Guest post by Steven Goddard
The UK Met Office forecast last Autumn “the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. ” We have now passed the 2/3 mark of the meteorological winter, and it is time for another report card to send home. Yesterday’s press release was titled “Wintry start to February” which stated “So far, the UK winter has been the coldest for over a decade” and “Met Office forecasters expect the cold theme to the weather to continue well into next week with the chance of further snow.”
The UK is expecting the heaviest snow in about 20 years tomorrow. “Snow and freezing weather threaten to shut down Britain Arctic blizzards are set to cause a national shutdown on Monday as forecasters warn of the most widespread snowfall for almost 20 years.” “Now is the time you’d expect to see the daffodils coming out but we’re not expecting them for two or three weeks at best if it warms up.“
So why is this important? Climate is not weather, after all. The Met Office is one of the most 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 unduly influenced by preconceived notions about the climate? It is worth remembering that London had it’s first October snow in 70 years this past autumn.
Or perhaps they know exactly what they are doing, and are just having a several year run of extremely bad luck with their long term forecasting.
John Finn writes:
There is no evidence that the climate during the Dalton Minimum period was appreciably different to similar length periods both before and after the DM.
But H. Lamb says that the weather was exceptional in Dickens’ childhood during the DM in
Climate history and modern man on page 249. He does say this could have been due to the eruption of the Tambora volocano.
Hi
Does anyone know why the colour of snow cover on the Cyrosphere Today site has changed from white to khaki ?
Best wishes
Bruce
Beauchamp:
Maybe this is an intermediate step to fire engine red?
Roger Sowell (12:00:33) :
I don’t recall the source but I liked this explanation of why it’s always true that “we are going to run out of oil in 30 years”. It’s just the investment horizon. Very few people are interested in an investment over that time frame, but quite a few more would be interested in, say, 20 years. So if it looked like supplies could runout in 20 years, more people would go looking and in the usual way things work they would all find some and supplies increase until the 30 year mark is in place again, and everyone stops looking.
To alantru (10:08:48) :2/02
You may want to ask your “gal from HR” whether this means that your organization assumes responsibility for any ill that may befall the staff who are being forced by the organization to ignore police advisories.
Alex (06:01:08) :
> This sudden warming everyone is going on about seems to be
> only happening in the bottom +- 15km of the atmosphere…
> available datasets higher in altitude than that show
> temperatures currently running at less than the same time
> last year : http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
That dataset is for *GLOBAL* atmospheric temperatures. The SSW is defined as a warming in the area enclosed by the Arctic Circle. What happens is that cold air form the Arctic moves south, and is replaced by warmer air from the south. This is musical chairs, with no net effect on *GLOBAL* temperatures. The polar areas get warmer, and more “temperate” areas get colder (like this winter). To get an idea of what’s happening in the Arctic, see
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratosphere/temperature/ and check out all the elevations from 70 mb to 1 mb (approx 50 km) in the first row “90N – 65N”.
Perhaps as well as a ‘leaf fall timetable’ (Google it for larfs), the Britz need a ‘Snow Fall Timetable’.
Blank sheets of A4………..
Roger Sowell (12:00:33) :
Reply: Thanks Roger i was looking for good data to respond with but could not find any, as you say it does not exist and it all works out even in the long term. What did give me a warm feeling inside however was that when i googled oil reserve there was a big long list of news articles about new oil finds around the world, guess we are not running out just yet.
Pragmatist (15:12:33) :
That the AGW clan still is selling their gloom astonishes. They seem not to want the end game as much as the gloom game. Since the end game is the transition to a non-fossil fuel based economy – why care how it is achieved? There are plenty of reasons to electrify and utilize alternatives. AGW is NOT one of them. So apparently the clan’s intent is not the achievement of an end. They defend their poorly substantiated claims even in the face of overwhelming science disproving them.
Which brings about the conclusion that their mission is not about achieving energy independence – but something else. Pillage of the western world? Cap and trade schemes benefiting the AGW elite? Expanded government and nationalization for the AGW elite commanders? It is certainly not about climate or… science.
They may not even have a rational goal/method.
It may simply be a nihilistic, misanthropic, drawnout screaming at a world that does not meet their expectations. A destructive urge writ large and to be played out without end. Some people find it literally painfully empty to be alive, and unable to deal with their internal pain they export it onto the rest of us as a form of self validation.
No amount of evidence will convince such people to change. From their POV the world and the rest of us are simply “wrong” – a wrongness that must be destroyed or enslaved.
davidc (16:49:04) :
“I don’t recall the source but I liked this explanation of why it’s always true that “we are going to run out of oil in 30 years”. It’s just the investment horizon. Very few people are interested in an investment over that time frame, but quite a few more would be interested in, say, 20 years. So if it looked like supplies could runout in 20 years, more people would go looking and in the usual way things work they would all find some and supplies increase until the 30 year mark is in place again, and everyone stops looking.”
Oil is a complex business, with so many players and points of view it is difficult to say what the primary view is. Small players who drill a few wells, hoping that one will find oil, probably have a very short-term outlook. If they can hit one well with oil, over a two or three year investment period, they are thrilled and profitable. Then they do it again.
OTOH, the major oil companies invest huge sums and are looking for equally huge oil fields. ExxonMobil’s find off Russia’s Sakhalin Island is a good example. That field is expected to produce 7 billion barrels of oil plus 80 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The investment is around $32 billion US. At $70 per barrel of oil, that is about a 15-to-1 return on the money invested. The field should produce for approximately 30 to 35 years. The time from field discovery to first production was another several years.
For the big boys, an investment horizon of 30 to 40 or more years is not unusual. The bigger the field, the longer the investment horizon.
My explanation for why it is said that we are running out of oil is that those who say that do not allow for ingenuity on the part of the oil business. If we had stayed with the simple drilling and exploration techniques of, say 1920, we would have run out of oil soon thereafter.
But oil guys love to find oil. They are some of the most inventive people on the planet. Better drill bits, better drilling rigs, slant drilling, directional drilling, improved geologic understanding, better geologic surveys, vastly improved seismic data interpretation with supercomputers, enhanced oil production methods such as water flooding and natural gas reinjection, deep-water drilling platforms, and a host of other things keep expanding the world of discoverable and economically recoverable oil.
In U.S. patents alone, ExxonMobil has received more than 250 patents per year since 1976. That is more than one patent for every day the Patent Office is open. They are not alone, either. The other oil companies have many patents also.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California
There was an interesting tidbit over at Roger Pielke Sr’s “Climate Science page. In an article discussing the differences between weather models and climate models this little gem was included in parenthesis …(but note that the Hadley Centre for instance, uses the same model for climate and weather purposes)… Would anyone in the UK care to comments on Hadley’s weather predictions from their weather/climate models?
UK surface pressure
A nice reassuring warm front over Britain, as it snows outside.
But if you click ahead 12hrs the warm front moves backwards.
Can someone explain why a backwards moving warm front should be different from a cold front??
Meanwhile next door in Ireland:
“Winter so far is coldest since 1991, says Met Éireann”
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2009/0205/breaking43.htm
More garbage from the UK. Met. Office.
I sent them an enquiry about material on their website:
“Dear Sir/Madam I am extremely disappointed to see that you are still using the thoroughly discredited “Hockey Stick” graph (by Mann et. al.) in your “Climate Change” higher education section.
Papers by McIntyre & McKitrick (2003, 2005) have proved conclusively that it is statistically flawed with the Principal Components Analysis used been able to produce “hockey stick” curves from autocorrelated “red noise”.
Furthermore the entire reconstruction is dependent on the inclusion of a limited set of high altitude Bristle Cone Pine tree ring reconstruction. These, by definition, cannot act as proxies for the entire Northern hemisphere and it is debatable whether they actually temperature limited.
The authorative Wegman enquiry recommended that these trees should not be used in climate reconstructions.
Finally use of this reconstruction ignores a wealth of evidence (over 100 peer-reviewed papers) from around the World that demonstrate that the “Medieval Warm Period” was warmer than today.
Please explain why you continue to use this misleading data”.
And this is the reply:
“Dear Mr Keiller
Thank you for your e-mail of 10 January 2009 regarding data used to support climate change research and published on the Met Office web site.
The issues you raise and many others have been comprehensively addressed in the scientific literature and so I do not propose to respond to all of them when the information is already available in the public domain. Instead , I would refer you to the web site of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who have produced a detailed list of FAQs at http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/wg1-report.html and the Met Office Hadley Centre publication “Climate Change and the greenhouse effect: a briefing from the Hadley Centre” which is available to download free of charge at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycen tre/pubs/brochures/.
Thank you once again for your interest and for taking the time to contact the Met Office.
Yours sincerely
Martin Kidds Customer Feedback Manager
Met Office FitzRoy Road Exeter Devon EX1 3PB United Kingdom
Tel: 0870 900 0100 Fax: +44 (0)1392 88 5681
E-mail: enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk http://www.metoffice.gov.uk
So good to see their touching faith in the IPCC and all its works!
I thought I would share what I got from the Met Office in in UK:
—–Original Message—–
From: Martin Kidds [mailto:enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk]
Sent: Thursday, February 5, 2009 05:26 AM
To: ‘Mike S’
Subject: re: Met office now the butt of giggles and grins
REF0002479
Dear Sir,
Thank you for your e-mail of 3 February 2009 concerning climate change predictions by the Met Office.
We would not accept your assertion that the Met Office is considered a “off the mark”. The Met Office is a scientific organisation which bases its decisions, conclusions and forecasts on established evidence and facts. We are proud of our world leading science, which has established our high reputation among policymakers and other scientists in this field.
The Met Office Hadley Centre is the UK’s national centre for climate change research. Partly funded by Defra (the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs), the newly-established Department of Energy and Climate Change and the Ministry of Defence, the Hadley Centre provides in-depth information to the Government and advise them on climate change issues using expert scientific evidence. Our climate scientists undertake studies of the global climate using similar, though more extensive, models of the atmospheres, as are used for the prediction of weather conditions.
There have always been seasonal variations of temperature in different regions of the world as part of natural climate variability. It is not possible to say that one or more individual such events proves or disproves climate change. What climate scientists do is try to estimate the changes in the risk of particular weather events occurring now and in the future due to climate change. However, what we can say
Whilst these years have not quite topped the record breaking year of 1998 they are still among the warmest years experienced, and all of the top ten warmest years ever globally have occurred in the last ten years. The following news release on the Met Office web site gives more details: [Global Warming Goes On].
In view of this, and the evidence available, the Met Office firmly believes that climate research has captured the essential aspects of what is causing our planet to warm. It is now time to move on and look at strategies for adaptation and mitigation; better defining uncertainty and improving regional detail in climate models. This is where our efforts will and should be directed.
Thank you once again for your interest and for taking the time to contact the Met Office. Yours sincerely Martin Kidds Customer Feedback ManagerMet Office FitzRoy Road Exeter Devon EX1 3PB United KingdomTel: 0870 900 0100 Fax: +44 (0)1392 88 5681 E-mail: enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk http://www.metoffice.gov.uk
Mike S,
Thanks for following up with the Met Office. Since they consider that their inverted winter forecast was not “off the mark,” that makes it difficult to take seriously any of their other long term predictions.
Stonewalling is not a good way to generate confidence – particularly in science.
“Whilst these years have not quite topped the record breaking year of 1998 they are still among the warmest years experienced, and all of the top ten warmest years ever globally have occurred in the last ten years.”
Warmest years ever?? That’s a pretty bold statement for the Met to make.
Mike S and Steve
I live very close to the Met office in Exeter and they got last nights forecast for this area hopelessly wrong.
I can only assume their spokesman is today stuck in 12 inches of white global warming on one of the approach roads to the Met office.
TonyB
As a meteorologist, I was shaking my head at this interview with a Met Office representative. See if you get as frustrated as I did:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7873872.stm
There is an article at the London Telegraph today regarding the UK Met Office predictions for this winter and the confess to its failure but claim a pass for the three previous years.. The following segment caught my eye, their process of predicting the weather based upon recent weather events and then adding their “global warming” factor.
The forecast is put together using observations of sea temperatures in the preceding summer, data from the Met Office’s northern hemisphere weather modelling systems, those of the French national weather service and that of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Reading. That is then assessed alongside predictions about the North Atlantic Oscillation – a measurement of pressure patterns and seasonal variations in the jet stream across the Atlantic. The Met Office then raises the temperature prediction for the winter by including the long-term warming signal caused by climate change.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/4534358/Snow-Britain-Further-snow-and-ice-forecast-for-rest-of-the-winter.html
To add to the current situation in the UK, authorities are running low on the road salt mix, there is a major supplier in the County of Cheshire that is currently loading 25 lorries/trucks an hour and the stockpile is looking very small, today there is a routine on site health and safety check that has resulted in the extended stopage of the conveyor system bringing the salt to the surface.
Could not make it up and people wonder why civilisations fail… 🙂
Mick J.
Interesting comment from Today’s Telegraph :
Critics said the grit shortage had proved Britain was woefully unprepared for the extended cold snap.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/4534827/Heavy-snow-sees-more-than-200-rescued-after-drivers-stranded-in-Devon.html
This was the Met Office official prediction from last autumn:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2008/pr20080925.html
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.
Seasonal forecasts from the Met Office are used by many agencies across government, private and third sectors to help their long-term planning.
Mick J,
The Telegraph article you quoted states “It is the first time in four attempts that their long range seasonal forecast has been so inaccurate.
This is complete rubbish, as documented here –
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/06/uks-met-office-blows-another-summer-forecast/
The Met Office forecast the summer of 2007 to be hot. That summer was later described as “the summer that never happened.” Similarly, they forecast a warm summer for 2008, which turned out to be the second most miserable, rainy summer on record. Not to mention their forecast of 2007 as the hottest year ever. Their accuracy has been no better than 33%.
So I see from putting together the comments above that the Met Office’s Hadley center is the organization that makes the long term forcasts, adjusts predictions higher to account for global warming and is using their very long range climate models to predict the trends for the seasons 3 months out. (At least according the Roger Pielke Sr.’s site.) It looks like we are all getting a pretty good demonstration of the capabilities of climate models and using them for public policy planning.
“Met Office forecasters expect the cold theme to the weather to continue well into next week with the chance of further snow.”
They looked out of the window at last then…
Phil’s Dad (16:06:38) :
That famous brass statue might be getting a bit nervous right now!
WRONG! I belive it’s made of aluminium so no worries there.