Readers of WUWT and millions of climate skeptics have read this article before, and in fact it is likely one of the most cited articles ever that illustrates the chutzpah and sheer hubris on display from a climate scientist who was so certain he could predict the future with certainty. Dr. David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit who famously said:
From the Independent’s most cited article: Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past by Charles Onians:
However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
It seems however, that after over 15 years, the Independent has removed that article, and the URL now comes up like this:
Here is what it originally looked like:
Fortunately, I have preserved the entire article as a PDF for posterity:
Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past – The Independent (PDF)
One wonders about the timing, whether it is related to the upcoming COP21 climate confab in Paris, or if it was simply some blunder, oversight, or archive purge on the part of The Independent.
Note: I owe a hat tip to a WUWT reader, whose email/comment seems to be lost in the firehose of communications I get daily. If you are reading, leave a note in comments and I’ll correct this. The reader was Cole Pritchard, who sent the info to my phone via IM, Thanks Cole.
Update: It gets curiouser, searching on The Independent website using their search engine for the phrase “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past” yields only one result for that exact string – a story lambasting the original article that contained the phrase.
Published in the year 2000, I thought maybe the story was just too old, and the Independent simply removed the story to save archive space, or maybe this had to do with some site redesign and the URL simply got broken. Yet when I remove the quote marks to search for the phrase in general, and not exactly, other stories back as far as 1994 about global warming and snow appear:
It seems clear now that the removal was deliberate.
Really, everybody. It seems hardly likely they are attempting to cover up a blunder after 15 years.
Some routine IT housekeeping seems more likely.
Meanwhile new daft predictions are popping up every day. Like this one from Nature:
“The results provide a clear, stark message: if we assume that the Amundsen Glacier is indeed destabilized, which current evidence suggests, then the entire Western ice sheet will discharge into the ocean within 3000 years, leading to a 3 meter rise in sea level within 10,000 years. This extreme loss is due to a ‘point-of-no-return’ scenario: once the grounding line begins retreating, ice will continue to melt inland, allowing water to carve a path inward until it breaks off the whole western sheet.
It is true that this process unfolds over a very long time period, giving us plenty of time to respond if this scenario does occur. But the world would look quite different. In the US alone, 12.3 million people would lose their homes.”
12.3million people who currently live in coastal areas will lose their homes in 10,000 years.
So this is Nature? A journal which prints material which is so embarrassingly idiotic that I couldn’t create a satire that was more bizarrely stupid than the original.
Do people now enter climate science direct from Kindergarten?
From: http://www.nature.com/scitable/blog/eyes-on-environment/shortterm_stability_and_longterm_collapse
Well, this story is still up:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-row-scientist-contemplated-suicide-1892260.html
It’s about Phil Jones and his problems and thoughts of suicide from dealing with Climategate.
It’s hard to feel too sympathetic with him since he wrote in http://assassinationscience.com/climategate/1/FOIA/mail/1075403821.txt on the sudden death of skeptic John Daly:
From: Phil Jones <...@uea.ac.uk> To: <Michael Mann> ...@virginia.edu Subject: Fwd: John L. Daly dead Date: Thu Jan 29 14:17:01 2004 From: Timo Hämeranta <...@pp.inet.fi> To: <...@pp.inet.fi> Subject: John L. Daly dead Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2004 12:04:28 +0200 X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.4510 Importance: Normal Mike, In an odd way this is cheering news ! One other thing about the CC paper - just found another email - is that McKittrick says it is standard practice in Econometrics journals to give all the data and codes !! According to legal advice IPR overrides this. Cheers Phil "It is with deep sadness that the Daly Family have to announce the sudden death of John Daly.Condolences may be sent to John's email account (daly@john-daly.com) " Reported with great sadness Timo Hämeranta xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxWell, I read the entire thing. It is wrong about the snow. It is wrong about the 0.2C/decade. It is roughly right about the +0.6C warming. It is correct that AGW is manifesting itself primarily in the winter. The sensationalization gets it a downcheck.-
I therefore give it a D. A middle-of-the-road D.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/seanthomas/100222487/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-we-have-to-trust-our-scientists-because-they-know-lots-of-big-scary-words/
Oh I’m bound to go
Where there ain’t no snow
Where the rain don’t fall
The winds don’t blow
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains.
He was describing his version of paradise, come to think of it.
Is he still alive? It’s time to rub it in his face if he is.
“Page not found ….
Sorry … .”
Right.
The change old temperature data, so why not old articles?
Every time it snowed where I live I would take a picture and tweet it along with a link to “Snow Is A Thing of the Past”.
( @protonice )
I should take a picture of todays rain and tweet it along with a link to “Dry Weather Today is a pimple Compared to the Dry Weather we are going to get”, published a few months ago in The Vancouver Sun.
Aaaaand down the Memory Hole it goes! Thank you Winston, now quick, off to the Two Minutes Hate with you! Time to hiss at Emannuel Koch.
As a disclaimer – I don’t really care all that much whether the Independent did this on purpose.
I just like drawing lots of attention to how completely stupid the media, media “experts”.
And attention to the fact that looney alarmist predictions are invariably further from reality than a random guess. The nitwits have learned though, I suppose. Inasmuch as they now couch alarmism in vague and often meaningless conditional terms. They only make solid prediction about events that will NOT occur after their retirement or death.
The odd idiot breaks free from the climate alarm asylum and further empties his mind in the presence of a journalist. In which case we get to witness the joyous spectacle of a once proud believer losing his marbles.
As has now happened with poor Mr Viner.
(I have removed his title – for his own benefit!! It was only doing him harm.)
It’s called ‘Climastrology’,in the past we had ‘Spiritualism’ ‘tea leave readers’ ‘seances’ ‘astrologists’ ‘ouija board readers’ ‘tarot card readers’ all sucking money from the gulible,
It seems that Governments have seen the potential for sucking money from the ‘Gulible’ and gone along with ‘Climastrology’.
In the future people will look back and laugh at the stupidity of people paying for ‘Climastrological’ predictions.
I suspect as the scheme implodes and members of the Cult of Calamitous Climate are deprogrammed by cold weather and angry impoverished taxpayers.
The records of their gullibility here on the internet will come under serious attack.
The US Democrats are already on the record wanting to control(regulate) the web and so is the UN.
Strange how people who campaign for immunity from prosecution also want to control the history.
I don’t know if there is any deliberate action being taken here, but that’s not, IMHO, what we should be discussing. What we should be discussing is how to preserve the original article for easy reference now that the original is gone. I know A_thony linked to his copy in this article, but at some future point, I’ll forget where that was. Future being about 48 hours for me…..
Perhaps a special link in the WUWT sidebar?
Ah, the Internet.
Once it goes up, guys, you ain’t never getting it suppressed.
A. W. wrote: “>i>One wonders about the timing, whether it is related to …” etc.
The timing could be related to the fact that it is snowing – in Kansas, Colorado, Washington State, British Columbia, and ….
David Viner likely meant East Anglia but I don’t recall that was specified.
“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.” Ingsoc (Newspeak for English Socialism or the English Socialist Party) is the political ideology of the totalitarian government of Oceania in George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Our blunder? Let bygones be bygones.
(Signed) 97%
11 Nov: LA Times: ‘Everything is blinding white’: Huge Sierra snowstorm pays off for winter resorts
By Joseph Serna and Bettina Boxall
A massive storm that dropped snow across hundreds of miles of the Sierra Nevada is paying dividends for winter resorts, if social media is any indicator.
From Lake Tahoe and Mt. Rose to Mammoth Mountain, vacation destinations have taken to Twitter to boast that their slopes are ready for visitors…
http://www.latimes.com/local/weather/la-me-ln-snow-storm-sierra-20151111-story.html
The second article on this topic in the Independent in 2011 simply made the situation worse.
By misrepresenting the first article.
They really are trying to desperately stage manage the interpretation of their own failure:
http://www.thegwpf.com/ministry-of-truth-independent-newspaper-channels-orwell/
And a more in depth analysis of the situation is here.
Take the time to re-read the original March 2000 Viner article and then the 2011 Conner manipulation.
Lying liars and the lies they tell. Shameful and desperate stuff:
http://www.thegwpf.com/met-office-spins-itself-deeper-into-the-hole/
We have one of those false prophets in Australia, called Tim Flannery. The socialists haven’t erased it from memory yet
http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/comments/tim_flannery_should_explain_these_full_dams/
I’ve heard of snow removal, but this is the first time I’ve ever heard of anyone feeling the need to remove the absence of snow.
I used to buy The Independent for many years, from the first day it was published.
It gives me no (net) pleasure to read this account of their fall. Like the BBC, they shall reap what they have sown.