The hijack of the Met

By far the biggest story of recent days, writes Christopher Booker, has been the astonishing chaos inflicted, to a greater or lesser extent, on all of our lives by the fact that we are not only enjoying what is predicted to be the coldest December since records began in 1659, but also the harshest of three freezing winters in a row. We all know the disaster stories – thousands of motorists trapped for hours on paralysed motorways, days of misery at Heathrow, rail passengers marooned in unheated carriages for up to 17 hours.

But central to all this – as the cry goes up: "Why wasn't Britain better prepared?" – has been the bizarre role of the Met Office. We might start with the strange affair of the Quarmby Review. Shortly after Philip Hammond became Transport Secretary last May, he commissioned David Quarmby, a former head of the Strategic Rail Authority, to look into how we might avoid a repeat of last winter's disruption.

In July and again in October, Mr Quarmby produced two reports on "The Resilience of England's Transport System in Winter"; and at the start of this month, after our first major snowfall, Mr Quarmby and two colleagues were asked to produce an "audit" of their earlier findings. The essence of their message was that they had consulted the Met Office, which advised them that, despite two harsh winters in succession, these were "random events", the chances of which, after our long previous run of mild winters, were only 20 to one.

Similarly, they were told in the summer, the odds against a third such winter were still only 20 to one. So it might not be wise to spend billions of pounds preparing for another "random event", when its likelihood was so small. Following this logic, if the odds against a hard winter two years ago were only 20 to one, it might have been thought that the odds against a third such "random event" were not 20 to one but 20 x 20 x 20, or 8,000 to one.

What seems completely to have passed Mr Quarmby by, however, is the fact that in these past three years the Met Office's forecasting record has become a national joke. Ever since it predicted a summer warmer and drier than average in 2007 – followed by some of the worst floods in living memory – its forecasts have been so unerringly wrong that even the chief adviser to our Transport Secretary might have noticed.

The Met Office's forecasts of warmer than average summers and winters have been so consistently at 180 degrees to the truth that, earlier this year, it conceded that it was dropping seasonal forecasting. Hence, last week, the Met Office issued a categorical denial to the Global Warming Policy Foundation that it had made any forecast for this winter.

Immediately, however, several blogs, led by Autonomous Mind, produced evidence from the Met Office website that in October it did indeed publish a forecast for December, January and February. This indicated that they would be significantly warmer than last year, and that there was only "a very much smaller chance of average or below average temperatures". So the Met Office has not only been caught out yet again getting it horribly wrong (always in the same direction), it was even prepared to deny it had said such a thing at all.

The real question, however, is why has the Met Office become so astonishingly bad at doing the job for which it is paid nearly £200 million a year – in a way which has become so stupendously damaging to our country?

The answer is that in the past 20 years, as can be seen from its website, the Met Office has been hijacked from its proper role to become wholly subservient to its obsession with global warming. (At one time it even changed its name to the Met Office "for Weather and Climate Change".)

This all began when its then-director John Houghton became one of the world's most influential promoters of the warmist gospel. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and remained at the top of it for 13 years. It was he who, in 1990, launched the Met Office's Hadley Centre for Climate Change, closely linked to the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia (CRU), at the centre of last year's Climategate row, which showed how the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC had been prepared to bend their data and to suppress any dissent from warming orthodoxy.

The reason why the Met Office gets its forecasts so hopelessly wrong is that they are based on those same computer models on which the IPCC itself relies to predict the world's climate in 100 years time. They are programmed on the assumption that, as CO2 rises, so temperatures must inexorably follow.

For 17 years this seemed plausible, because the world did appear to be getting warmer. We all became familiar with those warmer winters and earlier springs, which the warmists were quick to exploit to promote their message – as when Dr David Viner of the CRU famously predicted to The Independent in 2000 that "within a few years winter snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event". (Last week, that article from ten years ago was the most viewed item on The Independent's website.)

But in 2007, the computer models got caught out, failing to predict a temporary plunge in global temperatures of 0.7°C, more than the net warming of the 20th century. Much of the northern hemisphere suffered what was called in North America "the winter from hell". Even though temperatures did rise again, in the winter of 2008/9 this happened again, only worse.

The Met Office simply went into denial. Its senior climate change official, Peter Stott, said in March 2009 that the trend towards milder winters was likely to continue. There would not be another winter like 1962/3 "for 1,000 years or more". Last winter was colder still. And now we have another even more savage "random event", for which we are even less prepared. (The Taxpayers' Alliance revealed last week that councils have actually ordered less salt this winter than last.)

The consequences of all this are profound. Those who rule over our lives have been carried off into a cloud cuckoo land for which no one was more responsible than the zealots at the Met Office, subordinating all it does to their dotty belief system. Significantly, its chairman, Robert Napier, is not a weatherman but a "climate activist", previously head of WWF-UK, one of our leading warmist campaigning groups.

At one end of this colossal diversion of national resources, permeating every level of government, we have the hapless Mr Quarmby, who feels obliged to follow the Met Office, advise that the present freeze is a "random event" and call for no special responses – with the results we see on every side. At the other, fixated by the same belief system, we have our climate change secretary, Chris Huhne, hoping we can somehow keep our lights on and our economy running by spending hundreds of billions of pounds on thousands more windmills.

More than once in the past week, as our power stations have been thrashed way beyond normal peak power demand, the contribution of wind turbines has been so small that it has registered as zero percent. (See "neta electricity summary page") At the heart of all this greenie make-believe that has our political class in its thrall has been the hijacking of the Met Office from its proper role. It's no longer just a national joke: it is turning into a national catastrophe.

COMMENT THREAD

Booker

The weekly column is posted. At least he recognises a good story when he sees one - or two. Ironically, one of the contextualised Google ads on the page takes you here, to a site flogging carbon credits. My guess is that they won't pick up much business from Booker readers.

However, the site might come as a bit of a surprise to Jeremy Warner, assistant editor for The Daily Telegraph. He has just learnt about CDMs from this brilliant article. You can see why that paper is so far behind the curve – the system has only been in place since 1998, the year after Kyoto.

Meanwhile, Booker's second piece deals with a kerfuffle in The Independent. This has Sir John Houghton, former head of the UK Met Office – and erstwhile trustee of TERI-Europe – complaining of the use of a quote attributed to him, the apocryphal "Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen."

Houghton denies ever having said this – or anything like it, claiming that the exact quote was: "There are those who will say 'unless we announce disasters, no one will listen', but I'm not one of them."

Oddly, although the quote was attributed to his book, published in 1994, with it first appearing on the internet in 2006, it has taken until now for Houghton to complain – and that is after Booker used the truncated version in his book, The Real Global Warning Disaster.

The trouble is that, if Houghton did not utter the truncated version, it is so close to the sort of thing that he might of said that it conveys credibility. And, despite his denials, he did indeed say something very similar.

Thanks to that admirable expert on "risk", Professor John Adams, and Professor Philip Stott, who for years was almost the only voice critical of climate hysteria in the British press, we see this in an interview Houghton gave to The Sunday Telegraph in its "Me and My God" slot on 10 September 1995.

As a fervent evangelical Christian, Sir John claimed that global warming might well be one of those disasters sent by God to warn man to mend his ways ("God tries to coax and woo but he also uses disasters"). He went on: "If we are to have a good environmental policy in the future, we will have to have a disaster".

"Maybe," notes Booker, "these are not quite the words that have been so widely misquoted." They are close enough. Houghton might claim he opposes the idea of generating scare stories to publicise climate change, but the truth will out.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

African crops catastrophe

The Booker column is posted, under the main heading: "African crops yield another catastrophe for the IPCC". The strap line tells us: "One more alarming claim in the IPCC's 2007 report is disintegrating under closer examination, says Christopher Booker".

Interestingly, the IPCC is stalling on this one, especially after Pachauri's outburst on Friday. Yet, it has given way on the Netherlands affair. It has issued a "background note" admitting that AR4 wrongly stated that 55 percent of the country was below sea level.

This is rather like a bank robber being caught speeding fleeing from the scene of his crime, then pleading guilty to that offence and denying the more serious crime. Yet the IPCC knows full well that, to admit to "Africagate" will do it great damage, hence the current tactic of stalling.

As Booker writes, in the wake of all the other recent scandals, "Africagate" may be the most damaging of all, because of the involvement of Dr Pachauri himself. Not only is the reputation of the IPCC in tatters, but that of its chairman appears irreparably damaged. And just as damaged will be the reputation of Dr Martin Parry, WGII co-chair, who seems to have gone missing.

Unlike the Netherlands, it would seem that the institution and its principle actors are 100 percent below sea level, and sinking fast.

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

Amazongate: the final phase

The Booker column is up, with the headline: "Amazongate: new evidence of the IPCC's failures". This is the start of the final phase of the IPCC's meltdown.

Actually, the Amazon story only occupies one paragraph of the column, with the newspaper reacting to the building publicity by hyping it up in the headline. Booker actually addresses the wide-ranging failures of the IPCC, including a reference to Montford (of Bishop Hill fame) and his brilliant book The Hockey Stick Illusion. Buy it.

Booker concludes, of the IPCC that: "Bereft of scientific or moral authority, the most expensive show the world has ever seen may soon be nearing its end."

However, the BBC's Roger Harrabin is already swinging into damage-limitation mode on "Amazongate", quoting "Euro-sceptic blogger Richard North".

The hapless Harrabin is driven to play down the importance of this latest development, claiming that the inclusion of the WWF reference "is a blunder perhaps, but maybe of a different kind, because there is indeed plenty of published science warning about drought in the Amazon."

In so doing, he distorts the thrust of the Rowell Moore argument, which claims that "40% of Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation."

First of all, the figure is entirely unsubstantiated and secondly, although there is plenty of evidence that severe or prolonged drought can damage tracts of forest, there is no good (or any) evidence that a "slight reduction in precipitation" could have the drastic effect predicted.

Of special note, though, is Harrabin's choice of expert to back up his argument. He cites Dr Simon Lewis from Leeds University, who told him: "The IPCC statement is basically correct but poorly written, and bizarrely referenced." The full significance of this will not become apparent until my next post, so this is just a marker ... we will see Lewis in a different light.

Harrabin, though, is forced to concede that there are problems, stating: "It all points to the need for much greater transparency, though that will throw up issues of its own for a body striving to offer a coherent view to policymakers of an issue dominated by risk, uncertainty and values, rather that unambiguous science."

That this is the main problem is wishful thinking on his part. The IPCC is holed below the waterline, and our little BBC man is trying to stem the leaks with a paper tissue.

(Note – I'm starting a new forum thread, as below, and will shut down the others tomorrow, to give us all a fresh start.)

CLIMATE CHANGE – FINAL PHASE THREAD

Coprophagia watch

There was much warmist trumpeting last week, led by The Independent and the BBC, over a German businessman's claim that two of his ships had managed to sail round the Arctic coast of Russia, writes Christopher Booker in today's column.

Indeed there was, with even Time magazine joining the fray last Friday. Hilariously, the caption to its picture pronounced, "A pair of German merchant ships traverse the fabled Northeast Passage". Yet the lead ship of the two shown was the Russian nuclear icebreaker 50 let Pobedy.

Despite ample evidence that the story was false, the BBC just could not leave it alone. Yesterday, the coprophiles on the BBC Radio 4 Today Programme were back on the case telling us that the northeast passage had until recently "been too icy to navigate."

Coprophagic Richard Galpin had been despatched to Archangel (at our expense) to meet one of the two German ships which had just completed the journey. There, he breathlessly told us that "the fact that it is now possible to sail through the northeast passage in the summer months is all down to one thing – that the ice cover in the Arctic Sea has been shrinking rapidly in recent years."

He then cited the "environmentalist" Alexi Kakorin, who was "convinced that man-made climate change is the most important reason behind this." And then we got: "Many scientists do believe that it is only a matter of decades before there'll be no ice at all in the Arctic regions during the summer months."

This tosh was then repeated on television news (pictured - top) throughout the day, with Galpin signing off his piece by telling us that "the dream of a major shipping route through the Arctic is becoming reality, but only as the result of an environmental disaster."

You have to give it to the BBC, in pursuit of their religion, they are utterly shameless. Any lies will do, as long as they support the cause.


The more one looks into this, however, the more outrageous the claims become. Pictured above is the nuclear powered ice-capable transport Sevmorput, built specifically for the northeast passage and launched in 1988, whence it had been plying the route ever since, only recently having been withdrawn for conversion into a drilling ship.

Meanwhile, the Murmansk Shipping Company – which is the specialist operator in the northern sea route - is currently running a fleet of 303 vessels with a total deadweight of about 1.2 million tons. In 2006, the company shipped 2 million tons of cargo through the route. Pictures of some of the fleet are here, with some of the ships currently plying the northern sea route shown below.









The northern sea route, however, is a mere walk in the park. To July 2008, no less than 71 surface ships have reached the North Pole. The first was the ice breaker Arktika, which arrived at the Pole on 17 August 1977. It is estimated that a total of about 20,000 people have visited the North Pole, the vast majority on sea expeditions in Russian ships.

Nothing of this, however, can penetrate the brains of the BBC coprophiles and their fellow travellers. The only good news is that, by Christmas, The Independent might be closed down. The pity is that the BBC will not be following it.

COMMENT THREAD

The Taleban within

I suppose that, if we heard tales from Afghanistan of officials bursting into a family home accompanied by armed police, abducting the children and taking them in front of a bent judge for a rigged hearing, then to send the children for adoption, their natural parents prohibited ever from seeing them again, no doubt the human rights/feminist lobby would be in full flow, waxing indignant about the standards of justice in these third world countries.

That is its happening in rural Sussex, however, is even more bizarre, as Christopher Booker points out, where our own domestic brand of Taleban abducted a seven-year-old girl two years ago, on the slender grounds that her home had been left in an appalling mess after a raid by RSPCA officials and 18 policemen.

They had ransacked the premises looking for non-existent guns, and released into the house a pack of dogs kept in kennels outside by her father, a professional dog-breeder. The parents were arrested for protesting at what was happening (the mother suffering a miscarriage while in police custody) and the social workers were summoned to remove their daughter.

Everything about this case is bizarre, writes Booker, not least the apparent complicity of social workers, lawyers and the courts in determining that the child should not be returned to her parents, as she wishes, but rather, after two years in foster care, sent for adoption.

Booker has read through many papers relating to the case, including the judgments resulting from the 74 hearings in which the parents attempted to get their daughter back.

What stands out, he tells us, is the startling contrast between the two totally different versions of the case given by the social workers and the courts on one hand and, on the other, that presented by the parents themselves and by many who knew them. The latter include their GP, who recently wrote that he had never "encountered such a case of appalling injustice".

The most impressive document was a report by an independent social worker, based on many interviews with those involved, including the child herself and the chief social worker in charge of her.

In measured terms, this made mincemeat of the council's case. Nothing about it is more suspicious than the contrast between descriptions of the "clean and tidy" home reported by those who knew the family well and the mess allegedly found by the policemen who burst into it mob-handed on the day in question.

The report found an equally glaring contrast between the social workers' insistence that the child was quite happy to have been removed from her parents, and the abundant evidence, observed at first-hand, that the little girl had an extremely good relationship with her parents and wants nothing more than to be reunited with them.

The courts seem to have totally ignored this report, whose author last month expressed astonishment that the child had not been returned home.

What has also come to light is a remarkable judgment by Lord Justice Thorpe and Lord Justice Wall in the Appeal Court last year, in another case which also involved the apparently ruthless determination of East Sussex social workers to send a child for adoption.

The judges were fiercely critical. The social workers' conduct, said Lord Justice Thorpe, could only reinforce the suspicions of those who believe "councils have a secret agenda to establish a high score of children they have placed for adoption".

Lord Justice Wall described East Sussex's conduct as "disgraceful – not a word I use lightly" and also as "about the worst I have ever encountered in a career now spanning nearly 40 years". "The social workers in question," he said, appeared "not only to have been inadequately managed, they do not appear to have been properly trained".

As for the barrister who represented East Sussex (and who also appeared in most of the hearings in the "dog-breeder" case), Lord Justice Wall said "her attitude came across, to me at least, as – in effect – so what?" She had demonstrated, he said, "profound misunderstanding" of the council's legal position vis à vis adoption. He ordered his comments to be circulated to family courts and adoption agencies across the land.

Though the circumstances are different, Booker notes, anyone reading the documents could not fail to be struck by how many of the judges' comments are relevant to the case I reported.

The same council's social workers have again pushed for a child to be adopted in a way which prompts the family's GP to say "the destruction of this once happy family is, in my opinion, evil". And that barrister who was involved in both cases is now – a family court judge.

In the Sussex case, one can only admire the fortitude of the family concerned – but there are many, many more who have suffered the depredations of the social service Taleban. Had it been me, I suspect, murder would now have been committed. If this continues, murder will be committed.

COMMENT THREAD

State secrets

One has to smile, even if a little wanly, at the letter from Richard Shaw in The Sunday Telegraph today.

He refers to Booker's piece last week ("Weather records are a state secret"), which reminded him of an incident in the 1970s when he was writing technical manuals for the Services.

If, as occasionally happened, writes Shaw, an author was refused some piece of information on security grounds, his colleagues would jocularly suggest that he ask either a defence journalist or the Russian Embassy.

One author, who had been asked to include in his manual a table showing the difference in barometric pressure at one foot intervals from sea level to over 100,000 feet, was apparently told that this was highly classified information which could be released only to someone with the appropriate level of security clearance.

He took the usual joke literally and rang the Russian Embassy which, to everyone's amazement, as it was during the Cold War, duly sent him the required details.

This also reminds me of a long-running controversy in the 70s about the number of incursions of Soviet aircraft into British airspace, testing our defences and reaction times. Flight magazine mounted a spirited campaign to obtain from the government details of the number of Soviet flights that had been intercepted by the RAF.

The government consistently refused to supply the information on the grounds of "national security", provoking an exasperated comment from Flight, that we "wouldn't want the Russians to know, would we?"

So it is today. Much of what the government withholds on the basis of "security grounds" is kept secret not for fear it might aid any putative enemy, but simply to keep its own citizens in the dark.

This I found when researching for Ministry of Defeat. Much of the information came not from official channels – or the British media – but from Arab "resistance" sites, which gave consistent and remarkably accurate information about the activities of British troops.

But then, there is that very funny episode in Yes Minister when Hacker wants to know what the Foreign Office is up to. He is advised to contact the Israeli embassy.

With Booker today recounting the bizarre tale of the MoD press officer suing the ministry for forcing him to tell lies, we have at least one consistent frame of reference to work from. If it comes from the lips of an "official spokesman", we can usually take the opposite for the truth.

COMMENT THREAD

Justice there is not

It is a while since we visited the EU extradition treaty, the last time being in 2007 when we reported the case of Joseph Mendy, a black Englishman who fell foul of the Spanish police and the European Arrest Warrant.

What was particularly chilling at the time, with Frank Dobson having called an adjournment debate, was the response of the Parliamentary under-secretary of state for the Home Department, by name of Meg Hillier. "We have to have faith in our European partners," she said. "There are safeguards in place to ensure that each European country has a proper legal and judicial process to take such decisions."

Someone who most certainly will not agree with those fine sentiments is Andrew Symeou, who was deported to Greece last month to await trial for murder, where he was not allowed bail because he is not domiciled there.

This case is picked up today by Christopher Booker, under the heading "EU extradition treaty means British law no longer protects us".

He reminds us that, in 2001, when EU leaders gathered in Laeken, Belgium, to plan their next great leap forward to European integration – the ill-fated EU constitution – they also agreed on what they saw as another bold symbol of their wish to see Europe politically and legally united: the European Arrest Warrant.

At the time, our leaders were fired by the recent 9/11 outrage – or using it as yet another beneficial crisis – and agreed that the courts of any country could call on those of another to order the automatic extradition of anyone suspected of offences under 32 headings, with such crimes as terrorism, drug-running and "xenophobia" high on their list.

Even then, as we well recall, fears were expressed that such a summary shortcutting of normal legal procedures might lead to serious injustices. Not all of the EU's judicial systems (to put it mildly) rest on the same ideas of justice.

But even those most worried about the dangers of this system, writes Booker, could scarcely have imagined a case like that involving the extradition to Greece of a 20-year old British student, Andrew Symeou.

There follows a tale of skullduggery and violence by the Greek police which Booker recounts in full but, despite Mr Symeou's case was taken up by various bodies including Fair Trials International, Liberty, Open Europe and the UK Independence Party, their actions have been to no avail.

With politicians of the three main parties pointedly refused to get involved, in June this year, two High Court judges proposed that the case should go to the House of Lords because it raised legal issues of "public importance". But the Law Lords refused to hear it because it did not raise "an arguable point of law of general public importance".

So it was that on 23 July, Mr Symeou was deported to Greece, where he was not allowed bail because he is not domiciled in Greece. He was imprisoned for some days in concrete cells in Zakynthos, locked up with illegal Albanian immigrants in intense heat and taunted for being British, until he was last week transferred to another prison near Athens.

His parents, allowed to speak to him through bars, say he is not taking his ordeal well. He could be held in prison for up to 18 months before trial, although this week his Greek lawyer hopes to win a further plea for bail.

Concludes Booker, little could Tony Blair and his fellow European leaders have imagined in 2001, when they blithely agreed to strike a blow against terrorism by agreeing to the Arrest Warrant, that this was what it would come down to in practice.

All traditional British beliefs in protecting the liberties of the subject have been thrown out of the window. Mr Blair – and all those other politicians who acclaimed the Arrest Warrant and have refused to comment on Mr Symeou's case – can really be proud of what they have done.

But then, what is the liberty of British citizens – or even justice – when compared with the inestimable benefits of our membership of the European Union?

COMMENT THREAD

It hasn't gone away

Much to our disappointment, even when we completely ignore the EU for a while, in the hope that it is one of those bad dreams that will go away of its own accord – it doesn't.

Sniffing around the subject (to coin a phrase), we happened on this, where the good citizens of Lisburn are up in arms over a plan to build a giant incinerator on the shores of Lough Neagh, a well-known beauty spot in the area (pictured).

Such is the concern that the Council is backing a public inquiry over an installation, we learn, which is to be provided to burn the estimated 200,000 tons of poultry litter produced annually in Northern Ireland.

The plot thickens when we discover that the applicants, Rose Energy, are proposing the incinerator in response to "new European legislation" which means poultry waste can no longer be used as fertiliser on land and must be disposed of in another way.

Needless to say, people living near the site are concerned about the release of fumes and effluent. But the company insists that this is the only viable option to deal with the EU directive and "are assuring the public that the plant and its operations will be the best and cleanest available."

The interesting thing here is that we are not actually dealing with new legislation. This is our old friend the Nitrate Directive, which readers will instantly recall was promulgated in 1991 as Directive 91/676/EEC.

Here we are, eighteen years later and the law is still working through the system, having its dire effect, and no one even realises its genesis. There is our problem. Everything in the EU tends to work at a glacially slow pace, so slow that even the effects of a law as lunatic as the Nitrates Directive are diluted, as the enforcement takes so long and the attendant costs take so long to accrue.

This very much confounds people like myself and Booker who, when we see the EU legislation come onto the statute books, write of impending disaster and the enormous burden of costs. But when the disaster does not appear to materialise, and we get bored with writing about a catastrophe that never seems to happen, the whole issue disappears from public gaze.

Then, up it pops – an obscure local issue publicised in the local media, with no one joining the dots. The slow-motion disaster is happening.

This is how the EU wins. Watching paint dry is action-packed excitement compared with charting the unfolding disaster of EU legislative action. But just because we're not watching it (and reporting on it), every minute of the waking day, does not mean it isn't happening. It is. It hasn't gone away.

COMMENT THREAD

A certain sameness

Booker returns with a vengeance to the subject of global warming climate change today, picking up on the discomfiture of the Met Office, caught out over its April forecast that we were in for a "barbecue summer".

To that, Booker adds an analysis of the root cause of the Met Office's ineptitude, the fact that it relies for its short-term forecasting on the same multi-million pound computer it uses to produce data used by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to predict global warming.

In this respect, says Booker, the IPCC's computer models have proved just as wrong in predicting global temperatures as the Met Office has been in forecasting those mild winters and heatwave summers.

Behind that, though, "a curious little drama" has been unfolding over attempts by Steve McIntyre, a Canadian statistical expert, to get the Met Office to divulge the computer data on which they base their temperature record.

McIntyre was not only the chief demolisher of the "hockey stick", showing how it was based on a seriously skewed computer model, but later exposed the "adjustments" which had skewed the other official record of surface temperatures, run by Dr James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

To date, all Freedom of Information requests to see the data used to construct the Met Office temperature record have been given "an almighty brush-off", the Met Office saying that this information was strictly confidential and that to release it would damage Britain's "international relations" with all the countries that supplied it.

The idea that temperature records might be a state secret seems strange enough, Booker observes, but when the policies of governments across the world are based on that data it becomes odder still that no outsider should be allowed to see it. Weirdest of all, however, is the Met Office's claim that to release the data would "damage the trust that scientists have in those scientists who happen to be employed in the public sector".

This, however, is more than strange. It is a downright scandal and should not be tucked away in the Booker ghetto or left to a Canadian statistician to pursue. Given the political and economic implications, this should be front page material, with the opposition parties baying for blood.

Therein lies the problem. Instead of that, we have a comment section, with over a hundred contributions, but with the discussion stuck in the same, well-worn grooves. There is nothing much new there, because there is nothing much new to say. The opposing sides have staked out their territories and are indulging in the dialogue of the deaf.

What is entirely lacking here is political engagement. As we saw with the equipment issue and Afghanistan, until there is a controversy centred around high profile political figures, and the media can personalise the issues in a domestic political context, there is no traction. The subject remains in the ghetto, ignored by the mainstream, where the proponents churn over the same old arguments, ad infinitum.

Of course, this points up the utter fatuity of the Tory policy and Cameron's espousal of the green agenda, but the fact of the matter is that, until we get an opposition party that is prepared to stand up and be counted on this issue, it is going nowhere.

There is too much money in the climate change industry, and too many reputations at stake for change to occur without a highly focused political initiative and, as long as Cameron is at the helm, this is not going to happen any time soon.

COMMENT THREAD

Climate change hysteria

Richard S. Lindzen writes on climate change hysteria:

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well.

Booker, as always, beats his own drum, but then we have this garbage with which to contend.

And the problem is that it is garbage, but despite that, it is repeated relentlessly, time and time and time again. That is the nature of the beast.

COMMENT THREAD

Dead soldiers tell no tales

One of the things that is possibly upsetting the defence establishment is this blog's pursuit of the story about the Iveco Panther – the latest development I have been sitting on, while other more pressing issues were dealt with.

As it stood, we had found that this absurdly expensive machine, ordered in 2003 at a cost of over £400,000 each, had to be converted at an additional cost of £300,000 to make them suitable for use in Afghanistan, bringing the price to well over £700,000 each for a four-seater protected patrol vehicle.

However, we had also established that only 67 of these vehicles were being put through this conversion process, leaving 334 from the original batch of 401 that are basically unsuitable for deployment. Thus, it was left to Ann Winterton to ask what was to happen to the rest.

Answer there came from Quentin Davies that the remainder would be used for pre-deployment training individual and collective training, and trials and development. Never in the field of human conflict, he might have observed, have so many been used to train so few.

The more serious point is that, while the Army is crying out for protected vehicles, we have these useless machines stuck at home, when a fraction of the cost could have bought decent protected vehicles and had them in theatre.

Apart from Booker, however, only Defence Management was taking an interest in this procurement disaster. The rest of the media (and most of the politicians) - so full of faux concern for "Our Boys" - isn't interested in getting its hands dirty and actually reporting what is going on.

But then, an in-house cock-up by the MoD does not fit the narrative. Unless the story is about Gordon Brown and his "penny pinching", leaving "Our Boys" without the kit they need, the popular media does not want to know.

It is actually too much to hope for a responsible media though. Even if the story was handed to it on a plate, it would probably get it wrong and, if anyone gets near reporting the truth, we see the result .


However, one of the pieces can still be found on Google cache. This is what you are not allowed to see:

Hundreds of Panthers cannot deploy
Wednesday, July 15, 2009

The MoD has spent hundreds of millions of pounds on a new armoured vehicle that will mainly be used for training in non-operational settings.

Only 67 Panther armoured vehicles are in suitable condition to operate safely in Afghanistan according to the MoD.

Yesterday the minister for defence equipment and support Quentin Davies admitted to MPs in a written answer that 334 of the Panther armoured vehicles "will be used for pre-deployment training, individual and collective training, and trials and development."

The Panther Command and Liaison Vehicle (CLV) was procured earlier this decade to provide commanders and combat support services with better protection when they are on the battlefield. At £400,000, it will undoubtedly serve as one of the most expensive Army training vehicles, ever.

The vehicle has been riddled with problems from the outset, resulting in just 67 being available for Afghan operations due to a lack of capability requirements.

In May Defencemanagement.com revealed that none of the vehicles had originally been delivered with the required capabilities for Afghan operations, despite extensive field tests in Afghanistan earlier this decade. As a result, procurement officials were forced to spend an additional £20m upgrading just 67 vehicles.

This resulted in further delays to a programme that was already running over a year late.

The vehicle additions included a better protected engine compartment, the addition of Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) equipment, air conditioning and adding space for a fourth crew member to the vehicle.

Richard North, author of "Ministry of Defeat" said recently that the Panther "is a fine modern product of the Italian automobile industry, and therefore completely unsuitable for military use."

The outer portion of the vehicle, when hit by an IED or landmine is likely to be permanently damaged.

According to a National Audit Office Report, the MoD originally planned to buy 486 of the vehicles but due to "affordability" issues, was later forced to reduce the order to 401 Panthers. It is not clear whether the MoD will pay for the other 334 Panthers to be upgraded to combat standards.

As the threat from IEDs and landmines has grown, so has the demand for better protected vehicles. Ministers insist that they are sparing no expense in ensuring that troops have the best protection money can buy. However problems with the Snatch, Vector, Viking, Jackal and now Panther, leave these claims in doubt.

Even this fairly anodyne report, however, is too much for the defence establishment. It is far more important to stifle criticism than to protect "Our Boys" from getting murdered by the Taleban. In one of the more recent strikes, they only pulled the top half of the driver out of the vehicle. There was nothing else of him left. But hey! Dead soldiers tell no tales.

COMMENT THREAD

Propaganda daily

Embraced by the BBC and occupying nearly half a page in the print edition of The Daily Telegraph - the warmists' favourite newspaper – is an outrageous "puff" for the rather seedy government of Tuvalu, proclaiming that it is set to become the world's first zero-carbon country.

Missing from the on-line edition, however, is the short, but telling phrase which tells us that the state "relies on foreign aid as its main source of income". As such, the government is playing to its paymasters who have long exploited the totemic significance of an island that is supposed to be threatened with submergence as a result of rising sea levels due to climate change.

The premise is, of course, absolute tosh, debunked fully in the Booker column in March. That piece, incidentally, came under sustained attack from the warmists, via the Press Complaints Commission, which has been seen off.

Any halfway respectable and honest journalist would be questioning why about £12 million is to be spent on this fatuous and wasteful project, in a tiny, impoverished country, and why it is being used for a transparent propaganda exercise instead of being used to more worthwhile ends.

The uncritical presentation of this story, however, tells you a great deal about the modern media. It no longer offers news, but simply projects a series of narratives, shaping a "world view" to which the receiver is expected to conform. Any deviation from the narratives is treated as an abnormality, to be shunned, all in the interests of securing conformity.

It seems extreme, nevertheless, to categorise the media as the "enemy", but that it has become, by act and default in failing to challenge those influences which are encroaching on our freedoms and prosperity, while actively supporting those who would do us harm. The worst is that too few people recognise it for what it is, or has become.

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On Booker ...

Raedwald has said it for me. Read, inwardly digest and then pop along to the Telegraph website to make your comment.

And why are we fighting the Taleban in Afghanistan? They are already here.

Life goes on

Having rather neglected the wider world over the last few weeks, taking a quick peek away from the tragic drama being played out in Afghanistan, we find Booker writing in The Daily Mail on another constant obsession of ours, wind farms.

Wind farms, he writes, will be a monument to an age when our leaders went collectively off their heads. This is after the CBI warned that the government must abandon its crazy fixation with wind energy as a way of plugging the looming energy gap.

There is nothing new in the piece, nothing Booker and I both have not written a hundred times before, all on the back of warnings that electricity bills are set to rise exponentially to meet the costs of this insanity. There again, nothing new.

John Sauven in The Guardian, however, attacks the CBI, prattling on about how the "renewables sector", against the backdrop of the worldwide economic downturn, "is one of the few success stories," It is "creating millions of new green jobs, increasing countries' energy independence and reducing climate-changing emissions."

It is "scandalous", therefore, that the CBI should come out "attacking the prime minister and the climate change secretary Ed Miliband's commitment to boosting this industry in Britain just days before the launch of a fresh government initiative."

This is what passes for brains these days, and gets you printed in The Guardian - but the terrifying thing is that it is also the economic and political orthodoxy that drives government policy, fully supported by the two main opposition parties.

In the fullness of time, we will indeed come to see these windmills as a monument to a period of collective madness - as we now do the tower blocks that were the answer to the housing crisis - and Booker is right to tilt at the windmills. But, while the collective psyche is gripped by the madness, there is no moving it. It will have to play itself out in its own time, while we pay the bill, as our political masters indulge themselves in their fantasies.

And then we will shoot them.

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The Mail on Sunday can reveal ...

... this in today's newspaper ON THE FRONT PAGE, about the Husky. You may notice a similarity with this ... dated 3 April. There is a link to the full story here, with an honourable mention of Ministry of Defeat. The story, online, has been considerably updated as of midday, with much extra detail including the Vector story, and extra graphics.

The issue was raised on the BBC's Politics programme, with Drayson asked specifically about the Husky. As has proved normal with this man, he lied ... saying that the Navistar Husky was in use by US forces. It is not.

On the broader front, I've picked up over 20 stories in the Sundays I would like to review ... and I am working on some of them now. Booker has done the Ferris wheel story in his column, which gets us off to a good start.

Meanwhile, both the Ferris wheel and duff trucks appear in The Sunday Express. The duff trucks have been done here, as well as here and here. The story is getting out.

Then, I suppose you have to smile at this. The Independent "reveals" Brown's secret plan to cut the number of troops in Afghanistan by 1,500. On the other hand, The Observer "reveals" that Brown is set to increase troop levels by 2,000.

They can't be both right of course – and my bet is that neither are.

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They should not have died

I am sorry if it offends – and it certainly does upset some of the military types, and the "consultants" and designers responsible for the Viking and the decision to deploy it to Afghanistan – but, on the basis of all the evidence we have, Booker and I both have come to the conclusion that Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe and Trooper Joshua Hammond should not have died.

More on Defence of the Realm.

"No plans for a European Rapid Reaction Force"

That is the latest statement from the MoD, which follows on from our story about the demise of the European Rapid Reaction Force, picked up by Christopher Booker in his column on Sunday, bringing the news to a wider audience.

The clue on which Booker relied was last week's conference on land warfare where Gen Dannatt slipped out in coded form that the Army's £16 billion Future Rapid Effects System (FRES), planned as the centrepiece of Britain's contribution to the European Army (aka the European Rapid Reaction Force), was a dead duck. Without that capacity, the UK is unable to make a meaningful contribution to the ERRF.

Booker's piece provoked an almost immediate response from the MoD, lodging its disagreement on its blog yesterday. In typical style, though, it is unable to resist a sneer, declaring, "Christopher Booker's article displays a lack of understanding of some basic facts." And, according to the MoD, a crucial area where there is a "lack of understanding" is that "there are no plans for a European Rapid Reaction Force."

More on Defence of the Realm.

Rigging the debate

One of the explanations for the unseemly rush to get the Waxman-Markey Bill through Congress is that the warmists are on the back foot. The global warming tide is shifting against them and, before too long, their creed will be consigned to the dustbin of history as yet another of those mad obsessions that periodically grip the masses.

This is certainly the view of the Wall Street Journal which notes with approval how the Australian Senate is giving Kevin Rudd's version of a climate change law a very hard time. Furthermore, it observes, Australian polls have shown a sharp uptick in public scepticism; the press is back to questioning scientific dogma; blogs are having a field day.

The response of the warmists, however, is nothing if not predictable. Having controlled the agenda for so long, their reaction to the changing tide is to rig the debate, closing down on dissenting voices and suppressing alternative views.

One element of this strategy is recorded by Booker in today's column, where he describes the concerted efforts of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) to prevent one of the world's leading experts on polar bears attending a meeting because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.

The group is meeting in Copenhagen under the aegis of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission, set up – as Booker puts it- "to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming," one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN's major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December.

The excluded expert is Dr Mitchell Taylor who has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. His problem is that, more than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

To add to his litany of sins, while Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years, he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

Thus Dr Taylor has been told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – are "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".

This is but one example of how the warmists control the agenda, another being offered by Watts up with that, which catalogues measures taken by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to suppress dissident voices within its own organisation.

None of this could happen, of course, without the active participation of the media and, in his second piece, Booker refers to Lord Hunt, who last week "made one of the most absurd claims that can ever have been uttered by a British minister."

Solemnly reported by the media, Booker writes, he said that by 2020 he hopes to see thousands more wind turbines round Britain's coasts, capable of producing "25 gigawatts (GW)" of electricity, enough to meet "more than a quarter of the UK's electricity needs".

Hunt's ideas are so patently absurd that, had a minister announced that the UK was about to launch a series of manned space shots to the moon to mine green cheese in order to solve the global protein shortage, there would be little to compare between the two.

Booker notes though that perhaps the most disturbing point is that the media dutifully reported Lord Hunt's absurd claims without asking any of the elementary questions that could have revealed that he was talking utter nonsense. One cannot of course expect Opposition MPs to take an intelligent interest in such matters, he writes, but if journalists allow ministers to get away with talking such tosh, the slide into unreality can only continue.

This is a broader point that deserves more attention, touching on an effect we see in defence and elsewhere. The media – as a collective – has its own narratives and as long as an utterance fits with those narratives, it is given an airing. That which goes against the grain is buried.

Currently, the media narrative on climate change is that global warming is real and represents a major threat to the planet and humankind. Similarly, all the woes in the military stem from "under-resourcing" and all problems in Afghanistan will be solved by more "boots on the ground". Thus is the debate rigged, through which means our decline into obscurity, poverty and impotence is managed.

COMMENT THREAD

Clouded reason

One of the most dangerous phenomena of modern times is how the irrational greenies have hijacked the environmental agenda and suborned it in pursuit of their own political aims. No better example of this is offered than in a piece by Peter Schwerdtfeger, emeritus professor of meteorology at Flinders University in Adelaide, writing in The Australian.

Schwerdtfeger is reviewing the work of internationally acclaimed cloud physicist Daniel Rosenfeld of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who asserts that the most awful consequence of the burning of carboniferous fuels is not the release of CO2 but the large-scale injection of minute particulate pollutants into the atmosphere.

Detailed studies carried out by his research group have revealed that the minute water vapour droplets that form around some carbon particles are so small as to be almost incapable of being subsequently coalesced into larger precipitable drops. In short, the particulates prevent rainfall. Thus, humans are changing the climate in a much more direct way than through the release of CO2.

What seems to be happening is that pollution is seriously inhibiting rain over mountains in semi-arid regions, a phenomenon with dire consequences for water resources in the Middle East and many other parts of the world, including China and Australia.

This and other work is now showing that the average precipitation on Mt Hua near Xi'an in central China has decreased by 20 percent, but rather than "climate change" this is attributable to man-made air pollution during the past 50 years.

The precipitation loss was doubled on days that had the poorest visibility because of pollution particles in the air. This explains the widely observed trends of decrease in mountain precipitation relative to the rainfall in nearby densely populated lowlands, which until now had not been directly ascribed to air pollution.

The work also shows the "frightening persistence and longevity of pollutant trails across vast areas", not least in the Australian Snowy Mountains catchments, where a phalanx of brown coal-burning power stations may have substantially wrecked the natural precipitation processes over the once hydrologically rich Australian Alps.

If Rosenfeld's scientific interpretations are correct, then southern Australia would greatly benefit from the application of his discoveries. At the very least, Rosenfeld's conclusions should be accorded appropriate evaluation and testing by an unprejudiced panel of peers.

The issue here is that targeted measures to limit specific pollution is a common good, and far from being objectionable, is economically as well as ecologically sound. And, by virtue of their very specificity, not only are such measures cheaper than the scatter-gun approach of trying to reduce CO2 measures, their effects are more immediately measurable and there is a true cost-benefit.

However, Schwerdtfeger remarks that the work has so far has been ignored in Australia (and elsewhere) because it does not fit in with the dominant paradigm that holds CO2 responsible for reduced rainfall in semi-arid regions. And thus do the greenies, far from improving the environment, hold back sensible measures and lock us into the tunnel vision of group obsession, perpetuating the very problems they purport to be solving.

Booker and I had a phrase for this ... "the sledgehammer to miss the nut". Perhaps we should take the sledgehammer to the nut(s).

COMMENT THREAD