A January 2020 Cabinet Office presentation that is said to have changed Boris Johnson’s mind over the causes of climate change and acted as a ‘road to Damascus’ has been ridiculed by a number of sceptical journalists after it came to light last week following a FOI request. U.S.-based Climate Depot run by Marc Morano said Johnson had been “duped” by U.K. activists, while Paul Homewood from Not A Lot of People Know That, preferred the word “conned”. Overall, Homewood described the event as a “childish attempt to scare the PM”.
It seems to have succeeded. After the meeting Johnson noted “an almost vertical kink upwards in the temperature graphs. He said: “This was a very important moment for me.” Of course, most of the kinks came from climate models, now commonly referred to in the green climate business as ‘evidence’. In fact they are nothing of a kind, having registered 40 straight years of wrong and usually ludicrously high forecasts.
Climate Depot suggested that a more relevant chart to show the Prime Minister was recently produced by the Smithsonian Institution and tracked global temperatures since life took off on Earth (see above). It is very clear, said Climate Depot, that the current temperature of the Earth does “not represent a ‘climate emergency”.
There appears to have been a concerted effort around this time by green advisers, official and unofficial, to bring Boris Johnson fully on board with the green Net Zero agenda. Shortly after becoming Prime Minister in 2019, his partner (now wife) Carrie Symonds said that politicians had a “gigantic responsibility to make the right decisions” about what she described as a climate crisis.
The climate presentation was run by Sir Patrick Vallance, the Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser. Also attending were a number of special advisers, according to documents released under a recent Freedom of Information request, along with other interested individuals whose names were redacted. The purpose of the meeting was clearly set out in an email from Professor Stephen Belcher, the Chief Scientist at the Met Office. He prepared a slide show and said it demonstrated the goal was to “stabilise climate, which requires net zero emissions”.
At the beginning of 2020, Government scientists were working on stopping the climate warming, citing information from computer models. Within weeks another group of Government scientists, led again by Vallance, would use computer models to justify societal lockdowns, house detention, economic destruction and social distancing to try to stop a common global virus.
The Vallance climate team showed Johnson a graph displaying the warming seen since 1850, measured by surface instruments. Nobody denies the world has warmed about 1°C since then by rebounding out of the five-century long ‘little ice age’. The graph also discloses that temperatures actually fell from 1940 to 1980 despite CO2 levels rising in this period by nearly 9% from 311.3 parts per million in the atmosphere to 338.9. Little correlation between CO2 and temperature is seen in any current, historical and geological record.
Climate Depot quoted the Swedish meteorologist Lennart Bengtsson, who stated: “We are creating great anxiety without it being justified. … There are no indications that the warming is so severe that we need to panic. … The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all”. The site also quoted the climatologist Patrick Michaels, who said so-called ‘hottest year’ claims – based on surface data dating only back to the 19th century – “are political statements designed to persuade the public that the Government needs to take action on man-made climate change”.
The FOI request was made by the green activist site Carbon Brief. Covering the story, the BBC took a ‘better late than never’ tone, with Leo Hickman, the Editor of Carbon Brief, noting that he was surprised how long it took Johnson to have his “personal epiphany on climate change”.
Paul Homewood was less impressed with the event and explained: “The slide show was organised by Sir Patrick Vallance, which hardly gives you much confidence! But worse still, it was presented by the Met Office’s Stephen Belcher. The Met Office long ago gave up any pretence of objectivity where global warming is concerned, always positioning itself at the extreme end of the debate. To ask them for advice is akin to asking Greenpeace.”
At one point, Belcher presented a slide showing rising sea levels. It started in 1993, noted Homewood, and thus suggested it was a modern phenomenon. Why didn’t Belcher show the PM a chart “confirming that sea levels have been rising since the mid 19th century, with no acceleration?”, he asked. At another point, Johnson was shown simulations of what the global temperature would have been without human influence. Models are not evidence, said Homewood, and further asked: “Where are the charts which illustrate how computer-modelled projections of warming are consistently greater than observed?”
Writing in the Daily Telegraph this week, Sherelle Jacobs says that fatalism has steadily sucked the life out of the Johnson premiership, “prompting him to cave in on everything from taxes and lockdowns to green radicalism”. In general, Ms Jacobs suggests, the Tory party believes in individual free will but has surrendered to the apocalyptic terrors of climate change. “It is repulsed by radicalism but champions Net Zero and draconian lockdown to stay in vogue with certain voters.”
Meanwhile, an intriguing email from Professor Belcher discusses the need for five “experts” to contribute to the Cabinet presentation team. All their names, except Baroness Brown, deputy chair at the time of the Government’s Climate Change Committee, are removed from view. One is described as having done a lot of media work and is “quite campaigning”. Another is thought an “excellent communicator on impacts”. A final one comes with the remark: “I appreciate Stuart you thought she might appear too close? She is excellent”.
Who could that be?
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