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
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.
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!”
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.