Guest Post by Steven Goddard
Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun The Japanese don’t care to, the Chinese wouldn’t dare to Hindus and Argentines sleep firmly from twelve till one But Englishmen detest-a siesta
– Noel Coward – 1931
Persistence is the British trait which kept the Shackleton crew alive and helped England withstand the Nazi’s throughout World War II. It keeps the Catlin Crew going and kept Lewis Pugh relentlessly paddling his kayak over Arctic Ice towards the pole. And it is the same trait which keeps the UK Met Office forecasting warm summers year after year. The Met Office forecast 2007 to be the warmest year ever globally, and a hot summer in the UK.
Instead it turned out to be a cool summer and the rainiest on record in England. Similar story for summer 2008 and winter 2008-2009 . Yet in fine British tradition the Met Office remains undaunted –
The coming summer is ‘odds on for a barbecue summer’, according to long-range forecasts. Summer temperatures across the UK are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or below average for the three months of summer.
Chief Meteorologist at the Met Office, Ewen McCallum, said: “After two disappointingly-wet summers, the signs are much more promising this year. We can expect times when temperatures will be above 30 °C, something we hardly saw at all last year.”
The last 30C day in London was July 26, 2006 – that was over 1,000 days ago. But you have to admire their grit and determination to get the global warming message across to the ignorant British population.
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
– Attributed to Albert Einstein
Darts anyone?
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I often think: “the AGW phenomenon is more about Sociology and Psychology than Climatology”.
The major news organizations will trumpet the extreme annual Climatological predictions, trumpet the rare success, and never mention the failures. That will get them where they want to go — given human Sociology and Psychology.
BBC, how amazing, reports about the Scottish famine during the Maunder Minimum and UK Met Office restates that the sun is only one of the many drivers responsible for our climate! Funny that the Scot experience from the past is neglected by a fellow Scottsman who now happens to be the Prime Minister of Great Brittan and prepares his country for runaway Global Warming.
Great Britain is the first county in the world to have adopted harsh legislation to reduce CO2 emissions.
It will also be the first country to go broke because of that legislation, beating its citizens with immense costs to pay for their retarded policies.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/scotland/highlands_and_islands/8010513.stm
Sod 14 49 30
You seem to have accidentally left off some figures.
It must be pointed out once again that the vast majority of the CET figures from 1659 occured during the LIA, yet we still have figures from them that match the modern ones (which due to resiting of the stations exhibit some degree of UHI).
The mean average of the older figures was reduced because of the cold winters experienced during the LIA -not enhanced by warm summers-as I stated in my post 12 34 41.
1733 10.47
1736 10.30
1779 10.40
1781 10.20
1828 10.30
1834 10.47
1868 10.38
1921 10.47
1959 10.48
Are you seriously putting forward the argument that we are suffering catastrophic global warming with a temp difference of 0.01C betwen 1733 and 2007? Is that your contention?
Is it not more interesting to wonder why the recovery from the depths of the LIA is so small as to be barely measurable by anyone except those with a financial or political agenda they wish to promote?
Bearing in mind these are mostly LIA figures, if we put them into context against the MWP or the Roman Warm Period or the Holocenes, it seems to me that our recovery is so weak it could be argued that we are still in the LIA.
Tonyb
Flanagan (14:08:29) :
You are quite right that the paper you linked to is interesting. You also totally misrepresented the conclusions of that paper. Try showing a little integrity.
The UK channel Sky News carried the prediction and in doing so linked it to the waning of the La Nina and the warming Pacific. Broadcast is available here.
http://news.sky.com/skynews/Home/UK-News/Summer-Forecast-Long-Term-Weather-Preditions-For-2009-From-The-Met-Office/Article/200904415272552?lpos=UK_News_News_Your_Way_Region_6&lid=NewsYourWay_ARTICLE_15272552_Summer_Forecast%3A_Long-Term_Weather_Preditions_For_2009_From_The_Met_Office
The video link is to the left, the blog account is somewhat more pragmatic about the Met Office track record. 🙂
I did comment to the blog regarding the Pacific ocean temperature and referenced a negative PDO report but it was not published.
I did try making a short URL but it fails.
Mick.
Oops.
“Weather Forecast in Anglican Chant”
Let the Met office make their predictions. I don’t understand what they have to gain from this type of guesswork.
Remember the basic priciple of English law , in order to prove guilt the evidence has to be beyond any reasonable doubt.
This simple principle, dates back to Magna Carta 794 years ago. Every Engish speaking country’s legal system is based om Magna Carta.
To those who don’t understand or deny this fundamental point, explain why this does not apply to alleged climate change?
sod,
sorry but I don’t agree.
I’ve just checked the figures again and the top 10 according to the CET figures are:
2006 10.82
1990 10.63
1999 10.63
1949 10.62
2002 10.60
1997 10.53
1995 10.52
1989 10.50
2003 10.50
1959 10.48
Nobody’s disputing that the climate has been warming during the 30 years from the mid-1970s but note that 1998 doesn’t show and the following year (still, we presume, showing the El Nino effect) couldn’t do better than 1990.
2008, incidentally, came in at 47th!
Even a broken clock is ….
NO, A broken clock is still broken! Fix or replace the clock. Because on the odd chance you look at the clock when it isn’t right, it WILL tell you the wrong time.
And I thought economics was the only profession where an esteemed member of the profession could be wrong all of the time and still be esteemed.
Chief Meteorologist at the Met Office, Ewen McCallum, said: “After two disappointingly-wet summers, the signs are much more promising this year.”
Why was he “disappointed” that there were no scorching summers and hoping for one this year? He’s supposed to be an impartial observer and reporter of facts, not a fan of Global Warming.
“BrianMcL (15:58:37) : The Catlin thing isn’t funny any more. Why don’t they just admit they were wrong/misguided/unlucky/completely vindicated and come back home?”
It might be that in their thinking they don’t know yet if they are right or wrong. They are collecting data that will be analized at a later time. If that is the case they can’t know today if they are right or wrong.
“…take responsibility now and call the whole thing off before…”
Going by history Pen Hadlow isn’t one to call things off when circumstances are saying to call things off. Someone else may have to make that call, someone watching from the outside.
Sod
Admittedly anecdotal, but I couldnt resist repeating this letter from The Daily Telegraph of 29 April 2009 as it matches the debate about a virtually non existent change in our climate over the last 350 years
“The medieval Welsh cuckoo and climate change
SIR – On Monday, we heard our first cuckoo, and indeed, regular as cuckoo-clockwork, they have returned to the St David’s peninsula in the last week of April during the past 38 years.
A few miles away, at Nevern, there is a delightful legend that the cuckoo came on St Brynach’s feast day, the seventh day of April, and
sat on Saint Brynach’s stone. The priest would not begin Mass until the bird had appeared, but one year it was late arriving and “when
she came at last, lighting on the said stone, her accustomed preaching place, being scarce able once to sound the note, presently fell dead”.
George Owen wrote this story in the 17th century, but it is certainly of medieval oral tradition.
The change of calendar in 1752 took away 11 days so the medieval cuckoo actually arrived on what is now April 18.
After the best part of perhaps a 1,000 years the modern bird is just a few days later, despite supposed climate change.
Dr John Etherington
Llanhowell, Pembrokeshire”
tonyb
Does not matter, the taxes are coming…..and the leaders that are taxing and spending like demons, they need to remember one man.
Louis XVI
🙁
maz2 (15:56:09) :
“Weather Forecast in Anglican Chant”
That is AWESOME !! 🙂
I wish the weather channel adopted that style
Ding dong the hoax is dead, pay more in taxes to the government so government scientists can pretend to control the weather. And how would we know they were only pretending?
It’s ‘all in time’ for those taxes, we all need. Everything is coming down to it’s an emergency don’t you know.
Watching that ice melt with it’s cracks is really funny.
maz2 (16:24:47) :
As my wife and I were checking out of the Hotel St. David in St. David, Wales, the sun was shining brightly. We had awakened to a light snow which became sleet, which became rain, which became a bright sunny morning.
“Cathy (12:22:57) :
I love these posts that produce the best comments on the internet.
Thanks, Anthony. It’s good to have a few chuckles at the expense of the warmers.”
“Katherine (12:27:02) :
Maybe there’s a method behind their madness. If their forecast is wrong, they’ll have justification for buying another supercomputer to improve their forecasting capabilities. If it’s right, then by Jove, that new supercomputer was just the thing!”
Two very good points:
Cathy, my thoughts exactly. I had a read and a great laugh. A wonderful way to start the day. Thanks Anthony (again!)
Katherine: has raised a very good point. My experience with automating activities is that all too often, technology is used to address shortcomings in processes. If the underlying process or concept is flawed, no amount of automation, no amount of increasing computing power, will fix the problem.
Right now, my guess as to what Britain’s summer will be like on average is probably as good, if not better, than the Met’s, and same applies to most of the readers at WUWT.
The reason is for this simple: The Met’s forecast is based on a simple premise, that CO2 is increasing, that CO2 causes global warming, and therefore the summer must end up being warmer than in the past. It’s a simple 1+1=2. That they keep getting the forecasts wrong should be alerting the Met to the fact that the real equation is X+Y=Z, where the values of X. Y, and Z are all unknown.
The Met will go hard for a new Supercomputer (in fact aren’t they getting a new Sterling 140 million one?) so they can run more 1+1 formulas. If the computer spits out the same answer, but 100 times more times, then that answer must be right, and it’s the weather that’s wrong, dammit!
But doesn’t all that Met Office prognosticating in public frighten the horses?
Willamette Valley, Oregon definition of the Sun: A brighter than normal cloud.
England’s definition of the Sun: A brighter than normal fog.
There are those of us up North that don’t give a rat’s ass if lands South of us fry in AGW temperatures. We just want to get a tan for the first time in our fricken life!
“Nazis” doesn’t take an apostrophe here. It’s a plural, not a possessive. 😉
Just Want Truth,
They’ve spent the last six days (and counting) in a tent thinking about maths and have taken 16 ice core samples of their immediate area.
Assuming they’re not trying to sink the ice I can only assume that they’re still under the impression that they’re conducting some kind of research. Don’t scientists normally analyse their data?
They’ve published a paper on their website claiming surprise at a lack of first year ice. Given where they started, however, this is probably because they expected to be much further North by now. If they had made the progress they had expected we can probably assume that they’d have reached thicker ice a while ago.
The conclusion of their research was established long before they started their experiment.
Surely it’s not too much to expect that they would have spent at least some of the last 6 days looking at their manual records and compared it to what they expected before they left Blightly? That must be a more important contribution to science than playing I Spy in a tent in a blizzard in the arctic.
Also, I think they should be the last in line to decide when they should be rescued. Their research has at best limited validity, they’re stuck in a tent running out of food, the weather is too cold and wild to move, they’ll never get close to their destination and they’ve had frostbite and hypothermia for weeks. Why trust their judgement on anything?
Ron de Haan (15:17:13) :
3. We have the UN IPCC pushing the AGW scam but it is also the World Meteorological Organization.
The acronym for World Meteorological Organization is WMO, which sounds like “humo” in Spanish; “humo” does mean “smoke” in English. All things have easy explanations… Heh!
A couple of met office publications investigating CET (Central England Temperature) accuracies:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/publications/HCTN/HCTN_50.pdf
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/publications/HCTN/HCTN_46.pdf
The mildest winter I ever enjoyed was a summer in England.
I am sure the Metservice got the forecast right more often in the past when it was based on observation and knowledge, now they rely blindly on models that are clearly incapable of making long term weather forecasts!
They have become a joke in the UK!
BrianMcL (17:28:00) :
Just Want Truth,
They’ve spent the last six days (and counting) in a tent thinking about maths and have taken 16 ice core samples of their immediate area.
Assuming they’re not trying to sink the ice I can only assume that they’re still under the impression that they’re conducting some kind of research. Don’t scientists normally analyse their data?
…
Surely it’s not too much to expect that they would have spent at least some of the last 6 days looking at their manual records and compared it to what they expected before they left Blightly?
Do you think a sientist would be capable of doing these measurements under these conditions. Why should they (not scientists as they admit) analyse the data. They are collecting it ONLY. Others will analyse.