Peter Glover: Global Warming Just Isn’t Happening: Official

Spin it as “stalled”. Spin it anyway you want. The cold reality is that global warming just isn’t happening. In truth, it hasn’t been happening for 16 years. And – according to one of the world’s leading contributor to the UN IPCC’s theory on climate, the UK Meteorological Office, it isn’t going to happen over the next five years either. Beyond that, who knows? The Met Office certainly doesn’t – so neither does the UN IPCC.
Just last year, the UK Met Office Hadley Center confidently predicted the average global temperature must rise incrementally by around 0.2^oC decade by decade driven by CO2 rises. No small incremental rise. Then on Christmas Eve, something curious happened. The UK Met Office posted a note on its website announcing it was downgrading its assessment. Now we should remember that the Met Office white coats had long derided sceptics who questioned their assessment and their call for immediate government action. All of which helps explain why they tried to bury the news of their ‘revised’ downgrade by publishing it on Christmas Eve.
Unfortunately, though much of the pro-alarmist media duly missed its relevance, an alert blogger and the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) appreciated the implications of the story only too well, eventually forcing it onto the front pages in the national media.
The BBC’s pro-alarmist David Shukman interpreted the downgrade as meaning “there won’t have been much global warming for the past 20 years”. But  the downgrading of the Met Office’s earlier prediction of an average of 0.54^oC rise to a 0.43^oC above the 1971-2000 average, with the usual provision for “natural variability” (so it may well be much less), is far more significant than that. And it was left to GWPF’s Dr David Whitehouse to state the case more accurately, “Actually there won’t have been any global warming” in over two decades.
Now just a cotton pickin’ minute. Wasn’t it the hard-line prediction of the UK Met Office Hadley Center that set the UK’s (and the UN IPCC’s) climate hare running big-time? Within a year of the assessment, the UK passed its infamous Climate Act, the first of its kind in the world. It was widely touted as the “most expensive legislation in history”. The Act effectively committed the UK to foot an annual extra ‘de-carbonising’ spending bill of over £18 billion every year for the next 40 years. It’s the kind of government spending action the UN IPCC is urging on all governments, especially in the developed world, even in the face of the current global economic crisis.
But the simple fact is that the UK Met Office’s predictive credibility beyond assessing the ‘next few days weather prospects, have long been a national laughing stock. There was the farce of its warning over a “barbecue summer” prior to one of the UK’s coolest summers for decades. Then more than one warning about warming-induced perennial drought conditions just before the UK experienced extended periods of rainy weather causing major flooding.  As long-time critic of the Met Office Paul Hudson points out, “In the 12 years to 2011, 11 out of 12 [Met Office predictions] were too high.”
The alarmist media, including the New Scientist, immediately went into over-drive to explain the…er …unforeseen “standstill”. And right away it became clear that any theory would do – just so long as it didn’t torpedo entirely the central theory: that anthropogenic emissions are primarily to blame and thus global warming must resume at some future stage. But then the same computer models also insisted that temperatures must continue to rise because CO2 emissions are rising. Oops. But it was left to GWPF’s Director, Dr Benny Peiser, to put his finger on the real cost of this latest miscalculation: “This suggests that the Government’s climate change policies,including wind farms, are a waste of money and based on dodgy advice.” Peiser added, “Why should we trust Met Office forecasts about the climate for 2050 or 2100 if they get it wrong for the next decade?”
But other parts of the UK media have clearly had enough. The Daily Mail pulled no punches citing the Met Office’s clumsy attempt to cover up the scale of its gross error as “a crime against science and the public.” The Sunday Telegraph editorial described it as a “betrayal of proper science”. And David Rose of the Mail on Sunday, in the wake of various attempts to exonerate this latest screw up, wanted to know “Who are the deniers now?” Labour MP Graham Stringer further noted how the field of UK energy and environmental policy was “dominated by individuals with commercial interests in renewables”, singling out Tim Yeo, chairman of the relevant Select Committee as “a director of several renewable firms.”
But why it is the Met Office revision such an important story? After all, it’s just one national weather service and as mall downgrading of its predictions, is it not?  Far from it. The UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Research is one of a select group of four global centers upon which the UN IPCC depends, having been set up by former Hadley Centre Director John Houghton. And the downgrade calls into question the credibility of the entire ‘human-carbon-emissions-are-to-blame’ house of cards. And here’s how it adds to the growing crisis for the UN IPCC’s AGW theory.
In December, a draft of the IPCC’s fifth assessment, due for final publication in September 2013, was leaked to the press by climate sceptic Alec Rawls. Rawls had been accepted by the UN IPCC as one of its expert reviewers. The IPCC confirmed the draft was genuine while lamenting the leak.  The media furor that followed, however, focused on a section of the report that suggests what some key climate scientists, including Dr Henrik Svensmark in the excellent The Chilling Stars, have said all along: that the influence of cosmic rays (the Sun) could have a greater warming influence than mankind’s emissions. Rawls describes the relevant section as “an astounding bit of honesty, a killing admission that completely undercuts the main premise and main conclusion of the full report, revealing the dishonesty of the whole”. Given what we know of how UN IPCC administrators have …er ‘boosted’ the alarmist language of previous reports after the actual scientists went home, no change there then.
So long experience warns us that the UK Met Office’s predictive ability is up there with the anti-Elijah faction on Mount Carmel. Equally, increasing numbers are now questioning the man-made emissions drives temperatures theory, based, as they are, on highly fallible computer modelling games. Nor should we expect a highly politicized organization like the UN to admit how apocalyptic pseudo-scientific prophecies offer it an unprecedented shot at achieving its driving ambition: global governance. But perhaps we ought to start expecting our national democratic governments to abandon doomsday scenarios in the guise of popular science speculation in favor of old-fashioned ‘under-the-microscope’ empirical science.
However, if that’s too much to ask in a month where the high priest of global warming alarmism has abdicated his plant-saving responsibilities, perhaps we should all focus on immediate action to reduce the carbon footprint of the world’s single worst carbon emitter. Anyone knows Al Gore’s address?