Guest post by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The truth is out. No amount of hand-wringing or numerical prestidigitation on the part of the usual suspects can any longer conceal from the world the fact that global warming has been statistically indistinguishable from zero for at least 18 years. The wretched models did not predict that.
When I told the December 2012 UN climate summit in Doha that there had been no warming for at least 16 years, the furious delegates howled me down.
The UN later edited the videotape to remove the howling. The delegates were furious not because I was speaking out of turn (they did not know that at the time) but because the truth was inconvenient.
The Guardian carried a sneer-story about my intervention. When a reader sent in a politely-worded comment to the effect that, objectively speaking, it was true that over the relevant period the least-squares linear-regression trend on the Hadley/CRU global surface temperature data was as near flat as makes no statistical difference, within two minutes The Guardian deleted the comment from its misleadingly-titled “Comment Is Free” website.
The determined reader resubmitted the comment. This time it was gone in 45 seconds, and – what is more – the stub indicating that he had commented disappeared as well. Just 28 years after George Orwell’s 1984, the hard Left are still dumping the inconvenient truth down the memory-hole.
The Met Office, as WattsUpWithThat revealed recently, has noticeably downshifted its lurid warming prediction for the rest of this decade.
When it predicted a “barbecue summer” (wrong: that summer was exceptionally cold and wet), and then a record warm winter (wrong: that was the second-coldest December in central England since records began in 1659); and then, this spring, a record dry summer for the UK (wrong again: 2012 proved to be the second-wettest on record: not for nothing is it now known as the “Wet Office”), it trumpeted its predictions of impending global-warming-driven climate disaster from the rooftops.
And the scientifically-illiterate politicians threw money at it.
If the Met Office’s new prediction is right, by 2017 the global warming rate will have been statistically indistinguishable from zero for two full decades.
So, did the bureaucrats call a giant press conference to announce the good news? Er, no. They put up their new prediction on an obscure corner of their website, on Christmas Day, and hoped that everyone would be too full of Christmas cheer to notice.
That raises – again – a question that Britain can no longer afford to ignore. Has the Wet Office committed serious fraud against taxpayers?
Let us examine just one disfiguring episode. When David Rose of the Mail on Sunday wrote two pieces last year, several months apart, saying there had been no global warming for 15 years, the Met Office responded to each article with Met Office in the Media blog postings that, between them, made the following assertions:
1. “… [F]or Mr. Rose to suggest that the latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15 years is entirely misleading.”
2. “What is absolutely clear is that we have continued to see a trend of warming …”.
3. “The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Niño) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Niña) is about 0.03 C°/decade …”.
4. “Each of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.”
5. “The models exhibit large variations in the rate of warming … so … such a period [15 years without warming] is not unexpected. It is not uncommon in the simulations for these periods to last up to 15 years, but longer periods are unlikely.”
Each of the assertions enumerated above was calculated to deceive. Each assertion is a lie. It is a lie told for financial advantage. M’lud, let me take each assertion in turn and briefly outline the evidence.
1. The assertion that Mr Rose was “entirely misleading” to say there had been no global warming for 15 years is not just entirely misleading: it is entirely false. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the global temperature data is statistically indistinguishable from zero for 18 years (HadCRUt4), or 19 years (HadCRUt3), or even 23 years (RSS).
2. What is absolutely clear is that the assertion that “it is absolutely clear that we have continued to see a trend of warming” is absolutely, clearly false. The assertion is timescale-dependent. The Met Office justified it by noting that each of the last n decades was warmer than the decade that preceded it. A simple heuristic will demonstrate the dishonesty of this argument. Take a two-decade period. In each of years 1-2, the world warms by 0.05 Cº. In each of years 3-20, the world does not warm at all. Sure, the second decade will be warmer than the first. But global warming will still have stopped for 18 years. By making comparisons on timescales longer than the 18 years without warming, what we are seeing is long-past warming, not a continuing “trend of warming”.
3. In August 1997 global temperatures were not “in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Niño”: they were in transition, about halfway between La Niña (cooler than normal) and El Niño (warmer than normal) conditions. Likewise, temperatures in August 2012 were not “at the tail-end of a double-dip La Niña”: they were plainly again in transition between the La Niña of 2011/12 and the El Niño due in a year or two.
4. The Met Office’s assertion that each of the past ten years has been in the top ten is dataset-dependent. On most datasets, 1998 was the warmest year on the global instrumental record (which only began 160-odd years ago). Therefore, on these datasets, it cannot have been possible for each of the last ten years to be among the warmest on record.
5. Finally, the Met Office shoots itself in the foot by implicitly admitting that there has been a 15-year period without warming, saying that such a period is “not unexpected”. Yet that period was not “expected” by any of the dozens of lavishly-funded computer models that have been enriching their operators – including the Met Office, whose new computer cost gazillions and has the carbon footprint of a small town every time it is switched on. The NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 said this: “Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 years or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
In short, the Met Office lied repeatedly to do down a journalist who had uttered the inconvenient truth that there had been no global warming for at least 15 years.
The Fraud Act 2000 defines the serious imprisonable offence of fraud as dishonestly making an express or implied representation that the offender knows is or may be untrue or misleading, intending to gain money or other property (here, grant funding) or to cause loss or risk of loss to another ($30 billion a year of unnecessary “green” taxes, fees and charges to the British public).
So I reported the Met Office to the Serious Fraud Office, which has a specific remit to deal with frauds that involve large sums (here, tens of billions) and organized crime (here, that appreciable fraction of the academic and scientific community that has been telling similar porkies.
Of course, there is one law for us (do the crime, do the time) and quite another for Them (do the crime, make a mint, have a Nobel Peace Prize). The Serious Fraud Office is not interested in investigating Serious Fraud – not if it might involve a publicly-funded body making up stuff to please the corrupt politicians who pay not only its own salaries but also those of the Serious Fraud Office.
The Met Office’s fraud will not be investigated. “Why not try your local police?” said the Serious Fraud Office.
So here is my question. In the specific instance I have sketched out above, where a journalist was publicly named and wrongly shamed by a powerful taxpayer-funded official body telling lies, has that body committed a serious fraud that forms part of a pattern of connected frauds right across the governing class worldwide?
Or am I going too far in calling a fraud a fraud?
“Or am I going too far in calling a fraud a fraud?”
“Modernity has replaced ethics with legalese, and the law can be gamed with a good lawyer. [¶] so I will expose the transfer of fragility, or rather the theft of antifragility, by people “arbitraging” the system. These people will be named by name. Poets and painters are free, liberi poetae et pictores, and there are severe moral imperatives that come with such freedom. First ethical rule: If you see fraud and do not say fraud, you are a fraud. [¶] Just as being nice to the arrogant is no better than being arrogant towards the nice, being accommodating toward anyone committing a nefarious action condones it.(Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder, Prologue, ‘If You See Something’: p.15)
Australia’s ABC does not wish to report correctly either.Thank heavens “The Australian” nespaper is trying to do something.
For the latest on climate change, turn to your local real estate agent
by: Graham Lloyd, Environment writer
From:The Australian
January 15, 201312:00AM
THE ABC’s flagship news programs have favoured advice from a non climate scientist based on speculation from a Byron Bay real estate agent over less alarming research from one of the world’s leading scientific organisations.
In the first of a week-long climate change special to coincide with a meeting of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change scientists in Hobart, the ABC did not mention the fact that Britain’s Met Office had reduced its forecasts for average global temperatures up to 2017. The ABC has not reported the issue despite widespread debate internationally.
Instead, the ABC, which is running the series on its main radio and television news programs, yesterday focused on the threat to coastal living from possible sea level rises without discussing the great uncertainties that exist in future sea level projections. Australia’s pre-eminent sea level expert, John Church, highlighted concerns about the melting Greenland ice sheet. And the report did mention a Climate Commission report that a 1m sea-level rise could potentially expose 250,000 homes to inundation.
But the ABC did not mention recent scientific findings that there was no firm link to sea-level rises and climate change in the 20th century.
A key ABC source was Alan Stokes from the National Sea Change Taskforce, a body set up in 2004 to highlight the stresses on regional infrastructure from increased migration of coastal centres. Mr Stokes told The Australian he had based his sea level rise forecast of 80cm to 1.1m on differing advice to local governments from the commonwealth and state governments. The IPCC’s 2007 report forecast sea level rises of between 18cm to 59cm by 2100. The CSIRO has since published a medium scenario of 80cm and a “high-end scenario” of 1.1m by 2100.
The current rate of global sea level increase is 3mm a year.
Mr Stokes said climate change was already having an impact on coastal property. “I’ve heard cases of people wanting to sell up and even trying to sell up, but finding that you know the market suddenly isn’t working with them, that the values of their property have dropped,” he told the AM program. After the broadcast, Mr Stokes told The Australian he was referring to a report about Byron Bay property in The Sydney Morning Herald.
Erosion problems at Belongil Beach have been blamed on engineering works further along the coast that had stopped the natural flow of sand.
The ABC declined to answer questions specifically about its lack of reporting on the Met Office report, released on Christmas Eve, or sea-level rises.
Here in the UK rather than rely on the predictions of the gazillion pound Met Office computer, it would have been more accurate, and less costly, if the Met Office had just looked out of the window in the morning.
The determined reader resubmitted the comment. This time it was gone in 45 seconds,
>>>>>>>>>>>>
I can’t be bothered with the warmist sites anymore, but for those of you with the energy and determination, here’s a quick strategy to mess with their heads. Post something like this:
I don’t know how anyone in this day and age can be stupid enough not to see that the world is warming, and dangerously so, all it takes is the briefest perusal of the data to see the obvious
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/to:2012/mean:3/offset:-.25/plot/rss/from:1997/to:2012/trend/offset:-.25
Not only will the comment stay up for much longer, you’ll get a lot of people clicking on the link and then scratching their heads in abject confusion.
THEY are talking about prosecuting bank employees for manipulating the LIBOR interest rate – why is manipulating the temperature record, and the predictions upon which public policy is made, any different?
The thing that gets me is the MET can’t tell us what the weather is going to do tomorrow yet they had no trouble forcasting sandy to take that left hand turn days in advance If the met and the weather modification people don’t communicate with each other then most if not all predictions made by the met are just a guess(look out the window and see) were has Autum and Spring gone? You know those mounths that were mild were we didn’t need air con’s or heaters turned on We apear to jump from winter to summer with no inbetween.This is great for the power supply industry but not so good for our pockets To me the polar jet stream seem to be working back to front to me it should expand in the summer and shrink in the winter I think this is responsible for the jet stream change to drive more money into the pockets of the bigest CO2 polluter the electrical supply industry. http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/31/64/49/PDF/angeo-16-1212-1998.pdf I suggest everyone read this before comming to any conclussions regarding climate change.
Here’s some more detail on the fraud and general spin around this October reply to Rose on the Met Office blog. It is a cut and paste of a comment I made at the time so please skip past if you recognise it. I made it at the time so that I could present the most detailed and balanced overview possible (IMHO) of the claims and counter claims both by Rose and the Met. Rose comes in for some criticism (after all, it is the Daily Mail, guys and gals) but as Lord Monckton says, Rose was completely correct in his main arguments. I would say the Met gets 90% of my criticism, Rose, 10%. The comment was as follows:
Thanks to Mr Bliss’s link to the Met Office reply on their blog I have now pieced together the claims and counter claims by toggling to and fro between article and blog as well as links given by the Met Office blog post.
I’ve laid out my findings below. It wouldn’t be facetious to liken their claims and counter claims to a hackneyed Hollywood sword fight in a banqueting hall where, instead of a straight duel, they upend tables, grab candelabras and slash down curtains to thwart and deflect the thrusts of the other party. Except in this case it is very far from being chivalric.
That said, the main thrust of the Mail article is correct. This is despite the mealy mouthed wording, stretching of the truth, no source cited for the graph and “smoke billowing” from cooling towers in the picture. It’s a shame that despite being on the high ground, David Rose resorts to these measures.
Firstly, the first paragraph of Rose’s article implies right off the bat that there was a written report by the Met Office which stated that global warming stopped 16 years ago:
‘ Global warming stopped 16 years ago reveals Met Office report…’
This is a typical ploy, putting what looks like a quote at the beginning of a sentence, followed by the word ‘reveals’ (not ‘says’). BTW the quote marks above are my quotes of Rose’s article. Therefore Rose is the one making the claim. Although this is correct, he is trying to imply that the Met Office are admitting to it and doing so by making it the central point in a special written report. Furthermore, he implies that this is embarrassing because it was “quietly released”.
The Met Office blog post reply says there is no such report and that Rose must be referring to the HADcrut 4 update. This is probably the case. They say that they had reported that they were working on it six months before and that they had published it on their website. This was in order to counter the claim that it was not quietly revealed. However, Rose says later in his article “…with no media fanfare…”. That, along with the ‘quietly revealed’ earlier on clearly should be taken together and can only mean that it was not trumpeted to the media as it would be if the new data had shown a rise. Therefore, the Met Office were answering the bare bones of the first charge and not the full accusation in the round.
The Met Office go on to say:
“Mr Rose says the Met Office made no comment about its decadal climate predictions. This is because he did not ask us to make a comment about them.”
However Rose did ask, during their email exchange:
“Q.2 Second, tell me what this [new data] says about the models used by the IPCC and others which have predicted a rise of 0.2 degrees celsius per decade for the 21st century.”
This question is really a two part question: firstly, what does the new data say about their models? Secondly, albeit implicitly, what does it therefore have to say about their decadal climate predictions. The Met Office chose to answer the first of the two in its email reply but not the second. The implicit nature of the second is hardly obscure and
still less so for the Met Office because they are quick to link us to an earlier blog post “on the same theme” (their words) in Jan 2012, publishing an email exchange with Rose on the exact same subject of decadal projections where they answer at length, a question from Rose about the projections. In this earlier post they go onto complain that they were misrepresented because their rambling reply to Rose , citing projections as probabilistic and conflating temperature values with temperature trends, was cut for Rose’s (January) article.
Returning to the October article, Rose says (of the Met Office email exchange spokesman)
“Asked about a prediction that the Met Office made in 2009- that three of the the ensuing five years would set a new world temperature record- he made no comment.”
There is no specific reference to this in the email exchange which is cited as being reproduced in full by the Met Office blog post writer. Neither does it appear in the January exchange. That ‘3 out of 5’ so-called prediction was almost certainly a ‘probabalistic projection’ and not a prediction. Nevertheless it may have constituted part of the decadal projections which the Met Office knew were being implicitly referred to. This is the only piece of speculation in my comment. I would like to know if this is the case. Still, David Rose could have made it a bit clearer instead of implying that he had asked a direct question and got no answer.
In summary, there was no specific report, the Met Office didn’t declare that global warming had stopped. They didn’t bury anything. They did release new HadCRUT data that now ‘reveals’ that there has been either no warming or statistically insignificant warming in the last 16 years. They did not trumpet this as they have done for warming trends. They implied that they hadn’t been asked about decadal projections which they technically had but chose to ignore that technicality. Rose implied that his questions were direct and clear whereas they were implicit and thereby included a technical get-out if that implication was ignored. If this was a deliberate trap, the Met Office fell into it. However, it is impossible to know if it was deliberate but Rose definitely capitalised on their failure to acknowledge the obvious question of projections needing to be rethought, based on well-trodden ground in previous email exchanges.
Scute
Except for the part about the where they lie over and over again to convince you their ‘scheme’ is viable.
Yes, beyond doubt. Furthermore it is clear that those responsible for the fraud plan to continue. The real problem is what to do about it. That is the big ugly elephant in the room… The government is not planning on policing the government, and our hapless citizens are circling the drain created by the unimaginable cost of this fraud.
Do numbers count? What if everybody reported the Met Office to the Serious Fraud Office?
Clear, lucid presentation as always. What a team you and Willis make.
It certainly seems like fraud to me. The Met Off responses are designed to mislead and confuse people who do not have a strong scientific background.
Mark Lynas in the Sun. Times yesterday (changing his position with regard to GM farming) exposed the level of understanding exhibited by the environmental movement. Not only the M.O. but all the scare mongers could be accused of fraud costing us so much via the renewable energy scams.
George Tetley (12.37) has a good suggestion. I would happily contribute but I suspect the chance of success would be slim.
This just in from the UK Met Office:
Forecast for UK – Tuesday 15 January 2013
“Bright early, becoming dark later”.
Item. Christopher Monckton has stepped up to the plate and publicly used the word fraud. If I am not mistaken, by doing this he is taking things to the next level. Go. Fight! Win!!!
The Had/CRU surface temp record can not be verified. If the basic facts are in dispute, then anyone who claims historical warming is simply barking noise. The US temp data seem to have been corrupted by ongoing and unjustified “homogenization” and those stations were never maintained with any intention of scientific integrity. Why else would an entirely new and expensive “Climate Reference Network” be created if the old data were any good? Examination of a sampling of rural stations seems to produce temps with no significant warming, quite a few show cooling. Well maintained science stations (Amundsen-Scott, Vostok, Halley and Davis) spread around Antarctica all seem to show zero warming since 1957.
Why would Antarctica be immune from Global Warming for over 50 years? Why do Antarctic ice cap photos show decades of slow expansion? Northern ice cap melting can be explained by soot and dust settling on the surface. The satellite record seems to show no substantial trends if known oceanic patterns are subtracted.
It’s hard to see how computer models were ever given any credibility by anyone who is not a politician or media hack selling magazines.
The answer to the AGW issue is a simple three step process.
1 Pull the plug on the IPCC.
2 Pull the plug on the IPCC.
3 Pull the plug on the IPCC.
Once the IPCC disappears, the AGW story disappears.
Might as well delete the United Nations at the same time. The only downside to that is the paper shufflers will end up getting into mischief elsewhere.
Lord Monckton is entirely correct about the misrepresentation by the Met Office – but of course that’s typical of what has allowed AGW theory to be so influential for so long; the ‘evidence’ is politically motivated, not scientific.
He’s also entirely correct about the Guardian’s policies on ‘Comment is Free’. A week or so ago Suzanne Goldenberg had an article with a screaming headline about how 2012 was the ‘Hottest Year Ever in the US’.
I obligingly posted the WUWT article on NOAS NCDC possibly having 2 sets of data and how Anthony had stumbled across a discrepancy between the raw data (cooler) and the public-facing data (hotter, obviously!)
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/06/does-noaas-national-climatic-data-center-ncdc-keep-two-separate-sets-of-climate-books-for-the-usa/
Firstly it provoked a small storm of sneering protests, then it was deleted altogether. How about that, deleted for posting the truth that La Goldenberg had conveniently omitted to include in her piece.
One more thing: perhaps Lord Monckton could have some fun asking various warmist organisations how great the news is, that global warming has stopped and Mankind is saved! There could be some interesting mileage in that one.
Silver Ralph:
At January 14, 2013 at 1:39 pm you assert
No, it does not.
The House has no power to prosecute except in the case of misdemeanor in the House or by a Lord.
Richard
As amply compensated head of the Met Office, Mde. Julia Slingo has not only taken a standard public-servant’s (sic) Oath of Office, but functioned in a fiduciary capacity that precludes corrupt, self-serving actions to the detriment of her office’s constituents.
Extenuate, excuse herself, prevaricate at length and in detail as she may, Mde. Slingo is prima facie guilty of willfully misrepresenting material facts for her explicit personal benefit. Call this what you will, official cheats and liars betraying public trust are far more serious than any mere embezzlement. One way to deal with this is to enjoin Slingo et al. from propagating any further counter-factual hypotheses, meaning any maliciously fictitious CAGW factoids whatsoever, on pain of barrel-head prosecution for due cause.
Next up: Briffa, Jones, Hansen, Mann, Trenberth among others– the entire Green Gang of peculating Goodfellas dipping into public tills for nigh-on a quarter century. Faugh.
I have the name for the class action, Equal justice for Bernie Madoff.
Bernie got life plus for a fraud that is peanuts by comparison.
Great Post Christopher M.
Perhaps the real crime is in the failure of our institutions to prevent this cycle of promoting public hysteria for money.
Awful expensive watchdogs that don’t watch.Won’t act. Why should I keep feeding them?
Like the Just-us department, Environmental Protection, Major Crimes act…
Dan King says:
January 14, 2013 at 1:00 pm
—
While it may be true that the nitwits at the Met actually do believe the twaddle they propagateregarding global warming, Lord Monckton gives a list of claims made by the Met that are quite clearly counter factual. Either they are frauds, or they are incompetant at their current positions.
@bw totally agree, defund UN and they won’t cause us further aggro, if we send them somewhere they have been telling us is warming like never before.
The high Arctic where they can hug polar bears to sooth their scamming hearts.
I very much agree with Ingvar Engelbrecht (see above), who said this:
“I really think that a worldwide NGO could be formed, based on the web, financed by individuals all over the world, chaired by trustworthy people like you, Donna, JoeNova just to name a few. And with a scientific body that could match IPCC.
We have an enormous army but it is scattered.”
We are BIG!
We could even establish our own newspaper or T.V. station, since the MSM are all controlled by the Leftist/Warmistas.
We just need better organisation and I think we could be very effective in getting the truth out there.
(Great piece by Lord Monckton, as usual.)
This helps to understand global warming organizations as just another set of social programs competing for budget space. All such special interests, especially the less stable funding lines will employ alarmist tactics to stay in the budget fray and not get lost in the stampede of programs. This is true for growth money as well as absolute funding levels. It is a little more uncommon for such budget interests to try to distort program statistics to this extreme. It takes incredibly stupid or incredibly distracted public officials to get it this wrong on a serial basis relative to the program metrics. Distracted is code for money and power.
Clear and concise as always. What a great team willis and Chris. make.
I love George Tetley’s suggestion but I would have no faith in our supreme court in Strasbourg!
The M.O. statements certainly seem to be designed to mislead and confuse politicians with the consequence of them following economically suicidal energy policies.
May not be legally ‘fraud’ but a more pertinent word escapes me.
David Rose’s newspaper certainly has the ability publicize the Met Office’s distortions. David Rose can ask the Met Office to issue a retraction and/or threaten Met Office for libel. (That would at least force the Met Office to run future statements by a lawyer before issuing them.) If none of these things happens, the Met Office will continue to distort with impunity.
[snip. Nice try. However, any further such replies will be deleted without comment. — mod.]