Will the U.S. Follow? Cheers! Climate skepticism blamed as UK slashes spending on global warming by 41%

Owen Paterson has been accused of “incredible complacency” over climate change after new figures showed his department has slashed spending on helping Britain cope with global warming.

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) will spend just £17.2m on domestic “climate change initiatives” this financial year, a 41 per cent decline on the previous 12 months, according to its response to a freedom of information request.

The figures will fuel fears that the Environment Secretary’s personal climate-change scepticism could be exposing the UK to a higher risk of flooding and other global warming consequences.

Bob Ward, policy director at the London School of Economics’ Grantham Research Institute, said: “These shocking figures should worry everyone in the UK. Defra is the lead government department for climate change adaptation and is primarily responsible for making the UK resilient to the impacts of global warming, such as increased flood risk,”

Former chief research scientist of Aussie’s CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research Gareth Paltridge: Global Warming ‘Pause’ Risks Destroying The Reputation Of Science

The trap was fully sprung when many of the world’s major national academies of science (such as the …  Australian Academy of Science) persuaded themselves to issue reports giving support to the conclusions of the IPCC. The reports were touted as national assessments that were supposedly independent of the IPCC and of each other, but of necessity were compiled with the assistance of, and in some cases at the behest of, many of the scientists involved in the IPCC international machinations. In effect, the academies, which are the most prestigious of the institutions of science, formally nailed their colours to the mast of the politically correct.…

Settled Science: New paper finds effect of man on climate is ‘highly uncertain’ – Published in Science

One of several reasons for this high uncertainty is the complexity of determining the cooling effects of aerosols, which reflect sunlight back to space, and can also seed cloud formation. According to the authors, “Aerosols counteract part of the warming effects of greenhouse gases, mostly by increasing the amount of sunlight reflected back to space. However, the ways in which aerosols affect climate through their interaction with clouds are complex and incompletely captured by climate models.

The huge uncertainties with respect to cloudsaerosolssolar amplification mechanismsocean oscillations, and natural variability all make a mockery of the IPCC claim of increased confidence as its climate models increasingly diverge from temperature observations.

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