The Met Office brings doom to a place near you
On Thursday, the Met Office launched its new report on global warming, UK Climate Predictions 2009 otherwise known as UKCP09. This is based on the output of Hadley Centre climate models that predict temperature increases of up to 6°C with wetter winters, dryer summers, more heatwaves, rising sea levels, more floods and all the other catastrophes that one would expect from similar exercises in alarmism.
What makes this report different from any of its predecessors is the resolution of the predictions that the Met Office is making. They are not just presenting a general impression of what might happen globally during this century, or even how climate change could affect the UK as a whole. They are claiming that they can predict what will happen in individual regions of the country. Apparently there is even a page somewhere on their website where you can enter your postcode and find out how your street will be affected by global warming in 2040 or 2080, although I’ve failed to find it.
All this is rather unexpected. In May last year, I posted here and here about a world summit of climate modellers that took place at Reading University. On the agenda was one very important problem for them; even the most powerful super-computers that have been developed so far are not capable of running the kind of high resolution models that they claim would allow them to reduce the degree of uncertainty in their predictions and also make detailed regional predictions that policy makers would like to have so that they can build climate change into infrastructure planning.
Here are a couple of excerpts from the conference website:
The climate modelling community is therefore faced with a major new challenge: Is the current generation of climate models adequate to provide societies with accurate and reliable predictions of regional climate change, including the statistics of extreme events and high impact weather, which are required for global and local adaptation strategies? It is in this context that the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) and the World Weather Research Programme (WWRP) asked the WCRP Modelling Panel (WMP) and a small group of scientists to review the current state of modelling, and to suggest a strategy for seamless prediction of weather and climate from days to centuries for the benefit of and value to society.
A major conclusion of the group was that regional projections from the current generation of climate models were sufficiently uncertain to compromise this goal of providing society with reliable predictions of regional climate change.
My emphasis
http://wcrp.ipsl.jussieu.fr/Workshops/ModellingSummit/Background.html
Current generation climate models have serious limitations in simulating regional features, for example, rainfall, mid-latitude storms, organized tropical convection, ocean mixing, and ecosystem dynamics. What is the scientific strategy to improve the fidelity of climate models?
http://wcrp.ipsl.jussieu.fr/Workshops/ModellingSummit/Expectations.html
This was summed up by Julia Slingo (at that time Professor of Meteorology at Reading University, who also chaired part of the conference) in a report by Roger Harrabin on the BBC News website:
So far modellers have failed to narrow the total bands of uncertainties since the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990.
And Julia Slingo from Reading University admitted it would not get much better until they had supercomputers 1,000 times more powerful than at present.
“We’ve reached the end of the road of being able to improve models significantly so we can provide the sort of information that policymakers and business require,” she told BBC News.
“In terms of computing power, it’s proving totally inadequate. With climate models we know how to make them much better to provide much more information at the local level… we know how to do that, but we don’t have the computing power to deliver it.”
Professor Slingo said several hundred million pounds of investment were needed.
“In terms of re-building something like the Thames Barrier, that would cost billions; it’s a small fraction of that.
“And it would allow us to tell the policymakers that they need to build the barrier in the next 30 years, or maybe that they don’t need to.”
If, since the conference, several hundred million pounds had been invested in producing a new generation of supercomputers, a thousand times more powerful than the present generation, and the Met Office had already developed and run the kind of high resolution models which were so far beyond the scientist’s grasp just a year ago, then I suspect that this might have seeped into the media and I would have head about it. So far as I am aware, the fastest supercomputers are still a thousand times slower than the modellers considers necessary for credible regional scale modelling of the climate.
So I wondered whether Professor Slingo had anything to say about the Met Office’s new report, and googled accordingly:
“Through UKCP09 [UK Climate Predictions 2009] the Met Office has provided the world’s most comprehensive regional climate projections with a unique assessment of the possible changes to our climate through the rest of this century.
“For the first time businesses and other organisations have the tools to help them make risk-based decisions to adapt to the challenges of our changing climate.”
In an article headlined, U.K. Says New Climate Forecast to Cut Long-Term Planning Risks on the Bloomberg website:
Until today, projections didn’t distinguish between the likely consequences of climate change in the southeast of the nation compared with the northwest, for instance. “We can attach levels of certainty,” Julia Slingo, ….. told reporters today in London.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601102&sid=ae6gM9bGo2Jw
So what’s changed since last year? Well one thing is that Julia Slingo has a new job. She has been appointed as Chief Scientist at the Met Office. So far as I know, the limitations that lack of computing power place on the accuracy and resolution of models are just the same.
During a rather bad-tempered interview on Thursday evening’s Newsnight, Kirsty Wark asked Hilary Benn, the UK Environment Secretary, why local authorities were being told to use the Met Office predictions as a template for infrastructure planning when their report had not been peer reviewed and the authors had postponed publication of information about the methodology that they had used. She also told him that there was considerable concern among other climate scientists about the Met Office’s research.
Myles Allen made an appearance on the programme warning that local authorities should be very wary about planning infrastructure projects on the basis of climate models unless they were very sure that the science was robust.
Mr Benn parroted the usual mantras without addressing the questions, and looked as though he would have much preferred to be elsewhere.
Once they made the leap into blatantly making up data and decided that the real numbers were irrelevant, what was to stop them from going all the way and insisting that their ravings were all issued Ex Cathedra?
They’ve now completed the journey, and it is explicitly clear that this isn’t about “science” at all anymore. Not one little bit.
We truly live in the days of “policy based evidence.”
Aren’t these the same duckwads that predicted a broiling summer last year and a warm winter this past winter? Winston Churchill would be proud of their moxie, if nothing else.
Taxing CO2 is simply a too attractive opportunity to generate free money, unlimited power and control.
This process is nothing more but a socialist coup undermining our democratic societies.
We should act accordingly and stand up to it.
NO TAXATION ON THE GAS OF LIFE.
Are there two Met Offices in the UK? One seems to be able to tell you what the weather is going to be like at the Liver Buildings in Liverpool on 3rd March 2080, the other consistently tells us we’re going to have hot summers which don’t transpire. I think we should be told.
As a question to the posters here, does anyone have any idea why an upward trend in temperature is always accompanied with disaster and mayhem and has no beneficial effect whatsoever?
I had not realized that the Met Office had refused to show its workings. This is truly amazing. After all, these are the guys who get it wrong a few months in advance just about every summer. They forecast it to be warm, and dry in the North and West of the country a couple of years ago. What happened was the coldest summer anyone can remember and deluges in, you guessed it, the North and the West. Clips showing Gloucester under water dominated the news. Northern towns streets turned to rivers, which carried the cars down them.
This almost total inability to forecast extends to the same day. For example I am today looking out at a cloudy sky, from which a few drops of rain are seeking to fall. The Met Office forecast, issued at 7.00am today, calls for a deluge to have started at lunch time, and for there still to be rain at the moment. At lunch we went out for a pleasant sunny post prandial walk.
So why on earth these guys think that they can forecast 20 years out, not show their workings, and have anyone believe them? The mind boggles!
“As a question to the posters here, does anyone have any idea why an upward trend in temperature is always accompanied with disaster and mayhem and has no beneficial effect whatsoever?”
Simple. Because this is the answer most likely to result in increased Government controls, increased government revenues, and decreased personal freedoms.
With pronouncements from the state organs like the one detailed in this post, it’s getting silly to pretend it’s about anything else.
But there is a very amusing consequence of this – and that will be watching them try to explain all this way when temperatures keep dropping instead of rising.
At the beginning of the week the Met Office were telling us that it was going to be hot and dry by Thursday, then by the middle of the week they said actually it’s now going to be the weekend, then on Friday evening they were apologising and saying it will be the middle of next week before this hot weather arrives, so quite honestly who in their right minds would believe climate predictions made by this bunch of jokers!
It’s obvious, isn’t it? All Government-funded organisations have been instructed in the philosophy of the Big Lie. They’re merely carrying out orders.
Michel;
I know no more about delay in publishing the methodology than that the presenter mentioned it in her interview with the minister, and he didn’t respond.
Matthew commenting at at Climate Audit has kindly provided these links to video of the Newsnight coverage:
For the scene setting
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8109923.stm
For the Q&A with the Environment Secretary, Hilary Benn
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8110064.stm
This was reported in the Times of London as a full page spread by the deputy political editor, no less, assisted by the energy editor [who he?] witha commentary by some gentleman saying it was too late to stop the first effects.
As usual I wote a short letter to them pointing out tha if they wished to report and comment on such speculations then they owed it to their readers, indeed they had a duty, to report the facts as well.
Such as the fact that global temperatures are currently falling as even the Met Office admits albeit relutantly, warming will soon return etc.
As usual they did not publish it.
Kindest Regards
The MET office needs to listen to Phil Collin’s ‘Both Sides of the Story’…heh
wws (08:07:10) :
“As a question to the posters here, does anyone have any idea why an upward trend in temperature is always accompanied with disaster and mayhem and has no beneficial effect whatsoever?”
Simple. Because this is the answer most likely to result in increased Government controls, increased government revenues, and decreased personal freedoms.
With pronouncements from the state organs like the one detailed in this post, it’s getting silly to pretend it’s about anything else.
Huh!!! The parliament (all sides) cannot even keep its excesses of expenses secret. How on earth do you think this global conspiracy has not been blown wide open. The press would love it!!
Perhaps you still believe that the moon landings were fake?
They’ll never have enough computing power to change the future.
That’s their problem.
Large organizations are like living organisms. They satisfy their primary needs before all others. Like a living organism they will at all costs survive, if they can survive, they will try to grow, If they can grow they will try to dominate any competitor for their survival niche. The same goes for the large media outlets. They like the major meteorological organizations have a great deal of their credibility invested in AGW.
Once they crossed the boundary that they would become advocates for a single belief structure, they lost the flexibility inherent in building their credibility on unbiased investigation. That means they have no way to say “Oops we screwed up”, without in effect committing institutional suicide.
As a result you have the appearance of a grand conspiracy but it is really rooted in lots of individuals who are protecting their own credibility and in doing so feeding on each others “liberty with the truth”. It is sort of like the story whispered to a group of people in a circle, when it comes back it has no resemblance to the original story. Each participant either willingly or unconsciously makes a small change in the story to serve his/her own needs, beliefs, or misunderstandings, and the whopper that comes out the other end of the process has no relationship with the information that went into its making.
It is like a bunch of 5 year olds telling fibs so they and their friends won’t get in trouble. It just slowly gets worse and worse over time, until the teacher brings them up short.
I think (hope) the “teacher” (ie the climate) slaps them upside the head with a wake up pretty soon before this never ending escalation of absurdity leads to long term damage to our societies, culture, laws and economy.
Larry
Obviously their computers and models have improved dramatically since they issued their global forecast in about 2007 http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/publications/brochures/clim_res_had_fut_pol.pdf in which they stated
[i]We are now using the system to predict changes out to 2014. By the end of this period, the global average temperature is expected to have risen by around 0.3 °C compared to 2004, and half of the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than the current record hot year, 1998. [/i]
Of course we now have another 4 years to 2014 for the global temperature anomaly to increase from +0.432 (in 2004) to +0.462 which might be difficult given that the value for 2008 is +0.361 and for the first part of 2010 is about 0.381
NIce bill – total ad homineim attack while avoiding any mention at all of the idiocy of the met offices issue.
Spoken like a true Alarmist lemming. You’ve done your masters proud.
This is the same argument Hansen used in the early 1980s – that they just needed a little more computing power and they could solve all the equations required to simulate the climate – he only needed a 1988 Cray supercomputer.
Well, we now have climate models and supercomputers that use the energy of a small city and the same lack of accuracy is evident.
It all depends on the theoritical equations for GHGs – which have not been empirically derived/proven but just result from solving a few other theoritical equations.
The equations could still be right – but the year 2005 version of the supercomputer-powered model still says the equations are still wrong.
I have just attempted to start a petition on the site below.
http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/CRUSourceCodes/BhauuWC8H9oGBsZR9eAJa0C
with this text:
We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Force the
Climate Research Unit, or other publicly funded organisations
to release the source codes used in their computer models.
The Met Office , the climate research unit and various
individuals at numerous academic institutions are refusing to
release the source codes used in their climate research models.
These are tax payer funded institutions, which are influencing
government policy decisions which will affect the day to day
lives of us all.
With the Prime Minister’s belief in a new age of transparency,
it is unsurportable that these publicly funded organisations,
are not open to public scrutiny .
It now has to be “approved” , I expect it to be rejected , I wait to see their reasons.
However, should it by some miracle slip past the ” Gatekeepers” , I will post the link on here, and urge all British Citizens to spread the word.
The UKCP09 has customisable maps available here: http://ukclimateprojections-ui.defra.gov.uk/ui/admin/login.php
I didn’t fancy registering, but it looks like it has information for the 25km squares.
I thought the met office was part of the ministry of defence, so I don’t know why this is on the defra website
wws (10:09:18) :
Spoken like a true Alarmist lemming. You’ve done your masters proud.
And then you follow it up with an argumentum ad hominem of your own. Good job.
Mark
I had put the petition in without running the spell chucker , and it won’t allow me to change it , mind you they will probably use that as the reason to reject it !!
Susan Watts has a BSc in Physics
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/8109923.stm
“The models shows the next 30 years as pretty much set because past greenhouse gas emissions take 30 years to work through the system” – Sounds like a definite prediction to me.
Dr Vicky Pope – “We’ve taken the Metoffice Hadley centre as the basis for our projections and we’ve created 400 different models from that representing all that we know about the uncertanty in the science of our model, we’ve then also combined that with information with information from 12 internationaly known models from around the world which have been used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. We’ve taken all of that and produced probability information combining it with 11 regional models that we’ve run to provide detailed information for the UK, and to produce statistical informatiion about the risks of climat change in the future.”
Its just a rehash of other models.
The computer power excuse is a crock to get more funding for new equipment. There’s plenty of computing power available if they use network or cloud computing as SETI has done for years.
Projections from the Department For Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)
http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/adapt/pdf/uk-climate-projections.pdf
Hilary Benn, Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, will take part in a Number 10 webchat discussing the UK Climate Projections and the Government’s plans to adapt to the challenges it will cause.
The webchat will take place on Monday 22 June at 09:45BST. Read about the UK Climate Projections:
Any questions goto
http://www.webchat.pm.gov.uk/Default.aspx?webchatID=86