While England basks in a winter wonderland, with more on the way, and bookmakers are now slashing odds on a white Christmas (The Times reports “The odds on a White Christmas fell to match the lowest price ever offered at 6/4 today”.), it seems like a good time to review the Met Office forecast for the coming year.
The Met Office is forecasting 2010 to be the warmest year ever, due to El Nino. The moderate El Nino we have now appears to be weakening, with additional weakening in the next few months.
The Met Office did the same kind of forecast in 2007, right before the temperature dropped more than 1C. The UAH (Channel5 LT) temperature has dropped this past week and is the closest to the 20 year average it has been in six months. With these factors in play, has the Met Office has made a serious blunder with their current high visibility forecast? Is it a repeat of the now famously wrong Met Office BBQ summer forecast?
See the 2007 Met Office forecast here:
4 January 2007
2007 – forecast to be the warmest year yet
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.
Each January the Met Office, in conjunction with the University of East Anglia, issues a forecast of the global surface temperature for the coming year. The forecast takes into account known contributing factors, such as solar effects, El Niño, greenhouse gases concentrations and other multi-decadal influences. Over the previous seven years, the Met Office forecast of annual global temperature has proved remarkably accurate, with a mean forecast error size of just 0.06 °C.
See the 2009 (for 2010) forecast here:
Climate could warm to record levels in 2010
10 December 2009
A combination of man-made global warming and a moderate warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as El Niño, means it is very likely that 2010 will be a warmer year globally than 2009.
Recently released figures confirm that 2009 is expected to be the fifth-warmest year in the instrumental record that dates back to 1850.
The latest forecast from our climate scientists, shows the global temperature is forecast to be almost 0.6 °C above the 1961–90 long-term average. This means that it is more likely than not that 2010 will be the warmest year in the instrumental record, beating the previous record year which was 1998.
Here are some video’s from England that give some idea of the snowstorm:
I live in a rural part of SE England and, being a keen gardener and walker, pay special attention to the weather forecasts here. More in hope than expectation I consult the BBC’s website for these (its data come from the Met Office) and they are reliably wrong – so much so that a couple of years ago I entered into an e-mail exchange, pointing out some of the grosser errors.
The Met Office’s response? They lied. They claimed a level of accuracy which bore no rememblance to my on-the-ground experience. Then they stoppd responding when I (politely) pointed this out .
I have no reason to believe they have any better skills (or defences) at their disposal on the subject of ‘climate change’ as they stupidly insist on calling it.
The only perdictions that are worse than politicians is a weathermans. Now lets mix the two…….. oops!!!
“Over the previous seven years, the Met Office forecast of annual global temperature has proved remarkably accurate, with a mean forecast error size of just 0.06 °C.”
I checked what the mean error would have been if they had simply said “the next year will be the same temperature as this year”. Answer: 0,053 °C.
The Earth hasn’t warmed since the 1998 El Nino discontinuity. Maybe this is because since then, McIntyre and Tisdale etc have been watching the Warming CRU and so the CRU has not been able to cook the books since then.
This explanation is the simplest of them all, and so passes the Occam Razor test.
“It’s just the old adage: Keep predicting the same thing over and over again, eventually you’ll predict it right.”
A better way of putting it is ‘A broken clock is right twice a day’
Off topic, thought you might be interested in this:
http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/05/pdf/6americas.pdf
Quite detailed poll of the public’s takes on GW in America.
2009 is nowhere near the fifth warmest. The surface temp record is so badly screwed up as to be nearly worthless. I cannot wait for an open and credible surface temp record to be developed.
That’s not a snow storm; this is snow:
http://toronto.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20091211/ont_weather_091211/20091211/?hub=TorontoNewHome
And cold. The euros have it easy
Glenn (12:50:37) :
That’s the U.K. screwed then! Our grid nearly went into overload about a year ago, without France to dig us out, we’re really in the clag! 🙁
DaveE
There was so much snow that people were driving on the wrong side of the road 😀
Despite what one might be led to believe by the British Wind Energy Association (BWEA) and other wind lobbyists there are relatively frequent periods when there is virtually no wind and, therefore, virtually no output from wind turbines, however wide their distribution throughout the UK.
These low wind periods are more likely to occur in the winter months (when demand is higher) and the irrefutable fact is that, in order to meet peak demand in these periods, the capacity allocated to wind turbines would have to be provided by other energy sources. At certain times this back-up would have to be almost 100 per cent of that estimated wind turbine capacity.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/3347925/When-the-wind-stops—the-other-side-of-the-wind-turbine-argument.html
Not to quibble, but, “The moderate El Nino we have now appears to be weakening” – where did you get this information? Not in the link provided.
Also, all this about the snow, which is just a form of precipitation, quite common in the winter. What about temperature? Haven’t seen that mentioned much.
Nice press release from the Japanese, on their data, here – http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/news/press_20091215.pdf
BBC was classic this morning.
Radio 3 news lead item was ‘Governments close to Climate Change deal in Copenhagen”.
Second lead ” Up to 6 inches of snow fell in South East England”.
I did chortle out loud.
ClimateHoax (11:44:04) :
Meth office..
That’s the most amount of laughs I’ve had for the least amount of words, since I’ve been reading here.
Even Al Gore is right twice a day. Oh wait, that’s a broken watch… Where was I? Even Al Gore is right… oh wait…
Barbecue summer? Anyone?
@Leon Brozyna
“…If done properly you can create the impression of working at a well thought of government agency, say MI5, or Scotland Yard…”
Umm – not exactly. Leon, I don’t know if you live in the UK? The Met Office may be famous for incompetentence and pretending the globe is warming in order to keep their jobs, but the Security Service are famous for lying to get us into the Iraq war, and pretending there is lots of terrorist activity to maintain their jobs after the Cold War finished, while Scotland Yard are famous for shooting people in the streets and then claiming it was all a perfectly reasonable thing to do.
On the whole, I think the Met Office have a better public image…
Ian – Was it Robert Napier who got rid of David Bellamy from the WWF because he wouldn’t fall in line re AGW?
william (12:32:02) :
Same thing happened in Seattle, Washington last year. Huge blizzard, tons of snow, and no snow plows. To top it off, the city has rules against run-off into Puget Sound, so they couldn’t de-ice the streets with salt or chemicals. The whole city ground to a halt for a few days.”
The City politicians under the “leadership” Mayor McNickols weighed the dangers of climate change and sustainability against the safety of a half a million residents and came down on the side of “saving the planet”.
For whom, one is tempted to ask, was he trying to save the planet?
Oh, and BTW, he made sure his street was plowed.
People talking of temperatures got me thinking about how the average daily temperatures are calculated. I read recently in this blog that they take the high and the low temperatures read each day and average them to get the average for the day. But an average is far from a mean. To take an extreme example, in Alberta Canada, we get warming winds called Chinooks. The temperature could be sitting at 11 degrees, pop up to 20 degrees for an hour or two then drop back down to a low of say 10. Averaging the high and low would give you 15 degrees but the MEAN temperature would be about 11. I assume modern technology could give proper means, but the old hi-lo thermometers we all used to use won’t. I wonder how much error this introduces? I assume that it is hoped the plus minuses would average out but I bet it doesn’t.
How accurate is the whole average temperature thing? Has anyone looked at this?
Just been watching the weather forecast on the BBC. The forecast was, for many UK areas, sub-zero with the caveat that outside urban areas the temperatures would be 3 or 4 degrees C colder!
Why is it that the UHI effect when applied to Weather is so much larger than when it is integrated into Climate?
That the Met is totally wrong with their weather predictions was foreordained… what did they expect with Phil Jones’ fraudulent predictions??
Glenn (12:50:37) : Why are you posting this? We all know that cold is good, warmth is bad. How do we know? The IPCC tells us so.
If it stays this cold in Britain for a few months, folks will be able to walk to Calais across the ice. Say, if that happens, that would make a great protest march, wouldn’t it?
OT – The Now Show on BBC R4 – they are still a bunch of warmists, but gave this Dr Seuss view of Copenhagen. The good bit starts at 14:00 into the program.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00p99n5/The_Now_Show_Series_29_Episode_4/
Enjoy!