Statistically, not a huge number of people listen to a BBC Radio 4 programme called ‘More or Less’.
Presented by Tim Harford and produced in association with the Open University, it is a generally inoffensive programme that gets to the bottom of statistics and the numbers people in the public eye might use to back-up whatever claim they might be making.
Last Friday was the final in the current series, and so that’s probably why they were editorially a little bit daring and went ‘off message’ on the subject of man-made Global Warming. It is usually the requirement that editorially any BBC broadcast must preach the trinity of terrors that the world is warming, it’s all our fault and we’re all doomed.
It seems that four years ago, the programme instigated a £100 bet between Doctor James Annan, a climatologist who one could label a ‘warmer’ as he is convinced that man-made catastrophic warming is currently in place, and Doctor David Whitehouse, a scientific advisor to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (of Britain), a broadly sceptical organisation currently unconvinced that what little warming there is has anything to do with any human activity.
The bet, made in 2008, was that there would be no further ‘warm’ records broken by 2011. And, according to the ‘Hadcrut3’ data set from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, there weren’t.
Because of the nature of the current cooling to non-warming period we have entered actually being controlled by solar activity, with the trend since 1998 having been downwards or stationary because of the inactivity on our sun, in tandem with other natural oceanic factors meant that the ‘sceptic’ won the bet.
However, I’d wager that this news will be played down by those touched by the Global Warming religion.
Modestly, Dr Whitehouse explained that all he did was ‘listen’ to the data and was able to say with confidence that there would be no further ‘records’ broken between 2008 and 2011.
The data does not present the alarmist view of catastrophic climate change unless you convince yourself otherwise and design predictive models to make it so do. Realistic climate models show we are in for some serious cold trends over the next decade or so. That’s why it’s ever so daft that we appear to be preparing for much warmer trends, and want to tax emitters of carbon dioxide for causing it!
They’ll be sacrificing all our first born on an altar next!
England's England 
James Annan was a little unwise to accept a bet for such a short period but also a little unlucky as the latest solar minimum was, unexpectedly, the longest and deepest for about a century. AGW is proceeding unabated at around 0.2°C per decade but is of course masked in the short term by interannual variability of as much as several tenths of a degree.
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Source please for your conclusion that AGW contributes to 0.2°C warming per decade.
The HadCRUT3v land surface temperatures data only shows a total (AGW plus natural cyclic warming) increase of a 0.1°C increase over the last 130 years.
Yet you are saying that we've seen a 26°C increase in temperature since 1880 from AGW alone. I assume were we to include natural cyclic warming, you are saying that temperatures have increased by over 100°C since 1880. Clearly they haven't.
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Numerous studies find that at least 100% of the global warming of the last half century is anthropogenic (e.g. Meehl et al 2004, Lean & Rind 2008, Gillett et al 2012). Current rate of surface warming is 0.17°C per decade according to Foster & Rahmstorf 2011, 0.18°C per decade according to GISTEMP. BEST found land-only warming of 0.29°C per decade.
My point is that in a period as short as four years, natural variability on average is several times larger than the AGW trend, so the bet was a bit risky on Annan's part.
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