Head of UK Met Office Hadley Centre: "we now have rock-solid evidence to demonstrate that the world is warming"

UK Met Office has been forced to admit that global warming stopped 16 years ago, but that fact does not seem to bother professor Stephen Belcher, Head of the Met Office Hadley Centre, the least. There is no end to the praise he bestows on himself and his fellow modellers: 

We now have rock-solid evidence to demonstrate that the world is warming, and that this increase is due to human activity; we are as certain about these things as we ever can be in science.

The time has come for the climate science community to change its focus. We must now work to develop the tools that humanity needs in order to deal with climate change. This is what Climate Service UK is about. It is a framework to explain how weather-related events and their associated risks are likely to change over the coming seasons, years and decades. --

UK climate science is absolutely world class; there is no doubt about that. I am absolutely confident that the British climate science community has the skills and knowledge necessary to establish the type of service that will lead to job creation. Climate Service UK is about bringing this world-class expertise to the marketplace. This is a real opportunity for the UK.

But as Dr. Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama, points out, the real world looks somewhat different: 

In my opinion, the day of reckoning has arrived. The modellers and the IPCC have willingly ignored the evidence for low climate sensitivity for many years, despite the fact that some of us have shown that simply confusing cause and effect when examining cloud and temperature variations can totally mislead you on cloud feedbacks. The discrepancy between models and observations is not a new issue … just one that is becoming more glaring over time.

Hundreds of millions of dollars that have gone into the expensive climate modelling enterprise has all but destroyed governmental funding of research into natural sources of climate change. For years the modelers have maintained that there is no such thing as natural climate change … yet they now, ironically, have to invoke natural climate forces to explain why surface warming has essentially stopped in the last 15 years!

Forgive me if I sound frustrated, but we scientists who still believe that climate change can also be naturally forced have been virtually cut out of funding and publication by the “humans-cause-everything-bad-that-happens” juggernaut. Members of the public who fund their work will not stand for their willful blindness much longer.

The demise of Gazprom has a silver lining: It will also be the end of Vladimir Putin's corrupt regime

Many sad stories have a silver lining. The silver lining in the more and more likely demise of Gazprom, the world's most corrupt and mismanaged energy company, is that it also will be the end of the corrupt Putin regime. 

The Swedish Economist Anders Åslund, probably the leading western expert on Gazprom, does not have much positive to say about the company that has helped to finance Putin's mafia state:

No large company in the world has been so spectacularly mismanaged as Russia’s state-dominated natural-gas corporation Gazprom OAO. (GAZP) In the last decade, its management has made every conceivable mistake.

Even so, Russian President Vladimir Putin denies the very existence of a crisis and maintains his support for Alexei Miller, the chief executive officer since 2001. Gazprom’s situation is serious not only because it is Russia’s biggest company by market value, but because Putin is its real chairman. Where Gazprom goes, so does Russia and the Putin government.

In May 2008, Gazprom was one of the world’s most valuable companies with a market capitalization of $369 billion. Miller boasted that it would be the first global company to reach $1 trillion. Today, its market value has plummeted to $83 billion and the decline continues. Although it claimed the largest net income of any global company in 2011 at $44.5 billion and still at $38 billion in 2012, its price-earnings ratio has dropped to a fatally low 2.4 for 2013. It has no credibility with shareholders.

At the heart of Gazprom’s mismanagement lies extreme inertia; reluctance to absorb new information; corruption and outlandish arrogance. Its managers are used to exercising Soviet-style monopoly over consumers, not having realized that the market has taken over. The company has traditionally varied prices by countries for opaque reasons. For example,Lithuania pays 15 percent more for Gazprom gas than neighboring Latvia. --

Analysts at the state-controlled Sberbank (SBER) assess that Gazprom would need $11 billion a year for its gas production, but in 2011 its capital expenditure soared from an originally planned level of $27 billion to $53 billion. It stopped at $43.2 billion last year.

The analysts call this excess expenditure “value destruction,” which is their euphemism for waste and corruption, amounting to $30 billion to $40 billion a year. Investment analysts in Moscow suggest privately that two-thirds of this might be sheer corruption, while the rest is wasteful overinvestment. Corruption at that level may explain the poor management of the company’s official business.

Rather than reducing capital investment, however, Putin comes up with ever more expensive projects. Last October, he decided that Gazprom should develop the giant virgin Chayadinsk field in Yakutia in eastern Siberia, building a pipeline to Vladivostok on the Pacific Coast and an LNG plant there for export to China.

Officially, this project is supposed to be completed by 2017 and cost $40 billion, but Sberbank analysts assessed it at $65 billion. This production would be too expensive for it ever to be profitable, and Russia has no supply contract with China. This is as white an elephant as there ever was.

Last December, Gazprom went ahead with its South Stream pipeline through the Black Sea to the Balkans. It was supposed to cost $21 billion, but in February Gazprom announced it would cost $39 billion. In April, Putin and Miller decided to build a second pipeline from the Yamal field in northwestern Siberia to Europe. (The project, which was supposed to go through Poland, was immediately repudiated by Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk.)

In addition, Gazprom has plans to build two more superfluous Nord Stream pipes through the Baltic Sea at a cost of probably $20 billion. They have the single purpose of replacing the existing pipeline through Ukraine that Putin wants to abandon. None adds any value. --

Read the entire article here

German Der Spiegel: The UN 2 degrees goal "has become patently unrealistic"

Now, when climate change alarmism has peaked, it is time to skip the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 2 degrees goal, which, according to German weekly Der Spiegel "has become patently unrealistic":

Limiting global warming to just 2 degrees Celsius, as called for by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has become patently unrealistic. Political will is lacking, and emissions continue to increase. The target needs to be revised. --

Basically, there are three options to changing the primary target of international climate policy. World leaders could either allow the 2 degrees Celsius goal to become a benchmark that can be temporarily overshot, accept a less stringent target or give up on such an objective altogether.

The only sensible option is, of course, to give up the 2 degrees objective altogether, but this kind of honesty cannot be expected from the EU, the self proclaimed "global leader in climate policy": 

The EU will probably favor a reinterpretation over a complete revision of the 2 degrees Celsius target. However, that does not mean its preferences will necessarily prevail. What ultimately happens will be determined by the actions of major emitters, such as China and the US, and even more by how global emissions levels evolve over the next several years. If the trend is not reversed soon, a mere reinterpretation of the 2 degrees Celsius target might not be enough. If the EU wants to maintain its role as a global leader in climate policy, it will have to investigate all options for target modification as soon as possible, even those that seem politically unappealing.

No matter which option the EU chooses to pursue in the medium term, and which one is ultimately adopted in international climate policy, the relationship between climate policy and climate science will undoubtedly become much more pragmatic. The need to reinterpret or revise the 2 degrees Celsius target arises primarily from international climate policy's lack of success.

Thus, more political smokescreens are in the pipeline from the EU global warming alarmists, who are obviously not quite yet ready to admit that their costly climate adventure has been a huge mistake ....