for climatism. It started with Climategate and ended with the utter collapse of the Kyoto process at Cancun. In between, there was a United Nations report that admitted that the IPCC process was deeply flawed, followed by projections from the International Energy Agency that confirmed that bold commitments to slash fossil fuel use were so much political pollution. Meanwhile, the vast costs of government promotion of alternatives such as wind and solar have also become increasingly apparent, along with the fact that green jobs are a mirage.

Mirages definitely aren’t a problem this week on the runways of Heathrow. See post here. See Bishop Hill’s commentary on the Winter Resilience Review on the Met Office.

See also this blog post from Paul Hudson of the BCC with this plot so far (enlarged here).

H/T GWPF

By Dr. Gordon Fulks

Letter to legislators in response to this story in OregonLive.
Dear Jim,

While it is easy to predict that our electric bills will rapidly double with the current push for large amounts of renewable energy to replace the tried and true power sources we presently use, the real issue is what are we getting for our money?

First of all, how can we be certain that the present course we are on will double our bills?  That’s easy.  “Renewable” sources have a wholesale cost per kilowatt-hour that is many times that of conventional sources like hydro, coal, natural gas, or nuclear.  If only a tiny fraction of our generating capability comes from these “renewable” sources, then the effects on the ratepayer will be the relatively minimal increases so far.  But as soon as legislators force power companies to expand from one or two percent to ten or twenty percent coming from extremely costly sources, watch out.  Electric bills have to increase greatly or the power companies will go broke.  Legislators can hide some of the pain by shifting a fraction of the burden to taxpayers, but the public will quickly figure out that taxpayers and ratepayers are the same individuals - us!  In other words, the crazy mandates for extremely expensive power will take a huge toll on our society and destroy our once substantial competitive advantage of cheap power here in the Northwest.

But let’s ask for a moment if we are getting something for all the money we are spending.  One of Bill Bradbury’s aids admitted to me that Global Warming might be a hoax, but argued that we are justified in continuing with it because of all the wonderful changes it is forcing in our society.  Presumably, windmills, solar cells, and ethanol were high on her list of wonderful accomplishments.  But all of these are energy and economic disasters for us.

Here’s why:

All energy takes some energy to produce.  Let me call this ‘overhead.’ It takes energy to drill an oil or natural gas well, additional energy to pump or truck what comes out of the ground to a refinery, still more energy to refine the crude into useful products and transport it to market.  But the whole process produces a vast amount of net energy, as well as a vast amount of high quality energy.  That means we get somewhere with such an undertaking, because our overhead is relatively low.

But as even Al Gore has discovered, we get nowhere with ethanol made from corn.  It requires about as much high quality energy to produce as we ever get out of the inferior product.  You might as well just burn the natural gas and diesel fuel directly and shutdown the elaborate process that is today converting these into ethanol.  That would also help our food prices that have risen dramatically as a consequence of the diversion of a significant fraction of our corn crop to fuel production.  That has had devastating consequences in the Third World that has long depended on our agricultural surpluses.  The UN World Food Program estimates that a billion people now go hungry thanks to our very misguided ethanol ‘experiment.’

Solar cells are a similar boondoggle, but without the horrendous social consequences.  It takes about as much electrical energy to maanufacture silicon solar cells as will ever be returned by them over their typical twenty year lifespan.  In some applications, the use of high quality energy (electricity) to make more high quality energy is justified, if the solar electricity is extremely valuable.  Satellite applications are a good example.  But if solar cells merely replace grid power, then they cannot be considered high quality power, because they do not produce electricity when the Sun is not shining.  That gets us into the issue of back up power which is necessary for all intermittent sources.  Hydro and natural gas generating plants work well for back up, if they have excess capacity.  But if new natural gas plants need to be built just to back up solar, then it is very difficult to justify the expense.  You would be considerably better off just building the natural gas plant and foregoing the solar.

Windmills are perhaps the worst boondoggle of all because they require much more high quality energy to manufacture, install, maintain, and backup than they will ever produce.  And in fact the electricity they produce is far inferior to that from a conventional power plant because it is so erratic.  With solar, we can at least depend on the Sun shining most days in appropriate locations.  The same cannot be said for wind.  The erratic nature of wind places a huge strain on the electric grid, if we expect our power to continue 24/7.  Continually bringing huge generators up to speed and then shutting them down just to accommodate the wind shortens their life considerably.  The same argument can be made for the large generators used in huge windmills.  Substantial environmental problems with windmills also suggest that they are a problem not a solution.

I would hope that our State Senators and Representatives would take the time to learn something about the generation of electricity, because they are forcing changes that even by their standards are a disaster.  I say “by their standards” because they are claiming carbon dioxide, energy independence, and environmental dividends that simply do not exist.

With high costs and no demonstrable benefits, we need to abandon this bandwagon in favor of real solutions for our energy needs.

Gordon J. Fulks, PhD
Corbett, Oregon USA

By Paul Chesser

Clearly there is an organized effort by the Left to discredit Fox News’ “hard news” reporting credibility—most recently on global warming. Last week Media Matters and others criticized the network’s Washington managing editor, Bill Sammon, for a memo he sent to his reporters that told them to “refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question.” In other words, telling them to objectively report the facts. The Leftosphere is in a tizzy.

Now comes a USA Today report about a survey conducted in November which found that “climate science doubts increase the more you watch Fox News:”

The survey results follow news this week from a leaked memo that a Fox News managing editor instructed reporters to note doubts about global temperature increases last year, and a University of Maryland study found that Fox News viewers were “significantly more likely” to believe falsehoods about the economy, political votes and climate science.

“The more Fox News you get, the less likely you are to trust scientists,” says Stanford public opinion expert Jon Krosnick. The November survey of 890 people found that, “more exposure to Fox News was associated with less endorsement of the views of mainstream scientists about global warming, and all of these relationships are statistically significant.”

Yes, this was a perfectly objective survey conducted by an otherwise disinterested public opinion expert at Stanford. Who did the project for the university’s Woods Institute for the Environment, whose mission is “Creating Practical Solutions for People and the Planet.” And Krosnick is is a university fellow at Resources for the Future. Who just so happened to conduct this survey in November, before news broke about the Sammon memo, which implies they were sitting on it as they did their polling and waited until now so they could release a barrage of publicity—in conjunction with other Leftist groups—for maximum impact. And as you see above, Krosnick cited the Sammon memo in his survey report.

All of which USA Today found not relevant to report.

Update 2:00 p.m: I should have known better than to run this post without first checking if Marc Morano at Climate Depot had anything on Krosnick or Woods Institute. He does:

Professor Krosnick’s polling results are so woeful that both Pew Research Center Survey and Gallup polling recently took the time to harshly reprimand him for his shoddy work.

See: Warming propagandist Prof. Krosnick exposed: Pew research ‘says that Krosnick’s survey is marred by faulty methodology. ...used words that encourged a positive response’

Polling propaganda Prof. Krosnick slapped down by Gallup Polling! Recent polling ‘shows demonstrable drops in Americans’ acknowledgment of and concern about global warming’

Krosnick has been skewing polling results on global warming for years and has been getting caught every time.

And then there are the public opinion polls by Rasmussen that have shown increasing public skepticism on global warming—outnumbering alarmists.

Read more here.