By David Rose, Daily Mail
The official watchdog that advises the Government on greenhouse gas emissions targets has launched an astonishing attack on The Mail on Sunday for accurately reporting that alarming predictions of global warming are wrong.
We disclosed that although highly influential computer models are still estimating huge rises in world temperatures, there has been no statistically significant increase for more than 16 years.
Despite our revelation earlier this month, backed up by a scientifically researched graph, the Committee on Climate Change still clings to flawed predictions.
All a con? The Mail on Sunday revealed some of the science behind the scare tactics for Global warming were miscalculated and now they are being attacking for pointing out the truth
Leading the attack is committee member Sir Brian Hoskins, who is also director of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College, London. In a blog on the Committee on Climate Change’s website, Sir Brian insisted: ‘The scientific basis for significant long-term climate risks remains robust, despite the points raised ...Early and deep cuts in emissions are still required.’
He also claimed our report ‘misunderstood’ the value of computer models. Yet in an interview three years ago, Sir Brian conceded that when he started out as a climate scientist, the models were ‘pretty lousy, and they’re still pretty lousy, really’.
Our graph earlier this month was reproduced from a version first drawn by Dr Ed Hawkins, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science. Last week it was reprinted as part of a four-page report in The Economist.
The accuracy of computer forecasts is vital because they influence politicians and their key environmental advisers on how urgently to act on climate change ‘ and how many billions of pounds they take from the taxpayer in ‘green’ levies.
How the MoS reported the faulty forecast
The Committee on Climate Change claims such forecasts must be right because world temperatures have previously matched computer models’ ‘outputs’ for most of the past 60 years. Yet as this newspaper pointed out, for almost all of that 60year period the models were not making predictions because they did not yet exist.
Instead, the models had recently been making ‘hindcasts’ backward projections based on climate simulations and tailored to actual temperatures. The evidence shows the models collapse when they try to forecast the future.
Author Andrew Montford, who runs the widely read Bishop Hill climate blog, leapt to The Mail on Sunday’s defence and said Sir Brian’s reliance on ‘hindcasts’ was ‘crazy, crazy stuff’.
David Whitehouse, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the graph showed models were so unreliable that ‘if this kind of data were from a drugs trial it would have been stopped long ago’.
And last week, The Economist repeated our claims that many scientists now believe that previous estimates of ‘climate sensitivity’ - how much the world will warm each time the level of carbon dioxide doubles - are far too high.
In a key 2007 report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested this was most likely to be about 3C, with 4.5C considered ‘likely’. However, recent research suggests the true figure is much lower between 1.5C and 2C giving the world many more decades to avoid disaster through effective new technologies.
The Committee on Climate Change, established by the 2008 Climate Change Act, advises the Government on setting ‘carbon budgets’ and CO2 emissions cuts. It is chaired by Lord Deben, who also heads Veolia Water UK, which connects windfarms to the National Grid.
Note: I sat on a panel with James and Dr Singer a few years back at one of the ICCC conferences. James did not nor would not claim to be a weather or climate expert but a pundit and one of the very few who ‘get it’ and are willing to buck the mainstream currents and tell the truth.
Sir John Beddington, the government’s retiring Chief Scientist has been doing the media rounds today, telling anyone who’ll listen how “Climate Change” is still a serious problem about which we should all worry greatly.
Has he looked out of the window recently?
Looking out of my window just now, I noticed that the Northamptonshire landscape was completely blanketed in Dr David Viner (who predicted snow was a thing of the past in 2000). Just like it was yesterday. And the day before that, when we rescued two orphaned lambs from the frozen fields. Which isn’t something you normally expect in March, is it? (See more)
I’m sure I know what Beddington would say in reply to this. “Weather is not climate.” No, indeed. But it’s an argument which would surely carry a lot more weight if Beddington and his alarmist brethren hadn’t spent most of the Nineties and Noughties citing the hot summers and mild winters as evidence of man-made global warming. Later, as we know, they amended their scare-phrase to the more inclusive “climate change”. Then, growing more desperate as global mean temperatures stubbornly refused to rise with the alacrity their dodgy computer models predicted they would, they even had a stab at popularising “global climate disruption” and “global weirding”. Had these caught on (which they didn’t, really) it would have been a brilliant coup because what it would have meant is that whenever the weather did anything weird anywhere in the world (which weather does, by the way, all the time) the alarmist movement would have scored another propaganda victory.
Actually, though, if you’ll look at the facts - something that the Warmists appear increasingly loath to do - what you’ll realise is that our winters ARE getting colder. That there has been no statistically significant warming since January 1997. That the CAGW hypothesis is looking increasingly threadbare. And that, therefore, the billions if not trillions that Britain and the other Western industrialised economies have spent “combatting climate change” have very likely been utterly wasted.
This is what I find so puzzling about Beddington’s media circus antics today. If I were in his shoes, if I’d been involved in promulgating a disgraceful scam whereby the global depression was prolonged and deepened, where thousands of people died in artificially induced fuel poverty, where some of the world’s most beautiful scenery had been ravaged with wind turbines and solar panels and I had then been found out by events, the very last thing I’d be doing was traipsing round the BBC studios crowing about my achievements. What I’d actually be doing is retiring to my study with a bottle of whisky and my trusty service pistol, there to do the only proper and decent thing a chap should do when he has brought shame on himself and caused untold suffering to millions.