A graphical review of 14.5 years disappointing UK weather
Guest essay by Neil Catto
A meeting today (18th March 2013) took place at the UK Met Office HQ in Exeter. See the report here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2013/meeting-unusual-seasons
It was arranged to include the best climatologists and meteorologists to gain better understanding of the ‘disappointing UK weather over recent years’.
Now, that the AGW debate with regard to the relationship between CO2 and temperature has been shown to be insignificant, I can only imagine the next course of action. Listening to Roger harbinger of doom on BBC Radio 4 this morning; weird weather, extremes this and that…blah blah!
I thought I would have a look and see how unusual (oops! disappointing) it has been for the last 14.5 years at a southern UK location.
Fig 1 Average daily (24hrs) pressure Well that’s not very worrying, almost a straight linear trend. 
Fig 2 Daily rainfall duration (any hour of 24 reporting precipitation) Well that’s not very worrying either, a very small decline in rainfall duration. It appears wet every day, it isn’t of course, it’s only the large amount of information (5353 days) makes it look that way on these compacted graphs.
Fig 3 Daily (24hrs) Rainfall volume As with rainfall duration, there is a very small linear decline. There are certainly LESS number of high daily amounts in the last 8 years (2004-2013) than the previous 6 years.
Fig 4 Average daily (24hrs) relative humidity Getting bored with the flat line trends yet? How boringly normal the weather is!
Fig 5 Daily (24 hrs) maximum hourly wind speeds It is getting a little windier about 2.5mph/day, but hardly anything to worry about.
Fig 6 Daily (24 hrs) maximum temperatures Slightly COOLER, oh dear there goes the CO2 driving temperature rise theory!
Fig 7 Daily (24 Hrs) minimum temperatures Yet another boring straight line trend, shaking in your boots yet?
Fig 8 Daily (24hrs) average temperatures Slightly COOLER, so it’s lower maximum temperatures driving the average down! And still CO2 levels continue to rise.
Fig 9 this is my weather ‘feel’ index This index is how the weather makes us feel. On a scale of 0-60; 0-6.9 (feel bad), tired, lethargic, miserable and despondent: >7.0 (feel good) full of energy, bright, lively and dynamic. As ‘disappointing’ is an emotion and this index is a measure of emotion, it shows the weather has been making us feel a little worse.
There has been less hours of sunlight.
I know the comments have been a bit cynical and light hearted but honestly where is the gloom, the doom, the despondency and catastrophe in 14.5 years of perfectly normal very stable weather.
On a last note, I think we can all agree the Earth has been, at stages in its past history, covered or mostly covered in glacial ice. Most people will agree that global temperatures have been much higher than today, based on paleo-geology and archaeology. Well I suggest, in very simplistic terms, the difference between the two extremes of cold and hotter, is natural variation. Is climate change real? – isn’t the change between the wide divergence of natural variation, stating the obvious.
Related articles
- UK Met Office convenes meeting to make up excuses for lack of global warming (junkscience.com)
- Meeting on UK’s run of unusual seasons (metofficenews.wordpress.com)
- Met Office, do I see a prediction? (tallbloke.wordpress.com)
I am so scared & terrified of the impending…………………………………..average weather to come!!!!!!! Then again there are those wretched extremes of weather that are just so…………………….normal!!!
I was shocked, yet greatly heartened to see a BBC news report last night about this meeting and they reported that the Met Office “did not know” why the weather had been unusual. And the last 18 months have been unusual. I cannot remember a summer through to winter as wet as last years. There were definitely a lot more floods where I live in Cumbria, than there had been for years and the farmers I speak to up here have never known weather as bad for a very very long time. Likewise the unusual cold winter and spring.
No, this weather is not unprecedented, as some have tried to claim, but it is unusual.
What I was heartened by was the BBC reporting the Met Office press conference saying that this unusual weather could be caused by the sun, or any number of other things not exclusively, but possibly including, human CO2. And most likely it is a combination of these things. They said it was a result of the jet stream, but that they do not know what is driving it to change position to high or low, over or under the UK.
I know that there are still paid believers in ‘human CO2 being the driver of everything bad’, at the Met Office, but I am glad that there are still some scientists left there who are willing to look at conflicting data and admit that they do not know.
Small grammar niggle. When something is countable, e.g. hours, it should be ‘fewer’ not ‘less’. So you can can have e.g. ‘less sunlight’ and ‘less wind’ but ‘fewer hours’ and ‘fewer storms’, Best not to give them grammar mistakes to pick in, because when they see the have no factual criticisms, you can be sure that’s the way they’ll try to rubbish this.
Did you mean 18th June – because they had a meeting yesterday ?
the general “consensus” starting with harbinger in the early morning (pre meeting) and finishing with Dr Richard Betts in the afternoon (post meeting) was that the Arctic caps melting were a possible cause and various other natural phenomena could, maybe and perhaps could cause this “unusual” weather. no one challenged them on their models and lack of forecasting ability nor did anyone ask about CO2.
I’m sure given time they will come up with some appropriate spin on this and how they wil lneed more funding and a bigger computer 😉
I believed that one of the drivers for this “get-together” was to discuss the reasons why the MO models had, for the past 13/14 years, consistently, and without fail, predicted temperatures on the warm side of average. As of yet I have seen no reference to this in any official release or MSN output. Have I missed something here?
The UK press each have their own interpretations of the meeting.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/10128658/Run-of-wet-summers-could-last-another-10-years.html?placement=mid3#disqus_thread
“The high level meeting concluded that climate change is a major factor in colder winters.
A new pattern identified by the University of Reading was blamed for making wet summers more likely.
The meteorolgists noticed a warming of the North Atlantic Ocean in recent years.
This “North Atlantic Oscillation” pushes the jet stream south. Usually the channel of winds, that move from west to east, is much further north of the UK. When it shifts south, like it did last summer and is currently doing, it means wet weather from the Atlantic is blown in over the country.
It caused a run of wet summers in the late 1950s and early 1960s and in the 1880s.
The Met Office do not know exactly what causes the pattern to repeat but predict it will last for another ten years. The current run of wet summers began in 2007 and usually the pattern lasts for ten to 20 years.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/18/climate-uk-weather-summer-rain
“The scientists must now address what “dynamical drivers” are causing this cycle, Belcher said. The meeting debated a range of possible interconnected reasons for the unusual weather of recent years, including this year’s cold spring and the freezing winter of 2010/11. The most likely cause for the wet summers, he said, was the Atlantic multi-decadal oscillation, or AMO, a natural pattern of long-term changes to ocean currents.
Other candidate causes that could be “loading the dice”, as Belcher described it, include a shift in the jet stream, solar variability and fast-retreating Arctic sea ice. Aggravating all of these factors could be the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22959578
“The UK’s recent run of damp summers could be down to a cyclical warming of the Atlantic Ocean.
That was the view of scientists and meteorologists who gathered at the Met Office to discuss the unusual weather patterns of recent years.
They said that this 10 to 20 year pattern of Atlantic warming was shifting the jet stream, leading to washouts in six of the last seven summers.
But they suggested that the pattern would change at some point in the next decade.
The researchers said the location of the fast moving winds of the jet stream was critical to the UK’s weather.”
Thanks Neil, most enlightening. I shall use your graphs to lead the unknowing into the light, and hopefully they will have a happier existence as a consequence.
People often say that today’s weather is “worse than anything they remember”.
Leaving aside memory bias which often makes past summers seem warmer, how long is human recall? 40 years on average? Vanishingly short in the life of a planet.
Forget anecdotes and examine the instrumental records. Even with errors and ‘adjustments’ they have to be more reliable than memory, and they go back a lot further.
We have no right to expect the weather always to be comfortable – we happen to have lived during a relatively stable, relatively temperate period, but that wasn’t specially arranged for our benefit!
The planet and the universe don’t care a quark whether we are happy or not.
How can they have a sensible discussion of climate, without Greenpeace, WWF and a few Indian railway engineers present.
In North Wales it’s business as usual. warm rain/ cold rain.
Disappointing = Does not follow what the Climate Models predict.
Conclusion
The weather must improve itself or the CRU will not take it seriously.
……or is it the other way round?
Internationally the British are regarded as being obsessed by the weather and the reason is ‘normal’ in our weather is always abnormal.
I’ve been ‘going on’ about the north Atlantic and England’s climate for about nearly 3 years ( see here ).
Since then more research and data is incorporated to provide more complete picture, some of it shown here
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-NV.htm
From the above ‘armchair research’ it could be concluded that only a major geological activity to the north of Iceland may change current UK weather patterns, but even then there is inbuilt delay of up to a dozen or so years, not to mention the ‘heretical idea’ that the above is linked to the solar activity (as shown in the above link).
It would be extraordinary if anyone at the Met Office would even consider such unorthodoxy.
Fig 5 Daily (24 hrs) maximum hourly wind speeds It is getting a little windier about 2.5mph/day, but hardly anything to worry about.
I find it interesting that even with this numerically small, but seemingly significant percentage wise gain (looks to be about 35-40% to my admittedly rough eyeball) the highly promoted British wind energy industry has managed to turn in such thoroughly unimpressive output numbers over this time frame. Imagine how pathetic it would look if the winds had stayed as flat as all the other data shown.
Chris M says:
June 19, 2013 at 12:25 am
I believed that one of the drivers for this “get-together” was to discuss the reasons why the MO models had, for the past 13/14 years, consistently, and without fail, predicted temperatures on the warm side of average
I’ve read this 13 of 14 yrs before. I think it’s actually much worse than that. You see, the one year they got it right it was still high they were just dead lucky that a significant El Niño (unpredicted) came along without that piece of luck it would be 14 of 14 or maybe 20 of 20.
John Law says:
June 19, 2013 at 1:05 am
In North Wales it’s business as usual. warm rain/ cold rain.
I believe the saying in Wales is as follows: I you can see the hills it’s going to rain, if you can’t see them it’s raining. 🙂
Alarmists point out the higher pressure recently over Greenland and the Northern Arctic in general but fail to note that the switch to such a negative AO is pretty much coincidental with low solar activity.
In contrast, the high solar activity of the late 20th century was coincidental with a generally positive AO.
The same relationship was observed in the cooler middle part of the 20th century, the warmer early 20th century, the LIA and the MWP.
The evidence is clear in my view.
In ice ages the AO would have been even more extremely positive with climate zones and jets pushed way down towards the equator. In those cases orbital changes altered the solar effects whereas on shorter time scales (1000 years or so) the changes appear to arise from cyclical shifts in the mix of particles and wavelengths from the sun as activity waxes and wanes.
Such changes in mix appear to alter stratospheric temperature differentially between equator and poles thus affecting the gradient of tropopause height between equator and poles thus allowing the jets and climate zones to slide to and fro latitudinally.
The mechanism is via changes in the balance of destruction and creation of ozone at different heights.
Overall, an active sun cools the stratosphere whilst an inactive sun warms the stratosphere which is the opposite of established climatology but matches observations if one takes the assumed effects of CO2 and CFCs out of the mix.
I think it will turn out that the cooling stratosphere of the late 20th century was nothing to do with us after all or if we had any effect it was dwarfed by natural variability
Very nicely done. Yep, it must be getting harder for those scare-mongers to talk about doom and gloom all the time. I suppose that would make them depressed, and, well… more doomy and gloomy.
If these scientists looked at history, scattered with ”extreme” events, they would not look so daft. They also need to get rid of that fascination/fixation with CO2 and look at the real world which does not act like the models.
In the Met Office’s ramblings about yesterday’s meeting in Exeter they admit they still can’t tell what is climate change and what is natural cycles. It’s strange that when the global temperature was going up they were convinced that it had to be man made and couldn’t possibly be Gaia on her cycle.
I’m sure that half the problem with perception of ‘abnormal’ weather is Joe Public’s confusion over averages. Frequently on news items about weather you will hear things like ‘a month’s worth of rain fell in two hours’. This totally misses the point that during certain months of the year, rainfall will often fall in one heavy storm, rather than as a light drizzel spread over the whole month.
Basically they haven’t a clue and they are still hoping that CO2 is the driver,in the mean time
keep people like Harribin pumping out the climate change meme and hope for a hot el nino year to come along …..sad and they call themselves scientists
i have discovered there is a simple correlation between garbage summers in southern england ( summers are always garbage north of Birmingham ) and warmer arctic / sea ice melt rates. If you look back since the start of reliable records this is apparent. Why is this ? Well it is not intuative to assume this is caused by a warming atlantic because although recent discoveries point at warmer water being the cause of sea-ice and ice sheet terminus melt, from that one would assume that ( as basic science dictates ) the warmth of the atlantic would try to equalise towards northern climes to maintain “balance”….. BUT this would surely lead to far less dramatic difference in temperatures across the ocean latitudes and one would assume the atmospheric temperatures would be dominating Jet Stream pathways and these show much less cyclical variability ( relative to the norm ) than the ocean…. So…My hunch is that its the Jet Stream that may be driving the ground effects, and not the other way round. Furthermore , scientists at the MET office (word ‘scientists’ used loosely of course) seem also to ignore that the JetStream may appear to “guide” our low pressures towards us but really basic science tells me that its just as likely that the jet stream is a necessary partner of low pressure trying to be equalised by high pressure and the spin of the earth. Every time I visit this topic I am left with more questions than I had to start with. But then again unlike MET office “scientists” I do not pretend to know what drives our weather patterns…
Met Office dilemme explained. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/seanthomas/100222487/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-we-have-to-trust-our-scientists-because-they-know-lots-of-big-scary-words/
Come on man(C’mon Man). It’s the sun.
The sun is entering a Maunder like minimum. The paleo record shows there have been 9 warming periods in the North Atlantic followed by 9 cooling periods all of which correlate with solar magnetic cycle changes. Regardless of what Lief believes the sun was at its highest activity level in 11,000 years during the last 70 years.
The warmists scientists have ignored a long list of observations and analyses that indicate the majority of the warming in the last 70 years was caused by solar magnetic cycle changes.
http://cio.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/root/1999/QuatSciRevvGeel/1999QuatSciRevvGeel.pdf
https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/74103.pdf
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/Mar1/Bond%20et%20al%202001.pdf
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
The current once in 8000 year period of high solar magnetic activity is over, complete, concluded, fini, finished, and so on.
Reality is reality. The warmists can not hide another Little Ice age, significant cooling.
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
It is a no brainer prediction. The planet will cool. How will the warmists spin the following :
“The last 70 years of warming was due to increased solar magnetic cycle activity. The recently observed abrupt cooling, will last for 50 to 150 years. The incorrect statements made concerning AWG were hype, made up to push idiotic green scams that have wasted hundreds of billions of dollars and resulted in massive job losses in Western Countries. Increased CO2 causes benign, beneficial insignificant warming and a very significant increased in plant growth and crop yield. There is no need to reduce CO2 emissions. We are very sorry for the mistake.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22949012
“No surprise, the Met Office meeting did not produce any startling conclusions. Instead it pointed to areas where more research is needed (though scientists always say that more research is needed.)
For reasons that are not fully clear, the Met Office itself seemed curiously coy about this gathering.
None of us could sit in to follow the debate. We weren’t even allowed to film the opening minutes of the session, which is common practice at all kinds of events.
Was the shyness because of memories of the mishandled and notorious ‘barbecue summer’ forecast?
Or nervousness at climate sceptics finding fault with every detail?
Or fear of the media misunderstanding the delicacies and uncertainties of a complicated craft and distorting some point with hype and headlines?
Or was there concern that we might peer into the thickets of science with its myriad challenges and conclude that the answer to the question: “What’s going on with the weather?” is a rather disappointing and potentially embarrassing damp squib: “We don’t really know”.”
https://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/74103.pdf
The Sun-Climate Connection by John A. Eddy, National Solar Observatory
Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate during the Holocene
A more recent oceanographic study, based on reconstructions of the North Atlantic climate during the Holocene epoch, has found what may be the most compelling link between climate and the changing Sun: in this case an apparent regional climatic response to a series of prolonged episodes of suppressed solar activity, like the Maunder Minimum, each lasting from 50 to 150 years8. … ….The paleoclimatic data, covering the full span of the present interglacial epoch, are a record of the concentration of identifiable mineral tracers in layered sediments on the sea floor of the northern North Atlantic Ocean. The tracers originate on the land and are carried out to sea in drift ice. Their presence in seafloor samples at different locations in the surrounding ocean reflects the southward expansion of cooler, ice-bearing water: thus serving as indicators of changing climatic conditions at high Northern latitudes. The study demonstrates that the sub-polar North Atlantic Ocean has experienced nine distinctive expansions of cooler water in the past 11,000 years, occurring roughly every 1000 to 2000 years, with a mean spacing of about 1350 years
vukcevic says:
June 19, 2013 at 1:21 am
It would be extraordinary if anyone at the Met Office would even consider such unorthodoxy.
It would be extraordinary if anyone at all would consider such nonsense.
* they reported that the Met Office “did not know” why the weather had been unusual. *
The Met Office doesn’t know how many beans make five…..
“Summer is going to be a thing of the past”:
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4974770/Weather-experts-predict-summer-to-be-replaced-by-showersSummer-is-going-to-be-a-thing-of-the-past-for-next-10-YEARS-weather-experts-warn.html
Stephen Wilde says:
June 19, 2013 at 1:52 am
Overall, an active sun cools the stratosphere whilst an inactive sun warms the stratosphere
Which is opposite to what is actually observed.
William Astley says:
June 19, 2013 at 3:19 am
The current once in 8000 year period of high solar magnetic activity is over, complete, concluded, fini, finished, and so on.
It never was to begin with.
This is getting way beyond a joke now! As a UK weather forecaster for the coming few days, the Met Office is OK. Beyond that, evidentially, demonstrably, they guess – and invariably guess wrong!
The reports coming out of the meeting yesterday are stunning – but can be summarised as “it could be this or could be that” – but ultimately that haven’t got a clue!
We have had the Met Office warning us for years that global warming will bring the UK droughts and BBQ summers and winters where children will no longer know what snow is – now they have the gall, the turn all that on its head! The sheer bloody cheek of it!
The only thing “disappointing” about the UK weather is that it is behaving normally – i.e. unpredictably, and not adhering to their scaremonger predictions for the implications of MMGW.
How these so-called experts have the chutzpah to make yesterday’s pronouncements without a shred of apparent embarrassment or regret.
Useless, Useless, Useless!!
This is getting way beyond a joke now! As a UK weather forecaster for the coming few days, the Met Office is OK. Beyond that, evidentially, demonstrably, they guess – and invariably guess wrong!
The reports coming out of the meeting yesterday are stunning – but can be summarised as “it could be this or could be that” – but ultimately that haven’t got a clue!
We have had the Met Office warning us for years that global warming will bring the UK droughts and BBQ summers and winters where children will no longer know what snow is – now they have the gall, the turn all that on its head! The sheer bloody cheek of it!
The only thing “disappointing” about the UK weather is that it is behaving normally – i.e. unpredictably, and not adhering to their scaremonger predictions for the implications of MMGW.
How these so-called experts have the chutzpah to make yesterday’s pronouncements without a shred of apparent embarrassment or regret.
Useless, Useless, Useless!!
The one conclusion that can be drawn is that is you model computers you know about climate but if you go out in the weather for years in challenging situations you learn nothing about it.
Farmers know about weather and climate because they see the effects of it on their crops, in their livestock and in their bank accounts.
Mountaineers know about it because to interpret it incorrectly increases your risk of dying.
Insurance companies would do well to learn about it because if they get their premiums:payout ratios wrong, they’ll go belly up pretty darn quick.
I’m failing to understand why sitting in a building modelling computers brings insight per se…..
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 19, 2013 at 3:20 am
It would be extraordinary if anyone at all would consider such nonsense.
Yes sir, you stick with the ‘flat sun’ , CO2 and geniuses from the Met office, who got every single forecast longer than 5 days wrong, from barbecue summer to our children will not know what snow looks like.
Yes sir, you follow them, could even write them letter of support, they will need some.
I will follow what is happening in the Arctic ocean, its currents and the indicators of their change, you may not think that natural events control climate, but they do not happen without reason, but again that is your choice.
For nearly 3 years I advocated cooling in the N.W. Europe, the Met Office advocated rapid warming.
Vuk 1: 0 MetOffice
See you.
vukcevic says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:09 am
For nearly 3 years I advocated cooling in the N.W. Europe, the Met Office advocated rapid warming.
Consider being right for the wrong reason.
Vuk 0:1 Reason
And the man from the met office interviewed in the Times today
==========================================================
“”” Stephen Belcher, head of the Met Office’s Hadley research centre, warned sun lovers that the “dice are loaded” for the current run of bad weather to last for another five to ten years. He said that the cycle had only just been identified and it was too early to say what impact, if any, climate change is having or exactly how long it will last.
“I am excited about this research because it is a new thing. It is not necessarily the warming of the ocean, it is the pattern of warm and cold water so it is the contrast that is important, and when that sits in the right place below the jet stream it can steer the jetstream and influence where it goes,” Professor Belcher added. “”
=============================================================
Yes he said “”cycle had only just been identified”” and “”I am excited about this research because it is a new thing.””
He’s talking about the Atlantic Multidecadal oscillation. Quick give him more research money. Many have known about this for years. My mind is boggled.
“Stephen Richards says:
June 19, 2013 at 1:49 am
John Law says:
June 19, 2013 at 1:05 am
In North Wales it’s business as usual. warm rain/ cold rain.
I believe the saying in Wales is as follows: I you can see the hills it’s going to rain, if you can’t see them it’s raining. :)”
In South Wales, by the Bristol Channel, we have our own version:
“If you can see Devon, it’s going to rain. If you can’t see Devon, it is raining.”
Hi to University Of East Anglia
Thanks for taking a note of my graphs; you are welcome again at any time.
vukcevic says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:09 am
Yes sir, you stick with the ‘flat sun’
Perhaps you are ‘forgetting’ that I predicted a much lower solar cycle and that we are about to enter a prolonged minimum. Not exactly a ‘flat’ sun, but what is sticking with the truth when it comes to hyping your own nonsense.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:11 am
vukcevic says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:09 am
For nearly 3 years I advocated cooling in the N.W. Europe, the Met Office advocated rapid warming. Vuk 1: 0 MetOffice
Consider being right for the wrong reason.
Vuk 0:1 Reason
…………………………….
Far preferable even being right for the wrong reason, than being WRONG for the WRONG reason, but obviously not to you.
.
Leif seems to know as much about climate as the Met Office.
The stratosphere clearly cooled whilst the sun was active in the late 20th century and subsequently stopped cooling when the sun became less active.
It is not yet actually warming but there are reports of increasing ozone above 45km despite the quieter sun which is the opposite of expectations as conceded by Jo Haigh.
More ozone above 45km means warming above 45km and it can only be a matter of time before we see warming below 45km too.
vukcevic says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:18 am
Far preferable even being right for the wrong reason, than being WRONG for the WRONG reason
Actually not, as being right for the wrong reason makes you more likely to ‘predict’ a future event that will be wrong.
Stephen Wilde says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:21 am
It is not yet actually warming
You have finally seen the light.
Dr.S.
Perhaps you are ‘forgetting’ that I predicted a much lower solar cycle and that we are about to enter a prolonged minimum.
Big dill, so did I 10 years ago extrapolated from natural events (unlike you and the Met Office I do not do predictions)
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC2.htm
except that you only recently claimed NOT ‘prolonged minimum’ but very strong SC25, but then you change your mind.
My extrapolation from the astronomy data of possible prolong minimum goes back to 2003 !
How about that?
Neil, why cannot I see the very dry period of around 2 years leading up to the Apr 2012 hosepipe bans, and why cannot I see the extremely wet 6 months that followed, on your graphs?
Truly terrifying stuff Neil. The one graph you left out would show the rising trend of Met Office funding over the last decade. I’d bet that’d be another hockey stick …
Pointman
Winston Churchill says,” Americans usually get it right after they tried everything else”. Concur. Probable cause, our significant English ancestry.
vukcevic says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:31 am
except that you only recently claimed NOT ‘prolonged minimum’ but very strong SC25, but then you change your mind.
Not at all. More examples of your ‘forgetfulness’.
Extrapolations are not valid predictions.
This excellent blog article in the Daily Telegraph sums up the current state of knowledge very concisely:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/seanthomas/100222487/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-we-have-to-trust-our-scientists-because-they-know-lots-of-big-scary-words/
‘First, I asked Stephen Belcher, the head of the Met Office Hadley Centre, whether the recent extended winter was related to global warming. Shaking his famous “ghost stick”, and fingering his trademark necklace of sharks’ teeth and mammoth bones, the loin-clothed Belcher blew smoke into a conch, and replied,
“Here come de heap big warmy. Bigtime warmy warmy. Is big big hot. Plenty big warm burny hot. Hot! Hot hot! But now not hot. Not hot now. De hot come go, come go. Now Is Coldy Coldy. Is ice. Hot den cold. Frreeeezy ice til hot again. Den de rain. It faaaalllll. Make pasty.”’
Why Stephen Belcher, head of the Met Office’s Hadley research centre stated the AMO is “new” is beyond me!
We can only hope and pray that this will lead to more Media scrutiny and ultimately more questions being asked when the Meto gets forecasts wrong
STILL some of them are on about the ‘fast-melting Arctic sea ice…’
Do none of them take the trouble to look at the graphs on the Arctic Sea Ice page linked over there ¬ in the right-hand column..? Or is it a case of: ‘Yes, yes, I’m sure they’re very accurate but we like to make stuff up…’..?
This sort of extreme weather normality will be the end of all human life as we know it.
I think it is curious that the average wind speed is 6MPH and the UK Government still insists on building wind farms. So over the long term the output will always be low.
see – http://energybible.com/wind_energy/wind_speed.html
It obvious that with all that sunshine, 5 hours/day average and declining, solar power is the one to really waste money on.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:47 am
vukcevic says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:31 am
except that you only recently claimed NOT ‘prolonged minimum’ but very strong SC25, but then you change your mind.
…….
Not at all. More examples of your ‘forgetfulness’.
…………………………………
Or yours:
Leif Svalgaard says:
February 14, 2011 at 3:24 pm
Both assume that the sun is governed by real cycles, which there is hardly any evidence for.
I am inclined to think that SC25 might be a large cycle…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/13/m-class-solar-flare-today/#comment-599017
As someone who has lived in the UK all my life I can happily report that the weather is just as unpredictable as it’s always been. I remember well the ‘drought’ of ’76 (for a boy, a gloriously long summer holiday, despite stand-pipes in the street), as well as countless hot and cold ‘extremes’ in the decades since. The Met Office only make themselves look more foolish than they already are by pretending to be able to analyze the ‘underlying causes’ of so-called ‘extreme’ weather in the UK over the past few years.
What a joke. As anyone living in these Isles knows (yes, even the grumbling farmers, who are always very willing to offer a ready opinion on the weather), this is what the weather is like here – this really isn’t rocket (or climate) science.
PS: right now, outside my window here in Bedfordshire, UK, the sun is out, the temperature is lovely and warm and the reservoirs are all full to brimming.
What I’m seeing here (Atlanta, GA.) is that the local news, and the Weather Channel, are pushing everything as ‘extreme,’ ‘unseasonal,’ etc. Hit 89 today? The map will show a blazing red, even though it’s June, we’re in Georgia, and 89 is pretty much the status quo for the month of June in this location. Every single rainstorm, thunderstorm, cell phone report of high wind or a tree down gets the Media Blitz treatment. I work in an Infrastructure Operations Center, so we have 60+ large monitors, several with various weather radars active 24/7, and one with the Weather Channel running all day, all night, with every tiny localized event blown out of proportion constantly.
“The scientists must now address what “dynamical drivers” are causing this cycle, Belcher said. ”
Why? There’s damn all they can do about them!
BDTP, notes way above that Joe Public does not understand average. I agree, the average of 1 and 3 is 2. the average of storm force 12 and blinding sunny is grey overcast.
OK so not accurate but you see what I mean. Our weather over the past few hundred years is many floods, storms, ice, heat. The average is temperate west coast climate.
Get used to it.
The North Atlantic SST’s have been cooling since 2007, apart from the spike in 2010, which had a drier Spring/Summer: http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/6-no-atl.png
Pointman says:
June 19, 2013 at 4:40 am
Truly terrifying stuff Neil. The one graph you left out would show the rising trend of Met Office funding over the last decade. I’d bet that’d be another hockey stick …
Funding is of course the real reason for the panic and surprisingly overt meeting. Getting funding in the UK at the moment is somewhat difficult. Blood out of a Treasury stone. Even the sacred cows of the politicians have had to take large cuts. So along comes the Met Office fresh from 11 wrong out of 12 long range forecasts, a laughing stock for the entire population for the failure of even shorter range forecasts, and it wants more money while others are getting cuts. This is extremely difficult to justify. Judging by the reports, this meeting will not have assisted as much as they hoped. Somebody somewhere will be asking why _is_ the CRU being funded – justify their establishment. Hospitals, schools defence are all being cut – why do we need to fund these people that always get it wrong? Dr Slingo is your department more important than Accident and Emergency wards at 10 hospital trusts? Why? But you are always wrong…….? Meetings at the Treasury are never comfortable.
I can save them a boat load of money and tell them why the weather has been disappointing. It’s rather obvious. It’s because its weather. It changes. It does weird things. That’s just what it does. Just because some people would like it to be constant and predictable, doesn’t mean that it should be that way.
Leif thinks I have ‘finally seen the light’ when stating that the stratosphere has stopped cooling but is not yet warming (except maybe a little).
He knows full well that I have never said anything different.
However I have said that given time we will find that the stratosphere will warm if the sun stays inactive for long enough.
Leif complained previously about an alleged lack of means of verifying my comments despite my having given him many examples. This is another such example.
I say that the stratosphere will not resume cooling whilst the sun stays quiet and may well start warming.
Would it not be more appropriate for the Met to meet to discuss their increasingly disappointing forecasting?
Leif’s mad because he’s thick in the middle of this mad man modeling fetish that overcame everybody who pushed themselves to the fore of this climate scam with it’s magic gas and magic backerd-isms burning people’s eyes out of their sockets for looking up at the sky @ midnight.
All these various sophists, are looking like precisely
p.r.e.c.i.s.e.l.y.
what the magic gas story deniers,
have
a.l.w.a.y.s.
said they ARE:
Confidence men. Running scams acting confident
measuring popularity instead of correctness since that magic gas $#!+ was always preCISEly that.
Leif Svalgaard says:
June 19, 2013 at 3:48 am
“Summer is going to be a thing of the past”:
It’s all getting back to normal for the UK then!
@Ian Robinson – That can be reported to the Press Complaints Commission. It’s clearly not what was said in the press release. It violates
1. Accuracy
i) The Press must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted information, including pictures.
@Ian Robinson – I have lodged a complaint with the PCC.
Have the poster here noticed how many climate change critics are from an engineering background, computer/electronics seems to figure quite high as well. Maybe they are more used to the failure of computer modeling in the real world more than most.
Geophysicists who seek oil and gas are also accustomed to failure of the models, and that’s in a relatively simple situation with limited degrees of freedom in their models. (basically sound moving through rock)
I remember 1976 in the UK. Months and months of high pressure coming over the Atlantic from the Gulf of Mexico. This appears to be a low point for the AMO. No one claimed it was anything other than just a bit unusual and enjoy the summer. I remember Michael Fish week in, week out saying, tomorrow will be much the same as today, today, today… and today.
When did weather become scary? It’s like watching second rate horror films sometimes.
Ever notice in the real science fields, when you’re dead wrong and shown to be in front of millions you s.t.f.u. and fade to the rear and let someone whose stuff works, run the show –
but in climate, the mark you’ve been proven utterly wrong is going on an attack against others who are also in the field, in public, using snide sarcastic language acting like a jilted lover?
====
Everyone who’s getting their faces ground into pavement having been proven an utter buffoon buying into that magic gais scam is now going around growling “it’s YOUR work that’s REALLY disgusting” –
you can literally determine whose work has the MOST truth in it by simply looking for the “jilted lover hit piece” where false dichotomy is shamelessly laid out for taste testing by the uninformed sector of the audience.
====
The person who screams the other’s work infuriates him: is the one who’s been proven utterly and irrecoverably wrong; and EVERY one you see doing it’s a magic gasser.
The claim of being “infuriated/revulsed” (think jilted lover tone) by another’s work in climate
is ALL YOU NEED to SEE to know WHO’S been UTTERLY debunked as far as credibility.
It’s the one doing the jilted lover thing EVERY single TIME. Because they got their PLACE in climate, suppressing real science,
and the way you suppress real truth, is through feigned outrage at it.
If you’re new to the climate scam/ “green income stream” scam field where alarm about magic hot gas burning your hair and eye sockets out of your head at midnight due to magical Backerd’s radiation, get ready for your own variant of revulsion.
It’ll be the variant where “green income stream” scamming for no apparent reason, mindlessly attacks the work of perfectly honest men who happen to be right, while the “green income stream” clan try to keep doing the tribal boing-boing-over-magic-gas dance –
pretending everyone hasn’t stopped to watch them still bouncing up and down with their spears alternately ululating about the magic gas, and how not believing in it’s magic powers is ridiculous.
====
There are so many people ahead of these scammers. There’s a Dr. Nicola Scafetta an Italian who posts here sometimes. People don’t even spit at him. Watch his film on how he and some other guys figured out the sun’s internal center of mass being towed closer or farther from the earth according to the weight of the gas giant planets.
All these magic gas yodeling modelers are utterly humiliated. Not one of them can tell you what the weather’s going to be a week from today.
They have destroyed men’s reputations shamelessly: and now that the truth continues to roil up and swallow the ones who pushed that magic gas like it was Gospel Truth,
they’re desperately humiliated being seen,
fighting the hook they themselves, swallowed
and were gleefully destroying other grown men’s reputations, for not swallowing, too.
Michael Mann with his law suits, the whole mob of profiteers off magic gas alarm,
urgently & deliberately, cutting non magic gassers, completely out of any discussions possible, believers snidely organizing and using blog mobs, to extend ridicule –
-since being right was obviously never going to happen within magic gas / bigfoot / area 51 science country, ridiculing truth,
while simultaneously ringing, and profiting from “green” industry’s alarm bells,
was and still is the mode of operation.
====
If you think there’s a big mystery to how the climate works, you are either a magic gasser or you’ve been reading magic gas believers’ literature as answer to how it does.
Before you read one word there is something you must know: does the web site teach the GHGE is a real source of heat? If yes then every word they say will sound like it drizzled out of a man recovering from traumatic head wounds. Not one single word he tells you about any future event, will jibe with the instruments and with the other fields analyzing climate.
The ONLY people who EVER believed in it were and are making MONEY peddling it or profiting from the crowd the alarm brings. Because it simply never was nor will ever show any predictive power whatever.
How was a theory about a magic gas mirror absorbing 168 watts from a warm rock, then emitting 324 back down to the rock, and 324 up toward space, ever going to be real?
No matter HOW many lies it’s believer based science clowns tell: they’re nothing to science, but alarm scam profiteers:
for either money,
fame, or usually,
both.
If you’re new to this and you wonder why it all seems so complicated – it’s because the sole interest of a lot of grants scammers and other green income stream profiteers, for 20 years, has been to teach people about a magical gas mirror that has more power coming out of it, than went in.
Ask yourself if it looks all that impossible to tell what’s going on from this guy I already mentioned: I found this just going through his presentations one day after he personally posted here, some pdf of a paper he wrote.
He speaks native Italian and he’s hard to understand. “Oscillations: he says “isolations” and for “induced” he says, “in-dew-sed” and for “Heliosphere” he says “AY-lee-yos-feer”.
But I guarantee you that the next person who mentions magic gas being even credible as a suggestion will make you laugh, out loud, in spite of yourself. This guy’s no fool I kid you not.
You will not be asking for your 28 minutes back my friend. I promise you that. It’s like… “dAYUmn!”,
when at the 20:00 minute + mark, he says “you get THIS….black LINE.”
====
In due diligence I must say – you need to take the lull of the first 15 or so minutes. He explains how, it’s as simple as, the weight of the gas giants in the solar system, especially, combined with the weight of even other planets, pulling the mass gravitational center of the sun to the side where the earth is.
He says according to the weights of the various planets in their orbits, there are VERY easily defined patterns that have: 9 (the moon’s weight included) 10-11/20-22, 30/60, 200, and 1,000 year cycles.
In this one he concentrates on showing you how easy it is to see them, and then somewhere between 18:00 and 20:18 he says….”we get THIS….black LINE.”
====
You mark my words: I don’t know who you are, and I don’t care who you are. ONCE you hear a man named Nicola Scafetta say the words “THIS black LINE…”
YOU will be ANXIOUS for some clown to start barking magic gas in a space where you can hear it, because you will CALMLY walk over to that man, open your mouth, and say “Nicola Scafetta: THIS black LINE.”
You will walk off, and that argument will be O.V.E.R.
I GUARANTEE you that – or you can come back and tell me,
“Nah, I’m still a pretty big “magic gas”
man,
myself.”
We’ll see how many people come back saying they still have concerns magical backerdisms are going to burn their eyes out of their sockets
as they gaze up at the cloudless skies at midnight.
Nicola Scafetta: “this black line.”
iframe=true&width=80%25&height=80%25
Write the Met Office, send them a link to this, and tell them,
“Here – “review” this.”
Tell your Met Office Magic Gas Scammer you expect all his projections to come out like that.
LoL.
You will roam the earth LOOKING for somebody who’ll stand up in public and tell you he believes in that crap.
It’s even worse than that. Tossing a coin would would almost certainly have shown greater skill. A chimpanzee with a dartboard? Guessing? Tea leaves? All these would have done better than the Met Office or should that be Met Orifice.
tckev says (June 19, 2013 at 8:51 am): “Have the poster here noticed how many climate change critics are from an engineering background, computer/electronics seems to figure quite high as well. Maybe they are more used to the failure of computer modeling in the real world more than most.”
Maybe it’s just that programmers know a computer does exactly what you tell it to do. If you program warming into a GCM, for example, then–surprise!–you get warming out of it. GCMs tell us a lot more about the programmers than they tell us about the climate.
I know where I’m going this year for my summer holidays……………..the UK. It’s going to be a scorcher. ;-P Or maybe not.
After having received a £30 million supercomputer they asked for another one last year. Why??? So they can tell us that they have very little forecasting skill beyond 2 weeks?
vukcevic says:
June 19, 2013 at 6:12 am
I am inclined to think that SC25 might be a large cycle…
What you are neglecting is that a real prediction takes into account the evolution of the parameter(s) on which the prediction depends. This is a strength of a physics-based prediction. Back in 2011 the solar fields were decreasing rapidly. Had this held up we would have had an early SC24 maximum and lots of time for polar fields to build up again for SC25 [predicting a strong cycle]. As the Southern hemisphere stalled in 2012 it became clear that we would not have an early maximum and a weak SC25 became the only remaining option. Physics beats mindless extrapolation every time.
The alarmies just cling to their superstitions . . . the centerpiece thereof being that models are superior to empirical evidence. Day before yesterday, “global warming”; yesterday, “climate change”; today, “extreme weather.” Le plus ce change, le pluc c’est la meme chose. Nada nuevo abajo el sol.
I would recommend the MET read this paper. It is a no brainer to predict planetary cooling. The question is only how much cooling and how quickly the cooling will occur.
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/Mar1/Bond%20et%20al%202001.pdf
Persistent Solar Influence on North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene (William: Holocene is the name for this interglacial period)
One issue with using central England temperatures as a proxy for global temperatures is the central England temperature is strongly affected by the direction of the jet stream which changes year by year and decade by decade. Ignoring that issue, central England temperatures is the longest direct measurement data set which shows short term temperature changes. It should be noted that Greenland Ice surface temperatures correlates with both long term warming and cooling in Europe (Medieval Warm period and Little Ice Age for example) and correlates with solar magnetic cycle changes.
http://climate4you.com/CentralEnglandTemperatureSince1659.htm
Greenland ice temperature, last 11,000 years determined from ice core analysis, Richard Alley’s paper.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
Everyone agrees there has been a significant solar magnetic cycle change. That is an observational fact not a theory. How planetary temperature changes in the next few years, will determine what was the principal cause of the warming in the last 70 years (How much warming was due to CO2 Vs Warming due to solar magnetic cycle changes) … …What has happened in the past (cooling of the Northern hemisphere when there is a Maunder minimum) and the latitudinal pattern of the warming in the last 70 years strongly supports the assertion the planet will cool. There is now observed cooling in both the Arctic and Antarctic.
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
The regions of the planet that warmed in the last 70 years (Northern Hemisphere ex-tropics) is the same region of the planet that warmed in the past when there were a series of very active solar magnetic cycles. The Northern hemisphere ex-tropics (above 20 degrees) temperature anomaly is 4 times more than the tropical temperature anomaly (20S to 20N) and twice as much as the global temperature anomaly. This observational fact does not support the assertion that the warming in the last 70 years was due to the increase atmospheric CO2. The AWG theory and the general circulation models used by the IPCC, predicted that the majority of the warming due to the increase in atmospheric CO2 should be in tropics, 20S to 20N as that is the region where the most amount of long wave radiation is emitted to space and there is ample water to amplify the CO2 warming. Part of explanation for the lack of warming in the tropics is the IPCC models have amplification of CO2 warming of 3 to 5 times. The signature of amplification warming is warming of the troposphere at 8 km in the tropics. There no observed warming in tropics at 8km and further more there almost no warming in the tropics. Two peer reviewed papers support the assertion that rather than amplify the CO2 warming planetary cloud cover increases or decreases reflecting more sunlight off to space to resist warming.
When the solar magnetic cycle slows down there is a delay in cooling of high northern latitudes of roughly one solar cycle. The reason for the delay in cooling (if I understand the mechanisms) is the same reason why the earth’s rotational anomalously increases in speed when the solar magnetic cycle slows down (the change in rotational speed is too large to be explained by temperature changes).
http://climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#MSU%20UAH%20TempDiagram
Due to the current solar magnetic cycle change the length of day will decrease (planetary rotation speed will increase which reduces the length of day). Part of the reason for the increase in rotational speed is the cooling of the oceans, however, if you look at the length of day Vs planetary temperature it is evident that there is an unknown variable controlling the earth’s rotation speed. … … The unknown variable that controls the earth’s rotational speed is also the cause/the physical reason why Svensmark’s mechanisms which modulate planetary cloud cover were inhibited for the last 10 years. The current solar magnetic cycle change is unusual as there is a step change from a ‘series’ (I repeat a ‘series’) of very active solar magnetic cycle (i.e. The affect on planetary temperature of a series of very, very active solar magnetic cycles one after another is different than a single high solar magnetic cycle.) As Svensmark’s mechanisms are suddenly activated, the magnitude of the change in planetary temperature will be greater as the mechanisms were being inhibited.
http://climate4you.com/GlobalTemperatures.htm#Earths%20rotation%20and%20global%20temperature
William: The Arctic region cooling is predicted to be the most severe in the winter and the spring. There is now observational evidence that temperatures in the high Arctic have started to cool.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3256
Solar activity and Svalbard temperatures
The long temperature series at Svalbard (Longyearbyen) show large variations, and a positive trend since its start in 1912. During this period solar activity has increased, as indicated by shorter solar cycles. … … The temperature at Svalbard is negatively correlated with the length of the solar cycle. The strongest negative correlation is found with lags 10 to 12 years. … …We predict an annual mean temperature decrease for Svalbard of 3.5 ±2C from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24 (2009 to 2020) and a decrease in the winter temperature of ≈6 C.
William: Latitude and longitude of Svalbard (Longyearbyen)
78.2167° N, 15.6333° E Svalbard Longyearbyen, Coordinates
Hey Doc, you make me chuckle
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/19/a-data-review-to-supplement-the-uk-met-office-disappointing-weather-meeting/#comment-1341315
but I happen to be in a very good mood.
I don’t believe this meeting was really about recent weather, it was more to do with credibility and reputations.
Remember the models, http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/climateexperiment/theresult/resultsataglance.shtml
“UK temperature
The UK should expect a 4°C rise in temperature by 2080 according to the most likely results of the experiment.
Heatwaves are on the rise and, by 2080, summer temperatures of 40°C will be common. Winters will also be warmer.
UK rainfall
Summer rainfall is set to decrease and the UK can expect more frequent droughts
Winters will bring less snow and more rain, especially in the north and west. Storms will be more frequent and more severe.”
Basically we were to expect a northward movement of weather with Britain experiencing a Portuguese or Moroccan climate
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/climateexperiment/whattheymean/theuk.shtml
Why is it disappointing? Didn’t they cause the environment-destroying wind turbines to be built to remove CO2 from the atmosphere so that it wouldn’t be hotter with more drought ? In other words, isn’t cooler and wetter what they wanted ?
They collectively don’t know if they’re having a shit or a haircut.
I am just an ordinary meteorologist, trained by the UKMO, worked for them for 10 years, a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and took my career thereafter in another direction. For the last 15 years on a daily basis I have been archiving REAL (not manipulated) weather data. Using these data I have been researching how it affects living organisms, from mitochondria (bacteria) to humans. There is nothing alarming about what is happening to the global weather, it is all within the vast realms of natural variation.
My father was also a meteorologist (and atmospheric Physicist) and I do think its was always “yawn”. Nothing unusual happening abnormal in weather or climate. Basically been there seen it many times and its extremely boring and repeatable. If you actually could be bothered to look at daily weather in cities such as Brisbane Australia weather events are extremely repeatable even to the day. For example the Ekka Festival beginning of spring, was always cold,windy and a wet weekend. I saw the event repeat at least 14 out of 20 years to the date! I think to non-weather people (especially ardent young warmistas), looking at a weather map sometimes it looks like a monstrous storm, drought or whatever low or high system is coming to kill us all! Its all the lines, arrows, numbers and colors me thinks.. like this map for example which re-inforces their fears of AGW
http://wxmaps.org/pix/avnmr.00hr.html
hahah LOL
Hate to play Devil’s Advocate, but why was 1998 chosen as the starting point?
Réaumur says:
June 19, 2013 at 12:49 am
People often say that today’s weather is “worse than anything they remember”.
——————————-
One can search the historical archives and find books and papers from the middle ages where folks complained that the weather was “worse than anything they remember”. Probably written on Babylonian cuneiform tablets as well. But back then most people thought it was punishment from god for their sins.
Niko says:
June 19, 2013 at 6:43 am
What I’m seeing here (Atlanta, GA.) is that the local news, and the Weather Channel, are pushing everything as ‘extreme,’ ‘unseasonal,’ etc….
—————————————-
Same here in Philadelphia PA. Everything is “extreme” anymore. We had a “heat wave” a few weeks back. 90F for 3 days in a row! And then it was 65F and raining for the next 7 days. Oh but did we have a heat wave! Almost didn’t survive!
A week or so ago they scared everybody with a massive storm, flooding, winds, tornadoes, People didn’t come to work. I said one station was even predicting Chupacabras. Nothing but a little rain fell.
I think people tire of this like the story of the little boy that cried wolf.
.
Dear Met Office,
here’s a free clue. Until you can get the next month right don’t forecast the next 10 years. You are only going to look like an inept money pit.
Yours,
David
x
David UK
1998 was the year I started collecting the weather data for my research. Nothing more sinister.
Steveta UK
The resolution of these graphs cover over 5000 individual days. Expanding the resolution from the original data shows all sorts of patterns.
‘UK disappointing weather’ – (not so) clever way to deflect disappointing forecasts. Man this says oodles. I guess the forecasts were fine but the weather was disappointing. Taking this a bit further, how is the weather disappointing? Would it have been BETTER if we had your tropical summers and deep droughts that you were forecasting? Indeed, were you HOPING for such “extreme weather” things to happen? Weren’t you bemoaning the imminent onset of snowless winters that your poor children would only know from Christmas cards and tales of the old folks. Hey, the fact that it went the way you thought was best for the planet should not be a disappointment.
For both the Met Office and CRU I am proposing a new regime of ‘Payment by Results’ for all funding including wages.
Both agencies to be tasked to make forecasts and all payment will directly depend on the accuracy of the results. Forecasts will contain no passive language, error ranges to be strictly limited.
Met Office forecast will run up to 3 months into the future, CRU funding will depend on the accuracy of all forecasts and reports from the last 15 years to the present and weighted to reflect the publicity they enjoyed.
I believe such minor changes would improve all future forecasting in both accuracy and focus.
vukcevic says:
June 19, 2013 at 11:03 am
Hey Doc, you make me chuckle
Seems to be the only thing you can do. But take that lesson to heart.
“I think to non-weather people (especially ardent young warmistas), looking at a weather map sometimes it looks like a monstrous storm … or whatever … is coming to kill us all! Its all the lines, arrows, numbers and colors [like that red shading the Climatologists like to paint all over the western side of Antarctica on satellite photos, lol] me thinks… .” [Eliza at 12:24PM, today]
Good insight.
This isn’t for real, but it makes your point. (lol):
If the weather is back to what it was before CAGW and the greenies are still not happy, what weather will they be happy with? Is there any condition of weather that can co-exist with greenies?
mycroft says: @ June 19, 2013 at 4:50 am
Why Stephen Belcher, head of the Met Office’s Hadley research centre stated the AMO is “new” is beyond me!
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yeah,
He must not have bothered looking it up in WIKI
Phil Ford says:
June 19, 2013 at 6:17 am
As someone who has lived in the UK all my life I can happily report that the weather is just as unpredictable as it’s always been. I remember well the ‘drought’ of ’76….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
I remember it well too. We walked into caves that were normally sumps you had to dive and I managed to get a sunburn despite spending most of my vacation in the UK underground.
Ken Hall said: “There were definitely a lot more floods where I live in Cumbria, than there had been for years and the farmers I speak to up here have never known weather as bad for a very very long time. Likewise the unusual cold winter and spring.
No, this weather is not unprecedented, as some have tried to claim, but it is unusual. ”
No its not “unusual” at all Ken.
And the reason its not unusual is simply because the time frame youre measuring it over is only within the lifetime of a pesky carbon emitting human, its too short.
If you measure the patterns over a couple of 100 thousand or even a million years then youd see trends and changes because youd have greater resolution of the data, you have no resolution at timescales of 10’s of years, so no, its not “unusual” in the slightest.
Try measuring a 1 hz signal on an oscilloscope using the 10khz timebase and see where it gets you- straight lines anyone?
No wonder the [sarc] “best scientists in the field”[/sarc] dont know whats going on, not enough resolution to have a proper clue.
Guardian and BBC reporters are salivating in anticipation of the headline of a lifetime:
“Rain Stops Play At Wimbledon Not to Be A Thing Of The Past Due To Climate Change”.
First they forecast doom and gloom.
When the forecast is wrong, do they cheer and say “Verily, the Gods have spoken. Let us throw another
stack of taxpayer moneyvirgin on the fire”?No, they say “Oh noes, it’s worse than we thought!”
I can see it now. It’s Burn vs Freeze.
The new left vs right.
Which will kill us all first?
How can people live their lives seeking the down side of everything in life?
Boggles the mind.
cn
On the BBC weather site, people type in their local post code and it tells you what’s going to happen. We live in southern end of Lincolnshire – which is on the east side of the UK about a third of the way up.
On Saturday 15 June, the MET Office forecast for our area for this coming Sunday 23 June was “Cloudy, max 21C”.
Then the next day, Sunday 16, their forecast remained the same – this coming Sunday was still “Cloudy, max 21C”.
On Mon 17, forecast for this Sunday changed to “Cloudy with sunshine and rain, max 21C”.
Tue 18, forecast for this Sunday “Cloudy with sunshine and heavy rain, max 19C “.
Wed 19, they forecast “Cloudy with sunshine and heavy rain from 1pm, max 14C”.
Today, Thurs 20, “Cloudy, sunshine, heavy rain from 10am, showers all day, max 15C”.
What’s the betting that this Sunday 23 June will actually turn out to be beautiful, sunny and dry with azure skies and not a single cloud in sight. And, just remind me again, how much did the MET Office’s computer cost?
GeeJam, last Friday the BBC said Saturday in SE England would be fine with heavy rain in Sunday. At lunchtime on Saturday, they still said the same. It was peeing down at the time. Sunday was nice.
David, UK says:
June 19, 2013 at 12:31 pm
Hate to play Devil’s Advocate, but why was 1998 chosen as the starting point?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You have it in reverse order.
FIRST:
The IPCC expected that global temperature would rise at an average rate of “0.2°C per decade” over the first two decades of this century. Half of the rise would be due to atmospheric GHG emissions which were already in the system and as a result of the “slow response of the oceans.” That was the expectation and it says so right there in IPCC AR4 (2007) Chapter 10.7
SECOND:
The NOAA falsification criterion is on page S23 in its 2008 report The State Of The Climate
This means the climate models show “Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations”. However the climate models RULE OUT “(at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more”. (H/T to Richard S Courtney link )
So counting backwards to see if the NOAA criteria is met you get 2013- 15 years = 1998.
We have had (at the 95% level) zero trends for more than 17 years whether or not one interpolates across or extrapolates back across the 1998 ENSO peak. (Santer used a criteria of 17 years of no warming.)
Now that the 1998 ENSO peak can no longer be used to say “SEE, the earth is WARMING, be very afraid” and can be used to say we are cooling or at least showing no significant warming, the peccatogenesists are jumping up and down and screaming that the 1998 ENSO peak doesn’t ‘count’ and ‘Deniers’ are cheating. You can see this as they dance The Post Modern Mamba in response to Courtney nailing them with facts in WUWT Has Global Warming Stalled?
I think that WUWT readers might enjoy this snippet about the The Post Modern Mamba
(H/T to doesntplaywellwithothers commenting on Why do I call them bat-chomping, bird-slicing eco crucifixes….? by Delingpole for pointing me towards that very appropriate article.)
David L. says:
June 19, 2013 at 1:10 pm
…..I think people tire of this like the story of the little boy that cried wolf.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes, you are correct. I am retired and now do entertainment for kid’s birthday parties. It has been very cool this spring and I normally ask people how they like “the Global Warming” So far in the last couple of years I have only had one zealot try to convince me that “Global Warming” was causing the global cooling we were seeing. I usually get a Humph or a laugh.
Even more heartening is people are paying a lot more attention to what is happening in the economy as a result of the actions of the politicians. I have seen a big awakening of the general population since ~ 2008 and people are starting to question and dig for information.
the posting of videos in the comments section is most annoying as they all start playing at once and none of them seem to be pertinent, i.e. everything Janice Moore posts.
By “Disappointing Weather Meeting” I assume you mean a disappointing meeting, about the weather?
“… So counting backwards to see if the NOAA criteria is met you get 2013- 15 years = 1998. … ” [Gail Combs at 4:56AM today]
Excellent refutation, Ms. Combs!
We all here at WUWT have benefited greatly from the time your retirement has given you to post well-researched, helpful, insightful, information.
*****************************
Dear John,
The videos others post don’t start to auto-play when I peruse WUWT threads. I’m sorry that mine do (I have no idea why). Yes, that would be terribly annoying, not even giving you the option to scroll past and ignore what that always-irrelevant Janice Moore posts.
Sigh. I’m not sure what to do, John. I could do as you wish and just stop posting on WUWT, but, I love it so much and you’re the only one who has complained (so far). How about writing a post to the m- o d-r–at–r (spell it out completely so it goes into m-od-er-t-n) and complaining? I will, of course, abide by whatever the host or the m-dr-tr decides.
Wow. I’m glad you wrote, John. Yeah, it stung, but, I needed to know just how annoying my attempts at humor were to you (and, there are, no doubt, others). I’ve enjoyed so many of the other WUWT posters’ humorous or just-for-fun video clips that I stupidly assumed mine were also being enjoyed.
My sense of humor is not appropriate on a first-class science site, it appears.
Again, thanks for your candor.
Janice
P.S. Really? Everything I have posted (for the past 2 months here)?
Réaumur says:
June 19, 2013 at 12:49 am
Leaving aside memory bias which often makes past summers seem warmer, how long is human recall? 40 years on average?
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Is that what studies say? Wow. I still have memories from 1954 and a glimmer from before that.
vukcevic says:
June 19, 2013 at 1:21 am
I’ve been ‘going on’ about the north Atlantic and England’s climate for about nearly 3 years
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Thanks for your excellent work.
goldminor says/Réaumur says: …how long is human recall?
It varies, for a politician it rarely extends past election day, for some alarmist “climate scientists” it is as short as their last funding grant.