Why "The Arctic is melting!" is just Mann-made global warming scaremongering

The Hockey Schtick
"Climate fraudsters like to claim that Earth began in 1979, the year of peak Arctic sea ice. The graph below shows why. If they started their graph in 1954, there would be almost no downwards trend to the present." (must read post)

Busted: 120 gibberish science papers withdrawn — so much for “peer review”

JoNova (Australia)
At least 120 computer generated nonsense papers have been reviewed and published in publications of the  Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) and Springer, as well as conference proceedings. The fakes have just been discovered by a French researcher and are being withdrawn.
Cyril Labbé found a way to spot artificially-generated science papers, and published it his website and lo, the fakes turned up en masse. In the past, pretend papers have turned up in open access journals–this time the fake papers appeared in subscription based journals. But the man who caught the fakes says he cannot be sure he’s caught them all, because he couldn’t check all the papers behind paywalls."

Mann Misrepresents the UK Commons Committee

Climate Audit
Conclusion
Mann’s claim that the UK House of Commons Science and Technology Committee “investigated” and “exonerated” him personally is as invalid as his similar claims regarding the Muir Russell and Oxburgh inquries or his claim to have won a Nobel prize. Media coverage of Jones’ appearance before the Commons Committee hearings was eloquently savage, perhaps even Steynian. Nor did the Commons Committee report result in any uncontradicted findings on dishonesty: its only finding on dishonesty – that Jones had “no case to answer” in respect to the 1999 WMO diagram – was contradicted and superceded by the finding of the Muir Russell panel that the diagram was “misleading”. This diagram had “nothing to do” with Mann himself, but Mann was implicated in the 2001 IPCC TAR diagram, which also deleted adverse data from the Briffa recontruction and which the Muir Russell panel described as “similar”.

Shock News : NASA Has Massively Cooled The Southern Hemisphere Past Since The 1990 IPCC Report

Real Science
Blue line is current GISS southern hemisphere.  Solid black line is Hansen 1990 from FAR. Note the settled science before 1900.

Preparing For The Hockey Stick

Real Science
"As of 1999, GISS showed that US temperatures (red) closely tracked 1975 National Academy of Sciences Northern Hemisphere temperatures (blue.) They both peaked around 1940 and declined rapidly thereafter. ......
Hansen was concerned that the US wasn’t warming like it was supposed to.

"How can the absence of clear climate change in the United States be reconciled with continued reports of record global temperature? Part of the “answer” is that U.S. climate has been following a different course than global climate, at least so far"
NASA GISS: Science Briefs: Whither U.S. Climate?

This was just before the hockey stick was invented, and in order to get rid of Briffa’s trees they had to create a divergence between US and global temperatures, and they had to make the post-1940′s cooling go away. They did just that, and now have almost completely eliminated the 1940′s warming spike. Current GISS northern hemisphere is in red below.
.....Simultaneously, they worked over US temperatures and made the Dust Bowl disappear. Graphs below have the five year means normalized to the most recent common date of 1997. .......
Bottom line is that Northern Hemisphere and US temperatures peaked in the 1930′s and 1940′s – and the hockey stick is a government scientist manufactured fraud.
Extra credit. As of 1978, NOAA also showed strong southern hemisphere cooling, which GISS has completely eliminated and turned into a warming trend."

Global Warming Alarmists Caught Doctoring '97-Percent Consensus' Claims

Forbes
"Global warming alarmists and their allies in the liberal media have been caught doctoring the results of a widely cited paper asserting there is a 97-percent scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming. After taking a closer look at the paper, investigative journalists report the authors’ claims of a 97-pecent consensus relied on the authors misclassifying the papers of some of the world’s most prominent global warming skeptics. At the same time, the authors deliberately presented a meaningless survey question so they could twist the responses to fit their own preconceived global warming alarmism."

Britain's Floods Were Engineered by Green Government Policy

James Delingpole, Breitbart UK
"The evidence is now in and despite weeks of official denials it's a definite "Yes."
Thanks to Richard North we now know which organisations are responsible for the millions of pounds worth of damage the floods have caused, especially in the worst hit area, the Somerset Levels.
These include: the European Union (EU); Europe's largest wildlife charity the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB); the World Wildlife Fund (WWF); the Environment Agency (EA); the environmental quango Natural England; the last Labour government, especially its (subsequently disgraced) "floods" minister Elliott Morley; and the Met Office, whose inaccurate forecasts predicting a dry winter helped turn what could have been a minor inconvenience into a major disaster."

BBC flogs dead horse

Christopher Booker, Telegraph
"One could only utter a hollow laugh at the desperation of the BBC last week, in programme after programme, to put over its fond belief that our wettest winter for 84 years is all due to man-made climate change.
Today wheeled on the jailbird Chris Huhne to sell the message, impartially balanced by a chap saying much the same from the engineering firm CH2M Hill, which Evan Davis coyly failed to explain makes a fortune from renewable energy.
Newsnight had Prof Kevin Anderson from that hotbed of climate zealotry, the University of East Anglia, to tell us that despite global temperatures having remained pretty flat for 17 years, by 2100 they will somehow have leapt up by a staggering 6C.
When Panorama, in a programme called Britain Underwater, peddled a similar message – with the aid of such climate sages as the journalists George Monbiot and Sir Simon Jenkins – one wearily recalled a Panorama of November 14 2000 with exactly the same title, blaming floods in Yorkshire on global warming (on that occasion, with the aid of John Prescott).
Yet how strange that the BBC never quotes the latest report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which it normally cites as gospel, saying that “there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale”.
In other words, whatever the BBC’s propagandists may try to tell us, not even the IPCC believes it."

One Of The Most Impressive Bits Of Data Tampering

Real Science
"The most sophisticated satellite for measuring sea level was the EU’s Envisat. It was delivering non-scary data, so they killed off the satellite and altered the pre-existing data to nearly triple the rate of sea level rise."

Time to push back against the global warming Nazis

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
Yeah, somebody pushed my button.
When politicians and scientists started calling people like me “deniers”, they crossed the line. They are still doing it.
They indirectly equate (1) the skeptics’ view that global warming is not necessarily all manmade nor a serious problem, with (2) the denial that the Nazi’s extermination of millions of Jews ever happened.
Too many of us for too long have ignored the repulsive, extremist nature of the comparison. It’s time to push back.
I’m now going to start calling these people “global warming Nazis”.

 Comment: Dr Spencer's comments are significant indeed for a noted scientist.

10 Lefty Lies About The Floods Which Have Devastated Britain

Breitbart, James Delingpole
"The fact - and this cannot be restated often enough - is that these floods are a man-made disaster. But the man-made element has nothing whatsoever to do with anthropogenic CO2 emissions. Rather it is the result of deliberate policy, initiated by the UN (Agenda 21), the European Union and its amen corner the Environment Agency, designed to create wildlife habitats at the expense of humans."

Hansen’s 1981 Remarkable Conclusion

Real Science
Hansen wrote this in 1981

A remarkable conclusion from Fig. 3 is that the global temperature is almost as high today as it was in 1940.

At the time, he showed 1980 temperatures about 0.15C cooler than 1940.

...Now, NASA shows 1980 temperatures about 0.2C warmer than 1940. They made a relative shift of  0.35C, far exceeding Wigley’s hoped for 0.15C"

Cheating Down Under

Real Science
"Some of NASA’s more impressive data tampering is in Alice Springs, where they have knocked a full 2C off of older temperatures" (Also see: More Cheating Down Under)

Gavin Wins The 2014 World Cup Of Data Tampering In Brazil

Real Science

From the comments: "I used to just shake my head in disappointment with these taxpayer-funded miscreants….Now I am really, really angry at these criminals."

Could Met Office have been more wrong? Just before floods, secret report told councils: Winter will be 'drier than normal' - especially in West Country!

Daily Mail
"The Met Office’s ‘pitiful’ forecasts were under fire last night after it was revealed it told councils in November to expect ‘drier than usual’ conditions this winter.
In the worst weather prediction since Michael Fish reassured the nation in October 1987 that there was no hurricane on the way, forecasters said the Somerset Levels – still under water after more than two months of flooding – and the rest of the West Country would be especially dry.
Last night, it was confirmed the UK had instead suffered the wettest winter since records began."

Making The 1940′s Warming Spike Disappear In Iceland

Real Science

"In 2009, the world’s top climate scientists were looking for ways to make the 1940′s warming spike disappear. .....In 1974, the CIA reported that Iceland used to be much warmer. ........By a fantastic coincidence, the 1940′s spike in Iceland then magically disappeared."

Newsbytes: Why The Met Office Has Hung Its Chief Scientist Out To Dry

WUWT
"Instead of defending Julia Slingo’s statement on the floods the Met Office have defended the original report. This is very interesting: it seems that the Met Office is unable to come up with any defence of its chief scientist’s public statements. Yesterday I suggested that Slingo’s statement had misled the public. This clarification doesn’t seemed to have changed anything at all. It looks bad. Very bad."

Why the Met Office has hung its chief scientist out to dry

The Spectator

"On the grapevine I hear that climate scientists are privately furious with Slingo; their profession has had a rough ride in recent years and efforts to restore its battered reputation are not to be cheaply squandered. The signs are that climatologists have hung Slingo out to dry. Last night, Collins and the Met Office issued a much-anticipated response to the Mail on Sunday article. This made a great deal of global warming having increased the water content of the atmosphere, leading to increased rainfall, a surprising point given that as recently as 2012 Slingo had told Parliament that global warming was ‘loading the dice’ in favour of cold, dry winters. It also made a strong sales pitch about the potential of climate models to predict increases in storminess in future. But it was what it did not say that was most significant. For while it artfully implied that the Mail on Sunday had got things wrong, in fact it went on to show only that the original report was consistent with Collins’ mainstream views. Regarding Slingo’s outlandish claims about ‘all the evidence’ supporting a link between the floods and global warming, there was only an ominous silence"

Matt Ridley: They ridiculed skeptics. The skeptics were right.

JoNova(Australia)
Argument by ridicule is not just something that happens, it’s the main approach:

“In the old days we would have drowned a witch to stop the floods. These days the Green Party, Greenpeace and Ed Miliband demand we purge the climate sceptics. No insult is too strong for sceptics these days: they are “wilfully ignorant” (Ed Davey), “headless chickens” (the Prince of Wales) or “flat-earthers” (Lord Krebs), with “diplomas in idiocy” (one of my fellow Times columnists).

What can these sceptics have been doing that so annoys the great and the good? They sound worse than terrorists. Actually, sceptics have pretty well all been purged already: look what happened to Johnny Ball and David Bellamy at the BBC. Spot the sceptic on the Climate Change Committee. Find me a sceptic within the Department of (energy and) Climate Change. Frankly, the sceptics are a ragtag bunch of mostly self-funded guerrillas, who have made little difference to policy — let alone caused the floods.

On floods, the skeptics agree with the IPCC:

“Here’s what the IPCC’s latest report actually says: “There continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”

No, 97% of “climate scientists” don’t agree it will be dangerous warming

“That consensus, by the way, has never said that climate change will necessarily be dangerous. The oft-quoted 97 per cent agreement among scientists refers to the statement that man-made climate change happens, not to future projections. No climate change sceptic that I know “denies” climate change, or even human contributions to it. It’s a lazy and unpleasant slur to say that they do."

No, global warming did NOT cause the storms, says one of the Met Office's most senior experts

Daily Mail
One of the Met Office’s most senior experts yesterday made a dramatic intervention in the climate change debate by insisting there is no link between the storms that have battered Britain and global warming.
Mat Collins, a Professor in climate systems at Exeter University, said the storms have been driven by the jet stream – the high-speed current of air that girdles the globe – which has been ‘stuck’ further south than usual.
Professor Collins told The Mail on Sunday: ‘There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge.’
His statement carries particular significance because he is an internationally acknowledged expert on climate computer models and forecasts, and his university post is jointly funded by the Met Office.
Prof Collins is also a senior adviser – a ‘co-ordinating lead author’ – for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His statement appears to contradict Met Office chief scientist Dame Julia Slingo."
----------------------------------------------

Deliberately or otherwise, Slingo has misled the public

The real reason for flooding in Somerset Levels? Not global warming – the pump was turned off!

WUWT
"We’ve previously covered the absurd claims that “global warming” was the cause of flooding in Somerset, UK here and here, with yesterday, even a senior scientist at the Met Office disagreeing with the spinmistress in charge, Julio Slingo’s claim about an AGW connection. Now we learn the real reason. The ROF pumping station was turned off in 2008 and nothing was done to replace it, while at the same time the Huntspill sluice gates to drain water to the sea seemed to be improperly managed by the EA."

There is No Global Warming and Will Be None for Decades

Heartland Blog
"Then, about 17 years ago the Earth began to cool. It had nothing to do with carbon dioxide — which the Environmental Protection Agency deems a “pollutant” despite the fact that all life on Earth would die without it — and everything to do with the sun.
A few days after the email arrived, two-thirds of the contiguous U.S.A. was covered by snow. As this is being written, Lake Superior is 92 percent frozen, setting a new record. As of February 5, the entire Great Lakes system was, according to the Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory, 77 percent covered with ice."

UK weather: it's not as weird as our warmists claim

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
"...Inevitably, in the wake of all these dramatic storms and floods, the usual suspects, eagerly abetted by the BBC, Channel 4 News and Sky, piled in to claim that the latest “extreme weather events” – coupled with blizzards in 49 of the 50 American states – are clear evidence of man-made global warming. At their forefront, proclaiming that “all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change .....As we know, since the 17-year “pause” in the rise in global temperatures made a nonsense of all those IPCC computer models, the warmists have sought to prop up their faltering religion by seizing on any “extreme weather event” they can lay their hands on, hot, cold, wet or dry. These recent storms and floods have been as manna from heaven for the likes of our “climate change” secretary Ed Davey, Lord Stern, the Great Moonbat and Bob Ward ........All true science, of course, has here been thrown out of the window. There is no rising trend in atmospheric humidity. Put the Arctic and the Antarctic together and there is more polar sea ice today than at any time since satellite records began in 1979. Not even the IPCC predicts a temperature rise of 5ºC. The latest Nasa Grace satellite data on sea levels, which have been modestly rising since we emerged from the Little Ice Age 200 years ago, shows that, on the trend of the past decade, the rise by 2100 would be just 6.7in. "

UK flooding, Met Office, and all that – a map from 878AD tells us more than Slingo

WUWT
"People have been draining the area known as the Somerset Levels since before the Domesday Book in 1086AD. The Levels were frequently flooded by the sea during high tides, a problem that was not resolved until the sea defences were enhanced in the early 20th century. So, is it any surprise that the water wants to follow the path of least resistance with gravity rather than it being a new feature of “climate change”?

Somerset Floods – February Update

Summing up
(WUWT)
So what should we learn from all of this?
1) While it has been an exceptionally wet winter in the South West of England, it is far too early to be talking about it being unprecedented, or to be looking for links to “climate change”.
2) As the graph below shows, precipitation during the “six winter months” has actually been at historically normal levels in recent years, and the trend looks to be a declining one. If nothing else, this rather makes a nonsense of the theory that global warming is leading to wetter winters.

3) Whilst the continuing wet weather is prolonging the agony for the Levels, the situation in December and January was not an unusual one. I will leave others to judge what effect the lack of dredging and other maintenance work has had on the floods.
4) If any year was “unprecedented”, it was 1929/30. (And as I have shown previously, the wet winter of that year affected the whole country.) I find it incredible that the Met Office have not carried out a detailed analysis of that winter, and indeed some of the other wet years, to see what they have in common with this winter.
There is little doubt that scientists such as HH Lamb would have done precisely that. Instead, we see a desperate attempt to find a link to “climate change”.
Surely, to do science properly, you should first look for natural causes for events such as these. And to do that, you have to learn from the past. Only then can we hope to understand the present and the future.
5) We have been bombarded with claims of record rainfall months, and forecasts of record winters. Meanwhile, David Cameron describes the Somerset floods as “biblical”. Am I the only one that cannot remember being told that 1929/30, or other years, were much wetter?
At least the media have an excuse – they are trying to sell newspapers. The Met Office have no excuse at all.
We deserve better.

The Tale Of Two Reports

NotAlotOfpeopleKnowThat
"On 3rd January, the Met Office issued a report about the wet and stormy weather during December. Amongst their conclusions were: .....Note there was no mention of “climate change”, and no evidence at all that the storms were anything other than the result of natural forces.

....Now fast forward a month. Clearly the failure to put the blame on climate change did not go down too well, so up pops the latest report.This report, authored by Julia Slingo, finds that the jet stream changes are linked to the polar vortex over the USA (which is a natural phenomena that has occurred regularly in the past.) In turn, this is linked back to heavy rainfall over Indonesia (which has also occurred regularly in the past). And, Bob’s your uncle, Julia comes out and says: “All the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change” (Even though the report says no such thing). It appears that Slingo, who has recently been made a Dame, for services rendered, and received a whopping £25k bonus last year, can be relied on to produce the “right report”. Of course, it was this same incompetent who said just last April that “climate change was loading the dice towards freezing, drier weather.”

January 2014 Rainfall Not So Unusual
"In the UK as a whole, January was only tie 17th wettest month since 1910, with 183.8mm. Relatively speaking, last month was wetter in England & Wales, but even there it was only the 16th wettest month, on the England & Wales Series, dating back to 1766 . Last month recorded 184.6mm, well short of the wettest month on record, October 1903, which had 218.1mm."

Mann vs. Steyn: The Trial of the Century

RCP
"Mann vs. Steyn may be the trial of the century. It may determine, not merely whether the environmentalists can shut down industrial civilization, but whether they can shut down the independent thinking of skeptical dissidents."

An attempt to politicize the winter Olympics over climate change fails to demonstrate climate consensus

WUWT
"1. Check the expected climatic conditions of Sochi
From Capital Weather Gang: The Games are being held during a stretch of the coastal city’s coldest winter stretch, with a daily average high of 49 degrees and low of 36 degrees Fahrenheit.  Remarkably, Sochi’s daily average temperature values never drop below freezing at any time of the year.  According to NASA, it’s the warmest host city for any winter Olympic games."

UK Met office predicts 15% chance of heavy rain. Britain gets “biblical floods”.

JoNova (Australia)
"UK Met Office in December predicted a 15% chance of Jan-Feb-March being the wettest category ...Instead the UK got “Biblical floods”: ......The UK Met Office response — blame it on climate change: ....What evidence showed that climate change was to blame? Evidence from the same climate models that didn’t predict the rain? Climate models chop up the Earth into individual cells, then they predict the weather in each cell and add up all the mistakes cells. They will tell us that weather is not climate, but they don’t tell us how adding up a bunch of bad predictions can ever produce a good one. The weather-is-not-climate excuse is a fail. The Met Office can’t predict either beyond a week or two."

Global Laughing Stock UK Met Office – “Lost Touch With Reality…Corrupted Valuable British Institution”

NoTricksZone
"Just days ago I posted on a how veteran German Die Welt journalist Ulli Kulke was amazed at how supposedly one of the world’s best meteorological outfits, the Met Office of England, had botched 13 of the last 14 annual forecasts. Read here. Kulke accused the Met Office of ”systematic false alarms”, saying they “refuse to accept the reality” of no warming and that it was “stunning” that they “never learn.” Today Paul Homewood’s site features an article that focuses on the very competence of the Met Office Director asking: Can Slingo Get Anything Right? Homewood writes: ..."

Met Office Forecasts: A Reality Check

GWPF
"The Met Office’s temperature forecasts issued in 13 out of the last 14 years have been too warm. None of the forecasts issued ended up too cold. That makes the errors systemic and significant."

The reason for ‘the pause’ in global warming, excuse #37 in a series: ‘trade winds’

WUWT
"So far, we’ve heard from Climate Science that ‘the pause’ was caused by: Too much aerosols from volcanoes, ENSO patterns, missing heat that went to the deep ocean, ocean cooling, low solar activity, inappropriately dealt with weather stations in the Arctic, and stadium waves, to name a few. So much for consensus. Now, it’s trade winds going too fast that are causing abnormal cooling in the Pacific. A new paper from the University of New South Wales says that once the winds return to normal speed, well, look out, the heat is on. One thing for certain, even though the media is going predictably berserkers over this paper, the paper clearly illustrates that natural variation has been in control, not CO2. So much for control knobs."

Harsh European Winters To Remain Another 15 Years! Natural Ocean Cycles Determine Their Harshness

NoTricksZone
"Yesterday Ulli Kulke of Die Welt writes that this milder winter is more the exception than the rule, resulting from the positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Despite this year’s warm winter, the winters for Europe over the coming decades are expected to be on the cold side. Kulke writes: ...."

95% of Climate Models Agree: The Observations Must be Wrong

Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.
"I am growing weary of the variety of emotional, misleading, and policy-useless statements like “most warming since the 1950s is human caused” or “97% of climate scientists agree humans are contributing to warming”, neither of which leads to the conclusion we need to substantially increase energy prices and freeze and starve more poor people to death for the greater good. Yet, that is the direction we are heading."

Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is 27.4% above normal as of Feb 7 2014

sunshine hours
"Antarctic Sea Ice Extent is really on track to have the highest minimum in the modern satellite era. Antarctic Sea Ice Extent as of Feb 7 2014 was 904,000 sq km above the 1981-2010 mean and 220,000 sq km above 2008. 904,000 sq km above normal is 27.4%. Day 37 was the 20th daily record of the year."

Satellites show no global warming for 17 years 5 months

WUWT
"The monthly satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomaly from Remote Sensing Systems, Inc., is now available. Taking the least-squares linear-regression trend on this dataset (the bright blue horizontal line through the dark blue data), there has now been no global warming – at all – for 17 years 5 months."

IMF Chief: “Unless we take action on climate change, future generations will be roasted, toasted, fried and grilled”

The Hockey Schtick
"Responding to hyperbolic rhetoric on climate change by Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, Friends of Science point out that her comments are not supported by the recent IPCC report, the exaggerated climate models’ failed predictions or the evidence of no global warming in 16+ years. Unrestrained terrifying statements are damaging the mental health of children and youth; in fact Friends of Science recent report on the alleged 97% consensus shows only 1-3% of scientists in 3 of 4 "consensus" surveys explicitly stated agreement with the IPCC declarations on global warming, and no agreement with a catastrophic view."

Climate Scientist Who Got It Right Predicts 20 More Years of Global Cooling

cnsnews.com
"Easterbrook – a climate scientist and glacier expert from Washington State who correctly predicted back in 2000 that the Earth was entering a cooling phase – says to expect colder temperatures for at least the next two decades. .........“For the next 20 years, I predict global cooling of about 3/10ths of a degree Fahrenheit, as opposed to the one-degree warming predicted by the IPCC,” said Easterbrook, professor emeritus of geology at Western Washington University and author of 150 scientific journal articles and 10 books....Easterbrook noted that his 20-year prediction was the “mildest” one of four possible scenarios, all of which involve lower temperatures, and added that only time will tell whether the Earth continues to cool slightly or plunges into another Little Ice Age as it did between 1650 and 1790. “There’s no way to tell ‘til you get there,” he told CNSNews.com. But he lamented the fact that governments worldwide have already spent a trillion dollars fighting the wrong threat. (h/t Climate Depot)

Prince Charles Hits Out At ‘Headless Chickens’ Who Deny Climate Change

Climate Depot
"‘He talks about vested interests but he should be very careful his words don’t backfire on him. The Crown Estate, for example, is making huge profits from the very offshore wind-farms that have angered so many of his future subjects. ‘And for many people the issue of rising energy bills now is more important than what may or may not happen 100 years down the line. I fear he is ill advised to make such aggressive and contentious speeches. ‘One of the reasons the Queen and the Royal Family are so loved is that they steer clear of such issues. His aggressive words indicate a certain insecurity and intransigence that will not go down well with the public.’

"headless chickens" Prince Charles..

JoNova (Australia)
"Switch off your brain, Prince Charles has said you are a headless chicken if you do not accept what political committees tell you to think. .......So one of the richest men in the world, future ruler of nations, feels bullied by unfunded volunteers? Such bravery from our next Head of State."