"...actually I get some criticism for posting on sceptic blogs as I am told it increases web traffic and gives the blog attention."

A pep behind the scenes in the climate wars. What scientist on earth, with a theory worth a penny, wouldn't want to engage with his/her critics and explain his/her theory? On the other hand I know most religions don't encourage discourse with non-believers.

Richard, as I tried to say, you won't find such a problem with that approach. Let's examine the physical rules you put into the models, and the parameterisation. Are you SURE that they are all correct? Have they each individually been confirmed by measurement? What I am looking for here is what I understand is called a red team in industry. A group whose question is 'What if we are wrong?' But I do not believe the Met Office could do that or that the careers of participants would be safe. Perhaps I am being unfair though.

I'm late to the party as ever.

Richard, you wrote:

"...increasingly there are new sources of revenue such as commercial contracts with the private sector, which are competed for against other organisations (including commercial consultancies). This includes a growing areas of climate consultancy and climate services (ie: advice on climate variability and climate change sold to other organisations and businesses who see a business benefit in being able to make informed decisions on aspects of their operations which are sensitive to climate.

Presumably if these customers find this information to be not worthwhile, they'll stop paying us for it. However, on the contrary, this is a growing area, and we get a lot of repeat business. Some of these customers include industries which invest very heavily in long-term infrastructure - eg: energy sector (non-renewable as well as renewable), transport sector, utility companies, mining and oil companies. Opening a new mine or marine oilfield is a massive investment and they want to know about potential risks of, say, reduced water supply or changes in sea conditions."

How long would it take an organisation to evaluate whether information on climate change was worthwhile or not? Wouldn't that take rather a long time?

Are you suggesting that "this is a growing area, and we get a lot of repeat business" because your customers are finding that your assessments of future climate change are accurate, and have been accurate for some time? That seems rather unlikely to me, given the MO's track record.

Isn't it possible that you get a lot of business in this area because organisations are being scared into it by doom-and-gloom predictions of possible catastrophe? Haven't many of these predictions originated from the Met Office?

Isn't it of concern that the Met Office now has a very obvious financial interest in telling people to be worried about climate change?

Also late to the party.

Richard, Rhoda asks if there is any modelling to investigate the possibility of falling temperatures. An interesting computation would be to model solar variability as a function of planetary dynamics (which seems to provide a reasonably good fit to the empirical data):

http://www.fel.duke.edu/~scafetta/pdf/Scafetta_JStides.pdf

How easy, or difficult, would it be for your models to simulate that? Do you think that it is worth doing, as this theory seems to predict dangerous global cooling in the coming years?

They get a lot of business because more and more organisations are forced to use environmental consultants in order to do anything, by green legislation.

We all pay in the end when the end product gets more expensive as a result.

Martin,

I can not see a fallacy in Salby's work either. I found his lecture very impressive and it should be recommended to all BH readers. After I watched it I pondered if a further step in his mathematics could have used Scafetta's cycles (see above) to provide further correlation, giving an overarching thesis that mean surface temperatures were entirely natural and governed solely by planetary dynamics.

(I am interested in Scafetta's work because it not only provides the 60 year cycle discussed above, but also a strong 983 year beat cylcle, that could be used to explain the MWP and the LIA).

Rhoda, I am assuming that the Met Office brainstorming session will NOT be about how they came to make 12 out of 13 forecasts 180 degrees out of phase. We have had a hiatus in warming while the CO2 has risen 8%, so there is clearly something big they don't understand, some unknown, unknown that isn't in the models, but instead of admitting this Slingo et al have changed the message to "warmest years on record." They are activists plain and simple, at least at the top management level.

Richard's point about the models seems to assume that he is sure that everything there is to know. Surely that can't be true.