According to The Guardian, the "UK chief scientist [Mark Walport] calls for urgent debate on climate change mitigation."  Apparently, "it's time to move on from the basics of whether global warming is happening to how best to respond, says chief science adviser."

No, it most certainly is not time to move on past the basics, given how wrong and misleading the alarmists are on "global warming."  Now that the alarmists are under severe scrutiny and most of their claims in the media are falling apart, how convenient it is that they want to ignore the fundamental problems in many of their analyses and just skip forward to climate mitigation.

Walport wants "to ensure that policy decisions [come] from a public debate based on solid evidence."  Sounds great, so let's have a look at the U.K.'s warming trend – or lack thereof – over the past quarter-century.  That seems like a step toward ensuring that policy decisions are based on solid evidence, not unwarranted climate hysteria, doesn't it?

Of course, Walport is a medical scientist by training, and to the best of my knowledge, he has no significant expertise in environmental science.  In short, his opinion on the state of climate science seems merely to be regurgitating what others tell him, rather than engaging in a direct critical analysis of the underlying data.  If you haven't probed the raw data of a science discipline yourself, your opinions on the subject are effectively irrelevant for policy-making decisions.

Richard Tol from Sussex University and Benny Peiser – director of the climate-skeptic Global Warming Policy Foundation – both welcomed Walport's call to action.  If we fail to fully and completely debate the fundamentals of climate change, identifying and publicly acknowledging all of the problems in this field over the past number of decades, then science is lost.  To whitewash the undeniable core flaws in climate change science and just move on to policies founded on the flawed analyses is itself an actual War on Science.

What is truly frightening is that so many individuals – especially scientists – are going along with this anti-science nonsense.  The corruption of science is so deep that the problems appear to be intractable.

It is interesting that some of the greatest calls for climate hysteria come from the U.K., given how it simply hasn't been warming over the past quarter-century.  I had a look at the trends in average annual temperature during the last 25 years for the U.K.'s climate stations scattered around the nation.  To give the alarmists the benefit of the doubt, I used parametric and non-parametric approaches to analyze the data.

Out of the 37 climate stations, only one (Stornoway) has a significant warming trend over the past quarter-century.  Just one.  And at many of the stations, there is almost a perfect non-correlation in average annual temperatures during this time frame.

Consequently, of all the nations that should be a lot more skeptical about climate alarmism, the U.K. should be front and center.  It is too bad to see the U.K.'s science establishment degenerate so far, as the country has a rich tradition of great scientific work.  But the calls from the U.K.'s science leaders to just sweep the climate science problems under the rug of history is a black mark on its legacy.