In the mail, so to speak, I was sent this from the Mail on Sunday last month: Why my own Royal Society is wrong on climate change: A devastating critique of world’s leading scientific organisation by one of its Fellows. Here is the gist of it in the first few paras:

Five years ago, I was one of 43 Fellows of the Royal Society – the first and arguably still the most prestigious scientific organisation in the world – who wrote to our then-president about its approach to climate change. We warned that the Society was in danger of violating its founding principle, summed up in its famous motto ‘Nullius in verba’ – or ‘Don’t take another’s word for it; check it out for yourself’.

The reason for our warning was a Society document which stated breezily: ‘If you don’t believe in climate change you are using one of the following [eight] misleading arguments.’

The implication was clear: the Society seemed to be saying there was no longer room for meaningful debate about the claim that the world is warming dangerously because of human activity, because the science behind this was ‘settled’. . . .

Yet the Society continues to produce a stream of reports which reveal little sign of this. The latest example is the pre-Christmas booklet A Short Guide To Climate Science. Last year also saw the joint publication with the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS) of Climate Change: Evidence And Causes, and a report called Resilience. Through these documents, the Society has lent its name to claims – such as trends towards increasing extreme weather and climate casualties – that simply do not match real-world facts.

Oh those real world facts. Why should that get in the way of anything? These people are doing a bang up job of demonstrating that science is where the truth is. Because this is from The Daily Mail today: Our climate models are WRONG: Global warming has slowed – and recent changes are down to ‘natural variability’, says study. If the facts don’t allow you to use your models to reach the conclusions you want to reach, just get another model. Watch how it’s done:

To test these, [the research team] created a new statistical model based on reconstructed empirical records of surface temperatures over the last 1,000 years.

‘By comparing our model against theirs, we found that climate models largely get the ‘big picture’ right but seem to underestimate the magnitude of natural decade-to-decade climate wiggles,’ Brown said.

‘Our model shows these wiggles can be big enough that they could have accounted for a reasonable portion of the accelerated warming we experienced from 1975 to 2000, as well as the reduced rate in warming that occurred from 2002 to 2013.’

‘Statistically, it’s pretty unlikely that an 11-year hiatus in warming, like the one we saw at the start of this century, would occur if the underlying human-caused warming was progressing at a rate as fast as the most severe IPCC projections,’ Brown said.

In other words, it doesn’t actually matter what happens in the real world, climate change is happening. And it’s not an 11-year hiatus, it’s now up to 17, but that too, I’m sure, fits into the data. There is, in fact, the way this has gone on, no observation that we can apparently make that is inconsistent with a prior belief in global warming.

Of course, the interesting part is why they so desperately want the planet to be warming, and why they want this warming to be man-made. Methinks there may be other agendas running, not least amongst which is a desire for more grant money to look into this problem further. But the anti-free-market agenda no doubt remains the top priority, as my own model conclusively shows.

[Thanks to Des for sending the Royal Society story along.]