Reposted in its entirety from Climate Science
By Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. University of Colorado
There was an interesting news article in the Guardian on December 6 2008 by James Randerson titled Explainer: Coolest year since 2000
The article reads
“This year is set to be the coolest since 2000, according to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that is due to be released next week by the Met Office. The global average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C below the average temperature for 2001-07.
The relatively chilly temperatures compared with recent years are not evidence that global warming is slowing, say climate scientists at the Met Office. “Absolutely not,” said Dr Peter Stott, the manager of understanding and attributing climate change at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre. “If we are going to understand climate change we need to look at long-term trends.”
Prof Myles Allen at Oxford University, who runs the climateprediction.net website, said he feared climate sceptics would overinterpret the figure: “You can bet your life there will be a lot of fuss about what a cold year it is. Actually no, it’s not been that cold a year, but the human memory is not very long. We are used to warm years.”
The Met Office had predicted 2008 would be cooler than recent years due to a La Niña event, characterised by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean – the mirror image of the El Niño climate cycle.
Allen was presenting the data on this year’s global average temperature at the Appleton Space Conference at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, near Didcot, yesterday. The 14.3C figure is based on data from January to October. When the Met Office makes its formal announcement next week they will incorporate data from November. “[The figure] will differ from it, but it won’t differ massively,” said Stott.
Assuming the final figure is close to 14.3C then 2008 will be the 10th hottest year on record. Hottest was 1998, followed by 2005, 2003 and 2002.
In March a team of climate scientists at Kiel University predicted that natural variation would mask the 0.3C warming predicted by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change over the next decade.”
Lets do a reality check.
The statement that “The relatively chilly temperatures compared with recent years are not evidence that global warming is slowing” mixes up regional and global temperatures changes. Also, there has been no global warming in the last 4 years (at least; e.g. see). Global warming has stopped for the last few years.
The statement that “In March a team of climate scientists at Kiel University predicted that natural variation would mask the 0.3C warming predicted by the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change over the next decade” is scientifically incorrect. Heating cannot be ”masked”.
As given in the examples below, the news releases provided by the UK Met Office make for interesting reading and show the complexity and difficulty of skillful season climate prediction.
Thus why should there be any confidence in the forecasts regarding climate change in the longer term?
Examples of UK Met Office News releases
1. For example, on April 11 2007, they wrote in a news release “Met Office forecast for Summer 2007″ [to their credit, they do have a readily accessible archive]
“The Met Office forecast of global mean temperature for 2007, issued on 4 January 2007 in conjunction with the University of East Anglia, stated that 2007 is likely to be the warmest ever year on record going back to 1850, beating the current record set in 1998.”
This did not occur.
2. On April 3 2008 they wrote in a news release “A typical British summer”
“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 they published a news release titled “Wet summer could end with a bang” where they write
“The return to unsettled weather will mark the end of the meteorological summer which has been one of the wettest on record across the UK.”
I suppose that rainfall “near or above average” fits what actually occurred but this is hardly a particularly precise or useful forecast.
3. On September 25 2008 they wrote in a news release “Trend of mild winters continues”
“The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.”
They qualified this news release with the article on November 25 2008 titled “A cold start to winter” where they wrote
“The latest update to the Met Office winter forecast suggests that although the coming winter will have temperatures near or above average, it is very likely that December will be colder than normal.”
Now, in addition to a news release on December 9 2008 they published an article ”El Niño gives colder European winters”, which states
Sarah Ineson, climate research scientist at the Met Office says: “We have shown evidence of an active stratospheric role in the transition to cold conditions in northern Europe and mild conditions in southern Europe in late winter during El Niño years”.
The message in th UK Met Office press releases is that, since their is such poor skill with seasonal weather prediction, multi-decadal climate prediction must be a much less precise and accurate science than we have heard promoted by the IPCC and in the climate change press releases given out by the UK Met Office and others.
“Hottest was 1998, followed by 2005, 2003 and 2002.”
What about 1934 ?
The Met Office had predicted 2008 would be cooler than recent years due to a La Niña event, characterised by unusually cold ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean – the mirror image of the El Niño climate cycle.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we cooler…. despite not having a significant La Nina this year?
If the MET cannot get the short term ‘weather’ correct how can the be so sure of the long term climate. Some of the followers here have heard of the PDO and the shortage of sunspots (that have no effect on weather or climate birrr).
Sounds like when Dad was telling me about Santa. I did eventually figure it out.
The Met Office and its offshoots such as the Hadley CRU are politicised organisations (like the BBC) and their products are what their masters in the (green and red) Brown Government want to hear from them. The Met Office no longer has any scientific integrity.
You’ve got Pielke spelled incorrectly on your head. Just a heads up.
Reply: Thanks, fixed. ~dbstealey, mod.
Meanwhile, here in Kalyfornia, the Air Resources Gestapo… I mean board, just passed sweeping new regulations to stop climate change.
“The Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) is the first statewide effort to cap greenhouse gas emissions. It sets a firm cap requiring the state to cut its emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2020 (about 30 percent below business as usual).
Been tried – Kyoto – failed. Good luck with that.
My climate change prediction – The economic climate in California will grow extensively worse as businesses and many wealth individuals not tied to the film industry continue to move to more economic friendly states such as Arizona, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Meanwhile, the already struggling independent trucking industry will experience an implosion with more and more indies getting out of the business (and moving into employment by the ever expanding state prison system, and goods will then be hauled around by gross polluting Mexican trucks that drive right through the gaping loopholes of the environmental reg’s, courtesy of NAFTA….
I could go on, but I have work to do.
sonicfrog (07:28:38) :
Correct me if I’m wrong, but aren’t we cooler…. despite not having a significant La Nina this year?
I was thinking the same thing as I read the article. I thought that the “La Nina event” this year was just essentially the tail end of last years La Nina. Correct me if I thought incorrectly.
As Lawrence Buja of NCAR recently pointed out (see icecap.us – Dec 10th in Icing the Hype) – “The skeptics are doing a good job because they are making us present ironclad proof”.
Gotta love that ironclad proof of golbal warming.
Perhaps not entirely on the specific topic of the post, but one word comes to mind when I read Dr. Pielke, Sr’s posts: Integrity. From there, it’s a very short walk to Trust.
The looming tax on Carbon, the basis for all life on the planet Earth.
Obama’s Carbon Busters: A team of Al Gore’s protégés takes over energy policy.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122904166229300171.html
Retired Engineer
What about 1934 ?
That is so passe.
Exactly when is that “iron clad proof” going to be showing up?…
Anyone know?
Mary? ;*)
Yeah, I thought that correction of NASA computer programs had established that 1934 was th hottest in the 20th century. Is this still the correct view? It would be helpful to regularly (say monthly) publish a graph of global temperature using all the established corrections (NASA code errors, poorly sited instrumnets, UHI etc etc). Otherwise concerned but non-expert followers of the topic get to doubt what they heard a few months ago is still true.
But there was a moderate La Nina earlier this year, and the hang-over remains in the persistently positive SOI readings for the past three months.
Ed Scott says:
There. Fixed the link for you.
Anyway, this all looks like a standard failed ideology. The screeching becomes ever more strident towards the end as those most invested try to keep the whole mess on the tracks.
Then they run over the cliff.
People usually never forgive them after that.
I expect it will be another twelve months before this mess falls to pieces.
It is interesting that UK Met points to the La Nina as influencing the relatively cold 2008 temperatures.
But they don’t say the relatively high temperatures in 1998, 2002, 2003, 2005 and 2006 were influenced by El Ninos. They are happy to let global warming take the credit for those years.
Right now, we are in neutral ENSO territory. There is neither a positive or negative influence on temperatures from an El Nino or a La Nina.
Yesterday, the new AMO index figure for November came out and the index has fallen to +0.055C (which according to my other analysis would provide about 0.02C boost to temperatures or, in other words – nothing really).
So, we are right now, experiencing roughly “normal” temperatures without the oceans pushing the figures up or down.
It is not cool, it is not warm, it is normal. (a slightly higher normal than decades ago, but not that much higher).
TFN, to my knowledge 1934 was the hottest year for North America, not the world (according to the oft-adjusted thermometer at NASA GISS)
Temperatures and oceans levels have risen since the last ice age and should continue to as a general trend until the next ice age or little ice age begins. Which could be now.
Mcintyre over at Climate Audit corrected the NASA numbers. He found that in the US (important point, the US only), that a miscalculation showed 1998 to be the warmest, in the US. The correction showed it to be the second warmest, after one year during the 30s.
BTW, 1934 was hottest in U.S., but not (as far as we can trust the climateers) hottest worldwide.
“Manager of understanding and attributing climate change”
Wasn’t this Winston’s boss in Orwell’s 1984?
“Global warming has stopped for the last few years.”
This statement is completely meaningless. Over periods of a few years, weather noise completely dominates the forcing due to CO2. You cannot measure global warming over a ‘few years’, so to claim that it has stopped is ludicrous. It’s like saying an oak tree has stopped growing because you couldn’t measure a change in its height over the course of a week.
“The skeptics are doing a good job because they are making us present ironclad proof.” Talk about cognitive dissonance! The more so-called “ironclad proof” they present, the worse things get for them. The new http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=37283205-c4eb-4523-b1d3-c6e8faf14e84<a href=” U. S. Senate Minority Report:
More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims is out, all 231 pages of it.
Actually, it is the climate Alarmists who are doing a good job. The louder, and more alarmist they become, the more of us Skeptics/Climate Realists there are.
They are their own worst enemies!
Here is a quote from Prof. Myles Allen posted in the Guardian Dec. 5th, 2008 and my subsequent comment.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/05/climate-change-weather
“And 2008 would have been a scorcher in Charles Dickens’s time – without human-induced warming there would have been a one in a hundred chance of getting a year this hot. “For Dickens this would have been an extremely warm year,” he said. On the flip side, in the current climate there is a roughly one in 10chance of having a year this cool.”
How curious Prof Myles Allen would reference Charles Dickens, “For Dickens this would have been an extremely warm year,”. And why is that? Perhaps because Dickens’ lifetime which was from 1812 to 1870, overlaps the period called the “Dalton Minimum”, a period of low solar activity that lasted from approximately 1790 to 1830. (from Wikipedia) “It is named for the English meteorologist John Dalton. Like the Maunder Minimum and Spörer Minimum it coincided with a period of lower than average global temperatures. Low solar activity seems to be strongly correlated with global cooling.” Gee Prof Myles, we are currently experiencing a period of low solar activity AND the temperature is unusually lower. I’m not an actual scientist myself, but maybe someone should see if there’s a correlation.
TerryBixier: “If the MET cannot get the short term ‘weather’ correct how can the be so sure of the long term climate” – that’s a bit like saying, if we can’t predict the arrival time of individual waves on a particular beach, how can we be so sure about the tides?
I think 1934 was supposed to be the hottest year in the United States. The world wasn’t covered with thermometers at that time, so there was plenty of fudge factor available to keep the world as a whole warmer than 1998.