Reader Jelle U. Hielkema left an interesting comment about Aubrey Meyer's evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee last week. Meyer has accused the Met Office of deliberately misleading the committee in earlier evidence:
[Y]ou asked me to summarise the key points in Aubrey's work. I am assuming you mean on the matter of ‘contempt for the house‘. To do this you need to look at Aubrey’s *written evidence* to the EAC particularly on pages 19 and 20. It is here: -http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/EAC_Real_.pdf
The key point in this is the *proof* on pages 19 and 20 that the UKMO did intentionally mislead [lie to] the original EAC enquiry in 2009 and that they are continuing with the lie now. This is knowingly misleading the house and when and if the EAC gets its head around that, they will pursue it.
This is what you need to pursue, if you [all?] want to go after the UK Met Office for *provably lying to the EAC*. The UK Met Office is incidentally the UK Government's main 'arm' in IPCC and UNFCCC. The *lie* is deliberately concealing in 2009 that UKMO turned a major *positive*-feedback in the projected carbon-cycle [fully reported as such in IPCC AR4 in 2007] into a major *negative*-feedback in the model upon which the UK Climate Act [which became law in 2008] is based and not telling the EAC they had done this. In other words, they sold the EAC a 'Story' which Aubrey Meyer has documented in the written evidence to the EAC and which I sent this blog earlier and which raised 'not yet banned's Question. I send it again here: -http://www.gci.org.uk/Documents/EAC_Real_.pdf
Please do understand, the *sign* of the feedback is a very big deal indeed. Aubrey says, think of positive feedback in the carbon-cycle as a *bad-thing* [it makes a bad situation worse as more and more carbon stays in the sky as a fraction of the ‘budget-emissions’ from fossil fuel burning etc]. However, think of negative feedback as a *good-thing* [it makes a bad situation less bad as less and less carbon stays in the sky as a fraction of the ‘budget-emissions’ from fossil fuels etc that you are burning]. In fact you can think of a negative feedback in the carbon cycle as like finding the Holy Grail. It is like turning water into wine; in response to budget-emissions, carbon will be falling out of the sky and not adding up in it. So the 'discovery' by UKMO in their model that what was first a positive feedback was in fact a negative feedback is [at least in their terms] huge ‘good news’.
So on contempt for the House, the issue is not which of these [positive or negative] is true. The issue here [on contempt for the house] is, why would UKMO have lied to the 2009 Enquiry and misled them into believing that this so-called ‘coupled carbon cycling’ was in the Climate Act as very significant positive feedback [as reported in IPCC AR4 in 2007], when in fact you knew [but didn’t say] that using a model called MAGICC the feedback had been turned into a negative feedback in the UK Climate Act at least fully one year earlier in 2008.
Why did they do this? It is something that if anything they would have shouted about. But UKMO didn't say anything about this change of sign. In fact they did exactly the opposite, as the evidence from Dr Jason Lowe [quoted on page 20 of Aubrey’s evidence shows], they continued to make the EAC believe that it was a positive feedback making things worse.
This is an area of the climate debate that has rarely been touched on at BH, and so I'm very much in learning mode. But it seems to me that if the Met Office model had included the climate-carbon cycle feedbacks as positive, then we would have an even bigger divergence between models and observations.
I guess this is one plausible reason why the sign might have ended up reversed.