Floods and gales in the UK are not evidence of climate change

See The sceptics are right. Don't scapegoat them by Matt Ridley. Excerpts:

"Mr Miliband says: “This winter is a one-in-250-year event” (yet it’s nothing like as wet as 1929-30 if you count the whole of England and Wales, let alone Britain) and that “the science is clear”. The chief scientist of the Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, tells us “all the evidence” suggests that climate change is contributing to this winter’s wetness. (Why, then, did she allow the Met Office to forecast in November that a dry winter was almost twice as likely as a wet winter?) Lord Stern, an economist, claimed that the recent weather is evidence “we are already experiencing the impact of climate change”"

"All three are choosing to disagree with the IPCC consensus. Here’s what the IPCC’s latest report actually says:

“There continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”

Here’s what a paper published by 17 senior IPCC scientists from five different countries said last month:

“It has not been possible to attribute rain-generated peak streamflow trends to anthropogenic climate change over the past several decades.”

They go on to say that blaming climate change is a politician’s cheap excuse for far more relevant factors such as “what we do on or to the landscape” — building on flood plains, farm drainage etc.

As for recent gales caused by a stuck jetstream, Dr Mat Collins, of Exeter University, an IPCC co-ordinating lead author, has revealed that the IPCC discussed whether changes to the jetstream could be linked to greenhouse gases and decided they could not. “There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jetstream to get stuck in the way it has this winter,” he says, in a statement that raises questions about Dame Julia’s credibility.

In 2012, the Met Office agreed:

“There continues to be little evidence that the recent increase in storminess over the UK is related to man-made climate change.”

"That consensus, by the way, has never said that climate change will necessarily be dangerous. The oft-quoted 97 per cent agreement among scientists refers to the statement that man-made climate change happens, not to future projections [and anyway it has been comprehensively discredited and described as infamous by a prominent climate scientist]. No climate change sceptic that I know “denies” climate change, or even human contributions to it. It’s a lazy and unpleasant slur to say that they do.

Sceptics say it is not happening fast enough to threaten more harm than the wasteful and regressive measures intended to combat it. So far they have been right. Over 30 years, global temperature has changed far more slowly than predicted in 95 per cent of the models, and has decelerated, not accelerated. When the sceptic David Whitehouse first pointed out the current 15 to 17-year standstill in global warming (after only 18 to 20 years of warming), he was ridiculed; now the science establishment admits the “pause” but claims to have some post-hoc explanations.

While the green lobby has prioritised decarbonisation, sceptics have persistently advocated government spending on adaptation, so as to grab the benefits of climate change but avoid the harm, and be ready for cooling as well if the sun goes into a funk. Yesterday Mr Miliband yet again prioritised carbon limits — cold comfort to those flooded from their homes. Huge sums have been spent on wind farms and bio-energy, with trivial impact on emissions. The money has come disproportionately from the fuel bills of poor people and gone disproportionately to rich people.

Given that there are about 25,000 excess winter deaths each year, adding 5 per cent to fuel bills kills far more people now than (possibly) adding 5 per cent to future rainfall totals ever would. If just a fraction of renewable energy subsidies sluiced towards wind farms by the climate secretaries Ed Miliband and Ed Davey had instead been put into flood defences, they would have done far more good."

"By 2007, the Met Office was boasting that its new computer could see a resumption of warming in the future:

"We are now using the system to predict changes out to 2014. By the end of this period, the global average temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 °C compared to 2004."

In fact, as of now, at the start of 2014, global temperatures are if anything slightly lower than in 2004. The pause continues. Attempts to explain it, using volcanoes, aerosols, natural cycles, missing Arctic heat and ocean absorption of heat have proliferated, but so far they are extremely unconvincing."

"...ocean temperature measurements completely contradict Matthew England's neat explanation for the warming hiatus." 

"as Worstall puts it:.

"We can go further as well. As My Lord Stern has pointed out (and as have eminences like Richard Tol, William Nordhaus, Greg Mankiw and, in fact, just about every economist who has bothered to look at the issue) the correct solution to the results that come from the IPCC is a carbon tax. Of some $80 per tonne CO2-e in fact according to Stern. And it's well known that UK emissions are around 500 million tonnes. And also that we already pay some swingeing amount of such Pigou Taxes: the fuel duty escalator alone now makes petrol a good 15p per litre more expensive than it should be under such a tax regime. And there are other such taxes that we pay, so much so that we are already, we lucky people here in the UK, paying a carbon tax sufficient to meet Lord Stern's target (which is, it should be noted, rather higher than what all the other economists recommend: we're not stinting ourselves in our approach to climate change).

We don't quite pay it on all the right things as yet, this is true, but the total amount being paid is about right. We just need to shift some of the taxation off some products and on to others."