Worried by last week’s reports on the dangers of global warming? Well, this article in the Sunday Telegraph provides a bit of balance:

“While the world’s leaders and pop stars were in Davos, a group of dissenting climatologists and oceanographers met at the Royal Institution in London to question the scientific orthodoxy on global warming. They were supported by the former editor of Nature, John Maddox who, though himself hardly a noted champion of scientific dissent – he declined to publish studies questioning the link between HIV and Aids – has nevertheless been moved to describe the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as “monolithic and complacent”.

“It is not hard to see what Maddox means. While all work questioning the extent of global warming tends to be dismissed by the global warming lobby as propaganda on behalf of the oil industry, wild theoretical predictions of global warming are allowed to stand without challenge. Last week, Nature carried the results of a project called climateprediction.net, which has harnessed the spare capacity of 90,000 personal computers to run and re-run simulations of climate change. An accompanying news story in Nature was headlined “Biggest-ever climate simulation warns temperatures may rise by 11 degrees C”. Inevitably, the story was widely reported in these alarmist terms. Yet when read in detail, the Nature paper told a different story.

“The climate change simulations were run 2,000 times, each time with slightly different assumptions. Only the very highest estimate predicted a rise of 11C. Most simulations suggested a rise of around 3.4C, while several actually predicted a fall in global temperatures (though these were discarded by the researchers on “technical grounds”). Moreover, the simulations proposed no timescale for the predicted changes.”

If the case for manmade global warming is as strong as we’re told, why the need for so much exaggeration?