Deadly cold disrupts US
One of Shakespeare's persistent themes in Hamlet is that when people set out to fool others, it will eventually catch up with them. Repeatedly he emphasises that "purposes mistook fall on their inventors' heads", that such people end up "hoist with their own petard", or get caught like a "woodcock" in their own trap.

There was a delightful example of this on our letters page last week, when that well-known propagandist for global warming, Bob Ward, tried to challenge what I had written about the recent series of unusually cold winters in North America.

Mr Ward is employed by the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, sponsored by a climate change-obsessed billionaire, and challenges anyone who publicly questions global warming orthodoxy. His point last week was to claim that, contrary to what I had written, recent US winters have not been unusually cold at all.

But the only evidence he could cite to support his point was the latest figures from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), suggesting that seven out of the past 10 US winters have in fact been "warmer than average".

What Mr Ward has not said here is that, in a way which has aroused widespread suspicion, NOAA's figures have lately been significantly "adjusted", to suggest that several famously severe recent winters, such as those in 2008 and 2014, were not unusually cold by the standards of the 20th century.


Several expert bloggers have been analysing the surprising picture given by NOAA's new figures, as in a post by Paul Homewood on his blog Notalotofpeopleknowthat headed "US cold winters mysteriously disappear". Indeed, this is only the latest in a whole series of similarly suspect adjustments made to official US temperature figures in recent years, which I have described as one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time.

Even odder in this instance, however, was the way Mr Ward failed to mention the continuing stream of academic papers and other interventions by scientists on his own side of the argument trying to explain how these freezing US winters are in fact further proof of global warming.


Their theory, as I mentioned in the item Mr Ward objected to, is that a warming Arctic is pushing the jet stream further south, to grip North America in a swirling "polar vortex" of sub-zero air, snow and ice. All of these papers are predicated on the claim that recent US winters have indeed been exceptionally cold.

Mr Ward may happily ignore all this, preferring to rest his case only on those questionable NOAA figures. But what makes it indeed delightful is that the warmists themselves have now come up with two wholly contradictory ways to explain why the runaway global warming in which they all believe should repeatedly be giving the people of North America such a horribly cold time. Only one of them pretends that this isn't really happening at all.