A guest post by Steven Goddard:
A Chronology of UK Met Office press releases
The UK Met office is the official UK meteorological agency and is one of the leading promoters of the idea of climate change. Their web site is in fact titled “Met Office: Weather and climate change.”
In 2007, they made several notable predictions, starting with this one on Jan 4.“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.”
On April 11, 2007 they issued this press release stating “there is a high probability that summer temperature will exceed the 1971-2000 long-term average of 14.1 °C ….. there are no indications of an increased risk of a particularly dry or particularly wet summer.” This was interpreted by The Guardian as “Britain set to enjoy another sizzling summer.”
On August 31 The Met announced that summer 2007 was the wettest on record with “normal temperatures,” though his description did not adequately describe the miserable summer – because high temperatures and sunshine were well below normal.
On August 10, The Met Office proudly announced new climate models which included modeling of “the effects of sea surface temperatures as well as other factors such as man-made emissions of greenhouse gases, projected changes in the sun’s output and the effects of previous volcanic eruptions.” The same press release forecast that “2014 is likely to be 0.3 °C warmer than 2004.”
Turns out that global temperatures in 2007 dropped nearly 0.8 degrees according to satellite data, one of the sharpest drops on record. In order to hit The Met’s 2014 prediction, there will have to be a large increase over the next few years. So how is The Met doing in 2008 with the new models?
On April 3, 2008 the Met made their annual UK summer forecast – “The coming summer is expected to be a ‘typical British summer’, according to long-range forecasts issued today. Summer temperatures across the UK are more likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or above average for the three months of summer.”
On August 29, 2008 The Met reported that the summer of 2008 was “one of the wettest on record across the UK.” Here is how the Independent described the UK summer – “It has been a miserable summer for bugs as well as people….The combined effect of low temperatures and rain has presented Britain’s invertebrates with a double whammy.”
The Met is getting a new Chief Scientist – Julia Slingo. In the July 22 announcement she said “I am delighted to be returning to the Met Office after 28 years and to lead work into enhanced weather and climate-change science, and importantly see this deliver improved services to societies in the UK and around the world.”
We wish Professor Slingo best wishes and look forward to seeing the “improved services.” If the spate of miserable summers is to continue, Brits should know so that they can at least plan holidays someplace warm and sunny, like the Arctic.
“On some occasions, they even get the current observations completely wrong.”
That’s more than some. My neighbours have been remarking to me that ten years ago when they watched the BBC forecast on the telly for the next day it was usually correct. Now they get the BBC forecast off the web, and it’s usually wrong.
They attribute this to the Internet. Well, they may be right…
This is no surprise. The Met Office (funded by the UK Ministry of Defence) has become completely wedded (or maybe “welded?”) to the AGW bandwagon. To that extent it seems to have allowed itself to shed its scientific impartiality and, crucially, its forecasting accuracy, in its efforts to support the cause.
One only needs to look at The Hadley Centre to see how the Met Office has become a cog in a much bigger wheel:
From the Met Office website: “The Met Office Hadley Centre is the UK’s official centre for climate change research. Partly funded by Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), we provide in-depth information to, and advise, the Government on climate change issues.”
Now look at the PDF entitled Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings (by John McLean), available at:
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/originals/prejudiced_authors_prejudiced_findings.html
It notes that Chapter 9 of the IPCC’s 2007 Climate Assessment, entitled Understanding and Attributing Climate Change, concluded that “human-induced warming of the climate system in the past half-century is widespread and detectable in every continent except Antarctica, affecting extremes of temperature, causing glaciers and sea ice to melt, altering rainfall patterns, and perhaps increasing the intensity of tropical cyclones”.
So who contributed to Chapter 9? Table 3 on page 8 of that same PDF reveals the Hadley Centre (with the associated University of East Anglia) as the top organisation with multiple staff, with 2 lead authors and 8 contributing authors.
I know this is a science blog, but sometimes one needs to look at the backgrounds to the scientists and their organisations to get a feel for their degree of impartiality.
Aw, come off it, chaps. By our domestic metric, this summer was better than last. One barbecue rather than nil.
oldjim,
Well I guess you won’t have any trouble in the pub. There is a great one over in Torbay that I used to go to four or five years ago – don’t know if you ever get over there but they had one of the most attractive and funny bartenders I have ever met. I think her name was Karen.
I remember sunny, dry summers in Berkshire in the 1960s and 1970s. The grass was always brown by mid-August. That seemed normal.
stephen richards,
What Isn’t fair? It is just a bunch of quotes from Met Office press releases. Do you believe this was an accurate forecast for 2008? Which parts did they get right? As an engineer, I actually have to get everything right – perfect in fact.
The coming summer is expected to be a ‘typical British summer’, according to long-range forecasts issued today. Summer temperatures across the UK are more likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or above average for the three months of summer. However, the risk of exceptional rainfall on the same scale as the summer of last year remains a very low probability.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20080403.html
My point is that their models perhaps aren’t quite as accurate as we sometimes let ourselves believe.
One more point. When I am wrong, I admit it. If we could see some of that from some global warming advocates or political candidates, perhaps we would have a healthy dialogue? Warm does not equal cool and dry does not equal wet.
If the IPCC would come out and say “the world is not warming as quickly as we forecast” or “our models aren’t ready for policy decisions yet” perhaps it would be possible to move forward with a sane discussion. When Lewis Pugh gets stuck in the ice a few miles outside Svalbard and three days later tells Gordon Brown that he has seen the Arctic melting down, how are we supposed to take his arguments seriously?
Politicians are attempting to manage the earth’s temperature within one tenth of a degree 100 years from now, when it varies more than that every day.
Well, it could be worse. I’m sitting here while Tropical Storm Hanna moves into New England. Like a lot of tropical storms it will pick up speed and head north and east.
Oh dear.
UK folks won’t want to look at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/ and most certainly won’t want to click on the 5-day track for Hanna because that will take you to http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/refresh/graphics_at3+shtml/194734.shtml?5day#contents
Actually, it could be worse – yesterday the track was aimed straight at Ireland.
Steven Goddard:
“When Lewis Pugh gets stuck in the ice a few miles outside Svalbard and three days later tells Gordon Brown that he has seen the Arctic melting down, how are we supposed to take his arguments seriously?”
What is it that attracts Gordon Brown to poorly planned failures?
I guess Pugh was totally relying on an extended melt since everything else I have read about Arctic exploration indicated the need to be out of the area by the end of August at the latest.
You just have to wonder what the whole project was really about.
Ric Werme:
The summer weather here has mostly been driven by warm wet winds heading up from the Atlantic. Cloud, rain but generally averagely warm with a few slightly hotter days once in a while. Interestingly just recently here in the Midlands we seem to have moved into a regular overnight rain scenario. The clouds kept the night temperatures relatively high except for those nights where the wind direction was from the north or north east. August is often quite stormy, especially in the South West, but usually the cloud is more broken and far less persistent as I remember.
Looks like the lead into autumn is heading the same way.
The Hurricane stuff, or at least the tail end of the tropical storms, often reaches us but not with the same effects as experienced in the USA.
Don’t worry. According to “climatologists” the wet weather is all part of the “European monsoon” which, of course, is due to global warming.
“The combined effect of low temperatures and rain has presented Britain’s invertebrates with a double whammy.”
Oh come on, that’s no way to refer to the warmists 😉
Here in Australia the BOM constructs a daily mean temperature that is used for long term climate recordings and analysis. As a non met or science person my interest in weather is purely out of curiosity, but I wonder why diurnal averages are not constructed from 24 hourly data measurements instead of just 2. This would surely be a more accurate measure of daily temperature and would be more representitive of a real daily average. Another thing the BOM do here in Australa is derive the recorded maximum temperature only from hourly 9am to 3pm measurements. Since the introduction of summer time Daylight Savings back in the 80’s I note that the recorded maximum daytime temp is still derived from the 9 – 3 recordings and has not been shifted by one hour.
There are many aspects to measurements that make little sense to me. I wonder if there is an international standard for the recording of measurements ?
Old Man Winter. I think there is something wrong with your choice of 1977 for the hottest recent English Summer. In England 1976 was “the Summer without end, hot and dry from May to September. I remember it well.
“There was a taste of things to come in early May 1976 when a short heat wave led to 29°C being recorded in Greater London and Kent. The real heat set in on the 23rd June and for 14 consecutive days the temperature topped 32°C at a number of places in southern England.
At Hurn Airport in Dorset and Cheltenham (Gloucestershire) it exceeded 32°C for seven successive days. This is without parallel anywhere in the British Isles in modern times. Many long-standing records were broken. At Mayflower Park Southampton a reading of 35.6°C on the 28th June ranks as the UK’s highest June temperature.
The longest run of days with no measurable rain was 45 at Milton Abbas, Dorset and Teignmouth, Devon, in July / August which came on top of three other periods of absolute drought including 17 days in April, 22 days spanning May / June and 19 days June / July.
The drought and great heat combined to provide the ideal conditions for the propagation of heath and forest fires and some proved devastating. As the Summer wore on the situation became ever more dangerous.
The county of Dorset was typical of the serious situation throughout England and Wales with fires breaking out on a daily basis. Some were extinguished only to start again the next day having smouldered underground through the peat soils.
One fire at Horton common was started when a whirlwind or dust-devil picked up embers from one burnt area only to deposit them on another part of the bone dry common starting a conflagration a mile wide. Another inferno destroyed 50,000 trees in Hurn Forest.
A last minute change of wind direction helped prevent loss of life.
Meanwhile at St. Ives, near Ferndown, 250 acres of woodland was decimated when a 15 metre high wall of flame moved at 40mph across the area leading to the evacuation of 350 people from a nearby hospital. The incident made national headlines. Many patients were in beds and wheel chairs and thankfully emerged unharmed through a pall of black smoke. A last minute change of wind direction helped prevent loss of life.
The main A31 road was closed and hundreds more people were moved from nearby caravan sites. At one point a military fuel dump near West Moors was almost encircled by flames. Altogether 250 firemen and 110 soldiers using 37 fire appliances and two 6,000 gallon milk tankers commandeered from the milk marketing board fought to control the blaze.
In Surrey, the Fire Brigade answered 11,000 fire related calls in five months. 22 Home Office Green Goddess pumping appliances were called in to help. Concern was expressed for the effect of the fires on the habitats of rare birds such as the Dartford Warbler.
As the ground dried out thousands of subsidence claims poured into insurance companies with buildings in clay areas particularly vulnerable. Overall costs amounted to £60 million. Agriculture suffered badly with £500 million worth of failed crops.
The peak of the drought coincided with the holiday season and much of the south west of Britain could not cope with the increased demand for water. A Drought Act was passed and half a million people in Wales suffered cuts to water supplies. Standpipes were in use in Devon. Throughout Britain people became adept in saving water including British Rail who stopped washing their trains.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/features/understanding/1976_drought.shtml
We’ve never had a Summer like it in 36 years. Happy Salad Days.
PS. Is it only the English that at a time of National Emergency, write letters to The Times on the fate of the Dartford Warbler? Or were they early Climate Alarmists and HumanoPhobes?
NOAA agrees, 2007 will be the warmest year ever.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/01/070104-warmest-year_2.html
Any doubts regarding the UK Met offices leanings are dispelled here in this link to Jennifer Marohasy’s site. : Subject : Meteorology Bureau Running Training Course in Propaganda?
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/09/meteorology-bureau-running-training-course-in-propaganda-ver-2/
Oldjim (11:50:39) :
I noticed one of the planned improvements for the center is the inclusion of Antarctica in future projections of sea levels.
That’s probably a good idea as the southern polar regions contains 90% of the world’s ice.
If I were doing sea level projections, I would ignore the Arctic before ignoring Antarctica.
I’ve noticed the AGW crowd doesn’t like to talk about Antarctica. I found the place fascinating when I studied it back in 1958-59 at Carson Elementary in Denver.
An excellent summary of Met Office statements from Steven Goddard. Thanks!
Many observers have noted the Met Office summer forecasts were useless for both 2007 and 2008 whereas our WeatherAction long range forecasts – based on SOLAR ACTIVITY not CO2 hype – were in the words of some users ‘astoundingly accurate’.
If anyone wants a full report with pictures and links of our 2007 summer floods and Autumn storms forecasts please email me: piers@weatheraction.com
The questions we have to ask the Met Offices new Chief Scientist – Julia Slingo are:
1. How many failed summer forecasts must the Met Office produce before they recognise that their models do not work. Will they admit their models are wrong if their forecast for summer 2009 also fails?
2. For how many years must world temperatures continue to decline before the Met Office withdraw their support for the theory of man-made CO2 driven Global Warming / Climate Change?
3. Should the ‘prove and predict’ principles of normal science also apply to Climate Science – ie a theory which is contradicted by observations must be scarpped. Or are we in fact dealing with a political or religious phenomena?
Thanks.
Piers Corbyn
To BC, driving from the UK to the US across the Arctic ice would be a great idea – maybe we can get Top Gear’s Jeremy Clarkson to lead a convoy of us over. Or we could all meet up half way, and have a Frost Fair, like they used to do on the Thames – just like old times. One thing’s for sure, we wouldn’t need a lot of refrigeration for the beers…
I remember how it used to be, only a few years ago. The UK might soon have a Mediterranean climate, they said. We would grow grapes on our patios, and sip the local red wine, looking out upon a parched landscape of olive and citrus groves, they said.
Yeah, right.
Here in the UK we treat the weather forecast as a complete joke. The ‘forecast’ is full of “possibility of”, “chance of”, “maybe”, “in some areas”, “likelyhood”, “you might be lucky and miss it, “you might be lucky and be part of it”! For a period of five days, two months ago, my wife and I monitored the forecast for our area against reality. It was wrong four of the five times – one time being the complete reverse (rain/sun), and only right once. But what I want to know is, is it the same in other countries. Is the forecast more accurate in say, the US? Or is it just the UK’s that’s about as efficient as a French policeman?
“Early indications for Winter 2008/9 (December, January and February”
“Temperature
Winter temperatures are more likely to be either near, or above average, than below average over much of the European region. For northern Europe, including the UK, Winter 2008/9 is likely to be less mild than last winter.”
“Rainfall
There is currently no clear signal for either above or below-average rainfall. However, for much of northern Europe, including the UK, rainfall is likely to be lower than observed in last year’s relatively wet winter.”
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/seasonal/winter2008_9/
If the high altitude temperatures around the tropics have fallen (as I’ve read on these pages) I,m guessing that the overall energy in the tropical band has dropped. Presumably thats why the Jet Stream hasn’t gone as far north as usual. Unfortunatly it is sitting over the British isles.
[…] Office forecasts are not so good (but their long-range forecasts might be excellent: “UK’s Met Office blows another summer forecast“, Anthony Watt, posted at his blog Watts Up with That, 6 September 2008 […]
oldijm,
I looked closer at the CET graph you linked. It struck my how similar the last 30 years are to a comparable warming period starting at about 1700. It appears that annual temperatures have risen less than 0.5 degrees over the last 300 years.
http://www.holtlane.plus.com/images/cet_graph.jpg
Also interesting to note that that period was followed by a very sharp drop of about 3 degrees.
I remembered that the pub is in Torquay, not Torbay – about a block from the harbour.
MarkR (22:05:45) : Although 1976 was, as you described, very dry and hot indeed the actual lowest summer rainfall was in 1995 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/water_week/66193.stm
“However according to Met Office summer rainfall figures less water fell in the recent drought of 1995 (73mm) than in 1976 (76mm). ”
The drought of 1976 was however notable by being the only recorded instance where a politician changed the weather. Denis Howell was appointed Minister for Drought and within 3 days it started raining.
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/reports/philip-eden/The-greatest-drought-on-record.htm
M White, according to a warmist on another site, the jet stream has indeed settled lower again this year, causing a repica summer of 2007 over the UK. What I want answered is, is this a coincidence that we’ve had two summers of Arctic melt and two rotten UK summers – together?
By the way, there’s three “likelys” in that very short Met Office statement. Definition of ‘Likely’ in the dictionary: “probably or apparently destined”.
MarkR: Thanks for the correction! I had eyeballed the date from the list I compiled myself. Sounds like a tough summer!
We were entering a three-year drought at that point in California. Those of us in Northern California got with the program of water rationing right away and would watch news footage of people in L.A. with their sprinklers going and the water running down the street. It started talk of secession!