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.
Am I getting the wrong end of the stick, what’s all this stuff about “changes in the sun’s ouput” turning up in a Met Office notice all of a sudden about Climate Change? Never heard them mention it in any significnat way before so why now? Have they had a change of heart? I thought the sun had so little affect on climate according to them.
I know a while ago the UK’s Treasury posted an article on reduced solar output for cycles 24 & 25, I know not why, strange thing for a Treasury department to do, perhaps to place a little rear-end covering note of officialdom when the balloon goes up about Global Warming, so they can say “we knew this would happen”.
Steven Goddard,
A nice set of examples, but you omitted one of the best, their news release issued May 30 2007:
For those who don’t know – this was just 2 weeks before the start of the worst floods in living memory, across much of the country.
Then in their review of the year, their propaganda unit (sorry, press office) made the astounding claim on 2 January 2008,
PaulM,
Thanks for the links!
But I’m pleased to report that there is hope.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7381250.stm
So far modellers have failed to narrow the total bands of uncertainties since the first report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1990…..Julia Slingo from Reading University admitted it would not get much better until they had supercomputers 1,000 times more powerful than at present. “We’ve reached the end of the road of being able to improve models significantly so we can provide the sort of information that policymakers and business require,” she told BBC News.
[…] Signs are already up around town both Federal and municipal. And didn’t we see Brison in town today? That’s a sure sign of a Federal election. He’ll be knocking on doors soon and we can hardly wait for him to knock on ours. Or perhaps we can buttonhole him at Just Us, or the Farm market, or in the public loo. We’d like to ask him about the new carbon tax. And when he starts telling us why it is so important to burden our economy in order to curb emissions by taxing carbon because of dire Global Warming predictions we will tell him about the UK weather office’s weather predictions. […]
John M,
A nice little slice of data. The significance of which should not be understated.
The important property it illustrates is the inherent failure that will occur in times series forecasts with strongly endogenous explanatory variables.
Imagine the Met was trying to forecast the temperature trend over the forthcoming decade. WHen they do that they don’t get the opportunity to reset their baseline each year, so any errors roll over. If there is serial correlation in said errors you end up with a bias.
So ten years ago the Met would have said that the temperature anomoly was going to increase by 0.6 degree s over the coming decade( sounds pretty familiar). Of course their forecast would only have represented the compounding errors (bias) in their model.
Unfortunately, this doesn’t become completely provable until the 10 years elapse and the data are in. By then of course, the warmeners have “moved on”.
Do you think that scenario sounds awefully like Hansen’s 1988 forecasts???
6 09 2008 Old Man Winter (12:29:12) :
writes
“Note, too, that the long-term mean alluded to by Oldjim includes 200 years’ worth of the Little Ice Age.”
No it doesn’t. The mean referred to is for the period 1971-2000 and covers the UK as a whole (i.e. it includes Scotland, N Ireland & Wales). The figures you posted are from the Central England record which is generally warmer than the rest of the UK. Other posters have made the same mistake.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a supporter of CO2 warming but, like it or not, despite all the rain and the lack of sunshine, UK temperatures have been around (and possibly slightly above) average this summer.
Other criticisms of the MET Office are valid.
As someone who lives in England – over the past few years I’ve found Accuweather to be a more accurate forecaster for my home town then the Met Office (or BBC). It is a bit sad that an American forecaster can do better job then the local UK one.
It’s was very “basic” research – for a few weeks I made notes of the 3 day forecast for both services and found Accuweather was far more accurate.
No one believes the Met Office 3 day forecast – people just about believe the next day one.
Oldjim (13:01:38) : you say,
Steven,
You are correct but I was referring to the Hadcet numbers which you can download from here http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/ these are representative of a roughly triangular area of the United Kingdom enclosed by Lancashire, London and Bristol. I use these numbers because they go back to 1659 and let me look at the really long term trends.
I think there has been marginal level of development in this area since 1659.
I’ve been trying to find out whether the MetOffice have joined up the international research indicators: i) jetstream-shifts-south ii) did this during Maunder Minimum (from proxy studies), iii) MM coincides with lack of sunspots iv) so does summer of 2007 and 2008 – hence…..but no, they reported back that they did not have anyone specifically working on this line of inquiry. I also asked about whether they followed Drew Shindell’s work at NASA – on UV flux and the effect on the Arctic vortex – also linked to jetstream shifts (and Arctic melt-down, which are periodic and due to changes in first pressure, then winds and clouds, then Beaufort Sea gyre reversals sucking in warm water underneath the ice (from North Atlantic), and clouds radiating from above – hence thin ice – then wind and pressure change, then break-up and melting…..all well reported by Polyarkov at Fairbanks Uni and Intl Arctic Research Team and NOAAs Arctic Climate Report….so far, discussions are ongoing – but all the signs are that despite the enormous investments in climatology,
they are missing the wood for the trees – and the wet summer is relatively easy to explain – and Piers Morgan’s system, whatever it is, certainly predicts well!
Hey ….Steven Goddard
I live in Torquay some 10 mins from the harbour. Now which Pub would that be….
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Dear Anthony
Met Office Temps
http://theweatheroutlook.com/twocommunity/forums/t/23028.aspx
I haven’t a clue how many of you look at the Met Office site or even the global temps they show. Leaving aside the mediocre coverage of Canada, Africa and Eurasia in fact everywhere on the planet, even though they must have the data, I am intrigued as to why they are so shy about posting Low Temperatures. To me that is figures in the double minuses Celsius.
I’ve noticed over the past two years that whenever the temperatures drop below minus 10C they tend to be left off the current temps on these pages.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/europe/europelatest.html
and you can see the same for N. American temps as well. As I write the N. American temps have risen so they are shown as of Christmas Eve but only relatively mild temps at say Boston. On the other hand there is no bashfulness about Double Pluses Celsius and temps of say plus 10C to 30C+ are invariably present when they occur. Thus in the N. Hemisphere summer, the temps are invariably shown without any ‘n/a’ (data not available) explanations. To be fair I have noticed occasions when there are n/a explanations but these are rare, unlike in the winter when they are commonplace.
Recently it’s been chilly in North America even by their standards. Kansas, Chicago and Boston have sometimes been below minus 10C yet these figures were not available on the Met Office site at the time. They come back again once the temps have risen above the Minus 10C mark. Of course as anyone here knows you can check elsewhere which is what I started to do some time ago (one and a half years ago) to test my hypothesis that something was not quite right with what was shown on the Met Office site. As another example of this glitch, everyone knows who follows weather knows that Western Russia has had a mild autumn and these temps were invariably reflected on the Met Office site since the summer without any problem as far as I noticed.
If you use this PLEASE DO NOT use my name or email address.
Regards
[snip Then why did you add your name here or in your sign on? Seriously this job is enough work as is ~charles the moderator]
[…] vocal advocates of human induced global warming, and they have gotten into a consistent pattern of warm seasonal forecasts which seemingly fall in line with that belief system. Is it possible that their forecasts are […]
[…] vocal advocates of human induced global warming, and they have gotten into a consistent pattern of warm seasonal forecasts which seemingly fall in line with that belief system. Is it possible that their forecasts are […]