Global warming stopped 16 years ago, Met Office report reveals: MoS got it right about warming... so who are the 'deniers' now?

By David Rose

Last year The Mail on Sunday reported a stunning fact: that global warming had ‘paused’ for 16 years. The Met Office’s own monthly figures showed there had been no statistically significant increase in the world’s temperature since 1997.

We were vilified. One Green website in the US said our report was ‘utter bilge’ that had to be ‘exposed and attacked’.

The Met Office issued a press release claiming it was misleading, before quietly admitting a few days later that it was true that the world had not got significantly warmer since 1997 after all. A Guardian columnist wondered how we could be ‘punished’.

Pause: Last year The Mail on Sunday reported global warming had 'paused' for 16 years

But then last week, the rest of the media caught up with our report. On Tuesday, news finally broke of a revised Met Office ‘decadal forecast’, which not only acknowledges the pause, but predicts it will continue at least until 2017. It says world temperatures are likely to stay around 0.43 degrees above the long-term average – as by then they will have done for 20 years.

This is hugely significant. It amounts to an admission that earlier forecasts – which have dictated years of Government policy and will cost tens of billions of pounds – were wrong. They did not, the Met Office now accepts, take sufficient account of ‘natural variability’ – the effects of phenomena such as ocean temperature cycles – which at least for now are counteracting greenhouse gas warming.

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Surely the Met Office would trumpet this important news, as it has done when publishing warnings of imminent temperature rises. But there was no fanfare. Instead, it issued the revised forecast on the ‘research’ section of its website – on Christmas Eve. It only came to light when it was noticed by an eagle-eyed climate blogger, and then by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, the think-tank headed by Lord Lawson.

Then, rather than reporting the news objectively, Britain’s Green Establishment went into denial. Neither The Guardian nor The Independent bothered to report it in their paper editions, although The Independent did later run an editorial saying that the new forecast was merely a trivial ‘tweak’. Instead, they luridly reported on the heatwave and raging bushfires in Australia.

One of the curious features of Green journalism is that if it gets unusually cold, this will be dismissed as mere ‘weather’ of no significance, while a heatwave or violent storm will be seized on as a warning that catastrophic climate change is already here.

Instead of focusing on the news that global warming had halted, other newspapers reported on the heatwave and raging bushfires in Australia

Where the new forecast was mentioned on the BBC and other websites, experts were marshalled to reassure apocalypse-hungry readers that the end of the world was just as nigh as before. A warming hiatus of a mere 20 years, they said, was nothing.

This would all be faintly humorous, if it wasn’t so deadly serious. Back in 2007, when the Labour Government was preparing what became the Climate Change Act, far from being neutral, the Met Office made a blatant attempt to influence political debate.

In a glossy brochure, it revealed it had a ‘new system’ that could predict the future, by combining analysis of natural variability with long-term trends. The system, it warned, showed that by 2014 ‘global average temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 degrees compared to 2004, and half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than the current record hot year, 1998’.

It boasted that this showed how the Met Office used ‘world-class science to underpin policy’. No doubt some of the MPs who voted for the Act, with its hugely expensive targets to replace fossil energy with ‘renewables’ such as wind, were swayed by it. Barely five years later, it is clear this forecast was worthless. But the Met Office is unrepentant. ‘Climate models do predict periods of little or no warming, or even cooling,’ a spokesman told me. Despite the pause, the long-term projection that the world is likely to warm by about three degrees if the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles was still on course.

Inconvenient truth: The MoS report last October that was vilified by the Green Establishment

We all get things wrong, and by definition futurology is a risky business. But behind all this lies something much more pernicious than a revised decadal forecast. The problem is not the difficulty of predicting something as chaotic as the Earth’s climate, but the almost Stalinist way the Green Establishment tries to stifle dissent.

There is, for example, the odious term ‘denier’. This is applied to anyone who questions the new orthodoxy about global warming. It doesn’t matter if one states that yes, CO2 does warm the planet, but the critical issues we need to address are how fast and how much: if one doesn’t anticipate catastrophe, one must be vilified, and equated with those who deny the Holocaust.

Yet the real deniers are those who don’t just claim that the pause is insignificant, but that it doesn’t exist at all. Such deniers also still insist that the ‘science is settled’. The truth is that the unexpected pause has triggered a new spate of research, in which many supposed ‘consensus’ conclusions are being questioned.

Some scientists are revisiting some basic assumptions of climate prediction models, such as the effects of clouds and smoke particles in the atmosphere. They now think that the claim that the warming effect of CO2 is ‘amplified’ by things such as cloud cover have been seriously exaggerated. In their view, doubling CO2 may only warm the world by 1.5 degrees or so, giving us many more decades to develop lower carbon energy sources.

How have the Green deniers been so successful in concealing such debates?

Partly it is the web of commercial interests that both fund and are sustained by Green climate orthodoxy. But it is also their dissenter-trashing machine.

A day before the revised Met Office forecast broke, US blog site Planet 3.0 awarded me its Golden Horseshoe award for the ‘most brazenly damaging and malign bad science of 2013’.’

I’ll be clutching it when they burn me at the stake.

W.H.: Does this “stopping of global warming” sixteen years ago have anything to do with the implementation of geoengineering programmes for the alleged purpose of “mitigating global warming”? Who disagrees?

MDM: Disagree with what? You asked a question. You didn't postulate any theories.

W.H. Yes. That is right. Let me be more succinct. This Daily Mail article makes assertions about “global warming” having stopped sixteen years ago without making any mention of the fact that “geoengineers” argue "global warming" SHOULD be stopped by spraying light-reflecting particles in the upper atmosphere. The article does not of course mention the taboo idea that this activity, or something that looks like it, has already started, on a planetary scale, and not from yesterday but from years ago. The article in itself does not therefore appear to benefit chemtrails activists. Perhaps it could function as a “conversation opener” to provoke the question as to whether this alleged stopping of global warming has anything to do with the activity of geoengineers. But I don't see anyone, sceptics or non-sceptics, raising this question. What I “postulate” is that the Daily Mail article enables us to ask this question of “the authorities” and what I ask is whether anyone disagrees with my postulate and sees the article as having some other kind of relevance or usefulness.

MDM: That's only if you believe the “geoengineers”. I don't believe for a second that is the reason for their spraying program. Modifying the weather is more of a side effect.

C.C.: Wayne, you know my position. We cannot hide the fact that there is no Global Warming. I post articles to inform people. Like it or not, many people do believe in Global warming and truth is always welcome. I am sick and tired to live among the Zombie Sheeple and I wish people stop believing in the bloody global warming and wake up. I am not going to hide an article that says the truth. I do not think “hiding” this article will help the battle against Aerosol spraying.

W.H.: MDM, assessment of the utility of the Daily Mail article does not in any way depend on whether one “believes the geoengineers”. The reality concerning chemtrails is that one is faced by a unanimous media and government-based dictate that “they do not exist”, so that one is confronted by the task of proving to agencies which are determined to deny the reality of something, that the something whose reality they deny is real. That is impossible. One is faced by an impervious monolith. The situation becomes different if one explores the contradictions between the assertions of geoengineers and the assertions of climate change sceptics. To do this it is not necessary to believe in what either side says. It is only necessary to say that if climate change sceptics are right and climate change is a hoax, then the recipes of geoengineers for dealing with what they say is a non-existent problem must be rejected, and rejected by climate change sceptics themselves, including their leadership like Lord Monckton, and their propagandists like the Daily Mail. But this is not what happens. Instead of attacking geoengineers, leading climate change sceptics attack climate change activists for their stance on climate change. They ignore climate activists' position on geoengineering, which in reality is often LESS FAVOURABLE THAN THE STANCE OF LEADING CLIMATE CHANGE SCEPTICS THEMSELVES. Climate change activists say that geoengineering is a bad idea, but that “it may become inevitable if the climate change sceptics cannot be removed from politics”. That is an unacceptable position, which must be rejected by all chemtrails activists. Nevertheless it is only one pole, and indeed the weaker pole, of a bipolar game that is being played with us. Its hypocrisy is the hypocrisy of weak-kneed ecologists who want to fight climate change scepticism without acknowledging the tabooed reality of chemtrails. But leading climate change sceptics are equally dismissive of the reality of chemtrails. Some of the rank and file may not be, but the leadership is. Climate change sceptics are led by Machiavellian cynics, whose views and activities are publicized by equally Machiavellian and cynical media outlets. If the Daily Mail were not Machiavellian and cynical it would do one of two things. It would either 1) mention that geoengineers say they want to mitigate global warming through Solar Radiation Management, and if they are already doing this, that might provide an explanation for the alleged lack of global warming of the last sixteen years, or it would 2) condemn geoengineers for their proposals to implement aerosol spraying to mitigate a non-existent problem, employing a technique that may in itself lead to global warming. It does neither of these things. Instead it publishes decontexualized information, or “information”, whose only purpose can be to discredit “global warming alarmists” while ignoring the geoengineering factor (both geoengineering as a proposition and chemtrails as a reality). This is what I say to CC too, who is someone I know in real life, and who has said to me that she is discouraged and disheartened by activism against chemtrails. Her discouragement is an inevitable by-product of what she believes and what she therefore sees in front of her: a seamless monolith of deceit.

MDM: It's amazing that we live in an age where giant lines can be sprayed across the sky to the point where they create a milky haze. And the media can just say it's not happening and people believe the media instead of their own eyes.

W.H.: Have you ever read anthropological studies of the reactions, or rather non-reactions, of people in areas remote from “European civilization” when they first saw the ships of Europeans appearing off their shores? Their characteristic reaction was often to ignore them, to pretend they did not exist, because they had not been seen before, were inexplicable, and so could not exist. Sometimes, if they were lucky, their shamans, their wise men, were more courageous, and could assimilate the new phenomenon, interpret it to their own satisfaction and then provide a culturally acceptable explanation that would make it feasible for the inexplicable and impossible to begin to be perceived. That is how it was for them. But how is it for us? We do not have wise shamans concerned for our well being and mental and physical health. We have contending, “pluralistic” shamans, skilled in secret collusion with each other, who offer conflicting explanations, neither or none of which are adequate to encompass every dimension and every feature of the inexplicable and impossible phenomenon. The result is paralysis, and non-perception.

20th January 2013

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