While England basks in a winter wonderland, with more on the way, and bookmakers are now slashing odds on a white Christmas (The Times reports “The odds on a White Christmas fell to match the lowest price ever offered at 6/4 today”.), it seems like a good time to review the Met Office forecast for the coming year.
The Met Office is forecasting 2010 to be the warmest year ever, due to El Nino. The moderate El Nino we have now appears to be weakening, with additional weakening in the next few months.
The Met Office did the same kind of forecast in 2007, right before the temperature dropped more than 1C. The UAH (Channel5 LT) temperature has dropped this past week and is the closest to the 20 year average it has been in six months. With these factors in play, has the Met Office has made a serious blunder with their current high visibility forecast? Is it a repeat of the now famously wrong Met Office BBQ summer forecast?
See the 2007 Met Office forecast here:
4 January 2007
2007 – forecast to be the warmest year yet
2007 is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998, say climate-change experts at the Met Office.
Each January the Met Office, in conjunction with the University of East Anglia, issues a forecast of the global surface temperature for the coming year. The forecast takes into account known contributing factors, such as solar effects, El Niño, greenhouse gases concentrations and other multi-decadal influences. Over the previous seven years, the Met Office forecast of annual global temperature has proved remarkably accurate, with a mean forecast error size of just 0.06 °C.
See the 2009 (for 2010) forecast here:
Climate could warm to record levels in 2010
10 December 2009
A combination of man-made global warming and a moderate warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as El Niño, means it is very likely that 2010 will be a warmer year globally than 2009.
Recently released figures confirm that 2009 is expected to be the fifth-warmest year in the instrumental record that dates back to 1850.
The latest forecast from our climate scientists, shows the global temperature is forecast to be almost 0.6 °C above the 1961–90 long-term average. This means that it is more likely than not that 2010 will be the warmest year in the instrumental record, beating the previous record year which was 1998.
Here are some video’s from England that give some idea of the snowstorm:
LOL. I think the Met Office should lay low for awhile 🙂
It’s just the old adage: Keep predicting the same thing over and over again, eventually you’ll predict it right.
Andy Y (09:46:54) :
“It’s just the old adage: Keep predicting the same thing over and over again, eventually you’ll predict it right.”
– Yup. If you don’t go (more) insane first.
Pure propagandists im afraid. They need to be disinfected.
Right, and I’ll bet their “climate scientists” think there is no ice on the Arctic Ocean! Sorry “climate scientists” – it is still cold up there and the ice is still forming. They haven’t a clue as to what is going on – why don’t they just shut up.
BTW – what ever happened to the Catlin Arctic Survey?
To: Met Office employees
Subject: Employment Status
To save yourselves embarrassment when talking about your work, it is suggested that you merely offer a vague mention of working for the government. Let your listener draw his/her own conclusions. If done properly you can create the impression of working at a well thought of government agency, say MI5, or Scotland Yard. (It is, after all, detective work in which Met is engaged – trying to find the warming that we know is happening. We just haven’t found it yet.)
we have a water butt for rain water, it was so cold it froze it solid.. this is gallons of the stuff. and it was in a wind free area.. it is very cold.. i havent felt it this cold for many years, i have lived in teh same place for 35 years,
One quick OT question, how much land would be able to be cultivated if the temp goes up (thinks of the russian permafrost areas)
If they were smart they would just pay Piers Corbyn for a forecast and then just change a few percentages here and there and release it as their own. That way they would be able to get in the ballpark.
I wonder about the correlation of “snow days per year by county” versus the actual thermometer readings sometimes. Obviously there’s a strong precipitation factor – but at least the difference between “snow” and “rain” is a transition that doesn’t need a properly sited, maintained, observed, and reported Stevenson Screen arrangement to discern a threshold temperature.
If one is in the forecasting business, be it weather or economics or anything else, it is always better to forecast disaster. This is because if the disaster doesn’t happen you can claim relief that we “dodged a bullet” but if the disaster comes, then you are correct. “Dodging a bullet” is less of a career ending move than missing a “disaster”.
If you are an economist, always forecast at the low end. If things improve, you can claim pleasant surprise, times are good, and your employer can afford to keep you on. If things get worse, your employer must let people go and you were the one who “correctly” forecast that things would get worse so you are kept on.
Same with weather. Always forecast for the worst. The forecaster who calls for partly cloudy the day before a blizzard is going to be remembered longer than the one who forecast the potential for a blizzard that never materialized because a cold front fell apart.
And in the midlands of the uk despite bonechilling cold we only had the briefest of snowstorms. Ten minutes and a cm(half inch) of snow settling! I feel cheated! Give me my share of snow. Fortunately the snow gods are making an offering of significant snow on Tuesday.
As far as the met office goes I’m often too damn annoyed at them to even check what they are predicting with their so called super computers.
Each January the Met Office, in conjunction with the University of East Anglia, issues a forecast of the global surface temperature for the coming year.
ah…now I understand. There’s a typo. It should have said:
“2007 is likely to be the warmest arbitrary adjustments for any year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998, say climate-change experts at the Met Office.
oops. didn’t get the “” in there somewhere.
Piers Corbyn must be jumping of delight!
The screw is turning around!
Isn’t just as likely that a warming world would produce more snow and ice, up until some higher temperature was reached? Why do the Warmists focus on the low confidence output of their models – eventually inducing hysteria without results is going to create some significant negative public feedback.
!! SUNDAY FOXNEWS SPECIAL !!
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,580564,00.html
Who was it who said “Never make predictions. Especially about the future” ?
-2 here in Malvern, no snow yet ;(
3-4 weeks ago I scoffed at a Piers Corbyn’s prediction that it would snow in Copenhagen during the climate summit. He was right.
Next time I’ll be more careful!
The UK met office Hadley centre/UEA CRU are major contributors to the fabricated temperature series used by the IPCC, they also provide the UK regime with most of its evidence around which it creates multiple economic and enviromental policies.
It doesnt take too much imagination to believe that this is a very convenient way for a bent regime pushing through massive unpopular policies by covering those policies in lies and deceit.
Who pays the met office Hadley centre UEA CRU? well its the regime of course and seeing how the regime has placed stooges in all those bodies the its not a stretch to suggest that the those paying the piper get to call the tune.
The met office has gone from a scientific institution to a propaganda mouthpiece and policy advocate within a decade, their predictions are based around their beloved computer models which have been stuffed with rigged data so any forecast they make is trash which is why the met office is so wrong so often.
The UK political regime pay for lies and lies is what they get, the regime demands that temperatures increase and so temperatures increase even when they dont, last year will be warm and next year warmer still BUT only in their models and minds, there is a divergence between actual reality and the met office made up reality. In the real world its getting colder in the bought and paid for fantasy reality the climate does whatever the computer says it will.
The corruption of the UK climate science/ weather forecasting community is complete, they lie and cheat as easily as any Warsaw pact news agency because they have powerful political friends.
The USA circumstance is a little different for now because its a hell of a lot harder to buy a far bigger community of scientists and organisations, but I would caution any reader to treat any information on climate/weather coming from the UK as lies and made up trash.
John F. Hultquist (09:55:08)
“BTW – what ever happened to the Catlin Arctic Survey?”
Their busy getting their brass balls reattached!
Its funny. I was just watching the BBC1 6pm news and at the end of the report on the blizzards in the UK, they suddenly totted out with a line about it being so rare not much point investing in snow ploughs, gritters etc.. It was like they were saying, we’ll all be burning to death soon so dont take much notice of the snow; this is probably the last of it you’ll see in your lifetime.
BBC, they just cant stop spinning the agw crap.
Hadley is conferring with the local Druids. They appear to have reached a definitive agreement. Given that the winter solstice is only a couple of days away and Barrie Harrop is in Copenhagen, they figure that the only chance to make their forecasts come to pass is to follow the ancient tradition of burning a criminal alive in a wicker basket on the solstice. Given his proximity Mr. Harrop has been put forward as a candidate for the honor given his great grasp of AGW and hot emissions of postings in the WSJ.
It is rather easy to discover what is going on at the UK Met Office. Their advertising on the right side of the “weather” pages reads as follows:
“INVENT”
“Showcasing our latest ideas”
Not too difficult to work out what those latest ideas are….. their latest weather inventions, perhaps?
What amazing audio…
Brits and technology!
Foul-mouthed bloke probably had a few too many lagers.
How about we have a bet on the arctic sea ice level for Jan 1st 2010?
I bet 13.1 million sq KM.
They (Met Office) forecast Bar-B-Q summers for the last three years, not just 2007, but 08 and 09 as well. None materialised. With the CRU-gate revelations the Met- Office figures are in tatters.
Meanwhile, the weather seems to be returning to how it was in my childhood in the UK, i.e. nice but not spectacular summers (except 1976) and fun snowy winters. Climate change?? Global warming??? No, just part of a repeating natural cycle.
Oh, and another thing, Piers Corbyn IS doing a lot better than the Met office these days!!!
I love it how they use the term “very likely”.
“it is very likely that 2010 will be a warmer year globally than 2009.”
Very likely appears to be their favourite new measure of (un-)certainty. It is a travesty they don’t know what is going on, but “very likely” is just fine.
So, if 2010 is not warmer than 2009, then “very likely” wasn’t really very likely.
And the same is then true for global warming “very likely” caused by greenhouse gas emissions.
Super computers for forecasts = “bad forecasts faster”
I make an annual habit of looking at their forecast. They invariably predict one of the warmest years on record. If an ice age is in progress, and London is buried in ice, that’s what they will forecast. Sooner or later, they will be on the money.
Jean Parisot (10:12:19) :
“(E)ventually inducing hysteria without results is going to create some significant negative public feedback.”
And what would that look like? A loss in “belief” in AGW perhaps?
Could be its already happening.
UK Met is the blackjack player that just keeps doubling his bet after every loss.
This may put a damper on the Met office’s prediction for 2010.
Of course this is not needed for them to be wrong again, since these guys really don’t have a clue what the weather will be for more than a few days into the future, much less the climate. The “Big Lie’ needs to be repeated often and with many flavors to keep it propped up.
Sorry, I don’t know how to embed videos.
The Twelve Days Of Global Warming. M4GW
To be fair, November and early December were very mild and very wet in the UK. Sure, this cold snap of a week will adjust the December figure toward the annual mean, but the start of winter was anything but cold.
Of course, one of the hardest winters of the 20th century, 1947, was snowless up to New Year.
We await with interest what gives, but the Siberian cold air has certainly spread across Western Europe currently.
Snow before Christmas has occurred 5 times in the SE of the UK in my life that I can remember – 1970, 1979, 1981, 1984 and 2009. Anyone in the UK with a better memory than mine, please add any other years you can remember!
Even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally
I wish the buggers would forecast a COLD year!
If they did, I’d actually go out & buy Summer clothes in the sales! 😉
DaveE.
Don’t they predict the ‘warmest year ever’ every year? I mean eventually they’ll be right.
How is 2009 the 5th warmest “ever”? There was a cold winter, and a non-summer across most of the US. There was snow places that hadn’t seen snow in eleventy billion years world wide. The only place that looked warm last year was siberia…hmmmm
To a betting man, a person (entity) that is always wrong is every bit as valuable as a person (entity) that is always right. By that measure, the MET is very valuable.
Our own NWS office -Pendelton,Oregon, has missed long range too.though I
suspect some of the more seasoned forcasters have resorted to the good old,
“Partly to mostly with a chance of..” to cover the bases. I see that arctic air up in Ak and BC as a cold dagger pointed at the lower 48-and soon.Nino or not…
Can someone through some truth to this?
Mann gets an OpEd piece in WashPost
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/12/17/AR2009121703682.html
With their knowledge of probability, I wouldn’t mind playing these Met Office folks at Poker.
crosspatch (10:02:35) :
Same with weather. Always forecast for the worst.
Very true. Years ago one of our local weathermen also covered Saturday morning wrestling. They filmed it at the tv station. The forecast was to be partly cloudy one fateful Saturday morning, but instead it rained. Well, the rain ruined some guy’s fishing trip, so he drove down to the tv studio, waltzed right in & punched that weatherman right in the nose. Wrestling viewers thought it was part of the script.
If only he had predicted rain. True story, by the way.
I’m sorry to say, but I really hope that next year’s El Nino is a weak one, because then the game will be truly up. If the following La Nina is anything like we had in 1999 or 2008, then the bedwetters, to use Lord Monckton’s turn of phrase (How is he by the way, any update?), will be forecasting the next ice age.
At least they’ll stop brainwashing our kids into thinking that breathing out is killing the planet. Hopefully by that time too, a proper alternative analysis of global temps will be in place, and then we can start putting the science back in it’s rightful place.
Anthony you mention:-
The UAH (Channel5 LT) temperature has dropped this past week and is the closest to the 20 year average it has been in six months.
In all the excitement recently you may have forgotten:-
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/17/pielke-sr-hypothesis-on-daily-uah-lt-records/
I have been watching & waiting with baited breah for nearly 6 months for this temp to reach the average to hear what Roger Pielke Sr has to say when it does.
Anyone suggesting the MET Office should lay low and not make their predictions for a while, please reconsider. They are doing everyone a great service by revealing, in spectacular manner, the quality of the predictions (scenarios?) made by global circulation models. Please do all you can to make certain the MET Office continues with the practice.
Joe Romm on Climate Progress announced November 2009 was the warmest November ever. His anouncment was made on November 24 before the data was out. Who needs records? They are busy and can make them later.
Forecast for Winter 2009/10
“For northern Europe, including the UK, there is a 20% chance of a colder winter, a 30% chance of an average winter and a 50% chance of a milder winter.”
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/seasonal/2009/winter/
“An update to the winter forecast will be issued in December. A monthly appraisal of the winter will start in early February 2010.”
An update? Hang on I’ll just have a look outside.
A friend told me Tuesday, snow was forecast for this weekend. When I said it would be here Thursday or Friday, he told me he was going to turn the heating to constant on Wednesday night.
It’s something when even I am believed more than the T.V. forecasts.
DaveE.
This may be very important if true.
http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report_breaking-news-india-china-walk-out-of-climate-summit-report_1324981
The met off should also be thoroughly investigated. They too are a publically-funded member of the anti-science world socialist domination aparatchik. They should be shut down just for spending a kajillion on a supercomputer for homogenizing data,let alone making the worlds lousiest forecasts.
BBC have your Say:
Question: How are you coping with the weather?
SENT:
18-Dec-2009 15:55
COMMENT:
What weather? You mean the run away Anthropogenic Global Warming, the BBC supports and for which the science is settled? or the freezing over of northern American and Europe we are experiencing?
COMMENT STATUS:
Rejected
Well worth the license fee.
Speaking of Piers Corbyn’s forecasts, I wonder how that will change now that the Sun may be waking up finally (again)
The Solar Flux looks like it could hit 90, if the sunspot count goes way up from where it is now, then if you listen to resident solar/ocean relations expert Tallbloke and if I got his theory right, the ocean surface should become a bit colder as it goes back into energy retaining mode.
Why not? A broken clock is right twice a day.
I seem to remember last winter being cold but with not much snow here in the UK. The Met Office comment was “It would have been worse but for Global warming”. Honestly , I’m not making this up. The Met Office obviously are though.
The Met Office has long since ceased to be a scientific body. Now even its Chairman (why does a division of the Ministry of Defence NEED a “Chairman”?) is a professional environmental lobbyist.
What else should we expect? Why else was he appointed by this wretched governement we have in UK?
@ Rhys Jaggar:
Add 1962 to your list. I was living near Newbury, and it snowed on Christmas Eve.
The thing that isn’t amusing is that the UK Highways Agency seem to believe the Met Office and don’t prepare properly. Hence three hours to go five miles today on a motorway that was mostly a sheet of ice. Temperature only minus 1 centigrade, pathetic. Of couse their website said everything was more or less okey dokey. Turned out some people had been there all night.
Rhys Jaggar (10:34:14) : To be fair, November and early December were very mild and very wet in the UK. Sure, this cold snap of a week will adjust the December figure toward the annual mean, but the start of winter was anything but cold.
Exact ditto for Northeastern US (all of US?- No November temp data on this site yet)
In the “it’s just weather” category, I just saw on Fox News that they are predicting the biggest Christmas-time winter storm to strike the US in up to three decades.
Two feet or more of snow possible over a wide area including Tennessee and New York City. They also said Washington, DC, would be the bulls-eye for the storm, with up to 14″ of snow possible.
Not sure where Al will be for Christmas.
After reading this, I thought I’d check the winter 2009-10 forecast (after all the summer 2009 one was spot on). If you navigate to the page (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/science/creating/monthsahead/seasonal/2009/winter.html) there is a comment at the bottom which says that the forecast will be updated in November. Perhaps they were rather busy at the end of November 2009….
You folks ‘cross the pond there . . . . you folks in England . . . .keep this up and you’ll soon qualify for honourary Canuckistani status.
You’ll love playing hockey & lacrosse. So much more fun than your football 🙂
Well i´d call that normal winter weather. Lorries stuck on flat roads, the only way for that to happen is if you park with warm tires and they melt ice-pots below the wheels 🙂
What about the asteroid/fireball lightening/earthquake at spaceweather.com?
One thing I don’t know is when Met office say the “fifth warmest” is this in the adjusted instrumental temperature record or just the bare data record.
If its the adjusted instrumental record then the explanation is the adjustments made, which tend to make earlier years in the record appear cooler.
Any instrumental record is in fact a reconstruction and so has confidence limits, but they never quote confidence limits when talking about the instrumental record, but then again they are climate scentists
Seems that The Daily Telegraph is beginning to see the light.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/geraldwarner/100020279/copenhagen-climate-summit-most-important-paper-in-the-world-is-a-glorified-un-press-release/
Couldn’t have said it better myself!
But you forgot to point out that, as late as 29th November, they were predicting “a 50% chance of a mild winter”.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1231668/Forecasters-predict-mild-winter-Britain-Prince-Charles-visits-flood-hit-Cockermouth.html
That, of course, is with the benefit of their shiny new £30 Million Supercomputer. (The same one that predicts with great confidence what the climate will be like in 2100.)
But, in all fairness, I’m sure they will staunchly defend this less than three-week old forecast. They only said “50% chance”, right?
Isn’t that about the same kind of probability you get flipping a coin?
My taxes are going to pay these prats (and for their nice index linked pensions).
I found the guy from Gravesend in Kent quite funny, I must admit. I live in Scotland near to a place where you can go skiing (I’m not going to call it a ski resort) so I/we hope for snow.
And it did look for a while in ’90’s and the early 00’s that it might be all over for Scottish skiing – for that species of sport (OMG! Another casualty of global warming! (hands waving in air)). But things are looking up lately. I know the north American and European resorts have had two good years already, but we in the UK have the maritime climate.
I’m actually keeping an eye on permanent snow patches in the Scottish hills, which may, over the years, provide some indication that things are actually getting cooler. It’s a real-world observational technique, anyway. But then I guess if you did that – a study – you’d just end up with warmists hiking up there with rucksacks full of salt to make them disappear, like the tree by the shore in the Madlives.
So the guy from Kent is just excited, and freaked out by all the white stuff and the cold. They’re just not used to it down there.
I’m not Scottish myself but I know many Scots will laugh at him for locking himself out of his house because he was so excited about the snow.
This is just a UK cultural thing. I’m sure people from Canada are less than impressed with any of us calling that a blizzard.
“Counting chickens before they’re hatched now?”
The MET Office has to make some predictions. Pre-emptively mocking them is a high-risk endeavor–they may turn out right, or not that much wrong (even if for the wrong reasons).
I wonder that a soothsayer doesn’t laugh whenever he sees another soothsayer. [Cicero]
They’ve been regularly predicting the same for the last four years. I think they work on the stopped clock theory.
That picture has me wondering.
I don’t like these new low-profile tires. I drive in a real world of curbs, rocks, and the occasional tree branch. Having the wheel rim that low is inviting wheel damage, especially with aluminum wheels.
Are they so low now the metal rim could get frozen into a puddle? Trying to dislodge ice that’s frozen around the rim edge seems a bit trickier than prying a rubber tire out.
Robert Napier
Robert is also Chairman of the Board of the Met Office. He was Chief Executive of WWF-UK, the UK arm of the World Wide Fund for Nature, from 1999 to April 2007.
http://www.englishpartnerships.co.uk/robertnapier.htm
The former chief executive of the UK WWF would have no interest in keeping Met office predictions on message, would he?.
The Met Office couldn’t forecast what time they should take lunch.
Fred from Canuckistan – already with you on the hockey thing. Sadly we don’t get it televised much over here but I did get to see highlights of the Stanley Cup final play-offs and the deciding match. Bliss. Way to go Penguins!
Anthony,
OT… The youtube video is innappropriate for younger viewers due to excessive foul language. Are you sure you want this on your blog?
Thank you!
The Met Office Winter forecast covers Dec 2009 to Feb 2010.
The UK average for December to February from 1971-2000 is 3.7 °C.
LONDON, Nov 27 – The UK’s official weather watcher the Met Office forecast on Friday there was a 50 percent chance of a warmer winter than average this year for northern Europe, including Britain.
The Met Office said there was only a 20 percent chance of a colder winter, while there were no clear signals for precipitation during the three months between December and February.
So they have hedged their bets on this one, but my view is that we’ll be about the same or slightly colder than the winter was 2008/2009. This forecast was done by just observing nature – no £3.5bn computer required.
Meth office..
I just finished reviewing the Obama speech. I was jumping for joy because BO decided to read the BLUE script, as I 100% knew he would, and seal his fate as a one term President. BO took the blue Pill as I knew he would, because that’s just the way they are. Did you notice he was also wearing a blue tie? Did you also notice he didn’t read from his teleprompter? Maybe I got to them with my Red teleprompter Blue teleprompter comment.
Phrase of the day:
“common but differentiated responsibility”
Definition: a shared responsibility that must be borne by one party more than another based on a non sequitur.
Example: Al Gore
Expect to see this used a lot in the future
Fred from Canuckistan . . . (11:12:03) :
You folks ‘cross the pond there . . . . you folks in England . . . .keep this up and you’ll soon qualify for honourary Canuckistani status.
You’ll love playing hockey & lacrosse. So much more fun than your football 🙂
What is it we ‘have to keep up’?
Those of us that went to fancy schools played field hockey. Lax is only for girls over here!
HAND!
Robert Wykoff (10:45:15)
“How is 2009 the 5th warmest “ever ?”
good question, but nothing extraordinary, we are around a cyclical high due to ocean currents similar to the high in the 1930s, so all highest temperatures should be around now and then just for natural variability.
additionally current temperatures appear to be biased towards warming because:
– satellite data show approx. 0.5 deg/century less warming, though the troposphere should warm more and not less
– uhi is not corrected in CRU (only increases error bars) and NOAA. GISS correction doesn’t work outside the US, as there are as many upward as downward corrections.
– station selection and adjusted data appear to be biased towards warming at least for siberia, northern europe, africa, australia and antarctica.
– ocean temperature adjustments appear to be biased towards warming due to upward step functions when data series where spliced.
all together, it is “very likely”, that current temperatures are reported several tenths of a degree to high, making it “probable”, that the warmest year on recent record was in the 1930s.
Perhaps someone made a stop at London. Wanna know the Piers Corbyn method?
Easy: He just looks at Al Gore travel agenda.
Is there some reason they are using the 1961-1990 average? Seems like you pick up quite a bit of the cold period, but exclude the warmer 90’s, thus making the anomaly look greater that it otherwise would be?
Cassandra King (10:17:08) :
That was spot on! Really good, I could not agree more and I could not have put it better myself.
But when you call the Met Office a scientific institution:
“The met office has gone from a scientific institution to a propaganda mouthpiece”
I think you should say:
“The met office has gone from a Department of the Ministry of Defence to a propaganda mouthpiece”
Met Office – along with the MSM – is PsyOps. The whole thing is, a psychological operation. These people know exactly what they are doing.
Please do not any of you allow the wool be pulled over your eyes.
It’s a psychological war. It’s being fought in people’s minds.
The Met Office is obviously extremely busy as the have not found the time since 13th Dec to update the Hadley Centre’s CET daily running record. This often occurs when a series of colder days would cause a higher temperature anomaly to be downgraded. And there I was waiting for the anomaly to turn negative ( which must now be the case) – I feel cheated and I bet they have the weekend off!
There’s actually little criticism of the Met Office in our press (just grumblings). But talk to people and everyone thinks they are completely useless. You should see the weather reports. What they do is add-in lots of ‘possibly’, ‘maybe’, ‘chance of’, ‘could be’ – so they can’t be wrong. It’s hilarious to listen to – and useless.
BBC weather forecast presenter the other night. “The last time it snowed was February, which is quite a long time ago”. Compared to what, June? Did it used to snow between the winters before we warmed the world up? I’m confused.
Message to all Brits:
See what a success George Brown and his Miliband of Brothers were at the Copenhagen anti-global warming conference? Politicians of stupendous reach, I’d say.
John at 10:21noted that the MET has been wrong about Summer for the past three years. I recall them later one summer (not hot, not dry, apparently the usual British summer) trying to avoid admitting their mistake by saying, in essence, “well, we predicted that might happen, too…” Quacks.
Well, credit where credit is due. This has been the warmest decade of the past 10 years. At least they got that one right.
More seriously, with the AMO starting to go into the down phase, I would imagine that these sorts of snowstorms are more likely to be the case in the years to come.
Unfortunately now a 2 inch snow fall in the UK now comes with a ‘severe weather warning’ so its not surprising ‘imminent death warnings’ are issued if the outlook is slightly inclement for the time of year.
I blame the soft southerners.
Too high, Cassandra. I’ll go 12.8 m km2.
The house always wins in the long run. A few more “corrections” and “adjustments” are all that’s needed.
Robert Wood (12:09:59)
“Politicians of stupendous reach, I’d say.”
Yeah, and in Scotland we’ve got Alex Salmond swanning off to global-criminal-crime-syndicate-hagen (despite not being invited), while a Scottish airline company goes bust due to, essentially, a cash flow problem, leaving thousands of holidaymakers stranded and over 500 people without a job.
Hope he’s proud of himself.
Disgusted.
They release their pronouncements on the current year in Dec for effect, its based on Jan to Sept data so is only 75% of the data not 11/12ths as you would think. They always overstate the temp and when the final full year data is announced in Mar Apr with the lower figure its hidden away. The BBC never goes back to change the orginal notice.
mikey (10:17:59) :
Same thing happened in Seattle, Washington last year. Huge blizzard, tons of snow, and no snow plows. To top it off, the city has rules against run-off into Puget Sound, so they couldn’t de-ice the streets with salt or chemicals. The whole city ground to a halt for a few days.
The current blizzards were accurately predicted by Piers Corbyn at Weather Action:
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews09No100.pdf
Have a look and see if he’s right about the rest of the month. I think he’s got something.
Not above freezing all day here in East England – and that hasn’t happened for a while. No doubt the Met Office are too busy at Copenhagen to bother with accurate long distance forecasting.
“The power grid unit of French utility giant Electricite de France SA (EDF.FR) warned Monday that electricity demand could surge to surpass record highs in France this week due to the cold and said it will import power from abroad to help meet demand.”
“”At this time of year, a drop of one degree Celsius in temperature causes an increase of around 2,100 megawatts of consumption, double the consumption in the city of Marseilles,” the company said.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091214-710066.html
Today 4 days later most of Europe is under a deep freeze, with Paris reporting -4C in the early evening, forecasted to drop to -6C, the average low being 2C. Similar temp conditions are forecast for the next 2 days, or colder, with rain and snow possible thru to Xmas.
I live in a rural part of SE England and, being a keen gardener and walker, pay special attention to the weather forecasts here. More in hope than expectation I consult the BBC’s website for these (its data come from the Met Office) and they are reliably wrong – so much so that a couple of years ago I entered into an e-mail exchange, pointing out some of the grosser errors.
The Met Office’s response? They lied. They claimed a level of accuracy which bore no rememblance to my on-the-ground experience. Then they stoppd responding when I (politely) pointed this out .
I have no reason to believe they have any better skills (or defences) at their disposal on the subject of ‘climate change’ as they stupidly insist on calling it.
The only perdictions that are worse than politicians is a weathermans. Now lets mix the two…….. oops!!!
“Over the previous seven years, the Met Office forecast of annual global temperature has proved remarkably accurate, with a mean forecast error size of just 0.06 °C.”
I checked what the mean error would have been if they had simply said “the next year will be the same temperature as this year”. Answer: 0,053 °C.
The Earth hasn’t warmed since the 1998 El Nino discontinuity. Maybe this is because since then, McIntyre and Tisdale etc have been watching the Warming CRU and so the CRU has not been able to cook the books since then.
This explanation is the simplest of them all, and so passes the Occam Razor test.
“It’s just the old adage: Keep predicting the same thing over and over again, eventually you’ll predict it right.”
A better way of putting it is ‘A broken clock is right twice a day’
Off topic, thought you might be interested in this:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/pdf/6americas.pdf
Quite detailed poll of the public’s takes on GW in America.
2009 is nowhere near the fifth warmest. The surface temp record is so badly screwed up as to be nearly worthless. I cannot wait for an open and credible surface temp record to be developed.
That’s not a snow storm; this is snow:
http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20091211/ont_weather_091211/20091211/?hub=TorontoNewHome
And cold. The euros have it easy
Glenn (12:50:37) :
That’s the U.K. screwed then! Our grid nearly went into overload about a year ago, without France to dig us out, we’re really in the clag! 🙁
DaveE
There was so much snow that people were driving on the wrong side of the road 😀
Despite what one might be led to believe by the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) and other wind lobbyists there are relatively frequent periods when there is virtually no wind and, therefore, virtually no output from wind turbines, however wide their distribution throughout the UK.
These low wind periods are more likely to occur in the winter months (when demand is higher) and the irrefutable fact is that, in order to meet peak demand in these periods, the capacity allocated to wind turbines would have to be provided by other energy sources. At certain times this back-up would have to be almost 100 per cent of that estimated wind turbine capacity.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/3347925/When-the-wind-stops—the-other-side-of-the-wind-turbine-argument.html
Not to quibble, but, “The moderate El Nino we have now appears to be weakening” – where did you get this information? Not in the link provided.
Also, all this about the snow, which is just a form of precipitation, quite common in the winter. What about temperature? Haven’t seen that mentioned much.
Nice press release from the Japanese, on their data, here – http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/news/press_20091215.pdf
BBC was classic this morning.
Radio 3 news lead item was ‘Governments close to Climate Change deal in Copenhagen”.
Second lead ” Up to 6 inches of snow fell in South East England”.
I did chortle out loud.
ClimateHoax (11:44:04) :
Meth office..
That’s the most amount of laughs I’ve had for the least amount of words, since I’ve been reading here.
Even Al Gore is right twice a day. Oh wait, that’s a broken watch… Where was I? Even Al Gore is right… oh wait…
Barbecue summer? Anyone?
@Leon Brozyna
“…If done properly you can create the impression of working at a well thought of government agency, say MI5, or Scotland Yard…”
Umm – not exactly. Leon, I don’t know if you live in the UK? The Met Office may be famous for incompetentence and pretending the globe is warming in order to keep their jobs, but the Security Service are famous for lying to get us into the Iraq war, and pretending there is lots of terrorist activity to maintain their jobs after the Cold War finished, while Scotland Yard are famous for shooting people in the streets and then claiming it was all a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
On the whole, I think the Met Office have a better public image…
Ian – Was it Robert Napier who got rid of David Bellamy from the WWF because he wouldn’t fall in line re AGW?
william (12:32:02) :
Same thing happened in Seattle, Washington last year. Huge blizzard, tons of snow, and no snow plows. To top it off, the city has rules against run-off into Puget Sound, so they couldn’t de-ice the streets with salt or chemicals. The whole city ground to a halt for a few days.”
The City politicians under the “leadership” Mayor McNickols weighed the dangers of climate change and sustainability against the safety of a half a million residents and came down on the side of “saving the planet”.
For whom, one is tempted to ask, was he trying to save the planet?
Oh, and BTW, he made sure his street was plowed.
People talking of temperatures got me thinking about how the average daily temperatures are calculated. I read recently in this blog that they take the high and the low temperatures read each day and average them to get the average for the day. But an average is far from a mean. To take an extreme example, in Alberta Canada, we get warming winds called Chinooks. The temperature could be sitting at 11 degrees, pop up to 20 degrees for an hour or two then drop back down to a low of say 10. Averaging the high and low would give you 15 degrees but the MEAN temperature would be about 11. I assume modern technology could give proper means, but the old hi-lo thermometers we all used to use won’t. I wonder how much error this introduces? I assume that it is hoped the plus minuses would average out but I bet it doesn’t.
How accurate is the whole average temperature thing? Has anyone looked at this?
Just been watching the weather forecast on the BBC. The forecast was, for many UK areas, sub-zero with the caveat that outside urban areas the temperatures would be 3 or 4 degrees C colder!
Why is it that the UHI effect when applied to Weather is so much larger than when it is integrated into Climate?
That the Met is totally wrong with their weather predictions was foreordained… what did they expect with Phil Jones’ fraudulent predictions??
Glenn (12:50:37) : Why are you posting this? We all know that cold is good, warmth is bad. How do we know? The IPCC tells us so.
If it stays this cold in Britain for a few months, folks will be able to walk to Calais across the ice. Say, if that happens, that would make a great protest march, wouldn’t it?
OT – The Now Show on BBC R4 – they are still a bunch of warmists, but gave this Dr Seuss view of Copenhagen. The good bit starts at 14:00 into the program.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00p99n5/The_Now_Show_Series_29_Episode_4/
Enjoy!
How can you blunder when you are never wrong? The press won’t criticize these guys. The politicians are relying on these guys to justify the massive government growth. Anybody with a degree in “Climate Science” can’t get jobs unless they hype the apocalypse.
The only one who can stand a chance against them is reality itself. Fortunately mother natures is doing a fantastic job of that.
I wonder if POTUS’s plane will be allowed to land during the 20″ snowstorm predicted for DC starting right now.
I live in SE England and awoke this morning to eight inches of the white stuff. Many Americans may not realise just how rare such events are in southern England but our climate is temperate enough that precipitation nearly always falls as rain. It would not be uncommon for snow to fall on one day and disappear the next day, usually in mid to late January.
I’ve been living in this area for 12 years and this is the first year that I can remember snow fall as early as this. (Obviously that isn’t a scientific analysis). We had very heavy (for Kent) snow in February 2009, probably the same amount as last night.
It’ll be interesting to see how the rest of the winter pans out. Hopefully it’ll warm up until our central heating is fixed.
Dodgy Geezer (13:51:09) :
@Leon Brozyna
“…If done properly you can create the impression of working at a well thought of government agency, say MI5, or Scotland Yard…”
Umm – not exactly. Leon, I don’t know if you live in the UK? The Met Office may be famous for incompetentence and pretending the globe is warming in order to keep their jobs, but the Security Service are famous for lying to get us into the Iraq war, and pretending there is lots of terrorist activity to maintain their jobs after the Cold War finished, while Scotland Yard are famous for shooting people in the streets and then claiming it was all a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
—————-
Well said…
And the next thing the skeptic community need to ask themselves is: “why are we being lumped in with tin-foil-hat-wearing nnn conspiracy theorists”… Oh dear, we may now be, not enemies of the state, but enemies of the planet (even bigger crime). Bigger concentration camp.
Dragged away for denying climate change?
Possible?
Does history repeat itself?
Are you an enemy of the planet? Where are your papers?
Where are your carbon credits?
Arijigoku (12:34:48): The current blizzards were accurately predicted by Piers Corbyn at Weather Action:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piers_Corbyn
Corbyn began recording weather and climate patterns at age 15, constructing his own observation equipment, and obtained a degree in physics at Imperial College London.
Imagine if only a fraction of the AGW money had been used to large scale systematic and detailed scientific studies along the lines of Piers Corbyn? I mean, let us assume that such 1 year forecasts actually are possible under certain conditions using the proper observation equipment and supercomputers – it would be a shame if we did not get there wouldn’t it? If we further assume that we go very deep into far below Maunder Minimum, then such forecasting techniques, assuming that they are not science fiction, would be of major importance for mankind.
“The Copenhagen Outcome”
Obama: Non-binding deal on climate reached
President Obama announces a climate change accord at the Copenhagen submit, but admits it’s non-binding
accord = consensus ?
Deal or no deal, the greens say it`s a greenwash.
Given the importance of keeping Global temperature rises to less than 3C then surely we can achieve this easily at minimal cost.
One, re-site monitoring stations to rural locations and two, ban Climate Scientists from boiling, oops homogenizing, the raw data!
Problem sorted. Next. Clean Water? Now that’s a bit trickier.
I saw on the news that a volcano in the Philippines is about the erupt – how much will that cool things off?
Read, on EuReferendum, about the “carbon mafia” which is spending so-called “green funds” on such delightful, carbon-busting projects as one of the largest coal-fired power stations in the world.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/controlling-money.html
“President Obama announces a climate change accord at the Copenhagen submit, but admits it’s non-binding
accord = consensus ?”
The only words that matter are the following . . . .
“U.S. will not be legally bound by anything that occurred here today.”
DaveE (10:42:16) :
“I wish the buggers would forecast a COLD year!”
If they did that and got it wrong people would not become so angry. ‘Disaster’= cold in UK because over 20,000 people die each year from cold related deaths.
Sean (10:55:14) :
“They are doing everyone a great service by revealing, in spectacular manner, the quality of the predictions (scenarios?) made by global circulation models.”
I was thinking roughly among the same lines in that the yearly weather FARCEcast offers skeptics an opportunity to skewer the GCMs.
Non-binding climate deal struck at Copenhagen
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/12/19/2776502.htm?section=world
And the winners at Copehagen?
The caterers.
royfomr (14:44:46) :
Given the importance of keeping Global temperature rises to less than 3C then surely we can achieve this easily at minimal cost.
One, re-site monitoring stations to rural locations and two, ban Climate Scientists from boiling, oops homogenizing, the raw data!
Problem sorted. Next. Clean Water? Now that’s a bit trickier.
————–
But yes please, let’s have a conference attended by leaders from 130 countries on how to alleviate global human suffering. That would be something. And clean water is easily achievable at low cost.
The world is insane. Totally off it. There are poor, innocent children dying out there, who could easily be saved. ‘Bout time we started behaving like a family.
Another “hot spell” causing havoc in US. Northeast
“Wintry storm causing havoc, churns toward Northeast”
TheGoodLocust thegoo (14:49:50) : I saw on the news that a volcano in the Philippines is about the erupt – how much will that cool things off?
Answer: All thats needed to account for their failed warming predictions.
The sooner the Met Office returns to short term weather forcasting the better. There is less room for error and it is less political
This adds to my “unfit to serve” list, all involved in the global warming/ carbon credit scams have rendered themselves unfit for any official office, the met office and their mates at the university need a close scrutiny. I would like to see more people asking their officials and pointing out that getting on board with this scam makes them a pariah and unelectable, see how they like that!
Much of the talk relating to AGW refers to the notion of tipping points.
I am sure that we have just passed an important tipping point, but it’s not the point at which, according to catastrophic AGW proponents, the accumulation of positive feedbacks means that we are headed towards global Armageddon.
No!
Now that the Farce of Copenhagen draws to an end, and the doomsayers have finally had their three minutes of fame, the tipping point is away from the hysteria and back towards unpoliticised scientific research. Do you remember that?
Or am I just a naïve, idealistic dreamer?
As they sign their Copenhagen deal to stop global warming Europe gets blanketed by snow. Here is the latest snow cover map:
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims_gif/DATA/cursnow_asiaeurope.gif
The French are importing power due to the cold. http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20091214-710066.html
Obama flys back to a snowstorm, “If the storm forecasts are accurate – one to two feet of snow in major cities like New York, Washington and Philadelphia ..”
and North America has a fair amount of snow too.
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims_gif/DATA/cursnow.gif
Save us, please save us from Global warming…
Regarding the Met Office’s overcasting of warm temps, it seems that’s part of their hubris – as if their forecast somehow obligates the weather to deliver the goods.
I bet the Goracle can’t do this… God is just teasing with them …. LOL
current temperature waterloo, London. 29F Its normally above 32F mi December. Cold winters tend to come in “clusters” in the UK, regardless, though the Met Office every year say that winter will be warmer than average.
In truth they don’t seem able to grasp the weather legend of their own country.
http://theweatheroutlook.com/twoforecasts/UK%20seasonal%20weather%20forecast.aspx
probably have it right judging by colder than average so far, (this goes back to October’s original prediction) whilst typically, the MET Office’s prediction at the same time is proving to be wrong, as usual.
“Posted at 06:15 PM ET, 12/18/2009
Major to historic snowstorm starts this evening”
As snow makes its approach from the south, confidence is growing that this powerful storm will eventually find itself ranked among the greats. In fact, December (and perhaps other) snowstorm records, may be about to fall throughout the area. Louis Uccellini, director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Centers for Environmental Prediction and a ‘godfather’ of snowstorm analysis, spoke to CWG this morning and said, “chances are steadily increasing for this to be a historic snowstorm.”
Will Obama’s plane be able to land? He did leave Copenhagen early and said it was due to the “weather in Washington”, which is cold, while the climate remains warm.
Kitefreak (14:59:01) :
Agree with you about Clean Water being easily achievable but, sadly, rich people already have that, are anything but malnourished and adequate medical provision is taken for granted.
It’s only the poor that have to put up with the stark reality of survival and their tax-dollars are paltry!
When Trillions of dollars are cynically thrown on the table to solve a non-problem while real problems are pushed under the same table, then millions of lives will be cheerfully sacrificed. How can they sleep at night?
Jason Smith (13:38:28)
He was right in saying that climate change cuts across political frontiers. So does the need for exercise and food.
Incidentally last year’s winter forecast from the MET was “The trend of warmer than average winters continues”
It turned out to be very cold indeed
DaveE (13:20:46) :
“That’s the U.K. screwed then! Our grid nearly went into overload about a year ago, without France to dig us out, we’re really in the clag! :-(”
Looks like the whole country is going down for a hard freeze/snow for the next week or so. Is there any wood left in the UK?
Climate change agreement reached in Copenhagen
Page last updated at 22:56 GMT, Friday, 18 December 2009
President Barack Obama: “This progress did not come easily, and we know this progress alone is not enough”
. . .
He said the US, China, Brazil, India and South Africa had “agreed to set a mitigation target to limit warming to no more than 2C and, importantly, to take action to meet this objective”.
Jakers (13:36:44) : Please reread the link . It states that the moderate el nino has weakened and is expected to weaken further by Spring .
Charles. U. Farley (09:55:05) :
Propaganda comes at a cost. Even supermarkets don’t take it seriously. But thenm, they have to operate in the world
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article6806373.ece
British holidaymakers are not the only people upset that Met Office predictions of a barbecue summer have proved woefully inaccurate.
Tesco is so fed up with the unreliability of forecasters that it has set up its own six-strong “supermarket weather team” to help plan more accurately which types of food it will need to stock.
The UK’s biggest retailer has pulled together a dedicated team of data experts who collate weather forecasts from a wide range of sources that are then analysed using unique software.
The computer program includes detailed regional weather reports for the whole of the UK going back five years and, crucially, what each Tesco store sold as a result of that weather. A rise of 10C, for example, led to a 300% uplift in sales of barbecue meat and a 50% increase in sales of lettuce
A spokesman for Tesco said: “In recent years, the unpredictability of the British summer — not to mention the unreliability of British weather forecasters — has caused a massive headache for those in the retail food business deciding exactly which foods to put out on shelves.
“The present summer is a perfect example, with the weather changing almost daily and shoppers wanting barbecue and salad foods one day and winter food the next.”
Tesco said the system has already predicted temperature drops during July that led to a big increase in demand for soup and hot puddings.
The company believes that as well as boosting profits, its weather system will also help to cut food waste.
“Since heat-related deaths are generally much fewer than cold-related deaths, the overall effect of global warming on health can be expected to be a beneficial one.”
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/494582_3
Warmth not all bad? But what if we have global cooling instead of the predicted warming?
To me it seems that the AGW climate scientists are like the doctors ‘ In the madness of King George’. They spent their time looking at the wrong things as their mindset couldn’t take into account what was happening. The current cold spell in the UK will be seen as further proof of AGW because their models see any change as a part of the problem.
Richard (15:27:12) : – from the Washington Post
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/
boballab (10:00:13)
hmmm. I recall that even the Met office are jealous of Corbyn getting it right as much as they get it wrong, and complain that he won’t release his secret model to them… He won’t divulge until they discard co2 theory
If they are going to use CRU data it’s a safe bet that the figures will match the prediction with a degree of precision. Why do they persist in this farce?
National Weather Service made the same prediction in November: warm winter due to el nino. How long have they even known about el nino/la nina? I don’t remember Willard Scott going on and on about el nino during my youth. It’s amazing how they take 100 years of fairly good data and a few anecdotes from the natives to brazenly forecast everything from seasonal hurricane frequency to temperatures for the next 3 months. Someday, they’re gonna get their butts handed to them. I only hope it’s this year. Of course, they’ll have some lame excuse (el nino went away, teleconnecting aliens, etc.). They’ll never admit they haven’t a clue.
I real the MET forecasts regularly. They are the sort who would say “It would have been even colder if it had not been for global warming” , after already predicting on the basis of global warming theory a warmer than average winter for 2008/09.
If an unpridicted ice age came tomorrow, and the glaciers came down to Watford, so that you could walk from London to New York across ice, they would say “They would have come as far as Bournmouth had it not been for global warming”
I actually find the Met office quite entertaining, though its not wise to take it seriously
The Met Office just gave me a hot tip for the 1.15 at Haydock…
‘King of Confusion’.
Any takers?
The Gore Effect continues – east anglia copped it as well! Washington bracing for massive snowstorm also – somehow seems quite prophetic!
Linked a lot more here;
http://twawki.com/2009/12/18/1443/
December temps will drop obviously, but will peak in Jan or Feb, and looking at UAH records, Jan is the favorite. In 30 years of UAH records, on rare occasion do yearly temperatures peak outside of those two months.
My suspicion is Jan or Feb 2010 will rise sharply and meet or exceed Nov. As a SSW may be forming in the Arctic, that could have a profound effect on NH temperatures depending on how it develops.
We still haven’t felt the effects of El Nino, so it wouldn’t be wise to assume anything at this point, however, and SOI has been somewhat mimicking 2006 through the end of November (I haven’t compared recent weeks).
So although I doubt 2010 will exceed 1998, I think it may very well follow 2007 and develop into another moderate to strong La Nina by summer’s end.
My 2c
Wayne Delbeke (14:14:16) :
Great point. Granularity.
For the same reason we need weekly, not monthly global temperature anomalies. Then we may see a different thing entirely, in the (future) historical record and year on year, and enhance chunky artifices such as the 13 month rolling mean.
So,is there a deal or not? a ‘tentative’ deal? What has actually been signed?
I’d bet there’s not one Brit who believes any of the Met’s forecasts now. Climategate has completely destroyed any veracity CRU and the Met ever had.
“Harley Davidson-Rider (16:08:07) :
So,is there a deal or not? a ‘tentative’ deal? What has actually been signed?”
No idea, but whatever it is, nobodies happy, it isn’t legally binding and they’re all committed to move forward.
P Wilson (15:39:34) :
Piers used to plead with the Met Office to take on board his technique, and his forecasts, gratis. He would travel to meteorological meetings, on his own dime, to be studiously ignored. Then, after a series of wins, he was prevented from betting on the weather and became an advisor to one of the top bookies to vet speculation from other punters. The rest is history.
That he bears no ill toward these people speaks volumes about the man.
Gordon Brown has just given his take on Copenhagen. He smiled a lot, waved his hand about big-style and pledged that he would spend his every waking hour to the creation of a legally binding agreement.
That latter point is good news – it’s a cast-iron guarantee that no legal agreement will happen! This man is a political Jonah.
The bad news is that he’s still the unelected leader of GB and the BBC thinks that his cause is bolstered by getting John (Pork-Meister) Prescott into the studio to remind us just how omnipotent our Dear Leader is.
At least when the POTUS was on TV and handling ‘questions’ there was always an outside chance that he would point to a dapper gentleman in the audience and say.
You Sir, with the bandage on you head, what is your question?
I would say Copenhagen is officially a bust. Or as this person from the UE says, catastrophe:
“It’s a catastrophe,” said Dan Joergensen, a member of the European delegation. “We’re so far away from the criteria that was set up in order to call it a success, and those weren’t really that ambitious to start with.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30794.html
And Obama doesn’t even know if he needs to sign the document since it has no meaning….
Where’s that Jackson fellow from last night. I’ll share a bottle of that organic wine now. LOL
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6841696/Copenhagen-climate-summit-meaningful-agreement-hailed-by-leaders.html
In a nutshell, non-legally binding, no imposed hard targets, no imposed contributions to a global slushfund for AGW. Any CO2 cuts are dictated by each country ie whatever they want, any contribution to slush fund dictated by each country, ie whatever they want. Amounts to less ‘forcefull’ ‘treaty’ than Kyoto…which turned into an abject failure for warmist/alarmists/ecomentalists.
No, no, no. This isn’t Met office incompetence at all. It’s just that they’re recycling their forecasts to reduce their carbon footprint. 🙂
Manfred 10:23:43
I love it how they use the term “very likely”.
You’re forgetting the famous British penchant for overstatement. When they say “very likely” they mean “not a snowball’s chance in hell”.
OK I made that overstatement bit up. But think that they were using the British Understatement!!!
“Fred Oliver (10:17:47) :
John F. Hultquist (09:55:08)
“BTW – what ever happened to the Catlin Arctic Survey?”
Their busy getting their brass balls reattached!”
________________________________________________________________________
Here is their home site: http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/
From “Environment” page: http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/environment
“It is a stark reality that Arctic sea ice could disappear in the summer sometime between 2013 and 2040. Regardless of exactly when the summer ice will disappear, the downward trend is clear, and shrinking ice cover will change almost everything in the Arctic, and will also be felt globally.”
Looks like they support AGW theory.
In my judgment there are 5 reasons why the European winter temperature will not be above average or milder than last year as the Met Office predicts:
1] Ocean SST’s [including the Atlantic] are declining and ocean heat content rise has leveled off and is dropping
2] AMO has peaked and is likely to go negative or cool by January 2010. It is currently at 0.121
3] WINTER NAO is headed for more negative periods like the 1960’s to 1980’s where 17 out 30 winters had negative NAO. In the 1960’s, 8 out of 10 winters had a negative NAO [This December 2009 cold spell has a negative NAO of around -2]
4] PDO is heading for 30 year cool cycle and went negative/cool]-0.4] again Nov 2009
5] The current moderate El Nino will be less warming than predicted due to the cool PDO in the Pacific. During the last cool period for Europe [1961 -1990], only three El Ninos raised European winter temperatures. Six had no effect
Buy long johns.
http://www.catlinarcticsurvey.com/latestfromtheice
Latest Update
SURVEY DATA SUPPORTS RAPID ICE LOSS – LARGELY OPEN ARCTIC SEAS IN SUMMER WITHIN TEN YEARS
New data, released today (15.10.09) by the Catlin Arctic Survey and WWF, provides further evidence that the Arctic Ocean sea ice is thinning, supporting the emerging thinking that the Ocean will be largely ice-free during summer within a decade.
The Catlin Arctic Survey, completed earlier this year, provides the latest ice thickness record, drawn from the only survey capturing surface measurements conducted during winter and spring 2009.
[please post link and perhaps an excerpt, not entire article as I have illustrated here, or your posts may be simply deleted. ~ ctm]
A few key quotes from Copenhagen
The politicians:
YVO DE BOER, CLIMATE CHIEF The mountain goes on and on, it seems.
XIE ZHENHUA, HEAD OF CHINA’S DELEGATION After negotiations both sides have managed to preserve their bottom line.
GORDON BROWN, BRITISH PRIME MINISTER
We have made a start.
SERGIO SERRA, BRAZIL’S CLIMATE CHANGE AMBASSADOR
It is not a failure… if we agree to meet again and deal with the issues that are still pending.
The greens
NNIMMO BASSEY, CHAIR OF FRIENDS OF THE EARTH INTERNATIONAL
…rich countries have condemned millions of the world’s poorest people to hunger, suffering and loss of life as climate change accelerates.
JOHN SAUVEN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, GREENPEACE UK
The city of Copenhagen is a crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport.
Sounds like a roaring success then!
Just Me (10:47:20) :
>Mann gets an OpEd piece in WashPost
[Quote from W.P.]The National Academy of Sciences reviewed this work [= MBH 98] in 2006 in a study reported by this newspaper [“Past Few Decades Warmest on Record, Study Confirms,” news story, June 23, 2006]. Members of the peer-review panel said that they “saw nothing that spoke . . . of any manipulation” and that the study was “an honest attempt to construct a data analysis procedure.” [Unquote]
This is of course HIS view. I know there is another view, which states that the Review Panel concluded NEGATIVELY on this issue.
I have been wondering for years which view is correct. Could anyone in the know please tell me the reality?
Thanks in advance.
Reply: Read the short version of the report yourself. ~ ctm
I sit here listening to the doom- laden tones of the the BBC special one, David Shucks’man.
He tells us that any scientist would be less than happy because we’re all doomed. Aww, shucks man, and which scientists are you citing to back up you claims. The ones who’ve been squeezed out for years because their integrity disqualifies them from pecking at the pork or are you talking about your discredited chums who’ve disreputed the third oldest profession science by using tactics that would discredit the oldest profession of all.
Hope that your retirement plan is bullet-proof ‘cos your logic is cr*p!
ian – napier was surely a great choice for the met office!
Management of the Met Office
Chairman of the Board: Robert Napier
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/board/
2007: World Wildlife Fund: Tribute to retired CEO, Robert Napier
It was on Robert’s watch that climate change became widely accepted as the important issue it is today. He was one of the first to recognise this, understanding the delicate relationship between species and their surroundings. And thanks to his experience in business, he saw industry as an opportunity rather than a threat and found a way to develop ethical partnerships that brought not just financial benefits but changes in working practices and attitudes, too.
Robert understood that humanity’s footprint on the planet demanded a global approach and he worked hard within the WWF international network to leverage the power and experience of the whole organisation.
http://www.wwf.org.uk/what_we_do/about_us/annual_review_2008/annual_review_archive/annual_review_2007/chairman
Copenhagen is over. The Met Office will change or fade away someday. The jihad to replace the current world order with the dream of Utopian Perfection is not over. The search and fight for the truth continues on every front.
matt v. (16:43:35) :
As witness to the 1969 El Nino ,1972 and 1976/77 Ninos all had nasty winters here in the Pac NW. in ’69 there was two feet or so of snow dumped in January in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. That shut things down big time…
BREAKING NEWS – 3 EUROSTAR TRAINS BREAKDOWN IN THE CHUNNEL DUE TO THE EXTREME COLD
(HOW WARM IS MY GLOBE)
I see that all the U.S. political critters from Obama to Pelosi have made a rush to their planes to get home before the monster storm shuts down D.C. No, they didn’t have a sudden flash of common sense — they did so after their military plane drivers told ’em to haul their butts out of Denmark or they’d be stuck there for several days.
As to the monumental agreement, here’s my version of the no spin zone — the Copenhagen agreement is an agreement to disagree.
And here in Buffalo we’ll be enjoying the spectacle of all that coastal snow. So far this entire season we’ve had a total of 16″ of snow (all in December – a snowless October & November). And D.C. could get over 20″ from this one storm. Sweet.
A few weeks ago the BBC broadcast that outcome as >80% likely.
Gent was being interviewed who’s speciality is Game Theory. When ask about the circus he laughed and said it will fail, giving the reasons why, already been simulated.
“Eurostar trains stuck in tunnel due to cold weather”
“It’s snowing in northern France. It’s very, very cold. The weather conditions are very, very bad.
“There’s a difference in temperature between outside the tunnel and inside. And that’s why it causes technical problems.”
Hundreds of passengers are stuck. But the news is not all bad.
Most of the passengers are warmists.
Reply: This is a slippery slope which could lead eventually to the posting of …..lawyer jokes. Time to stop it now. ~ ctm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8421875.stm
Leftists in retreat.
Here is the real news:
O = Bush.
“*Obama has eliminated any difference between him and Bush.””
…-
“Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure
Deal thrashed out at talks condemned as climate change scepticism in action”
“Lumumba Di-Aping, chief negotiator for the G77 group of 130 developing countries, was scathing: “This deal will definitely result in massive devastation in Africa and small island states. It has the lowest level of ambition you can imagine. It’s nothing short of climate change scepticism in action.
“It locks countries into a cycle of poverty for ever. Obama* has eliminated any difference between him and Bush.””
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/dec/18/copenhagen-deal
H/T:
“Hopenchangen: The Family Photo
Wisely, Steven Harper heads for the bathroom*.
And because it’s not fair to beat up on the left during their darkest hour…. a pity link.”
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/archives/012933.html#comments
I’m right now watching a press conference direct from Copenhagen (on the local SVT24 channel) with EU’s José Manuel Barroso and Fredrik Reinfeldt (Swedish Prime Minister, chairing EU this half year). It sounds like a swan song. Negotiations seems to have more or less broken down. I missed the beginning of it, but the reporters use words like “disaster”, “disappointment” etc in their questions. (But I wouldn’t call a Copenhagen fiasco much of a disaster…)
More later, probably.
–Ahrvid
Anthony, you and McIntyre have accumulated enough clout to start organizing a few serious protests around the globe. We need some leadership in this area. The greenies seem to get all the press and they must be stopped before they destroy us all.
Even as America and Europe freezes, Al Gore, the American Poet Laureate pens his Apocalyptic Climate Change Poem- Death by Global Warming:
One thin September soon
A floating continent disappears
In midnight sun
Vapors rise as
Fever settles on an acid sea
Neptune’s bones dissolve
Snow glides from the mountain
Ice fathers floods for a season
A hard rain comes quickly
Then dirt is parched
Kindling is placed in the forest
For the lightning’s celebration
Unknown creatures
Take their leave, unmourned
Horsemen ready their stirrups
Where is that “floating continent” that is “soon” to disappear in the September “midnight sun”?
Is he referring to Antarctica? True you could call it a floating continent as much of it would be underwater if all the ice melts. But the midnight sun in September is in the Arctic, not the antarctic.
Could it be that he has got his facts slightly mixed up yet again?
Al Gore should be reminded of that old adage “Its better to keep your mouth shut and let people believe you’re a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.”
For the past three to four days snow has been attacking Japan:
http://www.jma.go.jp/jp/bosaijoho/radar.html#a_top
Clicking the orange arrow on the left bottom gives past 3-hour changes at 10-minute intervals, and you can see the northwesterly wind, typical for wintertime Japan, brings snow over the Japan sea. Please enjoy folks.
That should be “Its better to keep your mouth shut and let people suspect you’re a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.”
Have been trying to find out more about what the EU leaders said (I missed the beginning of it). It seems they have reached a not legally binding weak deal, which will be voted upon Saturday “in plenum” (at the conference).
I say, the weaker, the better. Greenpeace says they are angry, and that’s a good sign.
–Ahrvid
If Antarctica were “soon” to disappear in the “midnight sun” of September, (should that be just midnight or a different month?), it would be a real tragedy.
Thousands of penguins would be drowned and all 200 climate researchers, who would have no time to flee the suddenness of the event.
I would never, NEVER compliment 0bama that much.
Never.
However, that makes it sound like, as in a dozen other things, zero is learning that hey, maybe ol’ Dubya wasn’t as dim as the dems pretended he was.
Anyway, floating continent of ice sounds like the arctic ice cap. And for all the Canadians, mmmm… Ice Cap… Timmies…
The Met Office has nothing to lose.
If it really is warmer, it will be all over the news.
And regardless of how deep the snow becomes, numbers will be edited, omitted, fudged and forged to prove it is warmer.
And if it is colder beyond the ability of statistics to hide it, nothing will be reported.
Zero risk to the propaganda line.
Guardian:
Low targets, goals dropped: Copenhagen ends in failure
Deal thrashed out at talks condemned as climate change scepticism in action
Yes, yes, yes
Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me
Obama goes to Copenhagen to seal the deal on Chicago olympics – bummer
Obama goes to Copenhagen to seal the deal on COP15 climate summit – bummer
you do the math
now what can we do to stop these tectonic plates from moving around ?
There is an update to that news that 3 Eurostar Trains are stuck in the Channel Tunnel beneath the English channel. (Due to the extreme cold)
There are now 4 trains stuck there. They had sent in another train to try and rescue the passengers of the 3 trains….
Oh the irony. I just arrived at my parents place in Andorra and my oldest brother is set to travel here today for the Xmas holidays. He lives in England and felt it necessary to travel to a hotel next to Heathrow yesterday evening to avoid snow issues in England today. In the meanwhile there is stuff all snow in Andorra in the Pyranees.
Could Al Baby please swing by Andorra to save the ski season before leaving Europe?
Wow. They know what the temperature was 2000 years ago? 2 million? That’s quite a crystal ball they’ve got there.
The odds on a White Christmas
I heard Joe Bastardi say Copenhagen is going to have something very rare this year—a white Christmas.
“Never make predictions, especially about the future.”
~~Casey Stengel
The “Copenhagen Accord” is:
“meaningful
“historic”
“a step forward”
“a breakthrough”
In short, it’s pretty much useless, and hardly worth the paper it’s printed on.
Not a bad Christmas present for skeptics/climate realists.
The Met Office installed at enormous expense a huge new IBM supercomputer – thanks to the UK Taxpayer. Cost? £30,000,000.
I could have sold them my seaweed based weather forecaster for half that money! Just as accurate, if not more so!
When we have stable weather ie a high pressure area over the UK the Met forecast is usually but not always, somewhere near actuality. However if conditions are unstable then they fail more often than not.
However they quote their accuracy stats and ‘prove’ that they are so much better than yesteryear. Hmmm.. I wonder if they have ‘massaged’ their raw data and where they got that idea from!
Anyway their long range forecasts have been awful and as usual adjusted after the event to look successful! George Orwell saw it coming.
NoHopenhagen was a revelation I thought. The Noble Lord, Christopher Monckton was spot on with his predictions and the Warmists proved how left of Left the majority are.
From the Telegraph:
” ‘Most of the snow is falling in East Anglia, Essex and Kent – and will continue to do so,’ she said.”
East Anglia????
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Chris
Norfolk (not East Anglia) VA, USA
Here’s a link to the Met Office’s early forecast for winter 2009/2010:
“Preliminary indications continue to suggest that winter temperatures are likely to be near or above average over much of Europe including the UK.”
And here’s a later forecast (issued 27th November):
“For northern Europe, including the UK, there is a 20% chance of a colder winter, a 30% chance of an average winter and a 50% chance of a milder winter.”
It’ll be interesting to see how things will have panned out by the end of February 2010…
The last time I saw snow like that in the UK was in the ’70’s, and I lived in Surrey near the Kent/Surrey parrish boundary.
I had to laugh at the coulourful language in the first clip…LOL…good old south English lingo. And the comment in the second clip, yes, a small amount of snow like that does bring the country to a halt.
TheGoodLocust thegoo
The Philipine volcano currently in eruption is Mt Mayon. Those of us with a long memory know this volcano to be one of the two tropical volcanoes that unleashed huge eruptions in 1982 and therby reputedly exaccerbated the big El Nino of that year. The other volcano was El Chicon in Mexico.
For detrimental affects I rate the 1982-83 El Nino as being worse than the one in 1998 for New Zealand. That southern spring-summer period (Sep ’82 to Mar ’83) was miserable for the wind and lack of sunlight for west coasters on both main islands of New Zealand. East coasters here suffered a prolonged drought, 18 months in some areas, which is lengthy by N.Z. standards.
The east coast of Australia experienced a very bad bush fire season as well, with many deaths on one particularly bad day. The smoke, as it often is, was carried across the 1,000 miles of the Tasman Sea to N.Z. adding to our gloomy outlook.
As an idea to how bad it was, I moved into a new house on Jan 15th (northerners think July 15th), but we didn’t have a house warming BBQ until May 1st (think Nov 1st) in 1983! The Mt Pinatubo affected El Nino of 1991 came close to a repeat of ’82, but it relented and we had 6 weeks of actual summer in the beginning of ’92.
Possibly El Nino related, January 1997 and the 1998 are the only two Januaries of the past 30 years where we have seen snowfalls in the mountains around here. This would be the equivalent of July snowfalls in northern locales. February still remains the only month of the year NOT to record mountain snowfalls in my area of N.Z. March 4th 1983 and 2006 are the earliest snowfalls in the last 3 decades. The gap from Dec 30th, 1982 to March 4th, 1983 of 64 days is the shortest span between two snowfall seasons in the same period.
To sum it up mate, it would not be good for Mt Mayon to go ballistic again, or for any other tropical volcanoe to join in!
Here’s hoping not.
Coops.
A little OT, but in Australia last week there was a debate on ABC national TV between Prof Ian Plimer (author of “Heaven and Earth”) and George Monbiot (who seems to be a non-scientist environment reporter for a little read paper named something like “Gourdian”.)
Monbiot kept pressing Plimer “Will you state unequivocally that you believe the temperature of the globe has fallen since 1998?” or words to that effect. Over and over, interrupting like pesky reporters rudely do.
Ian kept on going back to periods like the Miedieval Warming period and the different ways that temperature can be measured, or supposing that George would not understand a scientific reply, but would not give a straight answer.
It was hilarious. Here was reporter George being subjected, before a large audience, to Ian’s own method to “hide the decline.” It’s ok with George if climatologists “hide the decline” and get caught out in emails – but it’s enough to work George into a lather when he is the one from whom the decline is hidden.
On debating skill, Plimer 10 , Monbiot 0.
Discalimer: I have known Ian for 30 years and have read his book “Heaven and Earth”. And we are or were both corresponding members of the Australian Skeptics Inc. And his book is largely correct and relevant (no two geological types would ever admit to having completely “settled” science – the discipline is too mature).
P Wilson (15:39:34) : hmmm. I recall that even the Met office are jealous of Corbyn getting it right as much as they get it wrong, and complain that he won’t release his secret model to them… He won’t divulge until they discard co2 theory
This is so entertaining. WUWT has so many amusing comments, I am enjoying a good moring coffee here in -10 C Norway with 10 cm new snow – reading all the witty remarks here is just like a “feel good movie”.
Sure if Corbyn has been playing with weather and climate forecasts since he was age 15, no wonder he may outperform the most expensive forecasts by UK Met Office.
I have downloaded the temperature data from the met office for RAF waddington near where I live in the UK. the yearly averages I have worked out from them remain fairly flat until the late 1990s and then start increasing after that.The winter temperatures show a greater increase than summer temperatures which still remain fairly flat.Could the increase in temperature be caused by an accelerated urban heat island effect due to the housing boom at this time?
Met Office forecasts warmest year ever. I would like to place a bet on that – but,
before I part with my money, I would like to know who is going to be holding the measuring tape. Surely we are no longer going to pay any attention to results that in any way depend on input from CRU?
approximately occurred area hypothesis
Trains stuck in Channel Tunnel due to cold weather…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8421875.stm
Took the family out to a friends birthday party last night so the house was empty overnight. Just spent the last two hours thawing out frozen cold water pipes in the kitchen extension, first time I’ve ever had to do that in the twelve years that we have lived here!
The UK is cold and if anybody tells me that it would be colder if it wasn’t for AGW they can go get ……….
Fred from Canuckistan . . . (11:12:03) :
You folks ‘cross the pond there . . . . you folks in England . . . .keep this up and you’ll soon qualify for honourary Canuckistani status.
You’ll love playing hockey & lacrosse. So much more fun than your football 🙂
Fred,
I am in North Carolina USA, and I am way ahead of you. I have my horse drawn sleigh, cross country skis and chains for my truck… All of which I have used here in balmy NC. I am presently watching it snow…
HadCRUT3 11-2009: +0.46 °C. Rank: 5/160
Warmest November in this series was in 2004.
Average last 12 months: 0.43 °C
http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.html
“KeithGuy (15:47:14) :
The Met Office just gave me a hot tip for the 1.15 at Haydock…
‘King of Confusion’.
Any takers?”
THOUGHT YOU MIGHT LIKE TO KNOW. IT’S JUST BEEN CALLED OFF BECAUSE OF THE COLD WEATHER.
Don Penman (02:18:07) :
I have downloaded the temperature data from the met office for RAF waddington near where I live in the UK. the yearly averages I have worked out from them remain fairly flat until the late 1990s and then start increasing after that.The winter temperatures show a greater increase than summer temperatures which still remain fairly flat.Could the increase in temperature be caused by an accelerated urban heat island effect due to the housing boom at this time?
From my own recollection it’s clear to me that winters really were warmer in the late 90’s and early to middle 2000’s, but have cooled again since.
I think this was due to the jet streams moving further north, and now moving south again.
Don Penman,
As you live nearby, why don’t you find the location and go take a look – indeed, why not take a picy?
Question: is this data raw data or adjusted?
I have a theory on why the MET use the Jan to Sept figure for its prediction on how hot a year is and why they normally get it too high.
As the northern hemisphere has a higher proportion of land/sea than the southern hemisphere then as land loses heat in winter faster than the oceans then they will always be pronoucing in advance that a years average temp is higher than a final figure as the last 3 months is always winter in the northern hemisphere.
Does this sound valid ?
Reference to the Met Office prediction that 2010 could warm to record levels due to the combination of manmade greenhouse gases and an El Nino.
The Met Office just issued a report concluding that the warming between 1999 and 2008 can be comletely accounted by El Nino’s . So how we suddenly know that manmade greenhouse gases will be responsible for the record warming in 2010 [ may actually turnout to be cooling instead ] is false. There appears to be real scientific confusion at the Met Office.
The UK MET Office recently reported that global temperature had slowed , and that the entire warming from 1999-2008 when all the global warming records were set can be accounted for by a natural cycle called El Nino and the warming seemed to have had very little to do with manmade greenhouse gases.
Here is a quote from their article
Observations indicate that global temperature rise has slowed in the last decade (Fig. 2.8a). The least squares trend for January 1999 to December 2008 calculated from the HadCRUT3 dataset (Brohan et al. 2006) is +0.07±0.07°C decade–1—much less than the 0.18°C decade–1 recorded between 1979 an2005 and the 0.2°C decade–1 expected in the next decade (IPCC; Solomon et al. 2007). This is despite a steady increase in radiative forcing as a result of human activities and has led some to question climate predictions of substantial twenty-first century warming (Lawson 2008; Carter 2008).
El Niño–Southern Oscillation is a strong driver of interannual global mean temperature variations. ENSO and non-ENSO contributions can be separated by the method of Thompson et al. (2008) (Fig. 2.8a). The trend in the ENSO-related component for 1999–2008 is +0.08±0.07°C decade–1, fully accounting for the overall observed trend. The trend after removing ENSO (the “ENSO-adjusted” trend) is 0.00°±0.05°C decade–1, implying much greater disagreement with anticipated global temperature rise.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/global_temperatures_09.pdf
And this is the latest forecast from the Met. Its in a piece they issued to explain why the increase in temps stopped after 1998.
‘Our decadal forecast predicts an end to this period of relative stability after 2010. We project at least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than the 1998 record. Climate researchers are, therefore, reinforcing the message that the case for tackling global warming remains strong.’
So if the cooling continues they are stuffed.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/policymakers/policy/slowdown.html
One of the knock on effects of poor Met Office forecasts is that some councils use them to gauge whether they need to grit the roads. Snow that is a surprise to the Met Office is a surprise to the gritters as well.
winter 09/10 forecast England
The Met vs. Piers Corbyn
cold 2009/2010 winter forecast for USA from Farmers Almanac
they compare the Farmers Almanacs forecast to the NOAA’s—they’re opposites
Someone gave me a link to the download page for hadleycru world weather stations it is station 033770.I am not sure if it has been adjusted or not.It gives average monthly temperatures from 1951 onward.I have wanted to find out where the weather station is situated for sometime now, more so now
************
JohnH (05:48:42) :
I have a theory on why the MET use the Jan to Sept figure for its prediction on how hot a year is and why they normally get it too high.
As the northern hemisphere has a higher proportion of land/sea than the southern hemisphere then as land loses heat in winter faster than the oceans then they will always be pronoucing in advance that a years average temp is higher than a final figure as the last 3 months is always winter in the northern hemisphere.
Does this sound valid ?
***************
Why should we be surprised at anything these jokers do. It is becoming clear that the resistance to releasing raw data is because it will be seen and shown to be a sham.
“2007 is likely to be the warmest year on record globally, beating the current record set in 1998, say climate-change experts at the Met Office.”
Conveniently forgotten, they said the same for 2002.
Hoping that 2010 may be third time lucky perhaps?
Another below freezing day in E England – might have to go back to 1997 or even the eighties to beat that…
“So the guy from Kent is just excited, and freaked out by all the white stuff and the cold. They’re just not used to it down there”
I live in Gravesend, myself – have done for 14 years – and I have to say that up until maybe 4-5 years ago we never got any snow here past occasional flakes that didn’t settle. I don’t know if it’s the proximity of the Thames or what, but this area is (with the possible exception of Heathrow!) often the warmest place in Britain. It can snow up on the Downs [if you know what I mean!] but be quite snow-free here. It just didn’t happen.
Before we had kids, I used to regret that they’d probably never get a chance to play in the snow. Yet now we’ve had heavy snowfalls (for Britain!) on and off through the last 5 years and in both of the last two winters. Met Office notwithstanding, the winters seem to be getting colder and the summers seem to be getting worse!
Four years ago in a fit of rampant optimism, my wife bought a sledge for the kids expecting maybe to use it once or twice. It’s starting to look worn, now…
The new name:
MET forecast = Magnificently Erroneous Temperature forecast.
My ex, who works as a seed shipper, used to rename railroad companies. For example the Union Pacific RR was renamed the Utterly Pathetic RR. But the Southern Pacific was renamed Simply Pathetic because they were a bit better.
You guys have GOT to take a look at the monster jet stream!!!! Such claws! And it looks like the horrid thing is about to EAT California!
http://squall.sfsu.edu/gif/jetstream_norhem_00.gif
BBC – On FIVE trains getting stuck in the Chunnel for 16 hours – “What was UNPRECEDENTED was the weather conditions particularly in northern France with heavy snowfall and very, very cold temperatures outside of the tunnel.”
Unprecedented? Hmmm… I see. Well NO train has ever broken down in the Chunnel due to “heavy snowfall and very, very cold temperatures outside of the tunnel” EVER in its 16 year history.
IPCC – Virtually Certain for the 21st Century – warmer and fewer cold days and nights, reduced disruption to transport due to snow and ice, (thats nice – so even less chunnel breakdowns?), reduced energy demand from heating (The power grid unit of French utility giant Electricite de France SA (EDF.FR) warned Monday that electricity demand could surge to surpass record highs in France this week due to the cold and said it will import power from abroad to help meet demand.)
“Major Snowstorm Hits Eastern U.S.”
They are not doing very well in their virtually certain predictions so far.
He added: “It is utterly unprecedented to have five trains failing in the tunnel at the same time. We will obviously be looking very closely at this to make sure that is does not happen again.” (Let the Globe get warmer?)
A true deja vu for the met office goes something like this:
[snip]
What?
The data don’t fit.
So, do the trick.
Isn’t that old already?
Don’t matter, if the map don’t fit reality, change reality.
Any ideas for post deja vu?
A fall off in Global avg temps in the last 3 months is not untypical. Dec 2009 will be interesting when it gets added
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/2009+2005+2007.pdf
John, personaly I have no longer any belief that any gov agency will give honest data so their pretty maps and graphs are just works of art. When independent scientists tell me the solar activity is down (and I read in 2001 or thereabout, that a Russian scientist pointed out the low solar activity with respect to solar flares and he had looked at data going way back to ancient chinese observations, predicted this minimum.) that I will listen to because although I am not scientifically trained I am an engineer by training and I do not like being treated like an idiot and that is what A Gore, the CRU and UN do. WUWT give information, if as clearer form as is logical and give decent analysis the rest sound like Jehovah’s witnesses “discussing” Darwin (in their books they say “of course you can dismiss Darwin”
I would like to say thank you to all of you decent scientific and mathematical good guys here who have made it possible to shame the greedy bastards who nearly stole our future!
Happy Christmas for next week.
Chris Edwards
I understand several people have frozen to death in the areas struck with severe weather.
In 2007, the Met Office also said that, “Warming will begin in earnest in 2009.”
This statement has since been removed form their website, but I remember it and so do many others observers, as google shows,
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&safe=off&rlz=1C1GGLS_en-GBGB298GB304&ei=21IvS8KEJ5iRjAfnrbzSAg&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&ved=0CAYQBSgA&q=met+office+warming+will+begin+in+earnest+in+2009&spell=1
I understand that the only temperature measuring station with an unbroken (and publicly accessible) record since sampling began int he mid C19th is the one in Ulster. This appears to reveal a continuous cyclical warming and cooling, with no overall increase over the 160+ years. I saw the graph on a site a couple of weeks ago but can’t find the link now – can anyone reference please?
As for the Met office, I’m a sports photgrpaher so have to keep a close eye on the weather to decide what to ear and take to a job. Twice in November the Met was still predicting gale force winds and driving rain on their website at midnight before a top race meeting – on both days we had almost constant sunshine and little wind.
This is not just an inconvenience for people in the business like myself – it impacts massively on gate attendance as people opt to stay home and watch on TV. I wish sports venues would start to sue the useless t*ssers who make these predictions at vast public expense