For reasons which are quite obvious, whenever I log into the Independent I find I cannot post comments.
However this one was just too good to keep quiet about:
Soon children won’t know what the Met Office is!
For anyone who doesn’t yet this is a reference to the 2000 article in the independent in which a UEA academic said:
Note: Oldbrew informs me: “It’s a £3 million contract not £30m so the MetO may just about survive :/”
http://www.thegwpf.com/bbc-pulls-plug-on-met-office/
I must learn to stop saying “we’ve won” – because each time I do, something even better comes along which seems a better point to mark the end.
So, again, it is just beginning to dawn on me that if reports that some £30million of the Met Office budget of £33million are true, it now appears the end of the BBC contract with the Met Office is not only the end of “credible” global warming climate extremism on the BBC (fuelled by the Met office), but quite possibly the end of the Met Office.
And if so, the “head” & much of the body and several arms and legs of the global warming beast will have been removed in the UK. The UK climate extremists will once again be relegated to a few leather-patch-on-elbows pipe-smoking sandal-wearing hi-vis jacket wearing academics, ready to be wheeled out once in a blue moon.
In other words, it now seems likely that it will be the end of the Met Office contract with the BBC that history will mark as the end of the global warming scam in the UK.
And if only I hadn’t already said “we’ve won” – I could now say “we’ve won”.
Moreover, because this came out of the blue in a way that must have been unexpected, it will certainly send a cold shiver of realism down the backs of other government climate extremist organisations, particularly in the US, where similar draconian action against e.g. the EPA, NASA or NOAA looks highly likely when the Republicans win the presidency (even without it still looks probable!)
I’m currently engaged on a very different project. So, if anyone whether sceptic or not, wishes to raise any issue or subject vaguely on climate, science, engineering or Scottishness, then I’d welcome a few paragraphs to raise an issue, interest or question.
Main rules are not to attack individuals and it must be legal and decent.
I have a poster named Cedric who keeps going on about NASA. As his comments were off topic, I removed them from another subject but as he put in the effort to write them, I will reproduce them here:
NASA, for example. Continue reading
When I was at school I seriously thought about joining the Met Office. So, I must admit I have some empathy with the old school weather forecasters who used to run the Met Office who may suffer as a result of the loss of the BBC contract.
But unfortunately, even if I had joined, like so many others with a science background, I would have been sidelined by the new breed of arrogant computer geeks with their £100million (public paid) computers and their (failed) models, marketing consultants and accountants.
Because, in a real sense the Met Office I wanted to join died years ago. Their obsession with global warming was not so much the cause of their decline, but just a symptom of its demise.
Of course, I am delighted that the climate extremists in the BBC will no longer have the succour of the climate extremists that now infest the Met Office. Continue reading
Dear sceptic (skeptics),
you might know me as “Scottish Sceptic”, in real life I’m Mike Haseler, a father of three, who like so many others felt obliged to fight the non-science in what some called the “climate wars”. I believe I speak for most of us, when I say our aims were modest: to stop the stupidity, arrogance and politicisation that infested academia and those like NOAA from seriously impacting our society, economy and yes … the environment. Because, I sincerely believe that at the heart of most sceptics is not only a passion for honesty and real compulsion to do what we believe is right for society, but also a deep concern for the earth.
And in a real sense we have “won” the climate war, because Green groups are now all but admitting what I call the “Dead Parrot Talks” (as I call them) in Paris will be a “failure”. They are now discussion “how to make people care” about the (lack of) warming. And the reality is that whatever their rhetoric, governments like the UK are starting to dismantle the global warming bandwagon.
But in another sense, the war can never be “won”, because the fight against arrogant stupidity and greed will always be with us. Because so long as there are gullible people, there will always be the profiteering sharks, ready to fabricated crisis to line their pockets. So, there will always be a need for us sceptics!
But like “the Dead Parrot” sketch of Monty python, this parrot (global warming) is dead as more and more the public realise that it was only ever on its perch “because it had been nailed there” as the sketch goes.
So, I think it is time we all gave ourselves a pat on the back,. But unfortunately, we sceptics initially few in number, but now overwhelming in numbers, do not have some leader to stand on some battleship and proclaim “the war is over”. Nor can we cannot award medals of gallantry to those who stood out for their devotion to duty however much they are deserved.
However, I can say without modesty or fear of contradiction (by the facts), never have so many owed so much to so few. Those bloggers who stood up against tyranny in the dark hours of repression, those who supported them in the comments, even just those who read the posts in quiet support, have all been responsible for one of the greatest victories of humanity: not against actual weapons of mass destruction, but instead against false ideas and ignorance. I sincerely believe that if there had not been those few first sceptics willing to take the lead and this global warming hysteria had taken a deeper hold, the impact to our society would have caused a Stalinist type holocaust greater than any war the world has ever seen.
That threat has gone (for now), so as the turmoil of the “climate wars” ebbs away and governments, academics and governmental agencies, begin to wake up to the changing world, I would just like to say “thanks” to each and everyone sceptic.
Thank you all the bloggers both big and small, all of whom played a vital role disseminating the truth. Thank you to everyone who has contributed articles and comments both on my blog, here and everywhere else. It has been a pleasure getting know people throughout the world. Thank you wives & husbands, families & friends that have put up with us “enthusiasts”. Thank you the few politicians who listened to us and thank you to those journalists who did their job and ensured the public heard the “other side” of the debate.
But those like me contributing on the internet at least could escape the vitriol and hatred thrown at us by the ignorant and greedy on line. In contrast, in areas like academia, sceptics not only risked their own careers, but in some notable cases lost them. So a particular thanks to them for their personal sacrifice in standing up for real science against the evil of ignorance and political spite.
But last of all one special lady deserves a mention. Without her, none of us would be here. She is without doubt our greatest sceptic who has consistently put up two fingers to all alarmists. She was the original sceptic who was just as sceptical of the global cooling crisis as the 20th century warming. So, let us all, in our own way say:
The Human race’s greatest sceptic!Back in 2008 when I wrote the following post, the BBC might have got away with what Andrew Montford on Bishop Hill describes as:
For such a trifling programme, Quentin Letts’ What’s the Point of the Met Office is really making waves. Booker reviews it over at the Mail and there’s some interesting coverage by Damian Thompson at the Spectator.
So, let’s just see what was already apparent some 8 years ago:
Global Temperatures & CO2
The Failure of the Theory of Manmade Global Warming
In logic, there is a requirement the world is structured such that A->B which can be read “if A then B”, but is often assumed to mean: “A causes B”.
As a physicist, I was indeed taught that the whole world could be dissected into smaller and smaller constituent parts and that these could all be put together again and their behaviour explained by a set of causal relationships (aka science) to build the world we have. As such the implied philosophical basis of science is that …
“everything has a cause”.
I would now like to suggest that there exists systems where it is not only impractical to describe them as having a cause, but that there is literally no “cause”.
Fortunately for me, after doing physics at University, I went into engineering and fairly quickly the arrogance instilled in me from my school and university courses began to disappear. I realised that in real life, the assumption the world could be dissected into constituent parts and that by knowing “science” you could predict how these would work was false.
Like most people who follow a similar path, I quickly learnt the idea that :
“it might work in theory – but does it work in practice”.
Looking back now, I now have a much higher regard for this engineering philosphy as I now see that this is undoubtedly the origin of what later came to be known as “the scientific method”. AKA (it might look OK in theory – but does it work in practice?)
OK, I admit I’m just extremely pissed off with the weather! (And by the time I finished writing this I was even more pissed off with the Met Office for their dishonest portrayal of this weather)
OK, there’s no evidence that the ice age is coming (my original title), but I rightly feel rightly miffed with the Met Office and all the other climate extremists. It’s another cold wet day, after a cold wet July following the coldest June in 40 years. And to put it in context, this coldest July since 1998* included a spectacular hot 2-3 days (see: How to survive a Scottish heat wave).
So, if this coldest July since 1998 includes a heat wave – which we couldn’t appreciate because it came as shock after the previous cold weather and so none of us had time to acclimatise and get to enjoy it – you can imagine how grim the rest of the month was like!
Scotland was the coldest July since 1998* – and probably if you exclude those 2-3 days with heat – it may well be the coldest on record.
And this is how the Met Office show it (courtesy of “NotALotOfPeopleKnowThat“).
AND HERE IT MIGHT HAVE ENDED HOWEVER ….
As I peered to see why there wasn’t a HUGE dark blue pot where we live, something occurred to me. It’s really easy to give a false perception of the climate by adjusting the scale. THIS SCALE GOES UP IN 1C STEPS. So I checked on line to see what scale the Met Office used when it is warm and I found this:
THIS SCALE FROM THE SAME MONTH LAST YEAR GOES UP IN 0.5C steps (not 1C as this year), but worse, the first colouring of “warm” is at +0.2C allowing them to plaster the whole map with red.
The majority of the warm of the map last year was “up to +1.5C”. This is exactly the same limit for the cold this july, but don’t the maps look completley different! This shows a clear conscious decision to down play the recent cold and/or to enhance the recent warming using to dishonest tricks:
I don’t have the actual data to allow a map similar to the above, but using something similar to last July’s scale and guessing where the -0.2C limit would be, I think it would not look too different from this:
|
Scale as used by Met Office this year. |
 The same colour scale as July 2013** |
* Allegedly but the Met Office clearly have a culture of exaggerating warmth when it comes and severely down-playing cold, so for very good reason I don’t trust the Met Office on any statistics.
**As close as I can get it given I don’t have all the data.
I’m finding these days that there are less and less stories online in the newsmedia on global warming – so I thought I’d go and look how Obama is doing with his “legacy”.
I first looked at the 90 day trend – but all you can see is less of a weekend dip in the last few days which would take too long to explain. So here is the last seven days:
The google trend for last & days of “Global warming”. If you look closely, you can see that there’s a small increase peaking on 4th with a 15% increase for around a day.
