Saturday, 6 April 2013

Let's lose the dodgy climate advice - and save £165,000

Christopher Booker,Telegraph
" Last week, as Britain and much of Europe were struggling through the coldest spring in decades, Sir John Beddington marked his retirement from his £165,000-a-year post as the Government’s chief scientific adviser by touring the television and radio studios to terrify us all once more with his all-too-familiar message of how we are threatened by runaway global warming. Thanks to climate change, the litany runs, we now face ever more disruption to our weather, ever more floods, droughts, hurricanes, blizzards and all the rest. Whether it is too cold or too hot, too wet or too dry, we are meant to believe that it’s all our fault and we must bring the climate back under control.
In fact, it is far from clear why Sir John, as an expert in population biology, should be regarded as having any authority to pronounce on such matters. A year or two back, for instance, he was telling us that by the end of this century we can expect the warmest days in Europe to be 8C hotter than they are now, and that in America they will be 11C hotter – claims that exceed even the wildest predictions of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
What is it about these chief scientific advisers that, one after another, they are expected to come up with the same old claptrap about the future of the climate, even though their scientific specialisms give them no more obvious qualification to sound off on this subject than a chap holding forth in the pub?"

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