Article Tags: Christopher Booker, Headline Story, Met Office
Might the beginning of Lent not be an appropriate time for a little repentance
As the roof continues to fall in on them, in an endless succession of scandals, the beleaguered defenders of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have at last managed to mount a riposte by coming up with a “scandal” of their own. Under the headline “fabricated quote used to discredit climate scientist”, The Independent recently trumpeted that a quotation attributed by “climate sceptics” to Sir John Houghton – one of the IPCC’s founders and long a key figure in the production of its increasingly alarmist reports as chairman of its scientific Working Group I – was an invention. Sir John was now insisting, as he again did in a letter to last week’s Observer, that he never said it or anything like it.
The sentence the former head of the UK Met Office now denies ever using – although in the past four years it has been cited unchallenged more than 100,000 times on the internet – was “unless we announce disasters, no one will listen”. In what looked like a concerted operation, Sir John’s disclaimer was circulated to sympathetic journalists across the world, along with demands for corrections and apologies issued to various prominent “climate sceptics” who had publicly quoted the remark, including Dr Benny Peiser, director of Nigel Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation, Roger Helmer MEP, Lord Monckton, and the Australian geologist Professor Bob Carter.
It was also asked, through this paper, that I publish a correction, because I quoted the sentence in my recent book The Real Global Warming Disaster – although I have never done so in these pages. Like many others, I was misled by the internet into assuming the quote, attributed to a book written by Sir John in 1994, was genuine, and that it must have been removed from the later edition I used when compiling my own account of the global warming story. Naturally, in the face of Sir John’s insistence that he never said it, we shall all in due course take steps to correct the record, as I shall do in the next edition of my book.
Source: telegraph.co.uk