YOU would think scientists of the NSW Climate Change Research Centre had done enough damage to their warmist crusade.

A month ago, its Professor Chris Turney got his ship of researchers stuck in Antarctic sea ice he had claimed was melting away.

“Sea ice is disappearing due to climate change, but here ice is building up,” Turney’s expedition wailed.

In fact Turney’s team — planning to examine parts of the Antarctic “highly susceptible to melting and collapse from ocean warming” — apparently hadn’t realised sea ice there had grown over three decades to record levels.

How we laughed.

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Turney’s climate centre, at the University of NSW, sponsored this disaster, which ended with two icebreakers rescuing the mortified professor and his warming crusaders.

It’s farce like that which helps explain why the CSIRO reported last week only 47 per cent of Australians buy its spin that the climate is changing and we’re to blame.

Australians now rate global warming of “low importance”, the CSIRO sighed, and warmists faced “the challenge of finding the right language” to gee them up. But up bobs another Climate Change Research Centre scientist to show the warmists’ problem isn’t the “right language” but the false hype.

Two years ago, Professor Matthew England appeared on the ABC’s Q&A to attack Nick Minchin, the former Howard government industry minister and a sceptic. Minchin had raised a puzzling fact: the planet had not warmed further since 1998.

“Basically we’ve had a plateauing of temperature rise,” he said. CO2 emissions had soared, but “we haven’t had the commensurate rise in temperature that the IPCC predicted”.

England’s response?

“What Nick just said is actually not true. The IPCC projections from 1990 have borne out very accurately.”

England later even accused sceptics of “lying that the IPCC projections are overstatements”.

So imagine my surprise when England admitted last week there had been a “hiatus” and “plateau in global average temperatures” after all. Startled readers asked England to explain how he could call sceptics liars two years ago for mentioning a “plateau” he now agreed was real.

England was defiant: “In terms of my comments on Q&A, I stand by them. Back then, the observations had not departed from the model projection range. In the past year or two, 2012 average and also 2013, that’s no longer the case.”

What bull. In fact, five years ago the pause was already so obvious that Family First senator Steve Fielding confronted Penny Wong, Labor’s climate change minister.

“Global warming quite clearly over the last decade hasn’t been actually occurring,” Fielding said, and showed Wong the temperature charts. Wong and her advisers — chief scientist Penny Sackett and climate scientist Will Steffen — said he was wrong. Journalists mocked him. Except, of course, the warming pause is now so obvious even England now admits it.

True, the warmists always have excuses and the ABC reports each without noting how the latest contradicts the last. Last week it reported England’s new paper explaining the warming pause: “Stronger than normal trade winds in the central Pacific are the main cause of a 13-year halt in global surface temperature increases ...”

England now claims those stronger winds somehow drove the missing warming into the deep ocean.

But only eight years ago the ABC reported the opposite: “The vast looping system of air currents that fuels Pacific trade winds ... has weakened by 3.5 per cent over the past 140 years and the culprit is probably human-induced climate change.”

Eh?

Will the ABC at least apologise now to sceptics who warned of the warming pause it now reports? How about a sorry from chief science presenter Robyn Williams, who once likened sceptics to people who “told you paedophilia is good for children”.

The Climate Change Research Centre might apologise, too. Another of its scientists, Professor Andy Pitman, once complained “climate scientists are losing the fight” because sceptics are “so well funded”, “don’t have day jobs” and “can put all of their efforts into misinforming”.

But warmists are being tripped up by stubborn facts, not corrupt sceptics. Where’s my warming, dude?

Emeritus professor Garth Paltridge, a former CSIRO chief research scientist, warns climate scientists hungry for power, fame and funding could have utterly trashed the reputation of science. They may have “been drawn into the trap of seriously overstating the climate problem ... to promote the cause”.

“It risks destroying, perhaps for centuries to come, the unique and hard-won reputation for honesty which is the basis of society’s respect for scientific endeavour.”

What a tragedy. Or is it? At least we won’t all die of heat.