A Christian Eye on Politics
...This whole global warming charade has become a vast money-spinner and jobs are going to be lost with many hundreds now holding down such jobs as 'climate change advisor,' and 'environmental consultant.' Small fortunes are starting to be made by cutting edge consultancies which prepare businesses and industries for new carbon emission laws. Truthfully, this has become a vast honey pot which thousands want to hold on to until the bitter end.
F or the last three or four years the British Meteorological Office has felt under enormous pressure from two factions which should have no influence over everyday weather forecasting. The most recent of these is British tourism, the more established being the now ever-present 'global warming lobbyists.'
The 'climate change' extremists now have enormous control and influence over a service which only really exists to forecast Britain's notoriously unpredictable weather, especially in the summer months. For those who are unaware of the point, the British summer can be either scorching (with temperatures above 30C [86F] not unusual in some years in the south of the country), or very stormy (when the Atlantic jet stream suddenly takes up a winter, more southerly, position - often with little notice). More commonly, it is a mixture of hot sun and showers with sudden bursts of torrential rain. But the speed at which typical British weather can change has become world famous.In recent years, the 'met office' has taken it upon itself to issue 30-day forecasts, which some believe to be an enterprise doomed to failure in view of the sheer unpredictability and changeableness of the British climate. For three years running they have offered rosy forecasts of summer weather, yet both 2007 and 2008 produced unusually wet summers with widespread flooding. This year, supposedly, confidence had been higher, if only because three unusually wet summers in a row would be unprecedented. But this year, recession-related factors are widely believed to have affected the Met Office; it is believed that an organisation which should be neutral apart from the mundane task of forecasting the weather, has this year come under pressure from British tourism chiefs to come up with a good summer forecast, the idea being to get more Britons to spend their holiday money at home rather than to go abroad. They forecasted a "barbecue summer" which did commence with a hot, dry June but has now produced an exceptionally stormy and gloomy July, with the infamous jet stream once again suddenly plunging southwards as in the summers of both 2007 and 2008.
The real problem for the Met Office is that this is the third summer in a row where it's forecast has failed. In 2007, the Met Office chirped: "The summer is yet again likely to be warmer than normal. There are no indications of a particularly wet summer." In fact, the British got downpours and floods in the wettest summer for England and Wales since 1912. Temperatures were also well below average despite the predictions of heat. The same thing occurred in 2008, with an unusually dismal summer despite unusually optimistic spring forecasts of summer heat to come. Earlier this year the Met Office forecast: "Summer temperatures are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or above average." Once again, this did not prepare people for the fact that, leaving June aside, it has thus far been one of the wettest summers on record with high winds and low sunshine. The Met Office embarrassment has now increased as they have suddenly revised their forecast for August 2009, turning it into a stormy one. Many in the media have quickly pounced on this, asking serious questions about how the Met Office do their work and questioning the influences which they sometimes come under. Since the Met Office now seems to have taken on all the claims of the global warmist extremists, people are saying,
"If they can't get the weather right over 30 days why on earth should anybody listen to their claims of what the weather will be like in a few hundred years from now??" It's a pretty fair point!So, of the two outside influences which appear to have been brought to bear, the climate change lobby is surely the most ridiculous and the most political. These people not only hold huge sway at the BBC, and in all the usual leftist-leaning press, but now seem to have hijacked British weather forecasting on a major scale. We should all remind ourselves that all the latest figures show - to be brutally frank - that climate change was only ever the latest hobby horse of the 'loony left' pseudo-environmentalist faction despite the reverential respect in which many bow at this particular altar. Huge expenditure has now been promised by the big political players of this world in order to "combat the threat of global warming," even as more and more of the major climatologists and metereologists are separating themselves from some of the absurd claims!
In fact, 1998 is now quite widely-known and accepted to have been the peak year in a warming trend which has now apparently finished (go here for evidence of that), with several record cold winters during the last few years. Eleven years would seem to be sufficient time for people to recant, and to lick their wounds, but - nothing daunted, the climate change hysteriaists still refuse to back down over their now quite plain errors. Problem is: this whole charade has become a vast money-spinner and jobs are going to be lost with many hundreds now holding down such jobs as 'climate change advisor,' and 'environmental consultant.' Small fortunes are starting to be made by cutting edge consultancies which prepare businesses and industries for new carbon emission laws. Truthfully, this has become a vast honey pot which thousands want to hold on to until the bitter end.With specific regard to the 'climate changers' who have invaded the British Met Office, interestingly, independent meteorologist Philip Eden, a member of the Royal Metereological Society, recently told BBC News that Met Office forecasts were "generally fairly accurate," however, he blamed "spinners" in the Met Office press office for exaggerating the certainty of forecasts (source: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8173533.stm). But perhaps Mr Eden should have gone a little further (as many are now doing) and insisted that the Met Office should once again strive for complete impartiality and reject the influence of all outside groups who carry a separate agenda. It is absurd, for example, that the British Met Office website now carries a link on "climate change" which leads to a page of the most amazing hype and unproven speculation which has nothing whatever to do with weather forecasting or any serious consideration of previous or present weather patterns which are evidentially-based.
British weather forecasters now seem to hold an agenda to push and publicize the belief that European summers are getting hotter because of global warming and there have been question marks raised over some of the graphs which they have produced which have seemed to play down previous unusually hot summers, such as 1959. The September of that year remains the driest, sunniest and hottest September the UK has ever experienced, but several Met Office 'hot month' comparison charts have not included it. Why? Could it be that exceptionally hot summers in the 1930s, 40s and 50s (of which there were several), just do not fit in with their hype and propaganda?
But - one might ask - does all of this even matter?
It is always wrong when well-meaning people, who like to rely on the "experts," have the wool pulled over their eyes by influences and agendas which have an ulterior motive. Few now doubt that the 'warming hysteriaists' have long held a leftist political agenda with many of them longing to see the demise of the West (a 'West,' by the way, which is currently giving many such people a good and prosperous living). It is wrong when universities and their research scientists now openly admit that no research grants are any longer available unless a clear link to "climate change studies" is made. This is wrong, just as it is wrong when inquistive and enterprising research scientists who would wish to take a fresh look into the origins of life are warned that they will be expelled from their studies if they challenge evolution.
Christians should always be concerned when the public get duped or fooled, whether it is the endemic lying - purely as a way of life - of the former Soviet Union which the late Alexander Solzhenitsyn so courageously railed against, or whether it is simply the very subtle placing of lies and falsehoods in any particular area of life (such as the absurd claim that Natural Selection "proves" macro-evolution, when the clear limits and parameters of the former are the strongest proof that macro-evolution, that is: men from monkeys, never happened).
The Christian Hawk, August 1st, 2009.
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