U.K.

Met Office Downgrades Warming Threat

The UK Meteorological Office (Met Office) quietly released on Christmas Eve a shocking report: instead of rising to 0.54 degree Celsius above the 1971 2000 mean five years from now, as predicted in 2011, global average temperature is now expected to be only about 0.43 degree Celsius above that meana level it has already reached, which implies no significant warming for the next five years.

Since the globe has not warmed in the last 16 years, Dr. David Whitehouse, science adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, commented, That the global temperature standstill could continue to at least 2017 would mean a 20-year period of no statistically significant change in global temperatures. Such a period will pose fundamental problems for climate models. If the latest Met Office prediction is correct, then it will prove to be a lesson in humility.

The significance of this development can hardly be exaggerated. The warming on which some scientists based their alarms about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) lasted only from about 1979 through 1998, or twenty years. A temperature standstill equally long, despite inexorably rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations, suggests rising CO2 didnt cause the earlier warming but natural variability did.

That implication is consistent with the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which was leaked in December. While earlier IPCC reports had claimed solar variability was too slight to account for the recent warming, which it attributed instead to anthropogenic greenhouse gases, AR5 will admit solar radiation had some influencewhich CAGW critics had contended for years.

Coverage of the Met Office story was sparse in the U.K. and usually presented it as unimportant. Perhaps that reflects the ongoing influence of the BBCs decision to ignore CAGW skeptics. BBC said the decision came after advice from a 2006 gathering of 28 distinguished climate scientists. As it turned out, the group consisted almost entirely of environmental activists, not distinguished scientists.

The Met Offices revised predictions suggest that more empirical observations are necessary to make good, reliable science. Policy should not be based on models, particularly not on models instead of contrary observations.

Year after year, the evidence for CAGW dwindles, and the evidence against it grows. We must strive to ensure that logically valid, empirically verified science, not the post-normal, biased science of CAGW alarmists, informs public policy on which trillions of dollars in spending, and major consequences for personal liberty and the well being of the poor, depend.