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?
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To their credit it is definitely not money they are stealing, just numbers on bank accounts, created out of thin air by commercial banks, by lending more than the amount of deposits they have, licensed to do so by corrupt political bodies, utterly failing the general electorate that was tricked to authorize them to set up the largest Ponzi scheme of history.
The climate fraud is only a minor part of this dirty business, designed to let it go just for another while, as the bitter end is inevitable eventually anyway.
Mosher says, ” as with climategate skeptics harm themselves by overcharging the case. Reserve the word fraud for better cases than this. No amount of evidence will be adequate for him to critizie his fellow warmers. Have we all had enough of the the “obsequious” one.
Steven Mosher says:
January 14, 2013 at 2:44 pm
as with climategate skeptics harm themselves by overcharging the case. Reserve the word fraud for better cases than this.
==================
or just take them to court in Italy
Willis, old sage one, I’ve heard of Jimmy, but not Sammy the Greek. Where is Sammy located?
[… hits himself on forehead … “Jimmy! Of course! Sammy is his cousin, he was working out of Athens until the market collapsed … fixed. w.]
Guest post by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley: “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).”
=============================================================
Although I am absolutely not an expert on the Fraud Act 2006, I doubt very seriously that grant funding can be considered to be a gain and unnecessary “green” taxes, fees and charges can be considered to be a loss.
My guess is that loss or gain should be direct to qualify. Grant funding is not a gain actually, it is a payment for a work/scientific research. If some scientific research has been conducted and salaries paid, then it would hardly qualify for “gain”.
Anyway, before writing such articles one should better consult a competent lawyer.
In Canada, by itself the Met Office would have committed a “fraud” under your terms, been part of a “conspiracy” if it involved others within its jurisdiction, i.e. throughout Britain, and a “racket” if it involved crossing jurisdictions as to organizing with NASA/NOAA/the Australian BOM etc.
A fraud, a conspiracy and a racket are each separate, criminal actions, with increasing severity.
The Mafia understand this well.
Dear Lord Moncton:
Yes, this is clearly fraud on the public – and there is something you can do.
If you can crash a climate conference, you can crash the House of Lords – after all, thepeerage still exists and law excluding you is not that clear. Since the house still has a post-judicial function: making your appeal there could force the judiciary to take note – and the government to support you. Underline “could”, of course.
Good luck!
Murph
steven mosher, one last comment. Christopher is aware of your concern that this may not rise to the level of fraud, he closes by saying:
Me, I don’t know the answer. I do know that the Met Office telling porkies to name and shame an opponent is a Very Bad Thing™, and it is clear that they knew (or should have known) that their attack on David Rose for having the infernal gall to discuss the ongoing hiatus in warming of 15+ years was scientific BS. The warming has indeed paused, for a while.
Is that “fraud” or some other crime? I don’t know enough about the UK law to tell you. It definitely is a huge over-reach for a government institution. Lord Chris makes a good case that it might be, but we’ll never know without an official investigation. Me, I generally put down to ignorance what ignorance is sufficient to explain. Bad computer models and poor seasonal forecasts come under that heading.
However, as Lord Chris points out, when there is big money (billions) at stake, it behooves us to lift the blanket and see just what the good old boys are up to. At that point, being ignorant is perhaps more deliberate than not. That is the point where they start to swing their weight against private citizens who make inconvenient claims.
At that point, the next question to ask is, who is making the Met Office decisions, and where is their money coming from? If they or their friends were getting windmill money, for example, or if their fortune is invested in carbon futures, that would not reflect well. Be clear that that is illustrative and that I have no information that the Met folks are anything but honestly deluded when they make such scientifically laughable statements.
However, with that much big bucks at stake, and with that level of denial of scientific reality, it would be interesting reading to know where their money comes from.
Best regards to you, my friend,
w.
How much of society’s resources have been wasted on a hunch and a personal belief system?
It wll be up to $ 1 trillion soon since the burn rate is up to $100 billion per year now.
Somebody has to pay for causing that amount of waste/loss at some point.
It took my wife to point this out – that in fact what the Met Office has done is merely to extend the window of opportunity. As I understand it they are now saying that variability can mean pauses of 20 years between warming episodes and then after 20 years it will re-commence warming. How convenient, since this will not now be measurable for a few more years.
I have put the non believing approach to journalism students and used whatsupwiththat in the process, but it takes grit determination: http://ro.uow.edu.au/apme/vol1/iss20/20/
A foul odor emanates from the Met. Whether it be fraud or stupidity, someone needs to take the cover off and poke around. We have something more definite going on with the EPA , thanks to Chris Horner. I myself have no doubt that Horner is on the trail of crooks, i.e. favors bought and sold. Wonderful thing to be able to save humanity and make hay while doing so.
Somebody needs to be poking a stick at the Met, like Chris Horner pokes the EPA.
I have a touching faith in the English legal system – the courts that is, not the police.
After all, it was an English judge who declared that there were multiple falsities in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth – and who caused the UK Department of Education to require teachers to put some balancing information alongside any showing of the film to schoolchildren. Yes, the UK school curriculum is still full of AGW bilge, but at least that judge took his decision on the FACTS of the case put before him.
And 30 years ago Tom Denning, a superb top judge said “You may be high and mighty in the land, but the law of England is above you” – when slapping down a Secretary of State for Trade He was upholding the Magna Carta idea that we should all be equal before the law.
So I have hope that little by little, the AGW case will be challenged before courts of law. Only the judges are capable of stepping aside from the groupthink that has seized the bulk of the UK political class and most of the UK media for decades now. Especially the BBC, which has an overarching impact on public debate in the UK, and which marches in lockstep with the Guardian on most issues.
Lord Monkton is correct to say that the Met Office has been defrauding us. Just as some of the ClimateGate enquiries in the UK were largely fraudulent – taking public money but blatantly failing to conduct proper enquiries. .But it won’t be a large and dramatic action for fraud that does the damage, because the Serious Fraud Office is traditionally supine. Private individuals and private bodies cannot bring a fraqud action. It is more likely that the AGW juggernaut can be slowed by smaller actions involving other aspects of the law, such as before the Freedom of Information Commissioner, or – as suggested by some commentators earlier in this thread – possible actions for libel by sceptical journalists traduced by the Met Office or other AGW zealots.
In particular, some of the recent statements by Slingo and the Met Office have been personally aimed at individual journalists, and have been so misleading and aggressive that at the very least a couple of stiff letters from lawyers for the journalists or their newspapers ought to be shot across the bows of Sling and the Met Office.
……………………
As regards the House of Lords, it has very limited powers. But Their Lordships also have more room for independent thought than the lobby-fodder politicians in the House of Commons. Lord Lawson and latterly Lord Donoughue are now asking more pertinant Parliamentary Questions than any we have seen in the Commons. Lawson was formerly a Tory Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Donoghue was chief policy advisor to two Labour Prime Ministers. I am sure they will be weighing in with further questions about the Met Office.
Monckton has earned a role as a folk hero, having simplified his arguments without dumbing them down, and he’s got war in him, properly.
Monckton, I agree and suggest that you get a writ of mandamus to compel the crown to lay charges.
{above bold emphasis mine – JW}
– – – – – – –
Willis,
I understand and tend to agree with the thrust of your whole comment. But one part, quoted above, I would like to discuss further with you as I think I may not agree with it.
If the context that you intend in your statement about ‘my side’ is strictly a scientific one, then I differ that ‘sides’ exist in the broad scope of the rigorous scientific process and its professional ethics. I think in science, per se, there are no ‘sides’.
If you are talking about a non-scientific context then would you please specify what other context?
Thanks. I find these kinds of discussions worthwhile.
John
leftturnandre says:
“Do numbers count? What if everybody reported the Met Office to the Serious Fraud Office?”
——————
I’d be willing to do my part! If an organized response by a group can impress the [self-snip] at the Serious Fraud Office, I say let’s do it.
Side note: As time goes on I appreciate Monty Python’s portrayal of British bureaucracy ever more…
Lord Monckton, we support you sir!
Chris,
I would love you to use your acid wit on this lot
http://www.climatechange.gov.au/en/climate-change/understanding-climate-change/~/media/climate-change/prof-plimer-101-questions-response-pdf.pdf
I would rate it at about seven “Pinochios” on a scale of 1 to 10.
There are two kinds of fraud.
Criminal fraud is where someone deliberately misleads or deceives for personal gain, and is prosecuted by the government. It is very hard to demonstrate that a public servant who gives wrong advice did it for personal gain, unless it involves something like trying to swing a government contract to them or their associates. In the case of an organisation, if it has deliberately lied to the government to obtain public funding, that is usually dealt with through a parliamentary process in the first instance, such as a parliamentary or Ministerial inquiry. Pinning responsibility on individuals is extremely difficult in such cases.
Civil fraud is a different matter. That is where an individual sues an individual or entity because they can personally demonstrate loss or damage as a result of deception or misrepresentation. The standard of proof is lower. This type of action includes defamation suits.
I agree that Monckton’s question is largely rhetorical, but the journalist could investigate the possibility of a defamation suit. Cases where people have tried to sue because they were damaged by a government policy which turned out to be wrong almost never succeed, because as long as the parliament approved the policy, it is allowed to be wrong. (This is a very generalised explanation of how it works under a Westminster system, but you get the idea.)
Criminal fraud? Highly unlikely, unless you can prove that people lied or took kickbacks knowing that the information they were providing was wrong.
John Whitman says:
January 14, 2013 at 4:25 pm
Heck, there are “sides” wherever there are disputes in science. Sometimes they even have names. For example, in biology there are “lumpers” and “splitters”, those that tend to lump a variety of animals into one species or other unit, and “splitters” who tend to split a variety of animals into different species or other unit. For years, there were sides in the discussion of plate tectonics, those who did and didn’t believe in it.
Today, in climate science we have skeptics and AGW supporters. They are as much scientific “sides” as are the lumpers and the splitters in biology, although the dividing line is far less clear.
Me, I’m neither a skeptic nor an AGW supporter. I’m a heretic. I think that the planet has a variety of homeostatic mechanisms that maintain the temperature within tight bounds, such as the ± 1/3°C of variability over the entire 20th century. I wish there were more folks on my side, but that’s my challenge.
w.
My layman’s interpretation of things is that the Met Office is part of a government department which is mostly funded by government (at the expense of the taxpayer, obviously), so even if there is fraud, the police and CPS will not act unless a charge is to be brought at the behest of government (which would have to be against individuals in the Met Office, not the Met Office as an institution). However, it might be possible for a company or individual to make a case if monies were paid for services from the Met Office which were sold on terms that were deliberately misleading. In this regard, it is clearly not the case that the reply given to David Rose — even if it is misleading — could be said to have been material to the decision of anyone to buy services from the Met Office at this point: it could only be considered as such if it formed the basis for future sales by the Met Office, which seems highly unlikely.
Moreover the field of “climate science” is so contested that it would obviously be possible for staff of the Met Office to argue that legitimate scientific considerations — rather than malfeasance — gave rise to any potentially misleading statements, and that consequently they were not deliberately misleading. There is a great deal of leg-room in respect of the interpretation of the various points they have made in their reply to David Rose.
Whilst Lord Monckton of Brenchley has done far more than me to combat this silly climate change nonsense, nevertheless I wonder why he comes out with this sort of stuff. It’s one thing to argue that the staff of the Met Office have behaved in a deceptive manner (hardly unusual for government offices), but quite another to try to interest the police in such a trumped up charge. One may as well ask them to arrest the Secretary of State for Energy. Oh wait… what was that thing about the £17bn for wind farms?
So what do the other climate prophets say where the global climate is heading after 5 years ?
This is from the various articles that they have posted . The figures are either eyeballed or calculated from their data.
Forecasts of global temperature anomaly [hadcrut3] at the end of 2017 [after next 5 years]
JAMES HANSEN 1.4 C for A, 1.2 C for B and 0.6 C for C
IPCC 0 .750 C [A2, A1B, B1]
CLIVE BEST 0. 55 to 0 .7 C BASED ON AIB and B1 SCENARIOS]
N.SCAFETTA 0.450 C HARMONIC MODEL [RANGE 0.3 C to 0.55 C]
MET OFFICE 0.430 C [ RANGE 0.28 C to 0.59 C] WAS 0.76 C last month
G.ORSSENGO 0.226 C[ Calculated from GMTA statistical model]
D. EASTERBROOK -0.1C, 0 C and 0.4 C [made three predictions based on 1790-1820, 1880-1915, 1945-1977 past trends]
LAST 12 MONTH TREND OF HADCRUT3 EXTENDED TO THE END OF 2017 0.350 C
Joeldshor at 12.54pm offers a reasoned explanation of the NOAA’s State of the Climate Report 2008, as well as a link to that report. He explains the statement that “simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 years or more” as saying nothing about non-zero trends – and says the actual trend has not been zero.
I take this to mean that there has been no statistically significant trend since 1997 and therefore there has not been a zero trend.
However, the NOAA report goes on to add: “an observed absence of warming of this duration [15 years] is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate”.
That seems to be quite unequivocal: if there is no observed warming for 15 years, then the “expected .. warming rate” must be wrong. How else can it be interpreted?
I suppose that some will get away with this fraud by simply arguing, “It wasn’t me that lied; it was my computer model. All I did was report what the model told me. I am, after all, obligated to report these things, since I have been paid all of this public money to do this research. The public has a right to know what it shows.”
If it was my tail caught in this ringer, that’s what I would say. They’ve got a pretty good gig going.