Christopher Booker of the UK Telegraph incisively recounts how British response to the third-in-a-row, record-cold winter has been dangerously hamstrung by government-wide adherence to climate predictions based on global warmist dogma originating in the UK Met Office, the equivalent of our federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Services agency,

The reason why the Met Office gets its forecasts so hopelessly wrong is that they are based on those same computer models on which the IPCC itself relies to predict the world's climate in 100 years time...

...Its senior climate change official, Peter Stott, said in March 2009 that the trend towards milder winters was likely to continue. There would not be another winter like 1962/3 "for 1,000 years or more". Last winter was colder still. And now we have another even more savage "random event", for which we are even less prepared. (The Taxpayers' Alliance revealed last week that councils have actually ordered less salt this winter than last.)

The consequences of all this are profound. Those who rule over our lives have been carried off into a cloud-cuckoo-land for which no one was more responsible than the zealots at the Met Office, subordinating all it does to their dotty belief system. Significantly, its chairman, Robert Napier, is not a weatherman but a "climate activist",'

He goes on to say due to the unprecedented cold,

"our power stations have been thrashed way beyond normal peak power demand, the contribution of wind turbines has been so small that it has registered as 0 per cent"

American government inhabits as well this " cloud-cuckoo-land " which leads to vast waste such as taxpayer subsidies to a quickly- failed solar cell company.

The "dotty belief system" has even infected our Venture Capital industry -- perhaps explaining the dearth of true innovation in recent years -- although they appear to be making adjustments in light of reality. Government needs to do the same pronto.