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.
MartinGAtkins (12:39:35)
My impatience comes from the fact that the value for January 2009 was published on the 3rd of February. Since February is shorter, maybe it should take a shorter time to gather the data.
TonyB,
Your exercise seems to show that, overall, the climate is more moderate. Is this a bad thing?
Mike
John Philip (23:29:04) : Hmmmm, let us not confuse weather with climate…
Yes, lets not. So why is 30 year weather termed “climate”? Since we know there are longer term weather cycles than that, the use of 30 years is a farce at best. There is even a well documented 1500 year cycle called Bond Events (that I suppose one could call a climate cycle, but maybe not since nothing about the overall location changes, and you return from the cold phase back to typical warmth pretty much on schedule).
But if you insist, yes, the 30 year weather cycle is an interesting “climate” cycle, and is now turning back to the cold phase with the PDO et. al.
Their forecast for the average global temperature of 2008 was 14.37C. The actual outturn was 14.3C. Alarmists!
Gee… one of their computer generated projections matches the other one of their computer generated fictions. How impressive…
Me, I’ll take the guy looking out is window at snow and a larger heating bill as better evidence that it’s colder.
In fact Over the nine years, 2000-2008, since the Met Office has issued forecasts of annual global temperature the mean value of the forecast error is just 0.06 °C.
Which just goes to show how pointless is the mean annual global temperature as a statistic…
Or, to put it another way … Bullseye!
In a pigs eye…
Regarding UKMet forecasts.
They do indeed claim to miss by “just” 0.06 C, but, in addition to noting that’s 10% of the entire warming of the earth since the late 19th century, it’s worth pointing out that they are almost always on the high side for their forecasts.
http://www.climateaudit.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=119&st=0&sk=t&sd=a#p13264
So, yes, std. dev. is not the proper tool, considering that there is a decidedly non-symmetric error involved.
“Milder and drier winter predicted”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7635513.stm
“That’s not to say that we won’t get annual variability in the future. A colder winter will be even more noteworthy and we will aim to warn people in advance.”
Summer 2008 was warm was it???
“He said the Met Office was satisfied it had got its initial long-range “wet and warm” forecast for summer 2008 correct.”
Using the forecast to make future policy
“The forecast of another mild winter has been welcomed by Help the Aged.”
“This forecast will assist policy makers to adapt their strategies to ensure that the negative effects of winter weather are reduced as far as possible.”
Let’s have a good little gander at the last year’s weather in London.
Rain all summer, very little proper summer weather.
October snow for the first time since 1934 on the very day that the Climate Change Bill was passed!
A very cold December followed by snow in January and February.
The coldest winter in 18 years.
A slight bit of hail in Central London today, March 4th.
Chuck L (09:28:24) :
OT but i need some help. Our local newspaper ran a column by an environmentalist and they wrote
“Once again, average global temperatures are rising, with 2008 temperatures placing it as one of the 10 warmest years on record. All of the record-setting years for global temperature have occurred since 1997.”
Can one of you provide a link to the data that most effectively refutes the above? I will be writing a letter to the editor and want to have the facts I need.
A statement like the above can be very misleading. There is no debate that the temps have been rising since the end of the little ice age. With this in mind, you would expect the most recent years to be among the warmest if the trend is continuing. Temps in the US appear to have peaked in 1998 universally explained by a large El Nino event and have tracked sideways since. So you would expect the 10 warmest years to cluster around 1998 which may include 2008. Here is a NASA link listing their top ten warmest years In the US and five are after 1997 with the warmest being 1934.
Global temperatures are a bit different. If you look at the record here you will see that the statement you wish to refute is probably accurate. Global temps are influenced by Arctic temps which have increased at a greater rate than the rest of the globe but the difference is not great and the mini-trend is sideways or down from 1998. You would expect the years at the top of the trend to be the warmest even if it is turning and that’s what you get.
But, as you can see, the differences are pretty small (less than .2C separates the 10 warmest top to bottom). The picture I get is the temps drifting up and down sometimes with co2 increase (1980-1998) sometimes against (1945-1975 and 1998-present) and staying at or below previous highs. An all time high wouldn’t surprise me within the next 30 years but I would expect it to happen
gradually and be of a small increment. Cooling is probably more likely and a cooling mini-trend of 30 years would just about turn around the large warming trend we have seen since 1900.
But who knows? We are kidding ourselves if we think we can control the climate. Let’s go about our lives, enjoy the weather and solve our problems as they present themselves. Let’s not waste time and resources on trying to control a problem which has not been shown to exist.
Prediction for next winter .. based on solar activity to date .. colder
Chuck L (09:28:24) :
Look at the chart “latest global temperatures” on Roy Spencer’s pages:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/
The 1998 peak was followed by a decrease. This has been followed by some ups and downs which are a bit higher than the 1979 to 1997 period. It is these higher years – about 2002 to 2007 – that get the attention. Then there is the recent drop. So the issue is whether or not you believe the information in papers such as these:
http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~dbunny/research/global/geoev.pdf
http://www.davidarchibald.info/papers/The%20Past%20and%20Future%20of%20Climate.pdf
Or whether you believe CO2 drives ever increasing temperatures. The AGW folks have taken a single period trend when CO2 and temps went up together. Everything they do is based on this. But temps didn’t go up in the 1945 -1977 period when CO2 increased nor in the 2002 to 2009 period when CO2 increased. This seems to falsify the CO2 issue. So you have to search for an explanation that relies on fundamental physical properties of the Earth-Sun system (incl. atmos. & oceans) as put forth in the two papers mentioned. Supply facts and give it your best shot!
Mike Bryant
I think my exercise shows that we are becoming more moderate at such a rate that it will take 1000 years before anyone starts to notice anything! Its a shame we keep on parsing back to nonsensical temperatures from 1850 when there are lots of sensible national records that show nothing much is happening and even within the LIA we have temperatures virtually as warm as todays.
Tonyb
Stephen Brown (12:46:25) :
“The carbon credit trading scheme appears to have fallen victim to market forces; i.e. no one wants to buy ‘carbon credits’ nor even ‘trade’ in them. That which pretends to be our Government now wants to enforce a much higher minimum price for a ton of CO2 exhaust than the market is willing to pay. I wonder why?”
The idea of a government-mandated market floor on carbon credits is to provide market stability, and some predictability for those who make the decisions to either purchase carbon credits, or invest capital to reduce carbon emissions from their operations.
California is currently discussing ways and means to implement a cap-and-trade scheme under AB 32, in concert with several other U.S. western states and Canadian provinces. Carbon credit market stability via government intervention is a topic. The government may also intervene to place a roof on the carbon trades, in case the price escalates too much.
See this 10-pg White Paper from California Air Resources Board’s April 2008 meeting on the topic: This Link
Englands Hottest.
http://i599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/EnglandHottest.jpg
John Philip (23:29:04) :
“Their forecast for the average global temperature of 2008 was 14.37C. The actual outturn was 14.3C. Alarmists! … Or, to put it another way … Bullseye!”
John its Bull but considerably further aft a bit lower than the eye.
Pray tell — what is a Global Temperature of a Planet as computed (not directly measured — derived from a rather esoteric algorithm applied to data contributed from a somewhat randomly distributed (there is some sense and stability to the stations in the US and most of Western Europe and a lot more randomness of siting and lack of maintenance in the rest of the data set) and constantly evolving set of stations of varying reliability mostly located in the Northern Hemisphere, on land and near cities (airports are real popular sites).
On the other hand satellite data (MSU) seems to show very insignificant warming since the satellites began to measure globally (about 30 years) and of that warming — it stopped and cooling has been underway since about 2004
When the Met Office, NASA GSSI, NCAR or any of the others can take 10 years of satellite temperature data + 10 years of satellite solar data + a 20 year history of volcanism, CO2, etc. — and then use that augmented 10 year data set to predict 10 years forward from the satellite data and then have those predictions reasonably match the next 10 years of data — well then we might want to take them seriously
Otherwise — my money is on “Its the SUN”!
Westy!
Ed Reid (05:32:09) : […] 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?
There can be no confidence in anything smaller than whole degrees F.
The historic data were measured to 1/10 th degree F then they were rounded to whole degrees F for reporting. Each day had three samples (min / max / TimeOfObservation I believe). If a datum was missing it was fine to “guess” and fill in what you thought it ought to have been on the form.
Now you can “oversample” a single thing and get a synthetic accuracy that exceeds your actual accuracy; that requires measuring the same thing repeatedly. We don’t measure each day/location repeatedly.
We do take those whole F temperatures and start mathematically manipulating them (adding, dividing) to make many averages of averages. These are what becomes the basic input to GISS. NOAA provides a table of monthly averages of daily means in F with precision into the 1/10 F. GISS then converts these to C. The relevant bit of code is in USHCN2v2.f
10 read(2,'(a)’,end=100) line
read(line(1:6),*) idus0
[…]
read(line(indd:indd+5),'(f6.2)’) temp
if(temp.gt.-99.00) itemp(m)=nint( 50.*(temp-32.)/9 ) ! F->.1C
end do
write(nout,'(a11,i1,i4,12i5)’) idg,iz,iyear,itemp
There is a bit of sloppiness here in that “9” is an integer and “32.” is a floating point number as is “50.” then they do a cast with nint into an integer type. I’m not sure what this mixing of data types will do to the precision in the low end bits (probably nothing) but a FORTRAN expert ought to pass judgement.
A cleaner approach would have been to leave everything in F and avoid false precision, but they probably decided C was more trendy… They do have to at some point face the fact that one set is in F and the other is in C so doing it this way might make sense IFF you watch the false precision properly (which they don’t do).
Some folks want to think this can be treated like an over sample of the month, but it can’t. There is no monthly temperature to repeatedly sample. There are only individual days with their own precision and accuracy. The monthly average is only a computed artifact, not a real thing to over sample.
This is where the “fun” begins.
The C number already has some false precision in it; but you can almost forgive it since they have the choice of giving a bit of false precision (but preserving all the information that was in the original full degree F number) or giving a full degree C precision (and having no false precision, but losing the difference in range that a degree F vs C has).
Now GISS takes this number are starts doing strange and wondrous things with it. see:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/gistemp-step0-the-process/
if you want to start touring the actual computer code and process.
That includes a great deal of math and averaging. Now what I learned (“Never let your precision exceed your accuracy!” – Mr. McGuire) was that any time you did a calculation, the result of that calculation could only have the accuracy (and thus ought to only be presented with the precision of) your least accurate term. Average 10 12.111111111 and 8.0004 and you can only say “10”, not 10.000 and certainly not 10.1111 or 10.04 as that is false precision.
(In fact, it’s slightly worse than this, due to accumulation of errors in long strings of calculations and the repeated conversion that GISS does from decimal in intermediate files to binary at execution and back to decimal in the next file… but that’s a rather abstruse topic and most people glaze so I’ll skip it here. But just keep in mind that repeated type changing corrupts the purity of the low order bits.)
So what gets trumpeted and ballyhooed?
Things (not temperatures, calculated anomalies based on averages of interpolations of averages of averages of temperatures – no, that is not an exaggeration! In fact I’m leaving out a few averaging and interpolating and extrapolating steps! ) measured as X.yz C! Not only is the “z” a complete fabrication, but any residual value in “y” from the greater precision of F over C in the raw data has long ago been lost in the extended calculations and type conversions. IF you are lucky the X has some accuracy to it.
(Though GISS even manages to corrupt this via “the reference station method” that lets them rewrite the whole thing based on other temperatures or anomalies up to 1200 km away…)
Under the Italy thread some weeks ago there was a blink chart of Pisa that showed about 1.7C “adjustment” IIRC to one of the data points. So if we are creating 1.7C of “fantasy” how much truth is left in the 0.01 C place?
GISS data are thoroughly cooked and, IMHO, only useful for fairy tails and monster stories…
To the inevitable assertion that it’s only the US data so the global number is still fine, see:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/02/24/so_many_thermometers_so_little_time/
The fact is that the only long term records we have are dominated severely by the U.S.A. and Europe. GISS makes up much of the rest by various sorts of in-filling of average boxes and in-filling over time.
Everyone needs to high-tale-it over to Climate Audit. There is a fun piece about how the climate community is very supportive of solid evidence that could undermine the current understanding and accuracy of long term climate model predictions.
Prediction next winter, based on a markedly colder Pacific. Hard Winter. How markedly different is solar data? And remember, solar stuff has to get down to the same level (IE through Earth’s atmosphere) that cold ocean water is.
As a model of human behavior, they are trending on their prior year forecasts.
Thank you all for you excellent ideas. In my letter I will concentrate on the leveling, then decrease of global temperatures since 1998 in the face of increasing CO2 and perhaps make reference to the medieval warm period when CO2 could not have been a factor. I am sure that there will be many angry AGW believers posting to the website of the newspaper.
Stephen Brown (12:46:25) :
From your link:
“In January the European commission appeared to rule out intervening to prop up the falling price of carbon, and Ed Miliband, the UK climate change secretary, told the Financial Times he was “not convinced that a floor is particularly necessary”.
Imagine, propping up the falling price of carbon. Wouldn’t that be investing in the very thing that evokes gnashing of teeth? Carbon trading – the greatest theft perpetrated on mankind. The UK and EU would do well to lower the entire fiasco into the round file.
“E.M.Smith (13:39:45) :
John Philip (23:29:04) : Hmmmm, let us not confuse weather with climate…
Yes, lets not. So why is 30 year weather termed “climate”? ”
E.M.,
Haven’t you heard–people like John Philip are now saying that natural variability are suppressing global warming? And in 30 years our co2 skeletons are going to come out of the closet? The only thing that qualifies as “climate” to them is warming . Anything else that happens, even if it lasts for 30 years, is “weather”.
You see, they are know-it-alls. And the ‘all’ they know is that co2 is destroying the earth. Oops, they forgot about photosynthesis.
“Alec, a.k.a Daffy Duck (12:46:32) :
Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation dipped just into negative territory, -.007, in January…
Feb number hasn’t been posted but it should be cooler than January!
http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/data/correlation/amon.us.long.data”
Ya, hello cooling. But wait, we’re supposed to call it “weather”.
“Brian BAKER (09:45:34) :
Of course if one was to turn to Piers Corbyn of Weather Action you would have seen that his forecasts were correct. But then you see, he’s not a believer.
http://www.weatheraction.com/id7.html ”
Some are arguing that we don’t know how much of an effect the sun has on temperatures and weather. But it can’t be argued that Piers Corbyn has figured something out in that area. The accuracy of his some of his forecast show he has a handle on some things. Certainly he’s more accurate than the MET.
“Steven Goddard (05:38:24) :
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.”
Figures they’d have done something on it. I’ll have to find it on youtube. Thanks for that.
“AndyW (02:41:46) :
That was Michael Fish, not Ian McCaskell and it was October 1987, not 1988, and it was not a hurricane by the standard definition, though did have hurricane force winds.
Regards
Andy”
Ok, thanks for that. Either way, I still recall waking up in th middle on the night to watch all manner of things, including the clothes, blowing about all over the place (Now reminds me of Wellington, NZ – This 1987 storm would be fairly normal wind there). I was rather amused by it at the time, and then day light broke.
Damn! There’s still an interface problem between the keyboard and chair!!!!!
Well; I am Happy
http://tinyurl.com/cnw42p