OPINION:
Lying in the age of independent media is becoming harder to get away with. Liberals in particular are struggling to safeguard the sacred belief that the planet is on the verge of melting because naughty plebeians keep driving SUVs and using air conditioning.
Climate change devotees are willing to lie to defend this article of faith. Ray Sanders, an engineer by trade, realized this as he double-checked the calculations of the Met Office, the British government agency responsible for guessing whether it’s going to rain in Blighty tomorrow.
The Met is also known for making bold prognostications about the conditions expected half a century from now. “Heatwaves, like that of summer 2018, are now 30 times more likely to happen due to climate change,” it asserts.
Mr. Sanders investigated each of the locations the Met relied upon to gather temperature readings in making its assertion. He found a bit of mischief that would skew readings, such as thermometers placed in the middle of a parking lot or surrounded by a heat-generating solar panel farm.
That’s nothing compared with his conclusion that a third of the 302 stations used to compute the country’s average temperature didn’t exist. The Met’s public website included 103 climate stations as the basis for the nationwide average, even though these had closed years or decades ago.
To make up for the shortfall, the Met said, it created “comparable data” from up to six nearby sites that were “well correlated” to the original spot. Mr. Sanders took a seaside town called Lowestoft to question the validity of this method. The only viable “comparable” regions would be more than 25 miles distant, far from the ocean breeze.
Rather than acknowledge error, the Met stealthily removed the “Lowestoft” readings that were recorded after the building’s 2010 closure. It has done likewise with closed stations in Paisley and Nairn.
That didn’t stop the usual fact-checking organizations from condemning Mr. Sanders as a purveyor of misinformation. Each dutifully pointed to prestigious scientific organizations praising the Met and all its works.
This scientific establishment makes a living from government funding. Academics must toe the party line if they seek publication in the sort of scholarly journals that make it possible to secure tenure, or if they want their research bankrolled by the public.
Great minds such as Albert Einstein, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton shattered the consensus of their peers, but 21st-century scholars have a financial incentive to avoid upsetting the status quo.
No wonder the Met’s disputed records were deleted without public explanation or acknowledgment. Proper science must be conducted in the open, not hidden by black box computer models whose inputs are massaged by agenda-driven researchers.
Mr. Sanders demonstrates a better way of evaluating the data. Using a well-positioned weather station in Kent, he assembled the official daily temperature readings from 1959 to 2006 and charted average temperatures. Although ups and downs were recorded over the decades, the overall trend was essentially flat.
Nobody would really care if the fakery was in service of the BBC nightly newscast’s weather report, but climate alarmism has become a billion-dollar industry. Politicians need a constant feed of terrifying tales to justify spending the public treasure on uneconomic energy projects.
When the models foretelling cataclysm are themselves rooted in made-up thermometer readings, skepticism is entirely appropriate. That’s why Americans keep driving SUVs with the a/c on, regardless of what the “experts” claim.
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