Reblogged from Mark Steyn’s website, an article on the UK floods. Buy one of his gift certificates if you would like to help give him a sporting chance of successfully countersuing the odious Michael Mann:
Amphibious Albion
by Mark Steyn
As non-British TV viewers may have discerned, the whole of the United Kingdom is presently underwater. Something to do with that rising of the oceans that Barack Obama promised to reverse?
Why, yes!
Mr Miliband says: “This winter is a one-in-250-year event” (yet it’s nothing like as wet as 1929-30 if you count the whole of England and Wales, let alone Britain) and that “the science is clear”. The chief scientist of the Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, tells us “all the evidence” suggests that climate change is contributing to this winter’s wetness. (Why, then, did she allow the Met Office to forecast in November that a dry winter was almost twice as likely as a wet winter?) Lord Stern, an economist, claimed that the recent weather is evidence “we are already experiencing the impact of climate change”.
In fact, before the prophets of doom drowned out everyone else, the “consensus” was that flooding was nothing to do with “climate change”:
Here’s what the IPCC’s latest report actually says: “There continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.” Here’s what a paper published by 17 senior IPCC scientists from five different countries said last month: “It has not been possible to attribute rain-generated peak streamflow trends to anthropogenic climate change over the past several decades…”
As for the organization Julia Slingo represents:
In 2012, the Met Office agreed: “There continues to be little evidence that the recent increase in storminess over the UK is related to man-made climate change.” So please will Lord Stern, Dame Julia and Mr Miliband explain why they are misleading the public about the science?
That’s the question my old Telegraph colleague Matt Ridley asks in a London Times column headlined “The Sceptics Are Right. Don’t Scapegoat Them”. Mr Murdoch has paywalled it, but Down Under the invaluable Jo Nova has excerpted a few choice quotes:
In the old days we would have drowned a witch to stop the floods. These days the Green Party, Greenpeace and Ed Miliband demand we purge the climate sceptics. No insult is too strong for sceptics these days: they are “wilfully ignorant” (Ed Davey), “headless chickens” (the Prince of Wales) or “flat-earthers” (Lord Krebs), with “diplomas in idiocy” (one of my fellow Times columnists).
These wilfully ignorant flat-earthers with diplomas in idiocy are, of course, at odds with 97 per cent of the world’s scientists:
That consensus, by the way, has never said that climate change will necessarily be dangerous. The oft-quoted 97 per cent agreement among scientists refers to the statement that man-made climate change happens, not to future projections. No climate change sceptic that I know “denies” climate change, or even human contributions to it. It’s a lazy and unpleasant slur to say that they do.
Sceptics say it is not happening fast enough to threaten more harm than the wasteful and regressive measures intended to combat it. So far they have been right. Over 30 years, global temperature has changed far more slowly than predicted in 95 per cent of the models, and has decelerated, not accelerated. When the sceptic David Whitehouse first pointed out the current 15 to 17-year standstill in global warming (after only 18 to 20 years of warming), he was ridiculed; now the science establishment admits the “pause” but claims to have some post-hoc explanations.
By the way, what was the consensus at the start of that 18-to-20-year warming period? Ladies and gentlemen, from the 1978 version of James Cameron’s forthcoming Years Of Living Dangerously, Mr Leonard Nimoy:
Climate experts believe the next Ice Age is on its way.
For Years Of Living Dangerously, Dr Michael E Mann has been signed as scientific advisor to celebrity climate correspondent Jessica Alba. I’m not sure if he’s also served as Leonard Nimoy’s personal “climate expert”, but, if so, perhaps he could boldly go where no Mann has gone before and ask Mr Spock to admit he was wrong. Warm me up, Scotty!
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Matt Ridley’s article: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-sceptics-are-right-don't-scapegoat-them.aspx
Ignorance of people is huge. Few people know what it is polar vortex. He uses the Jetstream. Where does the Jetstream? After all, it tropopause, the boundary of the stratosphere. From where energywhen the temperature of the tropopause is fixed at -60 degrees C?
Energy comes from the upper layers of the polar vortex. But for the AccuWeather polar vortex is a cold front.
The Met Office should be defunded. I cannot see that they perform any useful functions. They produce forcasts that are invariably hopelessly wrong and often the oposite of what actually happens They produce inaccurate and misleading statements about climate change, for example furnish graphs dating from 1948, as evidence that it was “the worst ever” when in fact just one year earlier in 1947 was a worse event than their “worst ever”.
The Met Office should be defunded.
Considering that the 1979-99 warming contains:
a) the Great Dying of the Thermometers, coincident with an inexplicable ~1.5 degree jump in the trend line, and
b) the one-off Super El Nino at the tail end, also adding almost 1 degree to the trend line
one is justified in asking whether there was any actual warming even in the poster child cherry bucket for AGW (excuse the mashed metaphor).
Ridicule and satire are the archiles heel of all the useful idiots.
They have a problem with humour, that many sites are openly sticking
it too them, is a sign they have lost the war.
They lash out and tell even bigger lies, and defame people, like
little Micky Mann is doing. The back lash is starting to bite them on the arse.
Expect them to become more shrill and stupid over the course of this year,
they have run out of options and Gaia is not co-operating.
Wayne: Indeed. If they’d listened to us 5 years ago when we told them that solar activity was about to take a big dive, they might not be in such dire straits with their co2 hockey stickery.
All of the alarmist statement from Slingo, Milipede, etc., just show that AGW is about politics and not science.