GWPF Newsletter: Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

1) Christmas Competition: The Tallest Climate Tales Of 2018
Global Warming Policy Forum

2) David Whitehouse: How Can So Many Scientists Be So Wrong About The Pause?
The GWPF Observatory, 20 December 2018


3) Ignoring Climate Alarmists, UK Government Promises More Flights And Bigger Airports
The Times, 18 December 2018

4) Sorry BBC. The World Isn’t Interested In Groupthink Obsession With Global Warming
Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 23 December 2018

5) Benoît Rittaud -- Yellow Vests & Carbon Taxes: What's going on in France?
GWPF TV,  December 2018
  Full details:

1) Christmas Competition: The Tallest Climate Tales Of 2018
Global Warming Policy Forum

An international competition for our readers, friends and supporters



We at the Global Warming Policy Forum like to keep a close eye on what the press and the broadcast media have to say about global warming science. Some of it is, it’s fair to say, pretty far removed from anything a reasonable person would recognise as, well, science. We had a very apt example, just this week, with the BBC caught making up spurious “facts” about penguins in Africa.

With the season of goodwill and merriment upon us, we thought it would be fun to celebrate the dedicated work of our friends in green public relations. We are therefore inviting you to take part in our special competition, with a chance to win some excellent prizes.  Simply tell us about what you think was the tallest green tale of 2018, and explain to us why it was so daft.

Nominations together with rebuttals should be emailed to harry.wilkinson@thegwpf.com

Deadline: 31 December 2018.

Prize: Two GWPF books (Group Think and Population Bombed) plus a bottle of House of Lords whisky.

The GWPF team will decide the winner of the competition early in in the new year.

Good luck, and Merry Christmas!

The Forum team

Top 3 Fake Climate News Stories of 2018 

* 'Nat Geo' Photographer Admits Viral Video Of Polar Bear 'Dying From Climate Change' Is False

* Deer oh deer! BBC admits climate change mistake

* The BBC’s fake African penguin claim

2) David Whitehouse: How Can So Many Scientists Be So Wrong About The Pause?
The GWPF Observatory, 20 December 2018
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor

The much debated and researched so-called pause or hiatus in global surface temperatures between 1997 and 2014 never existed according to a new study.

Using simple statistics it looked at and dismissed over 200 peer-reviewed papers that analysed the pause and concluded it was a real phenomenon. How did they, and the IPCC, get it all so wrong?


Source: Clive Best

Nobody who keeps an eye on climate research will be at all surprised by this “new” paper. Its conclusions were well aired in April 2018 at a meeting of the European Geophysical Union.

The authors must have been rather frustrated at the time as the paper describing their work had been submitted to the journal Environmental Research Letters over a year earlier, in February 2017 in fact, still had not been published. This was remedied a few days ago when it was finally published — one year and nine months after its submission!

The tone of this paper is established at the start with a quote about the polywater affair. This was a hypothesized polymerized form of water that was the subject of controversy during the late 1960s. By 1970 doubts about its authenticity were being raised and by 1973 it was found to be illusory, being just water with contaminants. Is the global warming ‘pause’ (also known as ‘hiatus’ or ‘slowdown’) a modern analogy to polywater pathological science?

To prove that the authors will have to come up with much harder facts and better arguments than they do. In fact, their approach is not new and is part of a series of papers by the authors, each reaching the same flawed conclusion. But what is truly staggering about this new paper is just how unscientific it is in dismissing the 200 peer-reviewed papers that confirm the empirical reality of a warming pause or slowdown in the early 21st century.

Considering that the paper was only accepted by the journal after one year and a half, it is quite remarkable that so much sloppiness managed to get through peer review. The authors talk of “short-term trends” in global mean surface temperature “over a decade or two.” A 20-year trend, most of a canonical 30-year climate definition period, is certainly not short-term, especially since the recent era of global warming began in 1979. The authors say that 30 years was chosen as it is considered long enough to smooth out decadal-scale changes. It doesn’t if such changes last for 20 years or more.

The definition of the pause or hiatus is not straightforward, according to them, and they say “mere description of it is not statistical evidence.” This flies in the face not only of those 200 papers they analyse, but the whole tenet of observational science.

It is often said that the most important words in science are “that’s interesting,” when something strange is observed. I am sure that if one looks at the HadCRUT4 data set from 1997 to date and notes the El Ninos and La Ninas most scientists would say there was something there. Statistics show there is.

The pause ended due to a severe example of weather not climate, the 2015 super El Nino, after which temperatures are returning to pre-El Nino pause levels. Nowhere in the body of this paper is the El Nino even mentioned!

News reports of this dodgy paper show that some commentators and journalists have once again fallen into the “last paper” trap. One just-published paper very seldom destroys a raft of others, especially since the paper was submitted in February 2017 and since then there have been many new papers confirming the existence of a global warming pause.

Yet the authors still claim that the IPCC got it wrong and all those 200 peer-reviewed papers are also wrong, all having made elementary statistical errors. Not surprisingly, the authors who have a long history of political activism, accuse climate scientists who have published papers on the pause for contributing to inaction on climate policy and giving succour to contrarians (who, let’s not forget, discovered the existence of the warming trend slowdown in the first place).

It is one thing to write a paper that claims that everyone else is wrong; it is entirely different and borders on intimidation to effectively accuse all other scientists of being traitors.

Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com

3) Ignoring Climate Alarmists, UK Government Promises More Flights And Bigger Airports
The Times, 18 December 2018

Ministers are paving the way to expand airports and create hundreds of flight paths amid warnings that demand for air travel will soar by a third in the next 12 years.



The Department for Transport publishes a long-awaited aviation strategy today that pledges to deliver “greater capacity at UK airports”.

It raises the prospect of airports other than Heathrow growing and accepting more flights if tough environmental and noise restrictions are met.

The strategy also outlines plans for the biggest overhaul of Britain’s airspace in more than 50 years to create new flight paths into the biggest airports. GPS-style technology will allow aircraft to fly along more accurate paths below 30,000ft instead of being led by ground beacons, which space planes out over a wide arc several miles across.

It will mean a considerable increase to the 600 or so dedicated flight paths that are in operation today.

The move is likely to prove hugely controversial, with campaigners insisting that it will subject those households directly beneath the flight paths to unbearable noise levels. […]

Nats says that the number of flights in and out of the UK is expected to grow 700,000 to about 2.9 million by 2030. An aviation industry source told The Times: “We have one chance to get this right but we need government to take the lead. Too often they have shied away because politically it is very tough, but without them setting the policy framework it puts industry in an almost impossible situation.

“The simple truth is that without modernisation we will not be able to grow our industry.”

The government has already given outline approval for Heathrow to build a third runway, allowing an additional 260,000 take-offs or landings a year.

Full story

see also: ‘Climate Leader’ China plans 200 New Airports

4) Sorry BBC. The World Isn’t Interested In The West's Groupthink Obsession With Global Warming
Christopher Booker, The Sunday Telegraph, 23 December 2018

The UN and the West may continue to believe in their apocalyptic scare stories. But the rest of world is carrying on regardless.



That mammoth UN climate conference in Poland may have opened with an apocalyptic warning by Sir David Attenborough that, unless we “act now” on global warming, we face “the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world”. But what followed over the next two weeks, despite the best efforts of the BBC and others to pretend otherwise, was that the 22,000 delegates gathered in Katowice achieved nothing at all.

Their proclaimed purpose was to get “back on track” the 2015 Paris climate accord, designed to limit “the rise in global temperatures to no more than 1.5C above their pre-industrial levels”, by committing the world to a 45 per cent reduction in CO2 emissions by 2030.

Their guiding principle was to endorse an emergency IPCC report that this would require “rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”.

They wanted the world’s “developed nations” to contribute $100 billion a year to a Green Climate Fund, to persuade still “developing nations” to follow the West’s lead in phasing out use of fossil fuels.

Despite 12 days of unbelievably tedious and fractious argument, none of this happened. A motion “to welcome” the IPCC report was vetoed by the US, Russia and several other oil-producing countries. The “$100 billion a year Green Climate Fund” was yet again kicked down the road for further discussion at some future date. And the “nearly 200 nations” represented could not agree on any binding steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions whatever.

All they were left with was what the BBC described as “the rules” that “are key to the game”. This was a tortuous agreement that both the developed and developing countries would accept common rules for measuring their own emissions. This alone was what enabled the BBC to claim forlornly that “the conference was a success”, because it showed “China showing leadership” by accepting that it and the US are at last both “on the same page”.

But herein lies the real reason why not just this UN conference but Paris, Copenhagen and all the other 23 before it ended in failure. The real problem goes all the way back to the Rio “Earth Summit” of 1992, when its utopian socialist organiser Maurice Strong first insisted on that division between “developed” and “developing” countries. His core principle was that the then-richer countries should lead the way in cutting their emissions, leaving the then-poorer countries, such as China and India, free to catch up economically (while subsidising them to follow suit in due course).

What we have seen, of course, is that those “developing countries” have been free to power on, to the point where China and India are now not only the world’s first and third-highest emitters of CO2 but intend, as they made clear in Paris, to carry on building hundreds more coal-fired power stations.

So, as we have seen, global emissions are continuing to rise and there is no way most of the rest of the world is any longer paying any more than lip-service to the Western world’s groupthink obsession with global warming. The UN and the West may continue to believe in their apocalyptic scare stories. But the rest of world is carrying on regardless.

The BBC may comfort itself with its make-believe that the rules are “key to the game”. But the real lesson of Katowice is that in reality the whole game is well and truly over. It’s time we all woke up to that fact.

Full post & comments

5) Benoît Rittaud -- Yellow Vests & Carbon Taxes: What's going on in France?
GWPF TV,  December 2018

To watch Benoît Rittaud's GWPF talk about recent developments in France click here - or on the image below