Lord Donoughue is still trying to get the government to respond on the subject of global temperature series:
Lord Donoughue:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answers by Baroness Verma on 14 January (WA 110), 5 February (WA 31-2) and 21 March (WA 170-1), whether they will ensure that their assessment of the probability in relation to global temperatures of a linear trend with first-order autoregressive noise compared with a driftless third-order autoregressive integrated model is published in the Official Report; and, if not, why not. [HL6620]
Lord Newby:
As indicated in a previous Written Answer given by my noble friend Baroness Verma to the noble Lord on 14 January 2013 (Official Report, col. WA110), it is the role of the scientific community to assess and decide between various methods for studying global temperature time series. It is also for the scientific community to publish the findings of such work, in the peer-reviewed scientific literature.
This is quite interesting. The government calls on the Met Office to provide it with advice on climatological matters and there is a raft of chief scientific advisers on board too. The advice seems to be that the temperature rise witnessed in the last century is statistically significant. But no backing for that view seems to be forthcoming apart from "it's in the peer-reviewed literature".