Da Techguy's (no longer backup) Blog

On Oct Post Tim Blair dared to tweak King Charles the Pious with the following post:

Then.

Now.

UPDATE:

Then. Then. Then.

Now. Now. Now.

Charles answer included the following:

Tim Blair seems to believe I was supposed to toe the right wing line on climate change forever. Now that I’ve invested the time and effort to educate myself on the issues and have changed my mind, I’m an unfaithful monkey who must be stoned.

But the Gods of Irony do not like to be mocked:

The climate change correspondent of BBC News has admitted that global warming stopped in 1998 – and he reports that leading scientists believe that the earth’s cooling-off may last for decades.

“Whatever happened to global warming?” is the title of an article by Paul Hudson that represents a clear departure from the BBC’s fanatical espousal of climate change orthodoxy. The climate change campaigners will go nuts, particularly in the run-up to Copenhagen. So, I suspect, will devout believers inside the BBC. Hudson’s story was not placed very prominently by his colleagues – but a link right at the top of Drudge will have delivered at least a million page views, possibly many more.

The actual BBC story is here:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Damion Thompson asks the question:

The BBC now has serious questions to answer. It has used millions of pounds of licence-payers’ money to advance a simplistic point of view that is beginning to fall apart under scrutiny. Did it not foresee that this might happen? And, now that statistics are beginning to point in the other direction, is it prepared to give equal prominence to a debate about climate change that is both respectable and urgent?

So as the evidence has changed to a degree that the Climate Change correspondent for the BBC actually questioned Global Warming Charles Johnson has managed to be convinced in the other direction.

There has been speculation that LGF is on the gravy train. Robert Stacy disagrees:

Some commenters have speculated that Johnson is now on the Soros gravy train, a conspiratorial suspicion that violates Occam’s Razor. Johnson surely isn’t a sellout, for this would mean that he had been bribed to betray some important principle or to dishonor some obligation of loyalty.

Yet no one has ever offered evidence that Charles Foster Johnson ever had any principle or honor, and or that he was ever loyal to anyone but himself. He has been consistently vicious and selfish, and this only escaped notice so long as it served Johnson’s interests to deceive those whose assistance he sought in advancing his own self-aggrandizing agenda.

I was in that camp for quite a while but the Global warming issue isn’t something that was a part of any kind of vendetta or a key issue for any of the people that Charles was feuding with. Combine this with the fact that the evidence is actually going the other way and this story:

Billionaire George Soros said on Saturday that he would invest $1 billion in clean energy technology as part of an effort to combat climate change.

and I must confess I just don’t know what to think anymore.

Update: Given my not knowing a new poll is in order.