Hmmm. Tony Blair believed we would find WMD and also is a strong proponent of AGW. Indeed with the notable exception of Robin Cooke, the foreign secretary, not the author, who resigned from Blair’s cabinet over the matter nearly, everybody did.

The video centers more on attacking Mr Watts via association with political commentators then on refuting his arguments which is strange. Why not simply state that the hypothesis that poorly placed weather stations are causing significant problems with climate data are false for the following reasons…

The claim that not absolute temperatures but change at a location is interesting. If the location changed from rural to urban overtime, then there would be an expected rise in temperature at that spot.

The argument that these problematic stations do not significantly affect the data set is harder to refute.

There has been much hyperbole. “The first time we have seen open ocean at the north pole in over 10,000 years”, I think one wag said, but some one came up with public relations of submarines surfaced in open water at the pole. The serious depletion of sea ice in the arctic without mentioning the expansion of sea ice in the southern hemisphere. The doom-saying which came about when a data set for the previous normally month was mistakenly released as the data for the next normally colder month. Suggestions that the Bush administration refused to release photographs taken by photographic intelligence satellites because they showed how extensive the loss of ice was in the arctic basin in 2007 when other satellites had already given a good picture of the extent of the sea ice loss. The mantra that any cooling is due to natural climatic variations, but warming is man-made.

The great majority of scientists who are studying the problem favor AGE as real, significant, and in dire need of addressing. Mr. Watts and Dr Dyson hold a minority view. The scientific consensus in support of AGE cannot be denied and is a call for action. Just what needs to be done, and balancing it against other national interests, and whether other countries will take the same steps is political. With the world presently in a cycle of natural variation, i.e., cooling, it is getting harder to generate interest in doing anything at all about the problem, let alone risking a long-term economic downturn