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.
Where is fat bigot? That guy was so big he had his own climate… (trying to stay on topic) I miss his insights…
Mike Bryant,
FatBigot has his own blog. Maybe you could invite him back: click
Done Smokey…
Mike
Anthony You have probably seen this already me thinks will be one of the biggest “climatic” stories of the year LOL
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=5054#comment-323917
It appears so serious that Nature may have to consider withdrawing it?
Roger, I believe I share your view on peak oil too. My post earlier relates to the inefficient extraction of oil at some sites, leaving much of it behind, as you suggest.
I don’t believe current nuclear technology is not the way forward either, I understand there isn’t enough of the fuel if the world switched.
Peak Oil was the fashionable worry when Oil was in a bull market and the need existed to bring more speculators in to push prices higher. So we got up to about $150/bl at which point several things happened –
1) people started driving less
2) oil sheiks started pumping much more (up to that point, keeping it in the ground had better ROI than investing the cash you got for it)
3) alternative energy sources started becoming cost competitive.
#3 is the key thing to keep in mind. Right now the Senate is preparing to essentially force every new grid tied “green energy” job to be unionized. Regardless of where you sit politically, that will have a simple effect – it will push the breakeven point from hydrocarbons to alternatives higher. That will give the oil sheiks and speculators the opportunity to push the price to a higher threshold once the market recovers (it will and they will). Now that higher price may just get more people to transition, but the costs to an economy are large and real and should not be waived off.
And as the US and Europe further stratify their economies with such overhead, those countries who “cheat” and have energy policies based on lowest cost versus hypothetical environmental impacts will be better able to create wealth using mechanical leverage.
IOW, the economic scare behind Peak Oil pales in terms of total economic impact when compared to Peak Regulation.
RW (00:14:58)
“Let’s look at the data. Someone linked to the CET. Over the whole period, the average temperatures in November and December are 6.04 and 4.08°C respectively. In 2008, the temperatures were 7.0 and 3.5 °C. Thus, the two thirds of winter so far has been, at 5.25°C, warmer than the average of 5.06°C.”
1659-2008 Nov+Dec averages 6.04+4.08=10.48
2008 Nov+Dec averages 7.0+3.5=10.5
I get 0.2 degree warmer. Where do you get 5.06 from?
Should be.
6.04+4.08=10.12
That’s still only 0.7
+0.38
That’s my last bid.
Adam: I think your analysis lacks the fact that since 2004, oil consumption largely exceeds its production.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/
Has links to 5 pages for Evidence, Impacts, Adaptation, Policies & links. I just noticed if you navigate to one of those pages the BBC website displays a banner on top of the new page that says “Just to let you know, we’re no longer updating this page.” With a link that says “more information here”. If you follow that link it displays the following.
“We’re no longer updating this page” – What does this mean?
We aim to make sure that all of the pages we publish on bbc.co.uk are as accurate, reliable and as useful as possible. Where a particular radio, tv series or other BBC event has ended we generally leave the related web page online, just in case visitors may find it helpful or interesting in future. However, in order to avoid confusion we add a banner notice to the page to make it clear that we’re no longer keeping these pages up to date.
We leave these pages online for reference purposes only, and you should be aware that the information provided may be out of date or otherwise inaccurate due to the passage of time.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/help/web/mothballing/
Just a lateral thought:
Has anyone considered using the rate of snow melt across cities to get a handle on UHI? Couldn’t satellite photo’s be used in conjunction with surface measurements inside and outside a city to measure this?
John Philip (09:42:27) :
“Hey Flanagan
To perform an informal ‘climate audit’ compare the number of hits from these two queries…
http://tinyurl.com/bup24s
http://tinyurl.com/dxp5dc
What are the chances of that? Clearly the site in question needs some ‘adjustments’ to correct its inexplicable ‘bias’
;-)”
Word up the pair of you.
The world has been colder, and we have seen more deaths due to cold than warmth, since this site became as popular as it now is.
Expect the “bias” to grow.
“Flanagan (00:25:50) :
Adam: I think your analysis lacks the fact that since 2004, oil consumption largely exceeds its production.”
I dont understand how can we consume more than we produce?
A Wod (14:48:34) :
A book by A.Kingston called Fragment of 2 centuries talks about what conditions were like in the Royston area, Hertfordshire, during the Dalton Minimum on page 57. Not only were the winters cold, but their were incessant rains. The CET record, by only showing temperature recors, misses out on the rainfall
The URL below links to a plot of precipitation in England and Wales since 1766. It shows rainfall (and snowfall) during the The Dalton Minimum was below the long term (1961-90) average. 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.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadukp.html
Even if the next 2 solar cycles are of similar magnitude to SC5 and SC6 there is no reason to think that this will have anything other than a tiny effect on the earth’s climate.
Richard: this is because there are oil stocks, which of course are not infinite…
Evan Jones (17:39:13)
You said it as about as true as you can get, 40 years in the oil patch tells me that all the stories about oil are the same as the stock market, money !
tallbloke (16:49:39) : ” The problem with this argument is that if temperatures go down for 30 years while co2 rises, then we have to ask which driver is it which so easily overpowers co2? ”
Clearly 😉 Sol’s state of being rulz (jupiter/sol perterbations mitigated by obilquity, precession, eccentricity, inclination… earth’s time spent in noctilucent clouds/solar orbital plane,,, All of which, currently, are resulting in lower magnetic flux/sun spot count and solar wind-resulting in a minor decrease in incidence while concurrently allowing for more cosmic rays/increasing cloud cover/increased albedo… and warmer stratosphereic temp which have the impact of loosening artic cold fronts on the lower latitudes… this portends for a cold feb, somewhere 😉
” And how do we know the rise in the late C20th was due to co2 and not the positive phase of that stronger driver? ”
Looking back over the last 400kyr (Paleoclimate and CO2
)
(Changes in temperature precede changes in CO2, with a lag of around 800 years )
Temp rise leads CO2 conc., but CO2 conc., thereafter, slows the reverse of the rise.
” You see the problem? ”
Yes, we need to step back a bit for the bigger picture… CO2 is up, certainly we contribute, but solar influences rule… that said, however, we will certainly be left with higher then usual CO2 concentrations and the forcing that comes with that fact After the Solar forcing falls back to that which we call ‘normal’
http://capnbob.us/blog/2006/08/23/correlating-sunspots-to-global-climate/
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/Solar_Changes_and_the_Climate.pdf
Monbiot vs Chris Booker – Handbags drawn. Quite a laugh…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/feb/03/climate-change-daily-telegraph-christopher-booker
Adam Sullivan.
Why is it always the union’s fault that high prices exist rather than the fault of the CEO’s making $150 million a year?
The Costs of global cooling:
Blizzard of anger follows London snowstorm
My light-hearted comment at the beginning was meant to be just that. But what I may continue with is this. FrankM said something about England, and power sources. To put it simply, we have power sources that we did not have during the last “ice age”, be it mini or full blown. We have technology such as domes, insulation, nuclear energy for heat, light etc, We do need to pull our heads out and capitalize on same. NOW! Not when the SHTF, but NOW in preparation. You DO know the “those who ignore history” thing, yes?
My error in accrediting statement. Apologies. Que Sera. I stand by my statement. We can survive this through technology, but only by getting TO it.
Richard Heg, flanagan,
Historically, oil consumption matches production over long intervals, but can differ a bit in the short term due to inventory changes.
The major oil companies measure and report reserve replacement ratio, which is the amount of proved oil reserves found each year, divided by the amount of oil produced. ExxonMobil is the best at this, but even their replacement ratio is just under 1.0. Shell has had a difficult time in getting their numbers right, even after taking a couple of whacks at it.
The worldwide situation is difficult to fathom, due to national oil companies and lack of access to good data. We have estimates only.
Roger E. Sowell
Marina del Rey, California…
where it is still 80 F and sunny…with rain in the forecast! (We could use a LOT more rain…even snow…)
Hello all. I’ve been having fun emailing the Met Office and the UK Climate Impacts Programme.
Now, the UK Climate Impacts Programme Director has written to me, and in the text is the comment “In a generally drying climate”. I immediately pointed out to him that the Met Office records disagree with this http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/hadleycentre/obsdata/HadEWP.html I then thought it appropriate that he should also know about Dr Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at Department of Physics, University of Oxford, today stating, “we have always expected precipitation to increase.”
It appears to me quite clear that none of them have a clue what they’re talking about. Here you have two people ‘on the same side’ who state two different things about what we are supposed to witness in both local and global climate change. The Director of the UK Climate Impacts Programme also believes that man-made global warming started ” from around the middle of the nineteenth century”. Really? Are you sure?
Dear, oh dear, oh dear.