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:
Incidentally last year’s winter forecast from the MET was “The trend of warmer than average winters continues”
It turned out to be very cold indeed
DaveE (13:20:46) :
“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! :-(”
Looks like the whole country is going down for a hard freeze/snow for the next week or so. Is there any wood left in the UK?
Climate change agreement reached in Copenhagen
Page last updated at 22:56 GMT, Friday, 18 December 2009
President Barack Obama: “This progress did not come easily, and we know this progress alone is not enough”
. . .
He said the US, China, Brazil, India and South Africa had “agreed to set a mitigation target to limit warming to no more than 2C and, importantly, to take action to meet this objective”.
Jakers (13:36:44) : Please reread the link . It states that the moderate el nino has weakened and is expected to weaken further by Spring .
Charles. U. Farley (09:55:05) :
Propaganda comes at a cost. Even supermarkets don’t take it seriously. But thenm, they have to operate in the world
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/retailing/article6806373.ece
British holidaymakers are not the only people upset that Met Office predictions of a barbecue summer have proved woefully inaccurate.
Tesco is so fed up with the unreliability of forecasters that it has set up its own six-strong “supermarket weather team” to help plan more accurately which types of food it will need to stock.
The UK’s biggest retailer has pulled together a dedicated team of data experts who collate weather forecasts from a wide range of sources that are then analysed using unique software.
The computer program includes detailed regional weather reports for the whole of the UK going back five years and, crucially, what each Tesco store sold as a result of that weather. A rise of 10C, for example, led to a 300% uplift in sales of barbecue meat and a 50% increase in sales of lettuce
A spokesman for Tesco said: “In recent years, the unpredictability of the British summer — not to mention the unreliability of British weather forecasters — has caused a massive headache for those in the retail food business deciding exactly which foods to put out on shelves.
“The present summer is a perfect example, with the weather changing almost daily and shoppers wanting barbecue and salad foods one day and winter food the next.”
Tesco said the system has already predicted temperature drops during July that led to a big increase in demand for soup and hot puddings.
The company believes that as well as boosting profits, its weather system will also help to cut food waste.
“Since heat-related deaths are generally much fewer than cold-related deaths, the overall effect of global warming on health can be expected to be a beneficial one.”
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/494582_3
Warmth not all bad? But what if we have global cooling instead of the predicted warming?
To me it seems that the AGW climate scientists are like the doctors ‘ In the madness of King George’. They spent their time looking at the wrong things as their mindset couldn’t take into account what was happening. The current cold spell in the UK will be seen as further proof of AGW because their models see any change as a part of the problem.
Richard (15:27:12) : – from the Washington Post
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/capitalweathergang/
boballab (10:00:13)
hmmm. I recall that even the Met office are jealous of Corbyn getting it right as much as they get it wrong, and complain that he won’t release his secret model to them… He won’t divulge until they discard co2 theory
If they are going to use CRU data it’s a safe bet that the figures will match the prediction with a degree of precision. Why do they persist in this farce?
National Weather Service made the same prediction in November: warm winter due to el nino. How long have they even known about el nino/la nina? I don’t remember Willard Scott going on and on about el nino during my youth. It’s amazing how they take 100 years of fairly good data and a few anecdotes from the natives to brazenly forecast everything from seasonal hurricane frequency to temperatures for the next 3 months. Someday, they’re gonna get their butts handed to them. I only hope it’s this year. Of course, they’ll have some lame excuse (el nino went away, teleconnecting aliens, etc.). They’ll never admit they haven’t a clue.
I real the MET forecasts regularly. They are the sort who would say “It would have been even colder if it had not been for global warming” , after already predicting on the basis of global warming theory a warmer than average winter for 2008/09.
If an unpridicted ice age came tomorrow, and the glaciers came down to Watford, so that you could walk from London to New York across ice, they would say “They would have come as far as Bournmouth had it not been for global warming”
I actually find the Met office quite entertaining, though its not wise to take it seriously
The Met Office just gave me a hot tip for the 1.15 at Haydock…
‘King of Confusion’.
Any takers?
The Gore Effect continues – east anglia copped it as well! Washington bracing for massive snowstorm also – somehow seems quite prophetic!
Linked a lot more here;
http://twawki.com/2009/12/18/1443/
December temps will drop obviously, but will peak in Jan or Feb, and looking at UAH records, Jan is the favorite. In 30 years of UAH records, on rare occasion do yearly temperatures peak outside of those two months.
My suspicion is Jan or Feb 2010 will rise sharply and meet or exceed Nov. As a SSW may be forming in the Arctic, that could have a profound effect on NH temperatures depending on how it develops.
We still haven’t felt the effects of El Nino, so it wouldn’t be wise to assume anything at this point, however, and SOI has been somewhat mimicking 2006 through the end of November (I haven’t compared recent weeks).
So although I doubt 2010 will exceed 1998, I think it may very well follow 2007 and develop into another moderate to strong La Nina by summer’s end.
My 2c
Wayne Delbeke (14:14:16) :
Great point. Granularity.
For the same reason we need weekly, not monthly global temperature anomalies. Then we may see a different thing entirely, in the (future) historical record and year on year, and enhance chunky artifices such as the 13 month rolling mean.
So,is there a deal or not? a ‘tentative’ deal? What has actually been signed?
I’d bet there’s not one Brit who believes any of the Met’s forecasts now. Climategate has completely destroyed any veracity CRU and the Met ever had.
“Harley Davidson-Rider (16:08:07) :
So,is there a deal or not? a ‘tentative’ deal? What has actually been signed?”
No idea, but whatever it is, nobodies happy, it isn’t legally binding and they’re all committed to move forward.
P Wilson (15:39:34) :
Piers used to plead with the Met Office to take on board his technique, and his forecasts, gratis. He would travel to meteorological meetings, on his own dime, to be studiously ignored. Then, after a series of wins, he was prevented from betting on the weather and became an advisor to one of the top bookies to vet speculation from other punters. The rest is history.
That he bears no ill toward these people speaks volumes about the man.
Gordon Brown has just given his take on Copenhagen. He smiled a lot, waved his hand about big-style and pledged that he would spend his every waking hour to the creation of a legally binding agreement.
That latter point is good news – it’s a cast-iron guarantee that no legal agreement will happen! This man is a political Jonah.
The bad news is that he’s still the unelected leader of GB and the BBC thinks that his cause is bolstered by getting John (Pork-Meister) Prescott into the studio to remind us just how omnipotent our Dear Leader is.
At least when the POTUS was on TV and handling ‘questions’ there was always an outside chance that he would point to a dapper gentleman in the audience and say.
You Sir, with the bandage on you head, what is your question?
I would say Copenhagen is officially a bust. Or as this person from the UE says, catastrophe:
“It’s a catastrophe,” said Dan Joergensen, a member of the European delegation. “We’re so far away from the criteria that was set up in order to call it a success, and those weren’t really that ambitious to start with.”
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1209/30794.html
And Obama doesn’t even know if he needs to sign the document since it has no meaning….
Where’s that Jackson fellow from last night. I’ll share a bottle of that organic wine now. LOL
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/copenhagen-climate-change-confe/6841696/Copenhagen-climate-summit-meaningful-agreement-hailed-by-leaders.html
In a nutshell, non-legally binding, no imposed hard targets, no imposed contributions to a global slushfund for AGW. Any CO2 cuts are dictated by each country ie whatever they want, any contribution to slush fund dictated by each country, ie whatever they want. Amounts to less ‘forcefull’ ‘treaty’ than Kyoto…which turned into an abject failure for warmist/alarmists/ecomentalists.
No, no, no. This isn’t Met office incompetence at all. It’s just that they’re recycling their forecasts to reduce their carbon footprint. 🙂