Readers of WUWT and millions of climate skeptics have read this article before, and in fact it is likely one of the most cited articles ever that illustrates the chutzpah and sheer hubris on display from a climate scientist who was so certain he could predict the future with certainty. Dr. David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit who famously said:

From the Independent’s most cited article: Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past by Charles Onians:

However, the warming is so far manifesting itself more in winters which are less cold than in much hotter summers. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”. “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.

It seems however, that after over 15 years, the Independent has removed that article, and the URL now comes up like this:

Here is what it originally looked like:

Fortunately, I have preserved the entire article as a PDF for posterity:

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past – The Independent (PDF)

One wonders about the timing, whether it is related to the upcoming COP21 climate confab in Paris, or if it was simply some blunder, oversight, or archive purge on the part of The Independent.

Note: I owe a hat tip to a WUWT reader, whose email/comment seems to be lost in the firehose of communications I get daily. If you are reading, leave a note in comments and I’ll correct this. The reader was Cole Pritchard, who sent the info to my phone via IM, Thanks Cole.

Update: It gets curiouser, searching on The Independent website using their search engine for the phrase “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past” yields only one result for that exact string – a story lambasting the original article that contained the phrase.

Published in the year 2000, I thought maybe the story was just too old, and the Independent simply removed the story to save archive space, or maybe this had to do with some site redesign and the URL simply got broken. Yet when I remove the quote marks to search for the phrase in general, and not exactly, other stories back as far as 1994 about global warming and snow appear:

It seems clear now that the removal was deliberate.

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