CHRISTOPHER BOOKER MET OFFICE UK SUMMER FORECAST 2012
Christopher Booker: OK, we got 2012 wrong – but trust our forecast for 2100
Saturday, June 30th 2012, 3:20 PM EDT
Much fun has been had in contrasting the Met Office's forecasts of our weather during the past three months with what actually transpired. Its prediction on March 26 "slightly favoured drier than average conditions for April-May-June", with April as the driest month. This forecast, the Met Office assured us, was based on "observations, several numerical models and expert judgment". What happened, as we know, was that we have had more rain than at any time since records began in 1766, with the wettest April and June in 100 years.
What is timely to recall, however, is the admission made to MPs in March 2010 by Professor Julia Slingo, the Met Office's chief scientist, that the "numerical models" used by the Met Office to make its short-term weather forecasts are exactly the same as those "we use for our climate prediction work".
The Met Office's projections of future climate change are viewed by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with total reverence. So the £33 million super-computer which failed to predict the wettest April in more than a century is one of those on which the IPCC relies for its predictions of what the weather will be like in 100 years' time. It is hard to know which has become more discredited in the past two years, the UK Met Office or the IPCC, both of which rest their faith on computer models as dodgy as one of those proverbial nine-bob notes.
ALAN JONES AUDIO CHRISTOPHER BOOKER HEADLINE STORY WINDFARMS
MUST LISTEN: Alan Jones speaks with British columnist Christopher Booker about global warming
Thursday, June 28th 2012, 2:58 AM EDT
Alan Jones is Australia's most popular talk back presenter. Alan Jones is a phenomenon. He is described by many as Australia's greatest orator and motivational speaker. Alan has the mind and capacity to make complex issues understandable to the largest Breakfast audience in Australia.
A costly hoax
Alan Jones speaks with British columnist Christopher Booker about global warming.
Click source for MUST LISTEN Interview
Also see below for link - The folly of wind power (Alan Jones speaks with MP Craig Kelly about wind power and why it's no real solution.)
Source Link: CLICK THIS LINK for MUST LISTEN Interview between Alan Jones and British columnist Christopher Booker
Christopher Booker: MPs have no idea how to meet the 'carbon' target they voted for
Saturday, June 23rd 2012, 2:43 PM EDT
When readers asked their MPs to explain how the UK would cut CO2 emissions by 80 per cent, the answers made worrying reading.
The great global warming scare has long been dying on its feet, but that sad fiasco of a conference in Rio last week saw it finally dead and buried. "It's pathetic, it's appalling," wailed a spokesman for WWF, one of the thousands of green activists who flew to Rio, many at taxpayers' expense, to see the last rites read over their lost dream. Their cause has even been abandoned by one of its most outspoken champions, the green guru James Lovelock of "Gaia" fame, who now admits that the warming scare was all a tragic mistake, and that talk of "sustainable development" is just "meaningless drivel".
But the "epic failure" of Rio, as Friends of the Earth called it, is an apt cue to recall how this leaves Britain as the only country in the world committed by law to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide by 80 per cent in less than 40 years. The Climate Change Act, on the Government's own figures, faces us with a bill of up to £18 billion every year until 2050, making it by far the most costly law ever passed by Parliament.
More important still, however, this raises the question: how do all those MPs who voted almost unanimously for this target (only three voted against it) think we can meet this obligation without closing down virtually our entire economy?
This is the question which, in April, I invited readers to put to their MPs, and I am very grateful to all those who have now sent me the replies they received, from nearly 50 MPs. These, I fear, are even more depressing than I anticipated.
Christopher Booker: How global-warming enthusiasts misread nature
Saturday, June 23rd 2012, 9:08 AM EDT
Under such headlines as 'British butterfly defies doom prediction to thrive in changing climate', the usual suspects (e.g. the Guardian and the Independent) recently publicised a study claiming that, thanks to global warming, 'a once-rare British butterfly', the Brown Argus, 'is becoming a common sight in the English countryside'. A paper from York University, it was reported, showed that these butterflies have moved so far north that they can now be seen 'within a few miles' of York. Not for the first time on reading similar claims, I wondered how it is that their authors seem to know so little about butterflies, My battered copy of the best book on British butterflies I know, published by Edmund Sandars in 1939, confirmed that 70 years ago the Brown Argus was found throughout Britain 'as far north as Aberdeen'.
Attempts to use butterflies as evidence of global warming are popular with newspapers because it gives them an excuse to decorate their pages with pictures of our most colourful insects — although in the years when the warming scare was at its height, these more usually accompanied predictions that climate change was threatening them with extinction. Typical was a piece by Louise Gray in the Daily Telegraph in 2008, headed 'Butterfly species may be lost to Britain through climate change'. Along with other evidence that she knew little about butterflies, this claimed that soaring temperatures could wipe out upland species such as the Mountain Ringlet altogether. But no explanation was offered for why these butterflies might find it any harder to survive than they did in those previous times, such as the early middle ages, when Britain was warmer than it is today.
We may have become familiar with how warmists like to call in aid of their cause almost any unusual weather event or passing change in climate patterns
Click source to read FULL report from Christopher Booker
Source Link: spectator.co.uk (Sub Req)
UK DROUGHT FORECAST 2012 CHRISTOPHER BOOKER
Christopher Booker: When will we wake up to the real water scandal?
Sunday, June 10th 2012, 7:59 AM EDT
As the rain pours down, our reservoirs fill and hosepipe bans are ended, we must not allow this Act of God – unforeseen, as usual, by the Met Office – to distract us from the utter shambles of our national water policy.
Last month I reported how, since 2007, in response to a Communication from the European Commission, our government has switched the entire focus of its water policy away from building more reservoirs and mending leaks (which every two years waste as much water as all our existing reservoirs hold) to concentrate instead, in face of the droughts promised by believers in global warming such as the Met Office, simply on using less water.
Accordingly, no fewer than five major new reservoir schemes have been scrapped in south-east England alone, where the shortage of water is most severe – two of them last year by our Environment Secretary, Caroline Spelman. In obedience to the EU's guidelines, her White Paper "Water for Life", full of references to "climate change", was all about how we must cut down our water usage and use it more "efficiently", not least by encouraging our largely foreign-owned water companies to make this "precious resource" more expensive.
The fact is that, since the 1980s, we have spent so much – £67 billion in the period up to 2007 – on complying with the absurdly exacting requirements of three EU directives on water quality that we have spent less than a quarter of that sum on "infrastructure", such as mending leaks.
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER BBC
Christopher Booker: On the euro, and on global warming, it turns out the 'thought criminals' were right.
Saturday, May 19th 2012, 2:20 PM EDT
Heretical thoughts about the EU and about climate change, long-suppressed, are becoming the received wisdom.
Two adjacent items in last Monday's Daily Telegraph highlighted what has become one of the more prominent features of British life. In one, Cristina Odone described how she was asked to speak in favour of marriage at a conference arranged by the World Congress of Families, at the Law Society. At the last minute, the Society cancelled the debate on the grounds that it was "contrary to our diversity policy" – "espousing as it does an ethos which is opposed to same-sex marriage". (Though the society happily hosted a meeting recently to promote assisted suicide which, unlike marriage, is still against the law.)
Adjoining this was a fine rant by Boris Johnson against the BBC: "statist, corporatist, anti-business, Europhile and, above all, overwhelmingly biased to the Left". He called for its next director-general to be a Tory.
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER UK DROUGHT FORECAST 2012
Christopher Booker: Keeping the country short of water is now government – and EU – policy
Failure to fix leaks and increase reservoir capacity are behind our water problems.
When I returned last week to a grey, cold, rainswept Heathrow, after a brief visit to Australia on rather sad family business, I naturally wanted to know what had been going on while I was away. It hardly said much for our democracy that Boris Johnson should have owed his "triumphant" re-election as Mayor to the support of just 16.8 per cent of those Londoners eligible to vote – while Labour owed its "victory" in council elections to just 12 per cent of the potential voters. The Greek and French election results heralded another sharp downward lurch in the slow-motion collapse of the euro. The prospect of Britain's lights going out moved nearer with the pulling out of France's state-owned EDF as the last company that might have provided us with new nuclear power stations, while the Environment Agency's Chris Smith announced that Britain may be hoping for a glut of cheap gas from "fracking" shale, but that this could be allowed to generate electricity only on condition that all the resulting CO₂ is buried in holes in the ground, by a wishful-thinking technology that would double its price and is unlikely ever to work anyway.
As big a story as any, however, was the ongoing drama of our "wettest-ever drought" as, despite record recent rainfall, we are told that hosepipe bans are still unlikely to be lifted because we don't have enough water to go round. And here, it turns out, there is a startling twist to the tale.
The great water shambles, as we know, centres on two major failings of national policy. One is the water companies' failure to plug the leaks that are costing us nearly as much water every two years as is contained in all our reservoirs. The other is their failure to add to that reservoir capacity, which has barely increased in the 20 years since water was privatised, despite our 10 per cent growth in population.
Source Link: telegraph.co.uk
Christopher Booker: How climate change has got Worldwide Fund for Nature bamboozled
Saturday, May 5th 2012, 5:59 PM EDT
WWF has travelled too far from its original aim, to protect endangered species.
What a strange body the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund, now the Worldwide Fund for Nature) has become these days. It is the largest, richest and most influential environmental lobbying organisation in the world. Originally set up in 1961 by Julian Huxley, Prince Philip, Prince Bernhard and others, for the admirable purpose of campaigning to save species endangered by human activity, it has morphed in the last 20 years into something very different, more akin to a multinational corporation.
The WWF empire now derives a very hefty chunk of its income from partnerships with governments, or the EU, or actual multinationals, such as Coca-Cola and Sky, which like to use its iconic panda logo (originally designed by the naturalist Peter Scott) to give an "eco-caring" gloss to their commercial activities. The chief reason why it has so greatly increased its wealth and influence is that it has joined other lobby groups, such as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, in pushing to the top of its agenda that most fashionable and lucrative of environmental causes, the "battle to halt climate change".
But this has led WWF into some rather odd little tangles, such as those which have recently emerged over its activities in Tanzania. Much of its work there is carried out under a UN climate change policy known as REDD+ ("reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation"), which is part of the UN's £17 billion Fast Start programme. Britain, giving £1.5 billion, is that programme's second largest contributor after Japan.
Source Link: telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange
Christopher Booker: The green mystery we must ask our MPs to explain
Saturday, April 28th 2012, 2:26 PM EDT
David Cameron, reiterating his claim to lead "the greenest government ever", has again highlighted one of the great political mysteries of our time – one I would be grateful for my readers' help in unravelling. Four years ago, our MPs voted almost unanimously for by far the most expensive law ever enacted by Parliament. According to the Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc), the Climate Change Act will cost us all up to £18 billion every year until 2050. It commits Britain, uniquely in the world, to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to only a fifth of what they were in 1990.
As we all know, emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels are inseparable from almost every economic activity of our civilisation. We rely on them for some 75 per cent of the electricity needed to provide us with almost all the necessities of life. Without CO2 we would not be able to light and heat our homes, power our computers, get money from cashpoints, buy food from shops. Our transport system would be paralysed.
Hence the mystery: how can we meet that obligation to cut our emissions of CO2 by 80 per cent in just 40 years? After six hours debating this in 2008, 463 MPs of all parties voted for it, only three against. But of the 50 MPs who spoke, not one showed the slightest interest in how the target might be met.
JOHN O'SULLIVAN UK DROUGHT FORECAST 2012 PIERS CORBYN HEADLINE STORY PAUL HUDSON CHRISTOPHER BOOKER UPDATED
John O'Sullivan: Britain's "Wettest Drought" Embarrasses Government Agency and Big Green Media: Updated by Piers Corbyn
Tuesday, April 24th 2012, 12:47 PM EDT
Google Image - Umbrella
As April deluges soak Britain a top long-range weather forecaster denounces error-prone Environment Agency and mainstream media spin.
Londoner Piers Corbyn, the maverick long-range forecaster of WeatherAction.com has poured more cold water over Britain's discredited Environment Agency and gullible eco-crazed national newspapers. Corbyn reveals how self-serving pro-green zealots obstruct his efforts to help give Britons a chance of a more effective national long-range weather prediction service.
Mainstream media organ, The Guardian typifies the lunatic element. The paper's Environment pages (April 16, 2012) have been gushing constant drought gloom and doom to a dwindling flock of readers.
Updated below with MUST READ comments from Piers Corbyn
Source Link: johnosullivan.wordpress.com
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