MOD Torpedoes Climate Research

Nature News reports that the MOD has pulled funding of £4.3 million from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change, amounting to 25% of its budget.

The news came as a bit of a surprise, not that it upsets me.

Far from it.

But it made me wonder why the MOD was supporting the organisation in the first place. I know that the MOD funds much of the Met Office. After all, it was part of the MOD until fairly recently for the very sound reason that weather forecasting is important for military operations. Like D-Day.

But Climate Change research?

(As an aside, let’s get one thing clear. I believe in maintaining the earth’s environmental balance, particularly its rainforests. I believe in climate change. Its been happening for tens of thousands of years without any help from humans. I also believe that the jury is far from decided on man-made climate change or the alleged catastrophic effects of man-made CO2.

But I believe that the hysteria gripping society is based on a hugely subjective viewpoint propounded by a relatively small band of arrogant, dogmatic zealots who are so obsessed by their own opinions they refuse to countenance any other and have closed their minds to debate.

And there are many thousands of eminent scientists who take a contrary view to the “consensus” and whose opinions are ignored by the climate change elite and the media. Until their views are allowed to be aired openly, the climate change issue will be dominated by a narrow-minded cabal who appear afraid to have their theories exposed to objective test, as any honest scientist should.

Unlike the credulous politicians, media, and folk in the street who have naively accepted the doctrine of disaster, I have spent many hours looking at both sides of the argument. Unlike the apostles of apocalypse, I believe the debate is far from over. Why is for another post

But I am in no doubt that until an open debate is forthcoming and some balance established, the West will be drawn into levels of climate spending, for which the need is speculative, that will reduce it to an uncompetitive industrial and economic backwater).

But back to the Hadley Centre’s funding. Reaction from the prophets of doom was predictable.

A climate science professor called Martin Parry, formerly of the Met Office, now at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London said:

"This news comes as a shock”.

I’ll bet it bloody well does, sunshine. Welcome to the reality of recession. The UK economy has just experienced its biggest quarterly decline in 51 years and you are surprised when some money dries up.

Get a life.

“ The UK's core modelling work on climate change has been funded from this source, up to now."

And you were quite happy to take it for your intellectually onanistic, close-minded, quasi-religion at the expense of soldiers on operations. Your use of the word “modelling” gives you away. Scientific modelling is a process for creating abstract models, which, in turn, are conceptual objects used in the creation of predictive formulae. All of which are hypothetical and none of which are facts.

So MOD money was being spent on generating hypotheses, which are then hyped to the public as facts. (The Hadley Centre is good at this*).

Funding guesswork or equipping soldiers properly? Tricky one.

Parry added:

“Global and regional security will be threatened by climate change, and the MoD is hopelessly wrong to think it is outside its responsibility".

No it won’t, you odious immoral man. You can’t say “will” unless you deal in fact, and you don’t; you hypothesise. So why not say “there is a possiblity that global and regional security………….”? Because you are a zealot, with no more moral authority or grounding than a Jesuit during the Inquisition.

In a statement, an MoD spokesperson said that the cuts, which will come into effect immediately, were made with a view to "prioritizing success in current operations, such as Afghanistan".

And about time. But why hasn’t “prioritizing success” been on the agenda before now? No doubt many families of soldiers who have died through lack of resources will be saying: “Well that’s fine; it doesn’t matter that Johnny didn’t come back as long as Climate Science is funded”.

The Met Office is now in negotiations with DEFRA, DECC and DfID to try to recoup some of the lost funding.

But a reasonable, sane citizen might wonder why DECC (Dept of Energy and Climate Change) hasn’t been underwriting the Hadley Centre for Climate Change completely. There’s a bit of a clue in their titles, after all.

Gavin Schmidt, another climate “modeller” at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies in New York said:

" If they don't recoup it, they are going to be in serious trouble. Losing 25% of your funding is a huge deal. Five percent is generally containable, but 25% is not an amount you can hope to absorb easily."

No Shit. Make efficiencies. The unemployed are having to and so will government, whatever Brownies the Great Leader and his acolytes spout.

These whinging puveyors of the Apocalytic Doom Theory should be invited to don a flak jacket and spend a few months on some climate research in Helmand Province. They deserve to experience the personal climate effects of the MOD’s core activity since they have been using its money so freely.

Naturally, George Monbiot, the Archdeacon of Apocolypse had to have his say and appears to contradict Professor Parry.

"Our wars make us less safe. We would be better protected from terrorism and global instability if the UK’s armed forces stopped going abroad to make trouble.

Now the rational, least painful solution is to stop building tanks, and use the money to address a real threat”.

Have a lie down, George. You’ll get better soon. Or perhaps not.

* The Hadley Centre was behind the scare story last week that Barnsley would soon be as hot as Buenos Aires. But how far should they be trusted?

Hadley are not just presenting a general impression of what might happen globally during this century, or even how climate change could affect the UK as a whole. They are claiming that they can predict what will happen in individual regions of the country - down to a 25km square.

Thanks to The Register for this:

All this is rather unexpected. In May last year, a world summit of climate modellers took place at Reading University. On the agenda was one very important problem for them; even the most powerful super-computers that have been developed so far are not capable of running the kind of high resolution models that they claim would allow them to reduce the degree of uncertainty in their predictions, and also make detailed regional predictions that policy makers would like to have so that they can build climate change into infrastructure planning.

Here are excerpts from the conference website:

The climate modelling community is therefore faced with a major new challenge: Is the current generation of climate models adequate to provide societies with accurate and reliable predictions of regional climate change? A major conclusion of the group was that regional projections from the current generation of climate models were sufficiently uncertain to compromise this goal of providing society with reliable predictions of regional climate change.

This was summed up by Julia Slingo (at that time Professor of Meteorology at Reading University, who also chaired part of the conference) in a report by Roger Harrabin on the BBC News website:

Julia Slingo from Reading University admitted it would not get much better until they had supercomputers 1,000 times more powerful than at present.

“We’ve reached the end of the road of being able to improve models significantly so we can provide the sort of information that policymakers and business require,” she told BBC News. “In terms of computing power, it’s proving totally inadequate. With climate models we know how to make them much better to provide much more information at the local level… we know how to do that, but we don’t have the computing power to deliver it.”

Slingo said several hundred million pounds of investment were needed.

If, since the conference, several hundred million pounds had been invested in producing a new generation of supercomputers, a thousand times more powerful than the present generation, and the Met Office had already developed and run the kind of high resolution models which were so far beyond the scientist’s grasp just a year ago, then I suspect that this might have seeped into the media and we would have head about it. So far as I am aware, the fastest supercomputers are still a thousand times slower than the modellers consider necessary for credible regional scale modelling of the climate.

So I wondered whether Professor Slingo had anything to say about the Met Office’s new report.

You bet she did.

“Through UK Climate Predictions 2009 the Met Office has provided the world’s most comprehensive regional climate projections with a unique assessment of the possible changes to our climate through the rest of this century. For the first time businesses and other organisations have the tools to help them make risk-based decisions to adapt to the challenges of our changing climate.”

Slingo confidently explained the 'breakthrough' to Bloomberg. “We can attach levels of certainty,” she said.

So what’s changed since last year? Well one thing is that Julia Slingo has a new job. She has been appointed as Chief Scientist at the Met Office. So far as I know, the limitations that lack of computing power place on the accuracy and resolution of models are just the same.

And the Met Office owns Hadley. So a quick flit into a £80K plus job and Julia appears to have flipped her opinion in just 12 months and Hadley’s “inability to predict” has become a “certainty”.

Wonder why.

It makes you wonder about the integrity of climate science.