Richard Betts Denies Daily Sceptic Claim That The Met Office Is Dispensing With Data And Using Model Projections Instead

Chris Morrison at the Daily Sceptic has written an article about the Met Office proposed method of calculating a metric which will tell scientists when we pass the 1.5C global warming threshold:

Richard thinks it’s all rather amusing and dismisses the idea that the Met office is going to “ditch” data in favour of models:

I wrote about this paper a couple of weeks ago and described Betts’ method thus, in appropriate Festive terminology:

. . . . . . . . . there’s no way of knowing if we’ve blown the 1.5C threshold until statisticians review the past two decades of data - and that’s way too long for climate hysterics to wait to declare a new, improved ‘1.5C climate emergency’. So what to do?Betts of the Met has the answer: consult the Ghost of Climate Change Future and see what he has to say, and combine his warnings with the testimony of the Ghosts of Climate Change Past and Present and thus designate their combined testimonies as ‘present’ for the purpose of informing policy here and now! There, climate Scrooged. No really, a friend thought I was actually joking when I quoted this from Betts of the Met’s recent paper published in Nature:

Betts claims on X that his new method of calculating the 1.5C threshold is only a “first indicator” which would be “confirmed with observations” later [10 years later in fact]. He’s being dishonest. It is clear that he means for it to be used in policy making as soon as his ‘first indicator’ shows that we have passed the 1.5C threshold:

“Researchers and the policy community need to agree urgently on a metric for determining the current level of global warming for policy purposes. Once defined, the metric should be formally adopted for use in the context of the Paris agreement.”

In other words, he is indeed advocating the use of climate model projections in place of empirical data to inform policy making. The Daily Sceptic headline is correct and Betts is misleading his Twitter audience by claiming that the Met Office is not ditching actual data for model output - it is, for the purposes of informing Net Zero policy. If that is in any doubt, these words confirm the intended purpose of the proposed new 1.5C breach metric:

Breaching it will trigger questions on what needs to be done to meet the agreement’s goal — to curb human-induced climate change. For example, its aim of “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C” would then mean taking action to reverse global warming, not just stopping it — a much greater demand. A breach will also inevitably prompt assessments of the observed impacts of exceeding 1.5 °C.

As soon as Betts & co. plug their numbers into their climate models and claim that there is a “high or very high chance” that we have reached the 1.5C threshold of global warming, it will be used as the ‘settled science’ lever for even more crazy carbon reductions, or even as the excuse to initiate madcap global geoengineering operations such as solar radiation management via the injection of aerosols into the upper atmosphere, or projects to suck carbon out of the atmosphere.