ACCORDING to a BBC report, Boris Johnson was convinced of the threats posed by climate change following a slideshow in January 2020.
It was organised by the Government’s chief scientific adviser Sir Patrick Vallance, which hardly inspires confidence. But more significantly, it was presented by Professor Stephen Belcher, Chief Scientist of the Met Office.
The Met Office long ago gave up any pretence of objectivity regarding climate change. To ask its advice is like asking for the Pope’s views on religion!
The 11 slides used by Belcher have now been published, and it is abundantly clear that the Prime Minister was grossly misled. The slides can all be seen here, but the major causes of concern include:
n No mention of the Little Ice Age, from the 14th century to the mid-19th century, or any discussion of how much of the warming since the 19th century is natural. This is particularly relevant given that warming started in the late 19th century, long before emissions of CO2 began to rise rapidly.
n Misleading graphs for sea level rise – Belcher showed this chart, which begins in 1993, implying sea level rise is a modern problem:
But why didn’t he display the full graph, which shows that sea levels began to rise in the mid-19th century, with little acceleration since?
n There is a lot of reliance in the presentation on computer models, but these are neither data nor evidence of anything.
Moreover, models have consistently run hot – that is, they grossly exaggerate observed global warming.
Predictions of four or five degrees Centigrade of warming this century are simply not credible, but it is upon these that the UK’s climate agenda is predicated.
It is claimed that the decline in Arctic sea ice has reached a ‘tipping point’, which conveniently ignores the fact that it has been very stable since 2007.
Charts are shown claiming that the weather is becoming more extreme, something for which there is absolutely no evidence.
It is also claimed that human health is suffering because of global warming, when the opposite is the case. In particular, scientific studies have proved that more people around the world die from cold than heat. It is also the case that deaths from diseases such as malaria have fallen markedly in recent years.
Finally, there is a series of tipping points included which are wildly reminiscent of the climate apocalypse movie The Day After Tomorrow. We have of course managed to survive all the other apocalyptic climate scares thrown our way in the past.
The simple reality is that the planet has been warmer than now for most of the millennia since the Ice Age, which ended about 11,000 years ago. Yet these tipping points never occurred. There was no runaway warming. Indeed, the climate cooled, most notably in the Little Ice Age.
It appears that the UK economy is being steered on to the rocks on the basis of this one-sided, inaccurate and extremely improbable vision of the future.
Militias, plague, collapse of society!
Talking of the Met Office, a new report, UK Shared Socioeconomic Pathways professes to look ahead to the Year 2100 and what effect climate change might have had on British society by then.
It was written by academics at the universities of Exeter and Edinburgh, in association with the forecasting group Cambridge Econometrics, but is funded by the Met Office as part of its UK Climate Resilience Programme.
According to this woeful document, our future is bleak, with armed militias roaming the country, collapse of government, the end of police and justice systems, implosion of the NHS, a return to hunter-gathering and child labour. The end of civilisation as we know it!
We have just one hope, the report assures us. All we have to do is rejoin the EU!
This rubbish could have been written by a sixth-form Marxist. Why is taxpayers’ money being wasted on such drivel? No serious scientific organisation would put its name to a report like this, and the Met Office should have disassociated itself from it at the very start.
There are many good, conscientious staff at the Met Office who must be utterly appalled by this sort of politicisation of the organisation. Sadly however, it has long been taken over at the top by climate extremists.
This certainly dates back to the 1980s, when Sir John Houghton was director-general. He heavily influenced Margaret Thatcher’s views on climate change, and was instrumental in the setting-up of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
A few years later, the former chief executive of the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Robert Napier, was appointed chairman.
The Met Office gets about 90 per cent of its income from government. Revenue from the public purse has jumped from £163million ten years ago, to £225million in 2019/20. Climate change is big business!
It’s high time the Met Office was defunded, its climate change work shut down, and it returned to its original remit of forecasting the weather.
BBC still promoting extreme weather lies
To most normal people, extreme weather in January would mean freezing cold, six feet of snow, storms and floods. But not to the charlatans at the BBC, who reckon that a bit of sunshine is somehow newsworthy.
In their report on last month’s weather in the UK, they claim: ‘Although 2022 is still only really getting going, January has been a month of chart-busting weather in the UK. Some will remember it for record-breaking temperatures, sunshine levels and a noticeable lack of rain.’
None of this is true. While New Year’s Day clocked a record high temperature of 16.3C, this is meaningless – since there are 31 days during the month.
The record daily temperature for January is 18.3C, and it was set in three separate years, 1958, 1971 and 2003. In other words, that 16.3C, which was also the highest temperature last month, is not remarkable in any way at all.
But the BBC’s claim for ‘record-breaking’ mainly concerns sunshine levels, even though last month was only the third sunniest January. The sunniest was in 1959.
With that much sunshine, January was inevitably also a dry month, but again nowhere near a record, ending up as the 13th driest. While the BBC is pushing its extreme weather agenda, it is worth pointing out that the Met Office continually tells us that global warming is making our winters wetter. Except when it is not wetter, it seems!
Cold or mild, wet or dry, the Met Office will call it extreme and no doubt blame it on climate change, when it publishes its annual Britain’s Wild Weather report at the end of the year.
In the old days, of course, when the Met Office did not have a political agenda, there was no such hyperbole. In January 1916, for instance, which is still the warmest January on record, its monthly report was just matter of fact:
However, between 1914 and 1918, they had a lot more to worry about than a bit of sunshine.
