Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

Dr. David Evans
7 Nov 2010

[A series of articles reviewing the western climate establishment and the media. The first and second discussed air temperatures, the third was on ocean temperatures, and fourth discussed past temperatures, the fifth compared the alleged cause (human CO2 emissions) with the alleged effect (temperatures), the sixth canvassed the infamous attempt to “fix” that disconnect, the hockey stick, and the seventh pointed out that the Chinese, Russian, and Indian climate establishments (which are financially independent of the western climate establishment) disagree with the western climate establishment about the cause of recent global warming and the eighth showed how government institutional and funding pressures created the consensus among western climate scientists. The ninth showed the evidence that the amplifying feedbacks, responsible for two-thirds of the model warming projections, are not present in reality—and that the lame response of the establishment was to miscolour a graph to mislead us into thinking those feedbacks were observed when they were not. The tenth noted the resort to Orwellian language to strengthen the case for the theory, and the crucial lie in Gore’s movie about the cause of global warming.]

Click to download a pdf file containing the whole series

An alternate PDF has been produced for the media in collaboration with the  Science and Public Policy Institute, that PDF version is here.

Conclusion

Until now this series of articles has been simple and direct as possible (though accurate and well referenced). It was written this way to cut through the clutter of words and rhetoric, so even people like jaded newspaper editors might pay attention. For everyone else, here are a few words of opinion and analysis.

The western climate establishment supports the concept that global warming is man-made, and disparages all other theories. They issue reports that overwhelm their readers with detail, written in dense language that is difficult for a layperson to decode. Basically their message is authoritarian: “we are the experts, it is very complicated, you can’t understand it, so just accept what we say.”

But their message is nonsense. Everyone is familiar with temperature, and everyone (except the “politically sophisticated”) knows that siting official thermometers near air conditioners is cheating. The reality is that the temperature and other data has become unfavorable to their climate theory, so they hide behind complexity and authority instead of simply telling you what is going on.

While their theory seemed plausible 15 years ago, new evidence has proven the influence of CO2 to be greatly exaggerated. There is a germ of truth to their theory, but our emissions are not nearly as serious as they make out. The western climate establishment does not want you to know this, presumably for fear of losing the considerable income, perks, status, and influence that has come their way since they started promoting their theory. So they have taken to bamboozling us with “science”, and to cheating.

The public, politicians, and media do not generally understand science, but they do understand cheating. This paper focused on a few of the more easily understood or critical examples of establishment cheating.

The western climate establishment receives a great deal of public money as a result of their cheating. Obtaining money under false pretenses, by deception, is technically fraud. We can leave it to government auditors and criminal investigators to sort that out as necessary, but in the meantime what matters most is whether the western climate establishment is right or wrong. If they are right, we aren’t doing enough to curb emissions and prevent disaster. If they are wrong, we are wasting time and resources that would be better spent elsewhere, entrenching a vast gravy train of parasites, and extending the influence of government into our economy.

The obvious cheating of the western climate establishment strongly suggests they are hiding something and that they are wrong.

That their cheating is so blatant suggests that the media has not put them under any real scrutiny. It is left to retired scientists and bloggers to point out their cheating and errors, over the Internet. Our media has been incapable or unwilling.

It’s been a lucrative theory for the western climate establishment, but reality will force them to abandon it eventually. And the political class will realize they were taken in.

What You Can Do

Spread the Word

The more people know about these problems in climate “science”, the less likely governments will pass unnecessary laws that make us all poorer. Link to the pdf of the whole series: http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/corruption/climate-corruption.pdf

Emails

For example of emails, small photos (suitable for emailing), and other suggestions, please see The Email Resource page.

In Australia: Call for a Royal Commission

Australia needs a Royal Commission to examine the arguments and evidence, under oath. Support Dennis Jensen’s call for one. Contact your parliamentarians at:

House members contacts | Senate Members contacts

OR use these handy parliamentary email lists compiled onto one page on this site.

Permission to use images and text

Feel free to use the images and text in this series of articles for whatever purpose you see fit, (Figures 1 – 8 should be attributed as in this document). Please keep the attributions and links listed with images.

Summary | PART I | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5 | PART 6 | PART 7 | PART 8 | PART 9 | PART 10 | PART 11

Thanks to Allen Ford for help with the parliamentarian emails list.

8.5 out of 10 based on 6 ratings

27 comments to Is the Western Climate Establishment Corrupt? The public might not understand the science, but they do understand cheating

  • #
    Poha

    hyperlink to .pdf of the 10 is to a 404 page not found.
    One other quibble: from the #9 posting, in October, is-the-western-climate-establishment-corrupt-part-9-the-heart-of-the-matter-and-the-coloring-in-trick,”Dr Glikson has no answer too” should read “… no answer to.”
    Thank you JoanneNova; you are beautiful!

    [Thanks! Fixed… –JN]

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  • #
    Juerg from Switzerland

    Excellent as usual. So let’s go for it and translate it into many languages! I can do the german version 🙂

    Keep up the good work

    Juerg

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  • #
    Rereke Whaakaro

    Our media has been incapable or unwilling.

    It’s been a lucrative theory for the western climate establishment, but reality will force them to abandon it eventually. And the political class will realize they were taken in.

    Lets look at a possible timeline (This is mostly hypothetical – a straw man, but it was – and mostly still is – my starting point in trying to unravel this whole mess):

    1. Late 1960’s/early 1970’s the possibility of using computer models to simulate weather patterns becomes theoretically plausible.
    2. Around that time, a young PhD graduate, Stephen Schneider, builds a model that predicts a coming ice age.
    3. Also around that time, Jim Hansen develops his theory of the climatic greenhouse effect, that predicted warming.
    4. The models were used to explore Hansen’s theory, and become the “empirical” proof of the theory.
    5. Politicians who then (and mostly now) were not computer literate, accept the “proof” at fact value and start funding more research, giving academia a lucrative income stream.
    6. Politicians also go public with their concerns, because they can be seen as doing something beneficial – which is good for votes.
    7. The newspapers jump on the idea, and start looking for different angles in the story.
    8. The conservationist lobby now get mobilised, hiring very good PR firms to produce “on-message” material to feed to the press. They also use this material to boost their own contribution income.
    9. Various American charitable foundations get into the act, by channelling funds towards “amenable research”, through various funding centres, giving academia another lucrative income stream through the grants system.
    10. The funding centres also pay for more, and better, PR to increase the media coverage.
    11. Notable Names in the US (movie stars, entrepreneurs, and the like) are attracted by publicity, and start to direct a portion of their taxable income (for taxation reasons) towards the charitable foundations, who then continue funding academia and produce yet more PR.
    12. All through this, the blogosphere has been crying foul, and pointing out the errors and inconsistencies in the models upon which, this whole edifice has been built.
    13. The politicians, who are the most attuned to the public mood, now suspect that they have been had, but emotionally cannot bring themselves to admit they were wrong – it is a sure way to commit political suicide – so government support continues.

    The whole edifice has some internal consistency – it is mutually supportive – including the role that we play in being a counteractive force.

    But the people involved know that it will not last indefinitely – perhaps not even past Cancun – the pressure from the sceptics is relentless, and the weather is not co-operating either.

    The first to bale will be a pariah. But the last to go will be left with all the mess and most of the blame. So nobody is moving but they are all very nervous.

    The trick is to figure out how the actual collapse might occur, and when and where astute business people might be able to show a profit from the old saying, “Where there’s muck, there’s brass”.

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  • #
    Joe Lalonde

    Jo,

    There is soooooo much science missing that have a direct influence to climate science such as rotation, pressure and the changes scientists refuse to look at as it is counter productive to getting funding.

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  • #
    cohenite

    Congratulations to David and Jo; a fantastic effort; copies should be sent to all politicians. The section on the lack of correllation between CO2 and temperature is particularly well done; perhaps the only illustration I have seen which is as good is Joe D’aleo’s graph here which shows the r2 between CO2 and temperature at 0.44; that is, no causation is evident:

    http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/PDO_AMO.htm

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  • #
    Dr.TG Watkins

    Agree with cohenite. I would contribute to a fund to circulate this well and simply written destruction of AGW to Aus and UK politicians.
    If we could organise to print and send to our local MP it actually would cost very little.
    Would they read it; probably not.

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  • #
    memoryvault

    While I applaud the efforts of Dr Evans in preparing this series of articles, and Jo for publishing them here, I would caution people against wasting too much time and effort contacting politicians of any flavour.

    While it is obvious that sending the information to members of Labor or the Greens is a waste of time folks should not forget that if Little Johnny Howard had not lost an election to Rudd we would already have an ETS now. Ditto if Abbott had not rolled Turnbull prior to the last election.

    Regardless of Dennis Jensen’s efforts and motives (and I have my suspicions) there is not ever going to be a Royal Commission on Climate Change for three reasons:

    First, it would leave egg all over the faces of a lot of people from all three parties.

    Second, in some form or other a carbon tax represents a big fat new source of revenue which our bankrupt govt (of whatever political flavour) sorely needs right now.

    Third, in case nobody has noticed, at a state level as a result of a couple of decades of govt failure to invest in energy infrastructure (power stations) pretty-much every mainland state is now facing an energy crisis, which will manifest itself shortly as prolonged brown-outs and black-outs in supply.

    Although this failure to invest pre-dates anything to do with climate change by a long shot, the “uncertainty” surrounding current proposed legislation is already being groomed as the “reason” for the coming power shortages.

    Since the failure to invest in energy infrastructure has been perpetrated by state govts of all flavours over the past twenty years, none of them are likely to now support efforts to unmask a ready-made excuse for their gross ineptitude.

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  • #
    Ken Stewart

    Well done. Not long to go now, but still much hard work to be done. Rereke- “Where there’s muck there’s brass” – Love it!
    Ken

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  • #
    Louis Hissink

    The most frightening aspect of this whole affair is that the proponents of AGW actually believe that what they have done and are doing is good science. It is obvious that the academics of the social sciences do not understand at all the fundamentals of the scientific method – but, and here is the problem, they believe that they do.

    And unmentioned is the deeper pyschological basis for the belief in a future catastrophe that some scientists believe is based on past catastrophic events anchored in humanity’s collective subconsciounce as proposed by Velikovsky and his peers and summarised in a posthumously written book “Mankind in Amnesia”.

    And then there is the alternative view, based on the fact that China, India and Russia have not supported AGW, except when it benefits them financially, that AGW is peculiarly a European-Anglo-Saxon fixation. It is relevant to note that the most vocal of the AGW proselytisers are devout socialists (of whatever hue one might distinguish them) and that AGW cannot be extricated from this association.

    That makes it a political movement employing cargo-cult science to justify its goals.

    Are they corrupt? No, but stupid, yes.

    It is astonishing that the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton keeps peddling the CAGW mantra. Does she and her fellow travelers actually believe that humanity is capable of altering the thermal property of the earth by oxidising carbon as a carbon based life form?

    Seems so, hence the appellation used above, and memorialised by Forrest Gump.

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  • #
    davidc

    Rereke Whaakaro:
    November 8th, 2010 at 6:20 am

    Something to add to your list. Around 1998 the data appeared to show a steady 20 year temperature rise (I’m not so sure now how much of that is “UHI” based adjustments). Since it’s obvious that human activity does tend to raise temperature (we burn things) it seemed plausible that the temperature record was confirming that the obvious local effect was extending globally. And there were grounds for thinking that the relationship with CO2 was more than just a correlation – the ability of CO2 to absorb IR.

    I heard a politician a few years ago say that he had made up his mind ten years before – which is to say, about 1998 – and implied there was no need to go through that tough process again. I’m sure a lot of people feel that way. So the first step is to persuade people to look at the latest available data -which shows pretty clearly that any warming due to CO2 is minor.

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  • #
    davidc

    Louis:

    “It is obvious that the academics of the social sciences do not understand at all the fundamentals of the scientific method”

    And I think you’re implying that climate scientists have taken on the methods of the social sciences. I’ve often seen the response to a falsifying observation – such as no significant temperature increase in the past ten years – dismissed as “cherry picking”.

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  • #
    bananabender

    The global warming scam was really started in 1969 by Shell and BP to sell more of their vast natural gas reserves. The only way to do that was to close the inefficient and heavily unionised British coal industry. The best way was to exploit the gullible environmental movement. To achieve this BP and Shell founded the Climatic Research Unit CRU at the University of East Anglia. UEA was a newly created third-rate university renowned for left wing extremism – the perfect place to begin an environmental campaign. Forty-one years later BP and Shell are still a major source of funds for CRU.

    Since 1969 Shell and BP have spent billions lobbying governments, financing environmental groups and advertising their ‘green’ credentials. Until 2009 BP was the world’s largest producer of photovoltaics.

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  • #

    Thank you Jo and David for producing and publishing this excellent summary. I intend to download it and send to my MP, MSP (Member of the Scottish Parliament) and all 6 Scottish MEPs (Member of the European Parliament). Sadly I think it’s unlikely to get even an acknowledgement from most of them, but perhaps the more of us who try it, the more the message will at least impinge on their consciousness and eventually their conscience.

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  • #
    Richard S Courtney

    Bananabender:

    Your account of the origen of the AGW scare is not correct. I explain the true origen at
    http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm

    Richard

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  • #
    bananabender

    Hi Richard,

    I have to disagree with some of your arguments. The CO2-climate hypothesis was actually devised by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 to explain ice ages. He thought a lack of CO2 had caused past cooling.

    Margaret Thatcher used CO2 as an excuse to break the communist controlled National Union of Miners and eventually shut down the coal industry. Whether she really accepted that CO2 was a danger is debatable. She certainly recanted much later.

    The first serious funding of CO2 based global warming research was by Shell and BHP starting in 1971. At the time science was far more worried about ice ages than warming. Margaret Thatcher was still a backbencher.

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  • #
    bananabender

    The entire body of climate science can be expressed very simply:

    Gas + Nuclear industries vs Coal industry in a trillion dollar prize fight

    Everything else is a sideshow.

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  • #
    Richard S Courtney

    bananabender:

    Your comments at #12,#15 and #16 are mistaken.

    I again ask you to read my explanation at
    http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm

    You demonstrate you have not read it because you say to me

    I have to disagree with some of your arguments. The CO2-climate hypothesis was actually devised by Svante Arrhenius in 1896 to explain ice ages. He thought a lack of CO2 had caused past cooling.

    The only statements in my article that could be said to relate to that are

    The hypothesis of man-made global warming has existed since the 1880s. It was an obscure scientific hypothesis that burning fossil fuels would increase CO2 in the air to enhance the greenhouse effect and thus cause global warming. Before the 1980s this hypothesis was usually regarded as a curiosity because the nineteenth century calculations indicated that mean global temperature should have risen more than 1°C by 1940, and it had not. Then, in 1979, Mrs Margaret Thatcher (now Lady Thatcher) became Prime Minister of the UK, and she elevated the hypothesis to the status of a major international policy issue.

    And my article explains that Mrs T. elevated the AGW hypothesis because that was in her personal political interest. She did not adopt the hypothesis for the reason you suggest; viz.

    Margaret Thatcher used CO2 as an excuse to break the communist controlled National Union of Miners and eventually shut down the coal industry.

    Indeed, she abandoned support of the AGW hypothesis before the destruction of the coal industry.

    However, as my article explains

    Mrs Thatcher could not have promoted the global warming issue without the support of her UK political party. And they were willing to give it. Following the General Election of 1979, most of the incoming Cabinet had been members of the government which lost office in 1974. They blamed the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) for their 1974 defeat. They, therefore, desired an excuse for reducing the UK coal industry and, thus, the NUM’s power. Coal-fired power stations emit CO2 but nuclear power stations don’t. Global warming provided an excuse for reducing the UK’s dependence on coal by replacing it with nuclear power.

    And the Conservative Party wanted a large UK nuclear power industry for another reason. That industry’s large nuclear processing facilities were required for the UK’s nuclear weapons programme and the opposition Labour Party was then opposing the Conservative Party’s plans to upgrade the UK’s nuclear deterrent with Trident missiles and submarines. Unfortunately, the Three Mile Island and Chernobyl accidents had damaged public confidence in nuclear technology. Then, privatisation of the UK’s electricity supply industry exposed the secret that UK nuclear electricity cost four times more than UK coal-fired electricity. Global warming became the only remaining excuse for the unpopular nuclear power facilities needed for nuclear weapons.

    And you make an obviously wrong assertion when you say;

    The entire body of climate science can be expressed very simply:

    Gas + Nuclear industries vs Coal industry in a trillion dollar prize fight

    Everything else is a sideshow

    None of those things is pertinent to climate science. And economic competitiveness is the driving factor of climate politics. Again, I ask you to read my article because it explains these matters.

    Richard

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  • #
    bananabender

    Richard,

    I have read your article. You are entitled to your opinions but I just don’t agree with your conclusions.

    The global warming racket was thriving long before Margaret Thatcher became PM. Politicians never drive policy they simply react to public opinion to buy votes.

    Margaret Thatcher never had any interest in science. She studied chemistry at Oxford because that was the only place she was offered – she wanted to study law. Thatcher worked for one year as a laboratory technician in a ice cream factory before giving up science completely.

    The real momentum has always come from the billions of dollars spent by the gas and nuclear industries to lobby politicians and manipulate environmental groups.

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  • #
    Richard S Courtney

    bananbender:

    Your post at #18 is plain wrong.

    It says:

    I have read your article. You are entitled to your opinions but I just don’t agree with your conclusions.

    The global warming racket was thriving long before Margaret Thatcher became PM. Politicians never drive policy they simply react to public opinion to buy votes.

    No! You are entitled to your opinions but I will stick to the facts.

    Mrs T. came to power in 1979. The global warming scare did not exist then. The ‘acid rain’ scare was raging, and the 1970s global cooling scare had yet to be morphed into the global warming scare.

    Your ideas are very, very mistaken. They have little if any relation to reality.

    Richard

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  • #
    Mark D.

    Rereke @ 3
    Very good list “theory” you have there!

    Conspiracy no. How about Conveniencey? 🙂

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  • #
    bananabender

    Mrs T. came to power in 1979. The global warming scare did not exist then. The ‘acid rain’ scare was raging, and the 1970s global cooling scare had yet to be morphed into the global warming scare.

    Global warming research was thriving long, long before Thatcher became PM. In fact there are global warming newspaper stories going back to the 19th century.

    Oceanographer Roger Revelle was teaching global warming at Harvard during the late 1960s. Al Gore was one of his students.

    Here is the American Institute of Physics Global Warming Timeline
    http://www.aip.org/history/climate/timeline.htm

    You are entitled to your opinions but I suggest you do some more research before telling other people they are totally wrong.

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  • #
    Richard S Courtney

    bananbender:

    I suspect you are a ‘warmer’ trying to re-write history.

    You say to me:

    You are entitled to your opinions but I suggest you do some more research before telling other people they are totally wrong.

    My research was conducted in 1980 and published in 1981. It predicted the AGW scare before that scare existed.
    The global cooling scare was in vogue in the 1970s. That is a documented fact. And your historical revisionism does not stand up to even cursory examination.

    Richard

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  • #

    [This is partially a repeat of my post on Part 9.]

    My main concern is the threat that the climate scandal exposed to the very survival of our free society : The threat that former President Eisenhower warned about in his farewell address on 17 Jan 1961:

    1. First Eisenhower warned about the threat to a free society from an Industrial Military Complex.

    2. Next he warned “that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

    “The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.”

    “Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

    “It is the task of statesmanship to mold, to balance, and to integrate these and other forces, new and old, within the principles of our democratic system – ever aiming toward the supreme goals of our free society.”

    http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/ike.htm

    His warning about the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite” is at time (t = 9:30-11:32) of this video recording of his speech:

    http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2465144342633379864

    This danger to the foundation of our free society is far greater than any threat from climate change.

    With kind regards,
    Oliver K. Manuel
    Former NASA Principal
    Investigator for Apollo

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  • #
    Charles Higley

    In the pdf of the articles, on page 31, they seriously miss a major point regarding water vapor and CO2.

    Any warming of the air by CO2 or water vapor will cause convection and carry heat and water vapor to altitude. Besides creating the possibility of cloud formation and their attendant effects, the condensation of the water vapor releases heat which is then lost to space.

    Estimates are that 67% of heat transfer is by convection, 25% by water condensation, and the last 8% by radiation (the part Trenberth can find, he can’t “find” the other 92% and muses about the missing heat, hypothesizing that its hiding in the oceans).

    Convection – the major reason we do not live in a greeenhouse.

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  • #
    Ted O'Brien

    Who defines “corrupt”?

    In 1986 the Hawke government made Neville Wran the chairman of the CSIRO. National president of the ALP at the time, he was the first non scientist to hold the position.

    They put their own brand of “political scientist” in charge of the real scientists. What then?

    This determines who is employed and what projects they are directed to undertake.

    2 years later we got the IPCC.

    In the not too distant future it is going to be necessary to audit all the “science” that has been generated in the last 25 years. It stands tainted by this politicisation of the science.

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  • #

    Thanks for the comment, Ted.

    You say “it is going to be necessary to audit all the “science” that has been generated in the last 25 years.”

    As documented by data in this paper in press, it will be necessary to audit all the “space science” generated since the 1969 Apollo Mission to the Moon:

    Neutron Repulsion
    The APEIRON Journal
    in press (2011) 19 pages
    http://arxiv.org/pdf/1102.1499v1

    With kind regards,
    Oliver K. Manuel
    Former NASA Principal
    Investigator for Apollo

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  • #
    Don Gaddes

    The Australian Bureau of Meteorology knew of the research of Alex S Gaddes (Tomorrow’s Weather,1990.)in 1979. They received the book in 1991. Although every ‘weather cycle/climate prediction in the book has been vindicated(to the present day,)they continue to ignore the obvious in favor of their now thoroughly discredited El Nino ‘model’. It’s time they were held to account!
    An updated version of ‘Tomorrow’s Weather'(with forecasts to 2055,) is now available as a free pdf from [email protected]

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