With recent news  that wind farms have been paid a secret £13 million compensation to shut down over the last few months it is no wonder all those in the industry are hearing the clink of cash above the roar of the turbines.

Cartoons by Josh

I've written about this several times before but because I was once the victim of a nasty stitch-up by the Royal Society's current president Sir Paul Nurse there's always a danger of it looking like sour grapes.

That's why I'm so heartened by the magisterially damning report on the Royal Society produced by Andrew Montford for the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

We all have different roles to play in the great climate wars and Montford's, unlike mine, is to write with cool restraint. But though he doesn't title his report quite as provocatively as "The Royal Society is a joke" – that, essentially, his conclusion.

Ouch.

Well, some of the facts.

The particular aspect that I want to look at is that ideaa that the glaciers will have disappeared by 2035. The story has been set out in great detail by EU Referendum. We know

Anyone who believes groupthink is not a problem in the insular self-righteous climate science community, should read the Hockey Stick Illusion or wade through just a few of the infamous emails hacked from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.)

IPCC head man Rajendra Pachauri famously dismissed criticism of the Himalaya's supposedly rapid ice melt as "Voodoo science". I think it has come back to haunt him.

Cartoons by Josh

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) launched its infamous 2001 report, its chairman did so in front of a huge blown-up poster of the hockey stick. It got six mentions in the text. It was hailed as proof of the link between CO2 emissions and higher temperatures.

The “stick” was garbage. The long handle supposedly showing no significant temperature movement over 1000 years, missed out the Medieval warming period, and the little ice age. Those who proved it garbage were subjected to vicious attacks.

He also uses the Atte Korhola quote that appears as the epigraph to Chapter 17.

The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) is calling on the Royal Society to restore a culture of open-mindedness and balanced assessment of climate science and climate policy.

In a new GWPF report, written by science author Andrew Montford, the Royal Society is urged to ensure that genuine controversies are reflected in its public debates and reports and that the full range of reputable scientific views are being considered.

“As the Society’s independence has disappeared, so has its former adherence to hard-nosed empirical science and a sober detachment from the political process. Gone are the doubts and uncertainties that afflict any real scientist, to be replaced with the dull certainties of the politician and the public relations man,” said Andrew Montford, author of the new report.

In his report, Andrew Montford describes the development of the Royal Society’s role in the climate debates since the 1980s. He shows the Society’s gradual closing of critical scrutiny and scientific impartiality and the emergence of an almost dogmatic confidence that climate science is all but settled.

In recent years, the Society has issued a series of highly political statements demanding drastic action on energy and climate policies from policy makers and governments. On the issue of climate change, it has adopted an increasingly political rather than scientific tone. Instead of being an open forum for informed scientific debate, the Society is at risk of turning into a quasi-political campaign group.

The GWPF report criticises the Society for being too narrow minded in its assessment of climate change and for failing to take into account views of eminent scientists and policy experts that do not accord with its own position.

In his foreword to the report, Professor Richard Lindzen (MIT), one of the world's most eminent atmospheric scientists, warns that "the legitimate role of science as a powerful mode of inquiry has been replaced by the pretence of science to a position of political authority."

 The report itself is here.

Committee Room 10 (bigger!) but, as always, still could be changed again. Trace it at Westminster itself by looking for room booked by Sammy Wilson MP.

St Stephens Entrance for security, then head for main lobby and ask at desks for directions for the room number.

This is one for the non-technical friend who needs a primer, an antidote to the propaganda that still seems to be all-pervasive. It's written with a lovely lightness of touch which should make it accessible to just about anyone. It has also been rather beautifully put together, with some very nice photos to pep up the inevitable graphs.

Here (with permission) is a chapter so you can see what I mean.

Buy it here.

From Lord Lawson.

Sir, I would like, as a former energy secretary, to wish Ed Davey, the new secretary of state for energy and climate change, the best of luck in his new job. He has the opportunity to enter the history books as the only minister to use his position to abolish it for the wider public good. The yoking together of energy and climate change has given this country the worst energy policy for a generation – bad for the economy, bad for industry, bad for the taxpayer and bad for the consumer. The time has come to put responsibility for climate change policy back into the environment department, where it properly belongs, and to put energy policy into the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills from where Mr Davey has just emerged.

Nigel Lawson, House of Lords

Well, one can hope, I suppose.

"Is academic research really threatened by the prospect of premature release of data sets? Are ministers living in fear?" Graham asked a government computing conference last week. "The Chicken Licken version of the FOI that the sky is falling is just that: it's a folktale – and the trouble with folktales is people start reacting to what the think is the case even when it isn't."

He didn't name names, but two particular chickens spring to mind: chiefs in Whitehall and academics such as those whose work has helped give climate research a bad name.

Apologies for the confusion.

Vahrenholt decided to do some digging. His colleague Dr. Lüning also gave him a copy of Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion. He was horrified by the sloppiness and deception he found. Well-connected to Hoffmann & Campe, he and Lüning decided to write the book. Die kalte Sonne cites 800 sources and has over 80 charts and figures. It examines and summarizes the latest science.

A couple of years back, at one of the UNFCCC meetings in Bonn, I had a long chat with Viscount Monckton. As a scholar of Classics, he was able to detail with Classical derivation the reasons why consensus matters far less than simply being right.

And he is surely correct; after all, in more recent times, Galileo, Darwin, Einstein and Hawking are among those whose work broke with the consensus, yet turned out to be correct.

But if the presence of a consensus is irrelevant, so, logically, is its absence; which makes the continued use by sceptics' groups of the "consensus is cracking" meme a bit mystifying.

After all, how many times can you say it's cracking before people start asking "so why hasn't it cracked, then?"

In both cases - consensus and breaking consensus - it's surely the evidence that should count, not the number of people you can get to sign your letter.