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.
Ou sont des absences des neiges d’antan?
I’ve checked numerous times over the past few years to see if Viner’s totally embarrassing foot-in-mouth escapade is still there. I checked about two weeks ago and got the bad link message. Frankly, I was a bit surprised they’d left it up this long. It’s gone, David Viner, but don’t you worry. It will never be forgotten.
I would not be so quick to suggest anything odd here. Most sites that publish online articles archive those articles after a while, somewhere, as per policy. Sometimes online articles do get purged, again as per policy. It’s just good data “house keeping” practice to bin stuff no longer needed. But, yeah, seems to be a common theme now. Thank crunchie for the “waybackmachine”.
It might be an idea to keep another prediction that the dams will not fill by Prof Flannery
At the moment Sydney and the Warragamba catchment is awash.
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDR033.shtml
128 km Wollongong (Appin) Radar
Received at: 08:44 UTC Fri 13 Nov 2015 EST EDT CST CDT WST
06:44PM 07:44PM 06:14PM 07:14PM 04:44PM
Friday Friday Friday Friday Friday
This link is time sensitive and does not show the storm extending from Dubbo to the Eastern seaboard of NSW
Things go missing … deep ocean heat … troposphere hot spot ….
medieval warming period … records that show yr workings …
Saved the page long time ago, alexjc38 brilliant comment included, its very funny:
———————————
Calling Charles Onians
alexjc38 wrote:
Sunday, 27 December 2009 at 09:53 pm (UTC)
Hello? Charles Onians in 2000? Don’t ask me to explain but I’m posting this back to you via a time warp from December 2009. Yes, the future! You probably won’t believe me and will think I’m mad or joking, but get this. Britain is suffering its second extremely cold winter in a row – we have enough snow, ice, frost and freezing fog to cobble dogs with (whatever that means.) Far from being “a very rare and exciting event”, snowfall has become a major hazard in this country twice this past year – and we haven’t even got to February 2010 yet. Also (again you will probably think I’m joking) but the CRU has just become a liability to climate science – leaked e-mails and files have revealed a web of deceit and manipulation that threatens to undermine the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming itself. I urge you to pull this article immediately, as it will become a laughing stock in years to come. Charles? Hello? Hello? … Rats, I’m probably too late.
LOL. 🙂
They would rewrite history…………um, except they do.
“Now, if we could just remove any and all traces of the Climategate emails”…………………..
It would be a trick of nature – eh Mike?
During the last couple of months, Accuweather web site stopped showing record temperatures of the past, as well as last year’s temperatures (at least for my neck of the woods).
It seems that there is a concerted cowardly secret effort in the mainstream media to confuse people about the weather as much as possible. As one of the heroes fighting bugs in “Starship Troopers” says near the end: “They are afraid!”
So did The Weather Network , last time I looked!!!
Someone out there always has a copy.
That is the internet 🙂
read all:
12 Nov: ABC America: AP: Seth Borenstein: CLIMATE COUNTDOWN: When’s a Warming Treaty Not a Treaty?
(Matthew Lee and Donna Cassata in Washington, Angela Charlton in Paris and Karl Ritter in Stockholm contributed to this report.)
It’s an issue of definitions and the way an agreement is framed, said Purvis, who is president of the non-governmental organization Climate Advisers.
The U.S. Constitution and the rest of the world have different definitions of the word “treaty,” Purvis said. Elsewhere, a treaty is a binding agreement. But in the U.S., there are several types of international agreements and only 6 percent of them end up being formal treaties that require Senate approval, he said. The last international, Senate-approved treaty was in 2010.
The climate treaty, Purvis said, is likely to end up as an “executive agreement” like the 1945 Yalta Accord at the end of World War II. This requires only presidential approval…
Purvis said it probably will hinge on a 1992 international treaty, signed by President George H.W. Bush and approved by the Senate, that promised to do something about climate change; a decades-old U.S. air pollution law; a U.S. Supreme Court decision that said the air pollution law applies to carbon dioxide; and presidential executive action…
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/climate-countdown-whens-warming-treaty-treaty-35165698
oddly this is an area where the warmest pathology really works against them , for has they hold that anything that enters the dogma of ‘the cause’ , cannot be challenged nor changed because its ‘perfect truth’ such as Mann hockey stick.
When it has been shown by overwhelming evidenced by nether ‘truth ‘ and a long way from ‘perfect ‘ they stuck with trying to either BS their way out of it or ,ironically , to deny they ever made the claim in the first place as in the Himalaya glaciers all gone by 2035 claim.
A practice they are currently engaged in over past claims that part of climate ‘doom’ would be an increase in hurricanes, when in reality the reverse has happened .
Well done. It is good that this little part of all the drivel we have been subjected to from such people over past decades had been captured for posterity.
No no no it is subsidies the oil companies receive, the CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, taxpayer funded, says so, so there you are all misinformed.
Do I need a sarc tag?
The CBC almost everyday is posting sometimes multiple postings a day, climate related missinformation leading up to the Paris carbon party. It is truly amazing what they are doing, the shear volume. It would be interesting to know who is behind this barrage.
Done of course to justify pre-ordained positions in Paris.
Couldn’t find the article I was looking for, but some other false/failed claims/predictions:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/27/ten-years-after-katrina-lets-learn-from-those-predictions-of-more-bigger-hurricanes/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/13/mt-baker-glaciers-disappearing-a-response-to-the-seattle-times/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/10/24/al-gore-and-the-media-were-wrong-u-s-major-hurricane-drought-now-one-decade-and-counting/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/22/failed-earth-day-predictions/
(it was a fairly recent post too – maybe from a Jimbo list)
Every time it snows I remind everyone of how it is a “very rare and exciting event”. I keep trying to sell tickets to see this but nobody seems to be interested.
It will live on in my memory even if it’s gone from the internet. I think I have a responsibility to remind people of how special it is when it snows, and snows, and snows.
I applied for climate refugee status with the UN so they could cover my all expense paid trip to Sun Valley, but I haven’t heard back. The situation is desperate here, it’s below freezing again tonight. The window is closing on this. It maybe even colder in January. So climate refugee only applies to warmer to colder and not colder to warmer? I’m wondering if I should lawyer up on this. Think of all those poor people who moved from NY /NJ /Penn/Con/Mas to Florida without any government assistance at all! But ” it’s worse than we thought” think of the ones who for financial reasons can’t leave! We must take action now!
I think I may have mentioned “children won’t know what snow is” around a dozen times in the last few days!
And with snow briefly settling on the hills today, it more or less proves the ASSERTION was a complete lie.
What people forget about the “children won’t know what snow is” line was that it didn’t refer to changes in the weather.
It referred to changes in education.
M Courtney wrote
Good point. Just the other day, I was chatting with Winston Smith about the outlook for the coming winter. When I began musing about the prospects for snow, he had no idea what I was talking about.
looking at the drop in temp of the atlantic this summer the likelihood of snow during the paris conference is fairly high ( note the use of climastrological terminology there) ,how ironic would that be 🙂
This is somewhat O/T but pertains to the expected predictions in the run up to Paris that 2015 is the warmest year on record, apparently UAH is not reading the current El NIno as pushing up temperatures. October 2015 was indeed a warm month, and many predicted that temperatures would remain high (and increase) for the next 4 to 6 months, but so far in November (first 12 days), temperatures have been falling back from the October figure.
ENSO is still showing up strongly in the ENSO meter, and, of course, it is too early to say how November will pan out, but it would be ‘useful’ if the November satellite data (which no doubt will be available early December) adds some realism and adds a contrarian standpoint to the claims that 2015 is the warmest year ever on record.
See: http://notrickszone.com/#sthash.kT65AL9n.dpbs
This is an artificial debate.
The people who came into this subject late, such as myself take no great issue with the suggestion that we are living during a period of slight warming and slight sea level rise.
Both are almost imperceptible but detectable using modern sophisticated instrumentation.
However, what the hypothesis suggests is accelerating warming and accelerating sea level rise in response to a higher rate of emissions of CO2.
If we live during a time of a slight warming trend and a slight sea level rise trend – then obviously there is a good chance that in each year the temperature and the sea level will be by some degree warmer and higher than during the period in which these things were measured.
Since “Sea level reached 120 meters below current sea level at the Last Glacial Maximum 19,000–20,000 years ago.” (wikipedia) then the general public should be able to reassure themselves that humans can NOT be entirely to blame for these trends.
i.e. the trend predates modern emissions by some considerable margin.
And the current trends as measured by satellites are unremarkable, in light of the striking rate of change that is revealed in the last 20,000 years.
This message has not got through into the minds of the populous.
Most people that I meet are still bamboozled by the “warmest year on record” or “warmest decade on record” memes.
I am surprised that there aren’t any “highest sea level on record” messages.
Of course, so much information is left out of these messages that they represent deception by omission.
And let us always remember that had “climatologists” established that we were currently living during a period of a slight cooling trend then they would have set about generating alarm about that – and holding that humans were responsible due to particulates and aerosols or suchlike.
In other words they would happily leap on any train, and ride it in whatever direction it was going.
Of course, during the 1970’s some scientists did throw their weight behind an “ice age” alarm, so we have record of this process.
In fact that WOULD be much more alarming – since the cold periods have dominated earth’s history.
i don’t know how we can get the message out to those who are still tricked by “warmest decade on record” memes. Somehow or other we need to communicate a sense of the rapid changes that have occurred over the last few thousand years and how in the light of these – this age is unexceptionally.
Yes, there appears to be some slight warming. Yes, there appears to be some slight sea level rise.
But, so what? It is not evidence of human activity.
Nor does it tell us that CO2 is having no effect.
And certainly it does not tell us that we are experiencing or going to experience “extreme weather”
The truth is that it is all so unremarkable that so far it tells us nothing.
Much greater rises were occurring long before humans started digging up coal.
In fact, the period of fastest change seems to have abated about 8,000 years ago.
ACCELERATION of the rate of warming might be consistent with the hypothesis.
But even that has occurred naturally at many points prior to the arrival of climate fear.
And since the 1980s-1990s we see either deceleration of change or a steady rate with some variability depending on the source of data.
There must be some way in which we can get these simple concepts into the minds of the majority of modern people who, let’s accept it, probably can not read graphs.
I came to this topic with a genuine desire to find out what impact CO2 was having on the climate.
I can now finally clearly see – that nobody knows. And due to the politicization of this subject, I suspect that there will not be any further progress in climate science for many decades.
They have trapped themselves in a quagmire of lies, distortions and confusion. And promoted their topmost idiots into positions of greatest influence.
Wicked mess – is an understatement!!!!
great assessment of the current situation. i am waiting patiently for the explanation regarding the rapid cooling of the north east atlantic this past several months .
north sea temperature since late 2011.
http://project.ncof.co.uk/B4G/graphics/series_full_sst.gif
“October 2015 was indeed a warm month, and many predicted that temperatures would remain high (and increase) for the next 4 to 6 months, but so far in November (first 12 days), temperatures have been falling back from the October figure.”
Hello Richard, TSI was high for the last part of October 2015, and has since dropped off.
http://lasp.colorado.edu/data/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_3month_640x480.png
The sun controls the climate.
Thanks the plot.
It seems likely that in the coming years, we will see to what extent the sun influences climate. I am hoping that there are no large scale volcano eruptions that may hinder the analysis of the impacts of a weak sun.
it would be ‘useful’ if the November satellite data (which no doubt will be available early December) adds some realism
When I used to monitor HADCRUT there was almost a linear relationship between how late the results came out and the amount of cooling. The massive cooling of Feb 2007? meant a whopping three weeks late – after around a week of saturation “the world is getting warmer” claptrap. So, it was clearly an orchestrated campaign to prevent any take up on the “coolest February for 14 years” (long since cherry picked out of the data!)
But now, it seems from your comment, that we’ll know that the satellites are showing exceptional cooling – just because we aren’t getting the results for the DeadParrotTalks
State funded “scientists” that make such indefensible and inaccurate predictions that are proven wrong should be forced to repay all their grant money and face charges for incompetence and scientific malpractice. These frauds are looting the public treasury and no one holds them to account.
It was just too much of a burden for Dr Viner to live down and carry to the day he dies. It reflects the rottenness of scientists all those years ago.
Well, I sure that he is quite comfortable financially.
There’s no business like snow business, like snow business, we know!!!
It highlights the scurrilous efforts of the sort – mainly if not exclusively the political claque of liberal loons and Ivy league academia – who wish to alter the reality and who openly deny the truth, “children won’t know what snow is” – just, which crew – are in denial now?
This proves how important it is that skeptics save copies of these crazy statements and studies which keep coming up daily. Those snapshots are needed for the history books. The establishment is going to do some serious clean up in the future.
You might check for air brushed images of dear leaders erased in political purges also.
Just to rub salt into Viner’s wounds, the Daily Mail is reporting that parts of Britain are currently being blanketed by the white stuff that children just will not know. Whilst this is just weather, The daily Mail reports:
“Parts of Britain have been blanketed in snow and thousands of homes have been left without power as Storm Abigail causes major disruption to Britain with its Hurricane-force winds and thundery downpours.
Scotland has been worst hit by the UK’s first ‘named storm’, which swept in from across the Atlantic overnight, but the rest of the country can expect adverse weather conditions throughout the day with forecasters warning of ‘significant river flooding’ across much of the north of Britain.
Snow has already started falling across villages in the North Pennine hills in North Yorkshire, as well as in the Scottish Highlands, and the Met Office is warning of further heavy, thundery showers which could cause surface water and localised flooding.
Conditions could be made worse by the remnants of Hurricane Kate, which is currently heading over the Atlantic towards the UK after leaving the US.
It comes after one hillwalker had to be rescued from Ben Nevis last night after he risked ‘certain death’ by attempting to climb Britain’s highest peak in winds of 84mph. ”
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3316687/It-s-AbiGALE-Britain-rocked-power-cuts-school-closures-storm-brings-high-winds-heavy-rain-one-climber-saved-certain-death-trying-climb-Ben-Nevis-100mph-gusts.html#ixzz3rNqKTwz5
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3316687/It-s-AbiGALE-Britain-rocked-power-cuts-school-closures-storm-brings-high-winds-heavy-rain-one-climber-saved-certain-death-trying-climb-Ben-Nevis-100mph-gusts.html
most over hyped low pressure system in the history of uk weather. this was the 5th time the met had forecast 40 mph plus winds for my area of scotland since the beginning of october. they failed to materailise the first 3 times and only a brief spell in the middle of the night on the 4th forecast. i know this as i was out fishing each time.
the actual weather versus that forecast for “the first named storm” was nothing out of the ordinary for a scottish winter. i can remember one storm that sank all the boats in elie harbour around twenty years ago. no need to worry though, this https://curve.coventry.ac.uk/open/file/aa6dfd04-d53f-4741-1bb7-bdf99fb153be/1/hick2comb.pdf is the definitive paper on scottish coastal storms, and no amount of data fudging will change the absolute facts it contains, ie , it was stormier during cooler periods in the past.
Dr. Biner was half right, you know. Snow isn’t very rare, but some people get pretty excited!
In the olden days of climate change fraud the predictions were short term and ridiculous. This exposed them to the risk of fact checking. In the modern era of climate change fraud, all of the ludicrous predictions are safely extended beyond retirement dates and expertly defended with taunts directed at the fact checkers. The move to daily releases of such tripe also helped support the volume-based argument of consensus and synthetic truth.