This year over summer, he put science in its place, and laughed and danced and laughed with glee ...

It's a new month, a new era, a new world ... 

Which is why the pond clings so devotedly to the dinosaurs, those brave souls determined to provide continuity and ongoing awareness of conspiracies afoot, and ever willing to laugh at the fools for thinking they might get away with it, when a sharp-footed, top notch, world class climate scientist is hot on their tails ...

Yes, thanks be unto the reptiles, because once more this day we are blessed by a visitation from Maurice ...

However, you cut it ... reptile splash ...

Or google splash ...

... this top notch climate, world class climate scientist - some say he's numero uno now that screaming Lord Monckton has faded away into the folds of barking mad Christian fundamentalists - can sniff a conspiracy at a dozen paces ...

Please allow the pond to sniff with him ...

Indeed, indeed. Needless to say, the pond is reduced to a humble awe and a revered silence by the stringency and deadly accuracy of Maurice's observations.

It goes without saying that as scientists without peer or parallel, Quentin Letts and Maurice Newman are a perfect fit, and it is to the utter shame of the BBC's trustees that they should have replaced the show online with a pdf here, claiming that the program was a serious breach of the editorial guidelines for accuracy and impartiality.

This is shocking stuff. As Letts himself admits, he's a perfect model of accurate impartiality:

Sometimes you got the impression its forecasts were being written by the same hand that authored the Book of Genesis and its chapters about Noah’s flood. Gosh, they did love to whip up a storm about a few isobars. 
The same hyperbolic desire for attention saw the Met Office meekly agreeing to dumb down its presentation techniques and allow broadcasting editors and producers to turn the Met’s once dry forecasts into melodramatic, matey interludes fronted by autocuties. 
The men and women telling us the weather long ago stopped being dispassionate boffins. Instead they grinned, cooed, empathised, screwing up their eyelashes when they told us it was going to rain and advising us to wear sun cream during heat waves. 
Do I think here of the likes of the infuriatingly simpery Helen Willetts, twisting her face in agony when she warned us of showers? Do I think of Tomasz Schafernaker, a tweeting turnip of a Met Office/BBC weather presenter who posed on the front of a magazine as a sex symbol wearing only his shorts? You bet I do. 
Sheer meteorology of the forecasts was crushed by modish silliness, in an ill-guided quest for egalitarianism, a stupid horror of sober scientific delivery. It damaged both our society and the good reputation of the Met Office. (and more, perhaps too much more, here at the restless daily wail)

Indeed, indeed. This is tremendously scientific stuff, and it reminded the pond that it too has a passing skill at scientific endeavour.

That's why it can call Quentin Letts a remarkably funny looking man - he possibly even wears his trousers rolled in the English way - especially when he's inclined to wear a hankie to keep his beetroot brain under control ...

Oh dear, the pond has been quite distracted from the more important science of the master Maurice.

And here we have to turn a little Freudian.

What drives Maurice on? What motivates this master scientist to each week bring forth new revelations, and astonishing new insights?

Could it be that he is still in grieving, still mourning the loss of his hero, even though it is now many months on, and it's a new month in a new year?

So it seems, because he still yearns for the days of Tony, while deploring that wretched walri lover, a bungling incompetent incapable of recognising a conspiracy, except when brought to heel by his now departed, much lamented master ...

Yes, the walri man is in the thick of the conspiracy concealment, a friend in high places facilitating the conspirators ...

Now there are a few that would suggest Lamar Smith is about as good a scientist as Maurice, and a barking mad McCarthyist delusional luddite to boot - Update: Rep. Lamar Smith Ramps Up His Climate Conspiracy, but the pond was outraged to learn that this expert had been subjected to mockery and ridicule, as can be read in Lamar Smith's Climate Views Win Flat Earth Award.

Why that would be as cruel as awarding Maurice a tin foil award:

In response to his Flat Earth award Monday, Smith indicated he would continue his efforts to subpoena the NOAA scientists. 
“I will continue asking tough questions of this administration because the American people deserve to know the truth about its extreme environmental agenda,” he said. 
At Monday’s demonstration, Jere Locke, program director for the Texas Drought Project, said he felt Smith’s concerns were baseless. 
“Lamar Smith isn’t peer-reviewed,” Locke said. “The scientists are.”

Outrageous. Maurice is of course peer reviewed by the many scientific experts employed at News Corp.

Memo to The Australian's editor: There is an urgent job to be done, and Maurice is just the man to do it. The pond notes with admiration the way the comments section below Maurice's readership suggests that your rag is now only read by barking mad right wing loons of the demented, delusional kind.

The pond relies on this continuing. Keep up the good work. Have you thought of publishing Maurice twice a day, or in lieu, making him the editor of the paper?

Just thinking on feet, in an agile way.

And so to a little ditty the pond always remembers when Maurice is on the prowl ...