Britain's winters are getting colder because of melting Arctic ice, the Government’s forecaster said yesterday. Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo said climate change was “loading the dice” towards freezing, drier weather. --Ben Jackson,
The Sun, 11 April 2013
Bungling weather bosses predicted a drier than usual winter, it has emerged. The Met Office’s staggeringly inaccurate forecast was made at the end of November last year – just a month before the record-breaking deluge began. --Tom Newton Dunn,
The Sun, 11 February 2014
The chief scientist of the Met Office has been criticised for claiming that “all the evidence” indicated climate change had played a role in the recent storms and flooding. Some scientists are said to be concerned that the remark has been interpreted as drawing a strong connection between climate change and the exceptional winter weather when the evidence is incomplete. Her speech came after the Prime Minister said he “very much suspected” that there was a link. “What Dame Julia says goes, at least by implication, beyond what most climate scientists are willing to say,” one academic said. “I find it very hard to look inside her mind as to what made her think that was a sensible thing to say.” --Oliver Moody,
The Times, 18 February 2014
Instead of defending Julia Slingo's statement on the floods the Met Office have defended the original report. This is very interesting: it seems that the Met Office is unable to come up with any defence of its chief scientist's public statements. Yesterday I suggested that Slingo's statement had misled the public. This clarification doesn't seemed to have changed anything at all. It looks bad. Very bad. –Andrew Montford,
Bishop Hill, 17 February 2014
A study by the Met Office and Centre for Ecology and Hydrology concluded that "it is not possible, yet, to give a definitive answer on whether climate change has been a contributor or not." At the launch of the report, the Met Office chief scientist, Dame Julia Slingo, seemed to go a bit beyond what appeared in print. She said: "All the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change." Not some of the evidence, but all of it. The Met Office scrambled to produce a statement to assert that there was no disagreement. It also confirmed the "uncertainty" about the storm track in the North Atlantic but did not address whether the chief scientist had gone beyond the conclusions of their own report. Does this leave us any wiser? No. In my experience scientists always disagree - that's how research advances. --David Shukman¸
BBC News, 18 February 2014
In the row over whether climate change is causing the current floods and storms, the sceptics are the ones who are sticking to the consensus, as set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — you know, the body that the alarm-mongers are always telling us to obey. And it is the sceptics who have been arguing for years for resilience and adaptation, rather than decarbonisation. While the green lobby has prioritised decarbonisation, sceptics have persistently advocated government spending on adaptation, so as to grab the benefits of climate change but avoid the harm, and be ready for cooling as well if the sun goes into a funk. --Matt Ridley,
The Times, 17 February 2014
Most of the climate sceptics operate on self-employed shoestrings and cost you nothing: Andrew Montford, David Holland, Nic Lewis, Doug Keenan, Paul Homewood, Fay Kelly-Tuncay. There is only one professional sceptic in the entire country — Benny Peiser — and he is not paid by the taxpayer. --Matt Ridley,
The Times, 17 February 2014
Extreme weather events being taken as signs for the coming end unless sinful ways are repented is as old as civilization. Today’s climate panic is merely just the latest relapse to a very old mental disorder that has afflicted mankind for thousands of years. The only antidote is reason and knowledge. --Pierre Gosselin,
No Tricks Zone, 17 February 2014
