“
Why did we slide into chaos?” asks the front page of today’s Telegraph. It was prompted by the wrath of Transport Secretary Philip Hammond who apparently can’t understand why it is that Britain has been caught out – yet again – by snowy weather.
“There are lessons to be learnt from our performance in every bout of bad weather and it is important that we learn those now,” he says.
All right, Phil. Your wish is my command. For considerably less than you paid the RAC’s David Quarmby last month for a review of weather-related transport policy, I can tell you what the problem is:
The Met Office.
Updated below with comments by Piers Corbyn
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As the good
Dr North reminds us,as recently as late October the Met Office was predicting that we should expect an “unusually dry and mild winter”. This was news to every independent weather forecaster in the world from
Joe Bastardi to
Piers Corbyn who have been predicting a harsh winter for months.
But the Met Office of course knew better thanks to its spiffy new £33 million IBM supercomputer (90 per cent funded, of course, by the taxpayer) whose precognitive powers are so great, it is said that on a good day with a fair wind behind it and can very nearly match the track record of the dead celebrity Paul the Octopus. And of course, it’s this very same computer which is responsible for so many of the “projections” – not even “predictions”, note, but “projections” – of Anthropogenic Climate Doom so
lovingly detailed on its taxpayer-funded website.
Why then, does the government go on relying on the services of this risible outfit? How come when the Met Office’s spokeswoman
Vicky Pope pops up yet again to reassure us that this Siberian winter is a case of “weather not climate” does anyone still take her seriously?
Really, this is one for the psychiatrists, rather than me, but in it a nutshell it’s a case of cognitive dissonance.
Cognitive dissonance is when all the evidence of your senses and intellect tell you one thing; but your brain stubbornly insists the truth is otherwise.
So, for example, it’s snowing heavily outside; the country is in chaos; independent weather forecasters are predicting dreadful winters for many years to come; global warming stopped in 1998 even as CO2 emissions continued to rise; the Climategate emails reveal the scientists at the very heart of the IPCC to be corrupt and mendacious; wind farms and solar farms are an excedingly inefficient way of producing energy and have wreaked serious economic damage on all countries (Denmark, Spain, Germany) that have tried introducing them on a massive scale.
Yet still you go on insisting that: the snow is a temporary blip (”weather not climate”), AGW remains a serious threat – as the majority of the most distinguished and reliable scientific “experts” testify; green jobs are the future and the drive for renewables can only do Britain the power of good.
Well, cognitive dissonance is the polite way of putting it. I’d call it sheer and utter bloody madness.
So does
Joe Bastardi:
The shiver that is hitting is similar to the opening of January last year world wide, where major cold shots engulfed the far east, the eastern US and Europe. That these are growing more pronounced is no accident, and the climate people arguing for reduction of greenhouse gasses are acting like spoiled children when they claim what ever happens means they are right. I wish I had their job. When I am wrong, in what I do in the private sector, the ramifications are people will cancel their contract if they feel I am wrong enough of the time to lose them money… By the way, its what I love about competition and capitalism..it forces those that wish to excel to compete.. Imagine if your favorite football team was forced to ” redistribute goals” based on some fictional rule that said that it wasnt fair to score more than the other team.
I bet you wouldnt be watching much football, eh?
Moral is that these wild cold shots mean at the least, the earth is fighting back from the warming, which is intuitive given the actual total history of the globe. What is amazing is the arrogance, and sheer elitism of a crew that will claim such events as theirs, when they have cost the world an untold amount shoving and unproven agenda down peoples throats. While I have always believed he was good intentioned ( unlike many of my other companions in this debate) at the very least Al Gores stand on ethanol, sacrificing food for a fuel that not only can still be attained through fossil sources, but is polluting the northern gulf o Mexico to a point where its becoming dead ( fertilizer coming downstream) and then his complete capitulation on the hurricane issue ( remember, global warming causes more hurricanes) should at least give pause. But instead, like any good ideologue, its simply ignore the facts and then claim the opposite affect as the sign you are right.
I get nuts about this stuff.
Don’t worry, Joe, you’re not the only one.
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Brill, you - and Joe - had me laughing all the way to a snowball fight.
There is however a technical defence the Top Metmen's minders can offer. Yes they do have minders as I discovered when invited to Sky last winter for a sort of parallel universes "interview" with the Met Office only present on the basis "WE are too important to speak to you directly"; so when my challenges (first interview) were put to their TopMetMan (second interview) I couldn't rebut the drivel they regurgitated which was on the lines:- "we were only wrong because we weren't right". I noticed the TopMetMan had a top minder and wondered why TopMetMen go round in twos - now there's a round of jokes already being written for Christmas crackers to relieve us from the LONG CRUEL WINTER of 2010/11 which has just begun.
Ah, yes the technicality; this must be explained slowly as if you were a child (well you were once) in the manner of "weather is not climate", "Monday is not Tuesday". It is as easy to understand as it is to spell CO2. It is simply that Octopuses are hairless creatures dead or alive and so can never get lice or be described as lousy. Therefore your associating the Met Office Octopus with something lousy, bad, wrong, requiring elimination or unacceptable is just "NOT ALLOWED". End of debate. The science is settled. Put on your D for Dunces hat, JD you are OUT. The Royal Institution did a simple experiment to show it, they put one live louse on one dead octopus and it died too (eventually). Amen.
Now on the matter in hand. Britain & Europe is heading into one of the most extreme if not THE most extreme winter for a 100 years. It will cause stacks of £billions of economic damage and suffering and deaths on un-salted roads (yes we are 90% confident the UK will run out of road salt) and through hypothermia because people will be unable to pay the theft energy prices imposed on us by Global Warming price hikes. The Met office will keep on with a monologue "It OUGHT TO end after x days" but x will not shrink and if it does a new cold period will quickly re-appear and melted snow will refreeze and get covered into the most treacherous killer of all - black ice under fresh powder snow. Much of this could be avoided. We have a game changer upon us.
We - you, people of goodwill - should call on the Coalition Government to think outside the box - and set up a Winter Emergency COBRA - a standing committee to actually prepare for what is upon us - not just pretend to get ready for something which "OUGHT NOT BE"- which includes me. So rather than me shouting from the snowdrifts that committee can
1. Get a good picture of the full crisis December to Feb inclusive upon us.
2. Issue useful warnings to the emergency services that certain snow deluges and bouts of black ice will be twice as severe (or worse) than standard Meteorology will expect even from two days ahead (see link above to me in JD's article), ie ORDER THE BBC TO AMMEND MET OFFICE WARNINGS TO CLOSER TO REALITY
3. Consider, now, realistic ways of coping with zero road salt - such as more air and rail freight or using snow chains and winter tyres in parts of the country.
4. For a substantial section of the population, bring in a whole programme of home-working via computer links instead of commuter non-links
5. Force the energy companies to cut prices.
6. Save Lives
The Committee will need to be a religious free zone and arguments like "It's OK CO2 will save us (Did you read that right?) from Siberia". would be not be permitted.
This is their (Met Office, Govt, BBC...) problem. The NO GO ZONE for CO2 religion might spread to children and as someone said If the children don't believe no-one will and bang goes carbon tax, carbon trading, the Climate Change Act, the empire of Green religion prayer wheels (wind farms), energy price and value hikes, control of the developing world through carbon credits, burning food as 'biofuels' while children starve, jamborees and junkets like Cancun...a whole way of being.
JD! - DO IT! DO IT! DO IT!