With the Science and Technology Committee currently, and with a slight air of desperation, trying to work out a way to persuade the public that the IPCC is trustworthy, it's amusing to see government Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Mark Walport and his three illustrious (and not so illustrious) predecessors writing to the Times today, apparently with the same aim. The article is paywalled, but it's mostly just a recitation of the AGW mantra, with much mention of the empty "consensus".
This is the bit where they explain why we should be getting worried:
It is widely expected that the panel’s fifth assessment report on the physical science basis of climate change, which will be published later this month, will present even greater confidence in the evidence that the climate is warming as a result of human activities.
And therein lies the problem. The models have failed, utterly, completely and catastrophically to predict the halt in temperature rises. That we should then be expected to accept "even greater confidence" about conclusions drawn from them is risible nonsense. This kind of spin is exactly the kind of thing one has come to expect from government chief scientific advisers and the climate establishment and is precisely why people are distrustful of their public utterances.