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Carbon Budget Order 2011

Perhaps I may help out the noble Lord by responding to a comment from the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, my Secretary of State for a year in 1998. It was a wonderful experience working for him. He asked ““What has changed?””. I think it was Keynes who said, ““When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?”” The temperature in 1998 was probably the peak. Since then, contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Teverson, said, there has been no rise in the temperature. If you go into the HadCRUT 3 series and go into that little bit called global, you will get the deviation from the baseline month by month, and the yearly average. In fact, 2011 was probably, in the 13 years since 1998, the second or third coldest and the first four months have been just as cold. That is the principal evidence that has caused me to change my mind.