Guest post by Steven Goddard
25 September 2008
The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average.
Seasonal forecasts from the Met Office are used by many agencies across government, private and third sectors to help their long-term planning.
The meteorological winter is over, and the official results are in :
The UK had its coldest winter for 13 years, bucking a recent trend of mild temperatures, the Met Office has said.
The average mean temperature across December, January and February was 3.1C – the lowest since the winter beginning in 1995, which averaged 2.5C.
Peter Stott, of the Met Office, said despite this year’s chill, the trend to milder, wetter winters would continue.
He said snow and frost would become less of a feature in the future.
….
The Met Office added that global warming had prevented this winter from being even colder.
2009 is expected to be one of the top-five warmest years on record, despite continued cooling of huge areas of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Niña.
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.
I saw the comment from the Met Office:
“The Met Office added that global warming had prevented this winter from being even colder.”
on yesterday’s BBC web site. I was going to post it here, but you’ve beaten me to it be making an article about it.
However, I see that that comment has disappeared from the web page today.
John Philip (04:52:27) :
“…in the period in question the anomaly has varied between 0.27 and 0.47 so a mean forecast error of 0.06C is pretty good…”
In fact, it’s been from .24 (2000) to .48 (2005), but 0.06C is NOT pretty good as this .24 to .48 is not year on year (such sudden jumps can not possibly occur). Year on year variance is much smaller. Even the big changes from 2005 to 2008 were pretty much gradual: .48 to .42 to .40 to .31 (yes, this last jump is bigger and that was exactly what Met Office did not see coming) and thus predicting something in this confidence range is not impressive! Check yourself:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/annual
Based on the information displayed on surfacestations.org (Thanks, Anthony.) and the “blink comparator” published here recently regarding the GISS output over time, is there anyone here who has any confidence in the second decimal place in either reported temperatures or reported temperature anomalies?
If so, why? I have lost confidence in the first decimal place in the reported temperature and anomaly numbers, but I may be overreacting.
Pat,
Penn and Teller did do an AGW show. It included scenes from AGW therapy workshops for people who had been traumatized by guilt about their carbon footprint. Some of them drove long distances to ease their carbon guilt.
John Philip,
So what you are saying is that by Met Office accounting, Met Office predictions have been accurate. Now that is surprising, isn’t it.
Things are getting bad when you can’t trust auto-correlation any more.
Re Alan the Brit,
To my mind this still looks like a Dalton Minimum rerun. Solar Cycles 2 and 3 were ultrashort at about nine years each and were followed by the very long Solar Cycle 4 at 13.6 years, and then the Dalton Minimum of cycles 5 and 6. Solar Cycles 21 and 22 were quite short, we are still perhaps in a very long Solar Cycle 23 coming up to 13 years. Oulu has not broken its uptrend and F 10.7 is now 69 and perhaps headed back down to 65 over the next three months. I still say that due to the lack of sunspots, the month of minimum will be put in the middle of the F 10.7 quiet period.
Who picked this right on a time-weighted basis is Clilverd with his wavelet analysis. There was also a Finnish tree ring study that came up with a similar result but one cycle out, also on wavelet. I know that Badalyan picked a weak number earliest on coronal green line but wavelet analysis has the promise of being predictive much further out. We have not had an update yet from the SODA index people though there is now a couple of more years of data.
Also OT, now that I have climate science figured out and have published a book on the subject, I have gone on to the economics of energy and in particular the price intersubstitutability of fuels. What I am seeing says that Li-batteried hybrids are viable at $60/bbl, solar thermal and photovoltaics are also now price competitive and that coal to diesel is commercial at $60/bbl. All this means that the US can be energy independent and the capital costs are not horrendous. In particular the combination of photovoltaic for daytime peak with thermal storage for solar thermal
could satisfy a lot of needs. From memory, a 50% penetration of automotive by plugin hybrid would require a 50% expansion in electric power production. All doable without much angst. People without much Sun are going to have to burn more coal (a good thing) or go further nuclear(a bit capital intensive at the moment). While the AGWers want a carbon tax to make solar more attractive by comparison, there is no need. There is an oil price signal coming that is going to drive it anyway.
The MET office do their best, but if you try and forecast the weather in UK you usually end up wishing you had not bothered!
I wonder what makes all the Climate/Weather experts want to forecast into the future, they are all so bad at it, nobody takes any notice.
Even looking backwards they have to resort to curious adjustments and statistics to make up the story.
John Philip,
I calculated the standard deviation of monthly UAH temperature data from 2000-2009, and it came out to 0.15. Thus a chimp forecasting the same mean value every month would come close to the error you claimed for the Met Office. Very impressive.
Congratulations, “Valentine”, your “comment” slipped through somehow. Just go away. Your kind are not wanted here.
As long as their are no consequences for being wrong, these bozos will just continue playing political climate propaganda instead of actually doing meteorology. right now they are rewarded for promoting global warming hysteria with bigger budgets.
Make their pay packet and pension size a function of their accuracy and they would abandon their Climate Scientology beliefs and actually do some science.
UK John,
People do pay attention to these forecasts, which is one reason why most UK cities are unable to cope with any significant accumulation of snow. They have been told that the climate of the UK is going to become equivalent to Portugal.
At a recent seminar, I was approached by a respectable-looking guy who told me he worked in country emergency planning and at a conference last year he found himself at the urinals peeing next to the top man at the MetOffice. He said to the Met Man, ‘you don’t believe all this global warming nonsense do you?’ Met man replied ‘None of us do. Its all cycles. But we can’t tell the government that, they don’t want to know.’
Off topic.
About a month ago I copied images and data from GISS from 1880 to present. Today I looked and they have changed the 01/1880 anamoly from +0.47 to +0.50. I checked a few other months from the 1800s and they have also changed. That was 129 years ago. I’ve also noticed that several of the stand alone grid areas have changed shape.
Does anyone know how this works?
Being at a loose end I set my dedicated team of climate researchers here in the UK on the task of graphing Hadley CET temperatures to 1660, so we could demonstrate to the misinformed the realities of indisputable catastrophic climate change, and get our large budgets increased.
Unfortunately the ‘adjustments and smoothing interpolator’ was away on holiday, and the ‘trend line coordinator’ was away at a wedding, so I must apologise that the data shown below is unadjusted and looks nowhere near as pretty and nicely ordered as we have been used to.
http://cadenzapress.co.uk/download/beck_mencken_hadley.jpg
One of our staff is a former actuary and thought she would amuse herself by working systematically through the records back to 1660, to see for herself the alarming warming trend over the centuries-obviously she had seen the Gore film and was wearing the T Shirt
“Catastrophic climate change-stop it now! Ask me How!”
Living near the coast she thought about the cycle of the tides, and whilst realising that the climate cycle was different- in as much it is however long we want it to be and starts from whatever point necessary to maximise our funding- thought it would be fun to use this idea of a regular cycle.
Consequently she based her calculations on a three score year and ten life span as she worked out the average annual mean temperature enjoyed by ‘British Everyman’ through each year of each decade. This assumed he was born at the start of a decade and died the last year of the decade seventy years later. Of course we urged her to call this mythical person ‘everywoman’ but as a woman was likely to live longer, she thought that as an actuary this would only complicate matters, so 70 years it is.
These are her calculations;
Someone born in Britain in 1660 and living to 70- Average annual temp 8.87c
Someone born in 1670 and living to 70 Average annual temp 8.98
1680 9.01
1690 9.05
1700 9.19
1710 9.21
1720 9.17
1730 9.14
1740 9.04
1750 9.03
1760 9.08
1770 9.10
1780 9.07
1790 9.12
1800 9.15
1810 9.13
1820 9.14
1830 9.12
1840 9.10
1850 9.14 (Start of the famously reliable Hadley global temperatures)
1860 9.17
1870 9.21
1880 9.30 Official end of the Little Ice Age
1890 9.39
1900 9.40
1910 9.46
1920 9.497
1930 9.60
1940 9.70 (projected to 2009)
1950 9.76 Extrapolating current trends (our favourite phrase)
1960 9.79 Using advanced modelling techniques to create a robust scenario.
The actuary has a poetic turn of mind and decided to call the people born in the period from 1660 to 1880 as ‘LIA Everyman’ in as much the person lived part or all of their lives during the Little ice age. She called those born from 1890 to the present day as ‘UHI Everyman’ She assures me that no adjustments have been made to correct UHI Everyman’s unfair reputation to exaggerate his (or her) temperatures.
It was at this point that the Accountants -who were in auditing our accounts to ensure we were spending our grants wisely- became really interested. They’re at a bit of a loose end as they’re the group who audit the annual EU accounts-they’ve refused to endorse them for 12 years in a row now, and say it’s so easy to spot the fraud that it’s not a full time job anymore!
Consequently they hope to get some work with the IPCC as they see them as a rapidly growing enterprise as fond of throwing meaningless and unsubstantiated-some might unkindly say fraudulent –numbers around, as the EU are.
After examination of the data the accountants reluctantly agreed that the temperatures were remarkably consistent, and the increase of a fraction of a degree in mean average temperatures during Everyman’s lifetime over a period of 350 years was so well within natural variability it was difficult to make any useful analogy (other than it was the sort of increase in average warmth that would pass by completely unnoticed if we weren’t looking very hard for it).
The fractional temperature difference was unlikely to have any effect on Everyman’s choice of clothes, or the day they might attempt to have their first swim of the year in the sea. Wearing approved buoyancy aids of course
The Accountants were particularly intrigued by the fact that the very slight rise in overall temperatures was almost entirely due to the absence of cold winters depressing overall temperatures, rather than hotter summers. At this point the actuary mentioned that warmer winters were good, as statistically, fewer people died.
Someone mused that the modern temperatures seemed rather too close for comfort to those experienced during the LIA, and another murmured as to what the temperature variance would show if we did this exercise for the MWP, or the Roman warm period. I quickly pointed out that it was just a Little Ice age and not the real thing, and that Dr Mann had told us all that the MWP was an outdated concept, and as I had never heard of the Romans they couldn’t exist, and neither could their allegedly warm period.
Another Accountant mentioned that if UHI was stripped out, the already tiny increase in temperature since the Little Ice Age would disappear. I reminded them who was paying their bills and to stop that sort of Contrarian talk immediately.
Of course I fired the actuary when she confessed that the almost indistinguishable blue line along the bottom of her original graph represented total man made co2 since 1750. Obviously she was some sort of closet right wing tool of Big Oil out to cause trouble.
I’m undecided whether to turn this report over to our adjustments and smoothing interpolator for remedial work or merely to lose it. Or burn it.
TonyB
Meanwhile, here in NC, the thermometer was below 20F, again, this am. I do not know what the record is for number of days below 20F, but we have to be close…
I watched the Penn and Teller episodes on climate change and green issues a few months back on YouTube. There were two episodes, one was called Being Green and the other was called Environmental Hysteria.
They are still on YouTube but sadly not in full. Some of the 10 minute sections of the episodes have been pulled down or deleted.
In a few weeks a score card for the U.S. predictions from NOAA is a worthwhile exercise.
For Michigan, a look at the Great Lakes ice data is quite revealing.
http://ice-glaces.ec.gc.ca/app/WsvPageDsp.cfm?Lang=eng&lnid=37&ScndLvl=no&ID=11890
Lake Superior is nearly frozen over, if not completely this week.
In order to have predicted the coldwinter, the MetOffice would have had to predict the formation of a blocking high pressure anticyclone in the Arctic. That they did not means either such things are random or that they don’t keep a lookout and don’t know what causes such events. I doubt very much this pattern is random. It ought to be a consequence of things leading to it – for example, candidates could be: the sudden cooling of the Bering Sea following the PDO cycle in the north Pacific arctic waters, the cooling of Alaska as a consequence and the knock-on effects on the wind-driven Beaufort Gyre which would change from anticyclonic to cyclonic – these changes are then propagated across the Arctic. This winter – which affected the whole of northern Europe as well as Spain and Portugal, is a direct consequence of these Arctic conditions. I have no evidence that the MetOffice studies such matters.
And to re-iterate my earlier submissions – there was research at NASA which does not seem to have been continued, which showed a potential causal explanation for the correlation of Maunder Minimum solar magnetic status to southerly shifts in the jetstream and the tracking of these anti-cyclone and cyclone conditions – so what is happening now in Europe and the USA is entirely in keeping with what would be predicted from a nascent solar-magnetic-polar vortex theory.
Any institution that has made a large investment in computer simulation is severely challenged by cycles research – because the cycles are a) regional, b) irregular (e.g. the PDO is 20-30 years, the Arctic Oscillation is 60-70, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscilation 60-100 years, and c) interactive (i.e. teleconnected) and so there are complex harmonics. Paleoclimatology finds correlation with the solar cycle in all of these as well as much longer term cycles -such as Gleissberg and double Gleissberg (can’t recall the name for that), and 400 years and 800 years, 1500, 3000 and possibly 5000 – also with harmonics.
So anybody starting a simulation run at 1900 or 1950 or 1980, would not know where they were in any of the ocean cycles, and in the case of solar only perhaps the 11-yr Schwabe, which is the least relevant, and in any case, there would be no mathematical causal link to add in the plethora of equations that make up this virtual reality world based upon entirely fictional equilibrium states.
For a very good critique of climate modelling without cycles see:
Koutsoyiannis et al. (2008) On the credibility of climate predictions, Hydrological Science Journal 53 (4) 671-684 and
http://www.itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/850/
the latter was presented at the European Geosciences Union 2008 General Assembly, so it is pukka stuff.
Sven.. In fact, it’s been from .24 (2000) to .48 (2005), but 0.06C is NOT pretty good as this .24 to .48 is not year on year (such sudden jumps can not possibly occur). Year on year variance is much smaller
Really? I am using the Hadley HADCRUT3 dataset and this shows, for example, El Nino giving a 0.224C drop from 1998-99 and a 0.179C rise 1997-98. The mean interannual change over the whole dataset is 0.079C and over the last thirty years 0.086C. So a naive forecast just using the previous year’s temp or a running mean would have done worse than the Met Office’s average performance most of the time.
Steve – would you like to think about your statement for a moment, reflecting perhaps on the relevance of the SD of a monthly dataset to an annual one? Its nil, isn’t it?
btw guys,
If you perused Climate Debate Daily on a daily basis, you would notice that nearly all the fear mongering and climate hysteria comes from one outlet – the Guardian. Sometimes the BBC too but they aren’t as bad.
Without the Guardian approaching scientists with offers of payment for climate change articles there would be far less hysteria than there is and scientists could get on with trying to understand the climate instead of jumping to financially motivated conclusions.
Diogenes
“I’ll do almost anything for a bacon sandwich”
Thas’ so good!
John Philip,
Even worse, the yearly standard deviation for 2000-2008 is 0.10, which is scarcely larger than the “bullseye” claim you made. What you have demonstrated is that they have shown essentially no skill with their annual forecasts.
It seems to me that there is a very important financial angle to this. My sister, who lives in Bridgwater, Somerset, told me that, this winter, the snow forced the closing of the local schools for 3 days, along with other distruptions. I live in Ottawa, Canada, and the amount of snow they had in Bridgwater, we wouldn’t even notice. Schools rarely close her; school buses are cancelled, but that is for insurance reasons. Staff are expected to get to school, and students walk there. The difference is, of course, money. Here in Ottawa, snow clearing costs 10’s of millions of dollars per year. We either pay this sort of money, or close the city down for 4 months a year. The question is, what is going to happen to winter weather in the future in the UK? If you believe the warmaholics, this past winter is unlikely to occur again for many decades. If you believe the hard data from Livingston and Penn, we are heading for a Maunder type minimum. In the latter case, the UK is heading for winter conditions they have not seen since the 17th century. Back then the UK economy did not depend on a highly sophisticated transportation system, which harsh winters will bring to a grinding halt, unless they start spending a lot of money on snow clearing equipment. It seems to me that the UK faces two very different options. Believe the output of the non-validated computer programs used by the warmaholics; e.g. Vicky Pope and Phil Jones. Or believe the hard experimental data from Livingston and Penn, and many others. So far as I am concerned this is a no-brainer; you believe the data.
Oh! but I forgot. The warmaholics have redefined GIGO. For climate models it no longer means “Garbage In, Garbage Out”, it now means “Garbage In, Gospel Out”.
i have lived in the UK for my entire life, and i always do the opposite of whatever the weather man says, if its hot, i dress as if its going to be an ice age, if they say its going to be cold i dress in tshirts and shorts. and i am usually the one who can cope LOL
All these Wrong pronouncments does the true meterologists a disservice.
“Phillip Bratby (23:13:29) :
It’s now light in the mildest part of the UK, the south-west, and we have another dusting of snow.
Of course the Met Office knows that weather is not climate: “The fact that 2009, like 2008, will not break records does not mean that global warming has gone away. What matters is the underlying rate of warming – the period 2001-2007, with an average of 14.44 °C, was 0.21 °C warmer than corresponding values for the period 1991-2000.” So the underlying rate according to the Met Office is only based on the last 18 years. Is that cherry-picking or not?”
Anyone want to make any bets that 1991-2000 and 2001-2010 end up being the same?
Now that they have values for 2008, why are the still using the 2001-2007 range for comparison?
That’s horse-hockey 🙂
JimB