Children just aren't going to know what sun is - Telegraph.co.uk (blog)

Enjoy it while it lasts

There's a great piece by David Rose in the Mail On Sunday nicely summing up what a lot of us here knew already: that the thing we really need to fear right now is not global warming but global cooling. And that, on current evidence, it's global cooling we're going to get.

The supposed 'consensus' on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Rose's piece comes hot on the heels of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal signed by 16 distinguished scientists (proper ones: not "climate" "scientists") noting the continuing absence of ManBearPig:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 "Climategate" email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't." But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

 

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere's life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

All true, of course. All very, very true. Which does rather invite the question: when's the scam going to end? When are all those "climate" "scientists" at institutions like the University of Easy Access finally going to eat crow?

Actually this question is entirely rhetorical since I already know the answer: when hell freezes over.

Consider, for example, the fate of Dr David Viner – the University of Easy Access climatologist responsible for the most-read-ever story in the Independent when, in 2000, he famously deployed his meteorological expertise to tell us:

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is."

And where is "Nostradamus" Viner now?

Why, only in charge of disseminating climate change propaganda at taxpayers' expense for the British Council.

More than £3.5 million has gone on recruiting a worldwide network of young "climate activists" in over 70 countries to engage in climate change propaganda – what Marxists used to call agitprop – and to pressure their politicians to join the worldwide struggle. Under a programme called Challenge Europe, £1.1 million has been paid out to fund young "climate advocates" in 17 countries across Europe, including Britain itself. But £2.5 million has been spent on a more ambitious project to recruit a global network of 100,000 activists in 60 countries across the world, led by 1,300 young "International Climate Champions", to participate in "international peer networks, both in person and online, to share ideas, projects and experiences".

Of this sum, £303,093.24 went to China; £71,262.91 to Brazil; £53,006.25 to Japan; £70,132.88 to India (including £11,000 to Dr Pachauri's Teri institute); £77,507.89 to oil-rich Qatar; and £50,000 to the US. There was £120,000 for a dozen different countries in Africa, including £14,000 to fund climate champions in starving Zimbabwe.

So, to recap: a scientist from arguably Britain's most discredited university department – the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA – made a fool of himself and his employer by feeding to a newspaper wrongheaded disaster scenarios based on woefully inaccurate computer projections, thus lending spurious credibility to a massive media scaremongering campaign which has led to the squandering of billions of pounds on an entirely unnecessary scheme to "decarbonise" the UK economy. His reward for this has been to be granted a taxpayer-funded salary to go round the world spreading more abject nonsense about a mostly non-existent threat called "climate change."

Viner is not the exception: he is the rule. We have a right, I think, to start getting very angry indeed.