In the kerfuffle over the Mail on Sunday's spread on climate change last week, the panel looking at the problem in the Met Office climate predictions got sidelined somewhat. But the implications of the error are potentially very expensive.

This is the conclusion of a new briefing paper I've put together for GWPF, entitled The Climate Model and the Public Purse. It outlines the nature of the problem and then looks at where the UK climate projections are being used. The answer is that they are making an impact across the public and private sectors. To be clear, the new version of the projections, which are affected by the problem identified, are relatively new and thus the impact may be limited. However, the last version of the model, which was unaffected (but just runs too hot) has already led to plenty of malinvestment, not the least of which was the famous French-standard roads fiasco:

...the Highways Agency Climate Adaptation Plan is based on UKCIP02 data and records that:

...the Highways Agency has already adopted French temperature standards for road surfaces (EME-2). This is an example of the Agency putting in place adaptation to ensure that design standards and operating practices can adapt to the changing climate expected over the lifetime and replacement cycle of the Agency’s highways infrastructure.

The foolishness of trusting unvalidated computer models for policy decisions was demonstrated by the failure of many road surfaces during the cold winters of 2010/11 and 2011/12.

And then there's this, from the press release:

GWPF chairman Lord Lawson is calling for an independent panel of climate scientists and statisticians to review the UKCP09 predictions.

This is actually quite important, because, as I mention in the paper, there are a whole lot of other problems related to the projections that have yet to be fully explored. Given that they are already influencing spending decisions that would seem to be a bit of an oversight.