Talking points of global warming now include lying about obviously failed weather forecasts

12/26/10, "Weathering the true lies of global warming Newspeak," Gerald Warner, Scotsman

"WEATHER is not climate. Grasp that crucial distinction and you have the essence of the situation, a gnostic insight that will enable you to, er, weather the current cold snap while clinging faithfully to the revealed truth of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). The ex cathedra dogma that weather is not climate has the authoritative resonance of similar Orwellian Newspeak maxims such as "War is peace".

• Beware, above all, of succumbing to a false consciousness, of imagining that a few snowdrifts somehow discredit the metaphysical reality of global warming.

Those gifted with climate gnosis arguably have a duty to proclaim their faith by dressing in Bermuda shorts and bikinis, to dispel the illusion of Arctic conditions. This is another area in which

• the Scottish Parliament, a tabernacle of AGW piety,

might profitably impose a ban on people wrapping up in warm clothing, for is that not implicit climate change denial?

These are challenging times for climate jihadists. Last week the Met Office was forced to issue a press release stating it "categorically denies forecasting a 'mild winter' ".

• In fact, in October, its long-range probability map predicted an 80 per cent probability of warmer than average temperatures from November to January in Scotland.

It claimed Scotland, along with Northern Ireland, the eastern half of England and Cornwall, would experience temperatures above the 3.7°C average,

• more than 2°C higher than last winter.

Perversely, those are precisely the regions most ravaged by blizzard conditions;

• but the Met Office now insists that was not a forecast.

Apparently, just as weather is not climate, a Met Office map predicting an 80 per cent likelihood of higher temperatures is not a forecast. The Met Office is notoriously zealous in warmist propaganda. Its chairman,

• Robert Napier, is also chairman of the trustees of the Carbon Disclosure Project and of the Green Fiscal Commission - so, no conflict of interests there.

The global warming Mormons of NASA are so disturbed by public perception that this winter is verging on the chilly across the northern hemisphere

• that they have produced a map showing areas where they claim alarmingly high temperatures are prevailing, such as the middle of the Arctic Ocean.

As sceptics have pointed out, all the hotspots highlighted coincide with

• places where there are no weather stations,

• so clearly it is the trusty computers that are generating these high temperatures.

Of the fragile construct of global warming mythology there is hardly a domino left standing. Declining polar bear population? Since 1970 the world population of polar bears has 'declined'

• from 5,000 to 25,000.

The notorious 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, claimed up to 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest could be drastically reduced by even a slight decrease in rainfall caused by global warming, replacing trees with tropical grassland. This year a study funded, ironically, by Nasa completely discredited that theory. And who can forget the imminent disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers fiasco?

The suggestion of a connection between "man-made" global warming and

• hurricanes has now been rejected by the scientist who first advanced it,

• Professor Kerry Emanuel, after further research.

Melting ice-caps? When Lewis Pugh tried to paddle a kayak to the "ice-free" North Pole he had to stop 600 miles south of his destination and

• 100 miles short of where a canoeist had reached a century before.

Even the IPCC has been forced to revise its forecasts of rises in sea level dramatically downwards. Global average temperatures reached a peak in 1998

• and have been declining since.

That, of course, is naïve empiricism, unlikely to deter the warmist fanatics. Gore's propaganda film An Inconvenient Truth contained nine major factual errors;

• Michael Mann's discredited 'hockey stick' graph is a global joke. So is the Piltdown Institute of Mann-made Global Warming ("Hide the decline!") at the Creative Research Unit, University of East Anglia. The whitewash job done on the jokers there was so blatant as to be counter-productive.

Our MSPs - mostly people who give cretinism a bad name - have gone overboard for a world-leading role in climate crusading. How much energy did Scotland's ice-bound wind turbines generate this month? The regulation director at ScottishPower Renewables has stated:

• "Thirty gigawatts of wind maybe requires 25 GW of backup."

Few Scottish windfarms attain even 28 per cent of capacity. Cutting-edge technology, eh?

But who cares? Hey, this isn't about science - it's about cash. Specifically, $130bn from Western taxpayers

• (though the mid-term elections in America mean Joe Public there has firmly said: "Include me out!").

It will take more than a few tax hikes and power cuts to deflect Civic Scotland from embracing the latest leftist fantasy. So, on with the motley! And if you are venturing out, take care to apply

• plenty of sunblock."

####

• 12/25/10, "...The hijacking of the Met Office... is no longer just a national joke: it is turning into a national catastrophe....

"The real question, however, is why has the Met Office become so astonishingly bad at doing the job for which it is paid nearly £200 million a year –

• in a way which has become so stupendously damaging to our country?

The answer is that in the past 20 years, as can be seen from its website, the Met Office has been hijacked from its proper role to become wholly subservient to its obsession with global warming. (At one time it even changed its name to the Met Office "for Weather and Climate Change".)

This all began when its then-director John Houghton became one of the world's most influential promoters of the warmist gospel. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and remained at the top of it for 13 years.

• It was he who, in 1990, launched the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Change, closely linked to the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia (CRU), at the centre of last year's Climategate row, which showed how the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC had been prepared to bend their data and to suppress any dissent from warming orthodoxy.

The reason why the Met Office gets its forecasts so hopelessly wrong is that they are based on those same computer models on which the IPCC itself relies to predict the world's climate in 100 years time.

• They are programmed on the assumption that, as CO2 rises, so temperatures must inexorably follow.

For 17 years this seemed plausible, because the world did appear to be getting warmer. We all became familiar with those warmer winters and earlier springs, which the warmists were quick to exploit to promote their message – as when Dr David Viner of the CRU famously predicted to The Independent in 2000 that "within a few years winter snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event".

• (Last week, that article from ten years ago was the most viewed item on The Independent's website.)

But in 2007, the computer models got caught out, failing to predict a temporary plunge in global temperatures of 0.7°C, more than the net warming of the 20th century. Much of the northern hemisphere suffered what was called in North America "the winter from hell". Even though temperatures did rise again, in the winter of 2008/9 this happened again, only worse.

The Met Office simply went into denial. Its senior climate change official, Peter Stott, said in March 2009 that the trend towards milder winters was likely to continue. There would not be another winter like 1962/3 "for 1,000 years or more". Last winter was colder still. And now we have another even more savage "random event", for which we are even less prepared. (The Taxpayers' Alliance revealed last week that councils have actually ordered less salt this winter than last.)

The consequences of all this are profound. Those who rule over our lives have been carried off into a cloud cuckoo land for which no one was more responsible than the zealots at the Met Office, subordinating all it does to their dotty belief system. Significantly, its chairman, Robert Napier, is not a weatherman but a "climate activist", previously head of WWF-UK, one of our leading warmist campaigning groups.

At one end of this colossal diversion of national resources, permeating every level of government, we have the hapless Mr Quarmby, who feels obliged to follow the Met Office, advise that the present freeze is a "random event" and call for no special responses – with the results we see on every side. At the other, fixated by the same belief system, we have our climate change secretary, Chris Huhne, hoping we can somehow keep our lights on and our economy running by spending hundreds of billions of pounds on thousands more windmills.

• More than once in the past week, as our power stations have been thrashed way beyond normal peak power demand, the contribution of wind turbines has been so small that it has registered as zero percent. (See "neta electricity summary page")

At the heart of all this greenie make-believe that has our political class in its thrall has been the hijacking of the Met Office from its proper role.

• It's no longer just a national joke: it is turning into a national catastrophe."

.
.