Professor Stott has a blog.

Well, really, who doesn't?

Anyhow, Professor Emeritus Philip Stott has a weblog dedicated as follows:

Professor Emeritus Philip Stott. The aim is to assess whether a subject is being fairly covered by press, radio, and television. Above all, the Weblog will focus on science, but not just on poor science. It will also bring to public notice good science that is being ignored because it may be politically inconvenient.

His January 10, 2005 entry has this thought:

In UK bien pensant circles, ‘global warming’ has become one of the grand narratives of the ‘New Age’. To argue against it immediately transforms you into a lackey of the fossil fuel lobby, a paid patsy of industry, an eccentric sceptic, or, to use the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen’s, phrase, ‘an enemy of the people’. I hope I'm none of these, but I must ask: ‘Is the science really known?’ ‘Are humans the single cause?’ And ‘Are the Kyoto protocol and 'climate management' the most effective ways of facing climate change?’ On all counts, I doubt it, and increasingly so.

Despite the allusions to ‘science’, to rising emission curves of CO2, to melting ice caps, and to this or that climate model, the construct of ‘global warming’ has little to do with ‘science’. It is fundamentally a socio-political idea that can be firmly dated to 1988, when it replaced the earlier ‘threats’ of a nuclear winter and a plunge into another Ice Age.

And:

But ‘global warming’ isn’t climate change. The truth is that, despite all our best efforts, we have no grasp of what is really happening to climate. We can all agree that there has possibly been a small rise in temperature since around 1800 AD, but this is hardly surprising when you recall that we are emerging from a ‘Little Ice Age’ that ended around 1880 AD. Moreover, from the end of the 1940s to the 1970s, there was a cooling trend. Yet more, in 1200 AD we were 1 to 2 degrees C warmer than we are now (despite ‘global warming’). Further, our climate models remain primitive, more primitive than Lara Croft, and they ignore many factors, from soot to Pacific ‘vents’ to the cosmic ray flux. The 'vents' alone could reduce warming estimates by as much as one third. It is vital to remember that all the dramatic projections we see in the media are just politically-selected ‘scenarios’ taken from fundamentally limited models.

More significantly, climate change is governed by millions of factors, some gradual, others catastrophic, ranging from the flip of a Monarch butterfly’s wing, through the character of the Earth’s surface (albedo), volcanoes, oceans, water vapour, the geometry of the Earth, solar cycles, dust, space debris, and chaotic attractors. The idea that we can predict the future direction of long-term climate change based on the human semi-control of just one factor is unbelievable.

This passage from November 12, 2004 is ironic in light of recent comment exchanges:

But, since the late-1980s, ‘global warming’ has been turned, especially by the liberal elites of Europe (and of the Boston (Beacon Hill)-New York-Washington axis) into much more than this, having been re-constructed as a semi-empirical entity, or incomplete symbol, which cannot be easily verified or falsified. In this sense, 'global warming' has morphed into what Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) called in Critique of Judgement a matter of opinion, i.e. an “object of empirical knowledge which is at least in principle possible, but is impossible for us because the degree to which we are capable of empirical cognition is not sufficiently high.” It is thus in the same category as the example recalled by Stephan Körner (in his book, Kant, 1955), namely the assumption that other planets are inhabited by rational beings. Such semi-empirical entities are ultimately neither verifiable nor falsifiable because of the continuing technical limitations involved.

And the technical limitations of our current climate models and knowledge are, in reality, horrifying, with even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitting openly that we know next-to-nothing about 75% of the main proxy (summary) factors implicated. We therefore cannot allow the Global Warmers’ key antinomy to persist, namely that: “Climate is the most complex coupled non-linear chaotic system known, yet we can control it by adjusting just one set of factors.”

Something to ponder the next time you hear that heavy snows in Southern California were caused by "global warming."