The Met Office, eyes wide open

First brought to my attention by Matthu at Bishop Hill.

” With solar physicists predicting a long-term reduction in the intensity of the solar cycle – and possibly its complete disappearance for a few decades, as happened during the so-called Maunder Minimum from 1645 to 1715 – this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite global warming.”
Shouldn’t that read “icy winters ahead rather than global warming”? As it stands it doesn’t make sense, it’s going to get colder despite getting hotter.

Let’s sent a kind thought to whoever started Climate-gate. The effects are starting to be seeing.

China’s soot saved them re the 1998 to 2008 non warming… now they are ready to say that CO2 would have caused the warming were it not for the blasted sun spots cycle! We still need a carbon tax though!

Cognative dissonace? (Hmm, spelling looks a bit dodgy there!)
Thyt’re still trying to keep in with their political masters, by saying that “Carbons” are very naughty and so any plebs using them must be suitably punished, whilst a spark of science has started a bit of a real fire under them.

From the article: “For all the prodigious processing power and observational resources of the worldwide meteorological system, forecasting decisions still come down to human skill and experience. The Met Office would never rely solely on a computer-generated forecast, . . . ”
I guess that’s what the AGW argument comes down to. It’s OK to introduce their human conviction that CO2 causes non-linear warming because “forecasting decisions come down to human skill and experience.”
Apparently their skill and experience gleaned from predicting millenia of warming has given them the intuition to know when they are right, regardless of the data or the models.

” Some climate-change sceptics seem to attack Met Office weather forecasts as a way of undermining its climate predictions.”
Ah! So its our fault that poor science emanates from Jones, his team and the Met Office. I will slap my legs and go and stand in the corner!
Until then, let the Met Office be run as a private company, raising its own funds and stop wasting U.K. tax payers money for its political ends. They will then stand or fall on the accuracy of their piss poor predictions.

At last common sense prevails, maybe we in the UK will have sufficient stocks of grit and snowploughs during winter from now on.

Ah, mundanes. The average reader of “hard” speculative fiction (particularly those of us who read “military SF”) got a heavy dose of this in John Ringo‘s 2008 – pre-Climategate – novel The Last Centurion.
Sample chapters are freely accessible online, including Chapter Two:
“I Was and Am an Idiot”, in which can be read the following:

The article my dad sent me was from a British source. See, there was this solar physicist in Britain who had sort of gotten out of the solar physics field and entered the long-range forecasting field. Weather, that is. We all know, Lord God do we know, that all that baloney about “greenhouse gases” and “man-induced global warming” was so much horse sh-t. But back then it was all “global warming! CO2 will kill us all!” Man, we wished we’d had that sort of CO2, didn’t we?
But the thing about this guy, don’t recall his name, was that he did long-range weather forecasts based on solar activity. He’d studied the sun until he should have been blind and had figured out that just about everything related to the sort of weather farmers cared about came down to solar output. Forget CO2, it was all the sun. We all know that now. Most of you probably know who I’m talking about. Damn, why can’t I remember his name?
Anyway, Dad sent me this article. It was complicated. I had to dredge up some long-stored memories from my “Weather and Agriculture” classes but I finally figured it out. Basically, the guy was being very cautious in saying that Our Friend the Sun had turned off.
Oh, not completely. But his predictions were way more cautious than normal and just f-cking dismal for the next growing season. He even put a caveat in the end. I recall it to this day.
“Based upon these indicators, NYP (Next Year Predictions) indicate significant chance of severe cooling regimes.”
Severe cooling regimes. That would be 2019. Nobody has to be reminded about 2019.
And then there was Dad’s note at the end. “Investing heavily in triticale.”
For all you non-farmers and non-Star Trek buffs, triticale is rye. See, there’s a couple of things about rye. The first thing is that it’s not exactly a big need crop. Wheat? Lots of markets for wheat. Ditto corn. (Maize to you Europeans and Canoe-Heads.) Soy? Always good markets for soy. Beans of various sorts. Peas. We grew it all, even seasonals like broccoli. All good markets.
Rye is a niche market. Not a bunch of people lining up for rye. (Didn’t used to be back then. Less so now, too. Thank God we’re past eating nothing but rye bread from the lines, huh?)
But the main thing about rye is that it grows fast and is cold hardy. Winter wheat’s cold hardy but . . . Oh, it’s complicated. There’s also only so much winter wheat market and it’s touchier than rye in certain cold and wet conditions. Look, I’m a professional. Do not try this at home.
Bottomline? Dad trusted this guy enough to be prepared to take a big hit economically on the basis that that was going to be the only way to survive.
Farmers are planners.

Pardon the elisions, but automated censoring in posting software sucks.
In his novel, Mr. Ringo was referring, I suspect, to solar physicist Piers Corbyn, of course, and he projected global cooling due to solar minima much later in the present decade than will most probably be the case.
But like most scientifically literate non-scientists during the run-up to the C.R.U. correspondents’ exposure in late 2009, he knew damned well that “global warming” was bullpuckey, and what the consequences of the most probable real global climate variations will be.
It’s true that “Farmers are planners.” Professional hard SF writers and readers are futurians.
And mundanes are cement-heads.

Brian H says:
“The blinders may be lowered for nearer term forecasting, but if the MET is operating at all with the opinion that CO2 is a “warming driver”, it’s walking on thin air when it comes to climate predictions. It is running the WAG-o-flop computer on that one.”
Surely you mean “it’s walking on thin ICE” 🙂