Christopher Booker says it all

[Snoopy]

  Idle bugger!

[Barman]

Idle bugger!

[Snoopy]

And yet more evidence presented by Mr Booker:

Considering that the measures recommended by the world's politicians to combat global warming will cost tens of trillions of dollars and involve very drastic changes to our way of life, it might be thought wise to check the reliability of the evidence on which they base their belief that our planet is actually getting hotter.

There are four internationally recognised sources of data on world temperatures, but the one most often cited by supporters of global warming is that run by James Hansen of Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

Hansen has been for 20 years the world's leading scientific advocate of global warming (and Al Gore's closest ally). But in the past year a number of expert US scientists have been conducting a public investigation, through scientific blogs, which raises large question marks over the methods used to arrive at his figures.

First they noted the increasingly glaring discrepancy between the figures given by GISS, which show temperatures continuing to race upwards, and those given by the other three main data sources, which all show temperatures having fallen since 1998, dropping dramatically in the past year to levels around the average of the past 30 years.

Two sets of data, from satellites, go back to 1979: one produced by Dr Roy Spencer, formerly of Nasa, now at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, the other by Remote Sensing Systems. Their figures correspond closely with those produced by the Hadley Centre for Climate Studies of our own Met Office, based on global surface temperature readings.

Right out on their own, however, are the quite different figures produced by GISS which, strangely for a body sponsored by Nasa, rely not on satellites but also on surface readings. Hansen's latest graph shows temperatures rising since 1880, at accelerating speed in the past 10 years.

The other three all show a flattening out after 2001 and a marked downward plunge of 0.6 degrees Celsius in 2007/8, equivalent to almost all the net warming recorded in the 20th century. (For comparisons see "Is the Earth getting warmer, or colder?" by Steven Goddard on The Register website.)

Even more searching questions have been raised over Hansen's figures by two expert blogs. One is Climate Audit, run by Steve McIntyre, the computer analyst who earlier exposed the notorious "hockeystick" graph that was shamelessly exploited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore. (This used a flawed computer model to suppress evidence that the world was hotter in the Middle Ages than today.) The other site is Watts Up With That, run by the meteorologist Anthony Watts.

It was McIntyre who last year forced Hansen to publish revised figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest years of the 20th century were not in the 1990s, as Hansen had claimed, but in the 1930s. He has now shown that Hansen had been adjusting almost all his pre-1970 global temperature figures downwards, by as much as 0.5 degrees, and his post-1970 figures upwards.

Although Hansen claimed that this only resulted from more careful calculations, McIntyre pointed out how odd it was that the adjustments all seemed to confirm his thesis.

Watts meanwhile has also been conducting an exhaustive photographic survey of US surface weather stations, showing how temperature readings on more than half have been skewed upwards by siting thermometers where their readings are magnified by artificial heat-sources, such as asphalt car parks or air-conditioning systems.

All this has raised such doubts over the methodology behind the GISS data that informed observers are calling for it to be independently assessed. Hansen himself is notoriously impatient of any criticism of his methods: earlier this month he appealed to Congress that the leaders of those who question global warming should be put on trial.

It is still too early to suggest that the recent drop in temperatures shown by everyone but him is proof that global warming has stopped. But the fact is that not one of those vaunted computer models predicted what has happened to temperatures in recent years. Yet it is on those models (and Hansen's alarmist figures) that our politicians are basing all their proposals for irrevocably changing our lives.
 

Meanwhile anyone who, like myself, takes an interest in the Social History of our country will know that diarists down the centuries have recorded variously extremely hot weather for tens of years whilst others have spoken of "Skating on the Thames". Climate change has always been with us and always will. Whether we are right to use up fossil fuels at the rate we do or should seek alternatives is another argument all together. I do wish the politicians would recognise the difference.

[Snoopy]

And for those still arguing the case for more wind turbines Mr Booker has kindly clarified his comments of last week by providing the breakdown and source of his calculations

Several readers ask me to substantiate my claim that the combined electricity output of all the 2,000 wind turbines so far built in Britain is less than that of a single medium-sized conventional power station.

According to Table 7.5 of the "Dukes" energy statistics on the Department for Business website, the latest annual figure for wind energy shows that it contributed 4,225 gigawatt hours. Dividing that by the 8,760 hours in a year gives a total average output of 482 megawatts.

Table 5.11, listing every UK power plant, shows that nearly 50 conventional power stations were each capable of contributing more than that.

Even if we could build the 7,000 additional wind turbines Gordon Brown dreams of, their combined output would not be much more than that of the single coal-fired power station at Drax.

[Snoopy]

And still they continue with their folly.
Mr Booker tells it as it is in today's Telegraph:

Ed Miliband, our new Energy and Climate Change Secretary, has committed Britain, at this moment of financial meltdown, to an 80 per cent reduction of “carbon emissions” by 2050 – which must go down as the most fatuous utterance ever made by a British Cabinet minister (immediately supported by the Tory shadow spokesman).

The only way this goal could be achieved would be to shut down almost the whole of our economy.

A slightly firmer grasp on reality prevails in those countries, led by Poland and Italy, which were last week in Brussels urging the EU to moderate its plans to reduce carbon emissions, on the grounds that this was not the moment to be piling onto Europe’s economies costs amounting to trillions of euros.

But Gordon Brown, alongside the Commission President, José Manuel Barroso, was at the forefront of those insisting that the EU must stick to its guns.

Brussels’s only concession came from the Environment Commissioner, Stavros Dimas, who said he would increase from 35 per cent to just over 50 per cent the amount of “carbon credits” which European industry would be allowed to buy from the developing world under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

In other words, for the right to continue emitting CO2 in Europe, firms would be permitted to pay hundreds of billions of euros to China, India and elsewhere.

The net result would be to impose astronomic costs on those firms, such as electricity suppliers, which cannot move their operations outside Europe (costs to be passed on to their customers) with little or no effect on emissions.

Just how crazy this system is already becoming was illustrated by a programme broadcast by the BBC World Service last June (and reported here) which highlighted several examples of the CDM in action.

A small Indian chemical firm, for instance, already receives up to $60 million a year for eliminating emissions of CFC greenhouse gases from its process.

A company spokesman admitted that it would have eliminated the CFCs anyway.

The $500 million it is due to receive over the next 10 years is just a free gift, to achieve nothing.

So this insanity gathers way on every side, creating fortunes for the “carbon traders” who broker the deals, all in the name of preventing global temperatures rising.

Yet for several years now, while greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, temperatures have ceased to rise, and even fallen, making a nonsense of all those computer models that predicted that one must rise with the other.

Arctic ice, which this year we were told might melt altogether, now covers an area 28.7 per cent greater than it did at this time last year (see the Watts Up With That website).

Has there ever been such a flight from reality in the history of the world?

[Barman]

I think it is absolutely terrifying Snoops...

Not only does Call me Dave agree with everything that is said about it, the media doesn't even question them when they come out with it! 

Yet it is clear from the world service programme he mentioned that information on how farcical the whole thing is exists...