Bishop Hill Who is briefing Davey?
Nov 15, 2013 Climate: WG2 
Nigel Lawson and Ed Davey were both on BBC Question Time last night (from 34 mins), and the conversation inevitably turned to hurricane Haiyan. At first, Davey was somewhat less belligerent than normal, offering qualified agreement with Lawson's suggestion that there was no connection between global warming and hurricanes. His qualification was, however, significant. He said in essence that while global warming was not affecting hurricane frequency, it was increasing their intensity.
This is not true.
Once again, the IPCC says there is low confidence in any global change in intense hurricane activity and low confidence in any human contribution to what changes there have been. Hurricane activity has been very low for the best part of 20 years.
And as if to underline the point, Paul Homewood has reviewed the data for the most intense typhoons and found that we have spent most of the last 20 years almost completely free of any such storms.
Reader Comments (68)
I know nothing for certain, but could it be a future tense thing ?
Could it be that IPCC reports say that cyclones are likely in the far future to be more intense ? ..please advise me
@Jamspid has a good comment on the Lurch thread
- Why are closing dockyards in Portsmouth and building navy ships in Korea, could it be cos of Mad Ed Davey's energy policies here (wind & solarPV FITs etc. making energy prices more expensive & unpredictable).
AlecM
I think Davey is simply out of his depth.
For whatever reason DECC is a hotbed of green activism, presumably dating back to Miliband or even earlier and certainly never likely to change as long as the Lib-Dems are in charge of that department.
So that's who is briefing Davey and if you want a look behind the scenes a couple of hours in the company of 'Yes, Minister' should fix it for you. The political end always justifies the means. Watch for the handbrake turn when the cAGW myth finally explodes.
According to a letter I received yesterday from Ed Davey's acolyte in the West, Dan Rogerson, the invisible MP; the Honorable Huhne and his successor have already saved us money. I quote:
""Financial support provided under the Renewables Obligation (RO) for onshore wind from 2013-17 was reduced by 10% from April 2013. Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) policies mean that current annual household energy bills are £63 lower than they would have been, and will be £166 lower in 2020 than if we remained reliant on fossil fuels.
That is the first time I have seen that £63. Where has that been conjured from?
There is lots of interesting work going on examining the link between climate change and Tropical Storm/Cyclone/Hurricane intensity. A couple of examples:
Elsner at al. (2013)
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00433.1
Holland and Bruyere (2013)
http://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-013-1713-0
Crikey, even the Met Office and BBC brigade are clear on this one. Davey needs to sack his not so SpAD. What I found fascinating was the reaction of the audience who did not give Davey any support or the equally dim Labour MP. The octagenarian Lawson took Davey to the cleaners and even asked him to withdraw a libellous statement, what would a sixty year old and fully fit Lawson have done to this lightweight minister. I know that the Portsmouth crowd had more pressing carbon intensive problems to worry about but the government's stance is coming off the rails. Surprisingly, the only one who made a genuine case for a way of alleviating the Phillipines from the poor housing ravaged in the storm was Lawson.
Here is Villarini & Vecchi (2013)
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00441.1
Vecchi et al (2013)
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00503.1
(You'll notice I am using BH as a bit of a literature store at this point, sorry) :)
Ed Davey quickly turned to claiming that it was in fact sea level rise that had caused the impact to be so much worse. Relative sea level rise in the relevant part of Philippines is 5.3-5.4 millimeter per year. That does not dramatically change the storm set-up, which is several meters.
Stella Creasy was an airhead.
Just watched this mornings repeat.First two questions Ship Yard Redundancies and the Royal Marine Taliban prisoner murder were very downbeat.
Once the Philippians Hurricane AGW question asked things got very animated from the panel and the audience.
Something Dimbleby said to Ed Davey cant think what is was but it wrong footed Davey have to watch it again
I have i had been in the Audience i would have mentioned Good way to reduce Carbon Emissions get rid of British Heavy industry sack 2 thousand Dock Yard Workers English or Scottish.
Why cant British Ship building compete with Korea because of high gas and electricity can thank Ed Davy and his Green Levy.
Mike Jackson: 'Watch for the handbrake turn when the cAGW myth finally explodes'.
That event started 3 weeks ago when Mike Lockwood of another hotbed of cAGW nonsense, Reading University, had a paper published predicting reduction of Solar magnetic would cause ~30 years of cooling. He did state there was likely to be CO2-AGW as well but watch for the slow burning fuse: for the warmunists to accept other effects than CO2-AGW are active in controlling temperature will open up the debate about whether the CO2 effect is much smaller than claimed.
To admit that is to admit the new religion is based on foundations of sand.
Listening to the clappometer was intersting last night. Not sure to what view the balance of the audience was sympathetic.
Thought Lawson did well at points but Dimbleby had to make his point for him at time.
The purpose of the IPCC & there summary reports was clearly displayed though. So politicians, like Davey, and the blond woman can shout down people with the 95% nonsense.
I didn't see the programme - I stopped watching it a couple of years ago when there was a danger that my TV might get a smashed screen. The better-half warned me I wouldn't be allowed a replacement!
Lord L will always give a good, calm account of himself in any situation - the video of him discussing climate change policy with Miliband junior a few years (2009) back is still worth a view. Now as the years have gone on Miliband looks even more deluded and Lord L ever more vindicated.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0wi9kMXHyQ
The Green/CAGW lobby look ever more like those Christians who still deny (sorry) that the world is older than a few thousand years.
I can't decide whether the dam will burst at some stage and the whole business unravel, as Mike Jackson suggests above
OR, given that so many people have a dog in the fight (including our Prime Minister), it will grind on and on.
I have long been sceptical (in the sense of wanting to see the evidence) of CAGW, but the main clincher for me is the level to which pure activism has infected the whole thing - once lying about the evidence becomes endemic eventually it must fall?? Surely - well I am not holding my breath.
How Ed Davey managed to obtain his position when he clearly lacks the ability even to lie convincingly marks a new low in British political life. Chris Huhne had that ability at least.
Particularly pathetic is his imagined "gotcha" moment when he "accuses" Lawson of quoting the IPCC.
I have say I like to preface anything I quote from the IPCC with "Even the tasked-with-promoting-the-demonisation-of-CO2 IPCC has said...." to ensure that I could not be accused of putting them up as any kind of authority OTHER than as the authority from which so many dim bulbs like Davey get the gist of their pre-digested opinions.
The more knowledge I acquire about climate science the more unbearable watching these debates become. Annoying (Sorry, My Lord, but you are!) as Christopher Monckton can be in many ways, he is one of the few people who can really debate well on the non-alarmist side. He always has the research and the quotes at his fingertips and always says, refreshingly, that we should not just believe him but go home and look it up for ourselves. We really do need a few more media-savvy ultra-well informed spokespeople...the truth will out eventually but I am getting tired of waiting.
Alec I think they are softening us up for a new line in CAGW. A solar minimum would be a replacement deus ex machina for the aerosols and volcanic eruptions.
The theory will be that there is a natural cooling going on, masking the high sensitivity of global temperature to CO2, that is, that more than 100% of all warming is caused by CO2. The pause, they will say, is a blend of their steady 0.3ºC per decade of AGW, with a matching natural cooling.
It may be nonsense, but it will buy them at least another 10 years to keep trashing fossil fuels and subsidising Sir Reginald Sheffield, Dale Vince OBE and their ilk.
Coincidentally I received a copy of a letter from Mr Davey to my MP the other day. This was in response to a couple of my letters in anticipation of AR5 and the ineffectiveness of his energy policy. Mr Davey concluded by saying that "IPCC reports reinforced the need for urgent action to drastically reduce global greenhouse gas emissions in order to avoid dangerous climate change." No sign of change there. Along the way there was no attempt to answer the points or criticisms I raised. They were just ignored. It reads like a standard brush off letter.
Doug McNeall: Feel free, we appreciate it :)
Richard Tol: Thanks for the Philippines sea-level rise figures. I was wondering if it could have made it to 1% significance level as I listened last night. Guess not.
It was hard for Lawson to be sat next to Stella Creasy. Young, female, articulate, impassioned, easier on the eye than the noble Lord (with the best will in the world) and convinced she knew so much better than him because she'd read about the 95% attribution-of-puny-warming-since-1950 confidence trick in IPCC AR5 - surely the most contentless number since 97% of very specially selected AGU scientists told us to shut up and do as we were told or we'd be for the high jump.
jamspid: I agree Davey was wrongfooted by Dimbleby, perhaps more than once. I'm going to watch it again and see if we agree on the what and how. But the way I see it some of the BBC luminaries are following Andrew Neil's lead and not allowing the climate establishment to have it all their own way. And a cloud as big as a man's hand is sometimes all one needs at the end of a extreme climate problem.
I usually cannot bear to watch this programme but last night I couldn't resist watching Ed and Nigel squaring up. Lawson stuck to the facts and did a very good job; he was too much of a gentleman to go and give Ed the good slapping he deserved.
The business woman and the union guy were pretty fair minded and sensible. They were a bit non-committal about how much they believed about global warming but they thought that energy saving measures were worth doing regardless of other factors. I suspect that like most people they gave the benefit of the doubt to the wonderfully confident scientists of the IPCC.
The 95% confidence that man was causing global warming really did it for the Labour woman.
"95%!!!", she kept exclaiming, working herself up to a hysterical panic. I thought she was going to have a fit. Perhaps Nigel was undecided about which one needed the slapping most.
Ed started off close to normal which is abnormal. He too worked himself up to a frenzy, His frenzy manifested itself as a torrent of alarmist speak. I was not entertained enough to justify watching the thing again, but if my memory serves me correctly, the torrent contained: "This is the seventh warmest decade ever, the typhoon last week was worse because global warming is making them more intense, and also because sea levels are rising and becoming more acidic and the warming has not stopped, it is just warming more slowly, rant, rant...."
The union man and the business lady watched in fascination as Ed leaned out of his chair towards Nigel and ranted furiously. The Labour woman was still hysterically screaming about the 95% confidence. Nigel observed them in silence. There was nothing he could do or say. He knew that they were past being slapped. He had left it too late.
Casting my mind back, it stems from hurricane modelling efforts by Knutson and a subsequent press release that stronger hurricanes may increase in intensity. However the projected increase was a tiny 5% or so and Knutson later admitted when pressed that in fact it was only a 50/50 shot and that he could equally well have written that stronger hurricanes may reduce in intensity: The only robust result of the models was that hurricanes would be less frequent. This didn't stop Kerry Emmanuel, whose previous papers had suggested Cat 4 and 5 hurricanes could get around 5% stronger in warming world, to go way beyond the paper and the press release and announce that the putative few percent of the models would somehow balloon into around 14% in costs - a number he plucked from the aether.
The fact that there were no big hurricanes after Katrina after all and that all "experts" therefore predicting big events for 2006/2007 seasons were utterly wrong, dulled the PR effect of hurricanes somewhat and Elsner in U of Florida even postulated a solar connection instead of a CO2 connection. This hasn't stopped the usual suspects attributing every storm to the global warming. Not 5 or 14% but the whole thing. And not hurricanes or even North Atlantic storms but Pacific cyclones (for which afaik there are zero papers declaring projected increases) and small storms like Sandy (for which there are certainly zero papers declaring projected increases and for which, as Lindzen reminds us, textbook meteorology used to say that storminess should reduce in intensity as well as in number in a warming world). And never mind that the warming has stalled so it can't be responsible for any putative recent storminess increase anyway. And never mind that there is no such recent increase according to all data.
Then it comes to the UK and numpties like Slingo and Stott from the warmist MO (who should really be expected to predict at least something correctly before calling themselves experts) and all of this nuance and uncertainty is replaced by the simple soundbite that all storms will get worse whether the MO are projecting a colder, warmer, wetter or drier future for the UK plus the contradictory and illogical fable that wet places will get wetter and dry places will get drier. Why is this so? We know that models are incapable of predicting such things. But then we discover that no science is really required, all we need is semantics and pessimism: Hey it's defined as climate CHANGE and everyone knows all change must be bad of course. QED!
I don't understand this blog post. Having low confidence in your hypothesis is meaningful only if you present your arguments with confidence intervals, error bars and so on. If you hide them, it matters not what your level of confidence is when you're making an argument. It only becomes important when people ask, "what is your level of confidence". In general, they don't.
In the meantime, the BBC's Tim Wilcox, reporting from the devastation in the Philippines, announced that 'winds up to 215 miles per hour' had been involved.
Totally untrue. Perhaps it would be helpful for BBC presenters to aquaint themselves with FACTS before spouting nonsense - the guest essay by Pauyl Holmwood on Wattsupwiththat could be a useful place to start...
BBC Question Time: Please give scientists proper representation on Question Time.
http://www.change.org/en-GB/petitions/bbc-question-time-please-give-scientists-proper-representation-on-question-time?share_id=vMtEayZwbM&utm_campaign=invite_page_mobile&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_petition
I was of the understanding that the IPCC report was a load of hogwash but now it seems to be a source of evidence. Un-related note...why would you name your daughter Nigella when you're called Nigel..poor lady!
@ Disko Troop 11:37
Maybe Ed Davey & Dan Rogerson are unaware of the “House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee "Energy Prices, Profits and Poverty Fifth Report of Session 2013–14” which on p59 states:-
"(Para)125. According to Ofgem, environmental charges currently account for around 11% (£59) of average annual electricity bills and 6% (£49) of average annual gas bills. DECC analysis suggests that energy and climate change policies make up approximately 9% (around £112) of the average annual dual fuel bill.267 However this is set to rise sharply in future years, with costs falling largely on the wholesale electricity price. DECC estimates that its policies will add to 33% to the average electricity price paid by UK households in 2020 and 41% in 2030. This significant increase is of particular concern to those households, often fuel-poor, that rely on electric heating systems."
It would be interesting to receive Rogerson's response to that above official quotation.
AlecM
I've had this quote from Strong on file for years. He said at the Earth Summit 20 years ago.Have you seen Tim Ball's guest post over at WUWT which seems to back up your hypothesis that the CO2 meme is — shall we say — less than 100% correct. It opens with this:
I was really annoyed with Dimbleby for not correcting both Davey and that stupid Labour bimbo and the Union guy for keeping on stating that the "Poles are Melting causing sea level rise", even a guy in the audience new that the Antarctic was breaking records for area.
It was basically a 3 to 1 attack on Lawson, who was the only one telling the truth as we understand it.
Also nobody brought up all the previous Typhoons in support of Lawson who pointed out the lack of Trend typhoon in strength or frequency.
Watching BBC QT last night made me squirm.
I wanted Lawson, to be animated, firm, eloquent, coherent, fresh, full of hard hitting facts and rebuttals but I am afraid he was none of these things. He was portrayed as an out-of-touch old fogey and I am sorry to say that is how he may have been regarded by the average QT viewer.
Davey seemed deeply agitated and worried about getting caught out. He scanned the audience for support and nodded furiously whenever he found it. He may have been inaccurate and deceitful but I bet his scattergun distribution of alarming ‘facts’ and impending disaster had more of an impact than Lawson’s, laid back rambling.
It is a sad state of affairs that no-one in government or in the main opposition is allowed to speak their mind on this. This means that the sceptic story is left to be told by octogenarian politicians, fringe parties, scientists who are close to retirement or dismissed as ‘rogue’ and self-reliant amateur advocates. To make a real impact we desperately need an energetic and well known current politician from one of the main political parties to lead the sceptical argument.
As for Creasy, maybe she is a light-weight but she is typical of those that superficially dip into the science. Lawson never even bothered to challenge her 95% argument and she was surprisingly effective just using that simple tactic. People like Creasy are never going to go further than the advice she is given by the established 'wisdom'. She is a representation of the majority of parliamentarians.
The warmists keep complaining that their problem is one of communication and for some reason think that sceptic communication is much better organised and more effective. On the other hand, I tend to think that sceptic communication is severely handicapped and will only improve dramatically when prominent politicians or scientists build up the confidence to ‘come out’ and demand an open debate. God help the warmists when the sceptics really get communication working as it should.
Mike Jackson: the really clever bit from Strong was to claim that it wasn't the stuff being fed into the generator engines that was the problem, but the stuff coming out of the exhaust. That solved the politics because it made the public nervous. The next thing was to invent fake physics.
We already had Arrhenius' big mistake claiming surface IR is emitted at bb level also the physicist's shortcut to neat equations, the 'grey body atmosphere' - they're still hooked on it even though most of the <40% bb surface IR goes directly to Space via the 'atmospheric window'. This was 'solved' in 1981_Hansen_etal.pdf which claimed that CO2 blocks the atmospheric window, arguably outright scientific fraud but it passed peer review in 'Science' a US government funded journal, via the AAAS.
Also in that paper was the false claim, from Houghton and Sagan, that the GHE = lapse rate. This exaggerated the GHE by 3x, the 'positive feedback'; this is really highly negative via the water cycle.
Nov 15, 2013 at 1:28 PM | Unregistered CommenterJoe Public
Thanks Joe. I will throw that at him next. I still cannot find where the £63 saving off our bills has come from though. Usually there is a bit of DECC bog paper with it written on somewhere.
@ Chairman Al
Couldn't agree more. Lawson was unchallenging, as was Dimblebore. Wrong Lord - a couple of others would have been better.
Well Lawson grabbed the headline in the MSM and very few people will read past that to the garbage spewing out of Davey's mouth:
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/443101/Question-Time-No-link-between-climate-change-and-Typhoon-Haiyan-says-Lord-Lawson
I watched Question Time this morning. It was interesting to see Davey spouting about the number of scientists the IPCC use and the 95% certainty which was taken by him, and even more by the Labour MP, as scientific fact.
There may be nothing whatever in AR5 to suggest that the 'certainty' should logically have increased, given the fact that even the IPCC graph shows a complete failure of the models to track relaity, yet these two fools dont want to know about facts. All IPCC has to do next time (AR6) is to claim 100% certainty and they have won.
Just as the communists infiltrated government in the pre and immediate post war years so the green activists have taken control over the past 20-30 years. Not until these zealots are removed and MPs think for themselves and take back control will we see an end to the foolery of Davey et al.
I formerly belonged to a professional body that was, about 5 years ago, taken over by zealots. Now members have no say in the Instiution, who runs it and what policies it follows. There are signs that this takeover of such bodies is widespread (the takeover was classic 'red robbo' stuff). These people guide governments - beware the NGOs.
WB
I was thinking it was more like the way the Militant Tendency infiltrated the Labour Party. There weren't many but they somehow gained control of every sub-commitee, and added all their political correctness, contempt for democracy, anti-capitalism, anti-nukes and uncontrollable public spending to every issue. The only difference then was they wanted to control the energy supply by controlling the miners so they were pro-coal. They don't negotiate, they dictate and in the end there is no other remedy than just removing them root and branch as Kinnock did. Now every party and institution in the Western world seems to have it's own new militant tendency. God help us, only UKip seems to have some common sense about UK energy policy - if not about much else. In fact, I find that Greenpeace even has a more sensible policy: I rather liked the idea of mini CHP units for every district.
I really can't explain what happened to the Liberals though. They used to be the party of common sense. There was no suggestion of closing power plants when acid rain was the trendy eco scare du jour or during the miners strike. They realized then that producing energy is the most important thing we do and everything else stems from it. Now absolutely everything has to be measured in units of carbon despite the glaring evidence that these climate scientists don't have a chuffing clue about what really drives climate. Clegg won't be content until the Lib vote is zero it seems.
William Baird
I've never been a member of a scientific professional body but was for several years a member of one of the NUJ's freelance branches (chapels were for newspapers, I understand; we had to be content with a branch!).
Two or three of us annoyed a few of our colleagues on occasion by insisting on sitting right through to the end of meetings and providing enough opposition to prevent some of their sillinesses being passed on the nod.
'Red Robbo' stuff describes it well. It was standard practice by the Trot activists in the 70s (and later) to spin out the agenda until the people who had wives and kids and lives and empty stomachs and fancied a pint on the way home gave up and left.
When the next unwanted, un-voted for, undemocratic edict came down from the branch objections were met with a shrug and "if you couldn't be bothered turning up for/staying to the end of the meeting ..."
Exactly the same thing has happened vis-a-vis global warming which is only further evidence that Delingpole's description of the activists as "watermelons" is right on the money. The tactics and the political philosophy are exactly the same as is the final objective!
As, in many cases, are the people — even if they have ended up with Nobel prizes.
Davey seems to have upset the MoD as well
http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/ministry-of-defence-slams-ed-davey-for-his-attack-on-us-drone-strikes-8942247.html
retireddave
I gave up watching QT about five years ago, when it all got too much for me. I warned Mrs S that if we kept watching a new TV would be the end result. Quite often it goes on "just to see who's on", I have to remind her of the potential problem. From the comments here it was fortunate that we were out last night as I may well have broken my self imposed abstinence and the TV!
A C Osborn: "I was really annoyed with Dimbleby for not correcting both Davey and that stupid Labour bimbo and the Union guy for keeping on stating that the "Poles are Melting causing sea level rise", even a guy in the audience new that the Antarctic was breaking records for area."
If the topic is polar melting affecting sea level rise, then the guy in the audience was wrong to mention Antarctic *sea* ice area; floating ice does not affect sea level.
On the other hand, if there was a claim made that polar melting has caused a significant amount of sea level rise, then that claim is incorrect. The largest melt rate claim recently made (of which I'm aware) is from Rignot et al. (2011), which talked of a 475 Gt/yr rate in 2006. This is about 5 inches per century of sea level rise.
Why does the Paul Homewood chart show storms of 895mb or LESS?
If 895mb is the power of Hurricane Haiyen surely it is more relevant to look at storms above a certain threshold rather than the total number less powerful than that?
Nov 15, 2013 at 5:36 PM | Unregistered CommenterPBL
Normally the lower the pressure the higher the wind speed and power.
Nov 15, 2013 at 5:31 PM | Registered CommenterHaroldW
That is precisely the point(s) neither claims is true, the Poles aren't melting at all in the case of the Antarctic and no more than historical (non Satellite) records show for the Arctic and even if they were it has to be land ice that melts to affect sea levels. Which have shown a slowing of the amount of rise not an acceleration as quoted by the politicians.
A C Osborn,
According to the Rignot et al. article previously cited, Antarctica is losing mass on net, and the losses are accelerating for both poles. While I have reservations about the GRACE estimates, relying as they do on very precise adjustments, I'm not aware of any estimates which have different signs on these metrics. If there's any slowing of the sea level rise rate -- none seems apparent to me at the moment -- it would more likely be down to a reduction in thermosteric effects. But the claim on the program was apparently about melting effects.
It's called cherry picking.
So much time and effort has been put to generally trashing the corrupt IPCC political and its less than robust link with honesty, yet when it suits it appears to be OK to pick a juicy bit that we happen to agree with. Here you quote the IPCC's belief that there is low confidence in any global change in intense hurricane activity....."
Either the IPCC is to be trusted or not, you cannot have it both ways.
I thought Lawson did very well. Dimbleby was fair on this occasion and allowed him adequate opportunity to put his case.
The audience quality also seemed to be a cut above the usual, but it was still depressing to witness how deeply green propaganda has embedded itself in the public.
There were several occasions however when Davey, waiting for applause, instead received a very muted reaction, and looked distinctly uncomfortable.
I was of the understanding that the IPCC report was a load of hogwash but now it seems to be a source of evidence. Un-related note...why would you name your daughter Nigella when you're called Nigel..poor lady!
Nov 15, 2013 at 1:24 PM | David
==========================================
Nigella is the name of a very beautiful flower.
http://flowergardengirl.com/2010/06/07/nigella-flower-and-its-outer-space-looks/
My problem with Davey is
1. He's clearly not very bright
2. He looks like Wayne Rooney, and as a lifelong Man City fan I find that distressing
Other Lords better, good on Lawson , but I suspect he allowed on as the token skeptic so that they can keep younger sharper skeptics off ..and pass him off as the old duffer.
- Someone else - can nail them on stuff like the fake 9%, fake 97% and non-melting ice
I have jut watched the programme and I thought Lawson did well. Some panellists won't shut up and keep interrupting, but this irritates the audience and Lawson avoided that. He remained statesman-like throughout and put across his points well. He was against three opponents in Davey. Creasy, and the GMB man. The company director lady was very fair, though admitted her lack of knowledge on the climate issue as did many in the audience. At one point Lawson got a big applause when he said that Davey had been misled about China cutting its emissions. For me that was a genuine indicator of the mood of the people that they are increasingly fed up with being told that we are leading the way and that others are following. I think it will become increasingly obvious that that isn't happening. Then as bills keep rising we will see a turn against the government policy. Then they will start to back track.
That Davey and two other panellists should spout nonsense about the "melting ice caps" and get away with it is down to the media.....in this case David Dimbleby.
The empirical data from the satellites clearly shows that Antarctica is bigger than ever recorded and the Arctic is recovering.
It is therefore insulting to our democracy that ignorance is allowed to pass as the truth.
We do not have a climate problem...we have a media problem....the words unprofessional and liars come to mind!
james griffin
The Antarctic ice extent record goes with some of the warmest winter temperatures on record. This makes it unlikely that the high extent is due to low temperatures, as you no doubt wish to suggest.
http://antarcticsun.usap.gov/science/contenthandler.cfm?id=2911
It is more likely that the larger sea ice extent is due to changes in wind direction tending to disperse the ice further from the coast; and lower salinity (due to increasing ice sheet melting) increasing the freezing temperature.
The Ice Caps are melting ! - Holy cr@p, when did that start ? Quick PANIC everyone.
Entropic man, please explain how ice melts at temperatures way way below zero. Or have you just changed the laws of physics.