Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dave Gadziala; Three months ago, WUWT reported on the MET issuing a new end of snow prediction. At the time I thought it was funny; but given the catastrophic failure of the electricity grid in Texas, and soaring heating bills in Britain, perhaps it is time to reflect on how much damage the people making such predictions might be doing to people’s lives.
From December;
Climate change: Snowy UK winters could become thing of the past
By Justin Rowlatt
Chief environment correspondent
Published6 December 2020Snowy winters could become a thing of the past as climate change affects the UK, Met Office analysis suggests.
It is one of a series of projections about how UK’s climate could change, shared with BBC Panorama.
It suggests by the 2040s most of southern England could no longer see sub-zero days. By the 2060s only high ground and northern Scotland are still likely to experience such cold days.
The projections are based on global emissions accelerating.
It could mean the end of sledging, snowmen and snowball fights, says Dr Lizzie Kendon, a senior Met Office scientist who worked on the climate projections.
“We’re saying by the end of the century much of the lying snow will have disappeared entirely except over the highest ground,” she told Panorama.
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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55179603
When you ask why politicians are so poorly prepared for cold, snowy weather, why Texas never properly winterised their grid, or why British people are suffering soaring power bills in the midst of bitter cold, I don’t think you have to look far for the answer.
“People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful.” – attributed to MET scientist John Mitchell.
So what would it take to introduce just a smidgeon of doubt into the fortress mindset of those who value models over observations? We have an answer to that question.
In 2015, then British Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd organised a meeting between the GWPF and The Royal Society, to see if they could resolve their differences on climate science.
The Royal Society rejected the idea that observational evidence which contradicted their predictions undermined the credibility of their climate models.
…
“We pinned them down on this hiatus… they were arguing that yes, there might have been a hiatus, but warming might be going into the ocean, or it could be due to volcanic activity. So we asked at what point would you begin to accept there had been no warming. If there is no warming for five years, or ten years?
“Finally they conceded they would wait fifty years.
“We asked would that be fifty years from now, or fifty years from 1997, when the hiatus started? They said they wouldn’t change their mind for fifty years from now.
…
This is a group of people who openly admit they are unmoved by observational evidence which contradicts their worldview.
How do you change the minds of people whose view of climate science appears to be based on blind faith in computer models, rather than observations?
The answer is you cannot. There is no penalty for alarmist climate scientists clinging to scientific ideas which are not supported by observations. Any observation which contradicts their theories is immediately dismissed as black box “natural variation”. I suspect most of them will carry their conviction that the world is on the brink of runaway global warming to the grave.
What we can hope to do is convince politicians and voters to stop taking alarmist climate predictions so seriously.
Thankfully politicians in advanced societies face a regular reality check, on a much shorter timescale than the 50 years proposed by The Royal Society. And voters can be pretty unforgiving when they are left shivering alone in the cold and dark, thanks to politicians making bad decisions about power grids – regardless of whose advice politicians claim they were acting on.
via Watts Up With That?
February 22, 2021 at 08:07PM
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