Richard North from the EU Referendum writes of a curious juxtaposition of forecasts, then and now. I thought it worth sharing here since it highlights the chutzpah with which CRU botched their forecast in March of 2000. At least they didn’t claim that UK snowfall was in a “death spiral”.
From The Independent on 20 March 2000 we got the headline: “Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past”. According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
Then, from the Telegraph online today we get: “Snow and ice to hit Britain at New Year.”
The mercury is set to drop to 28°F (-3°C) in most of England and Wales on Thursday night, New Year’s Eve, and 17°F (-8°C) in Scotland, with widespread snow showers also predicted. New Year’s Day will also be chilly, with the northern half of Britain’s struggling to get above freezing during the day, while London will do well to reach 39°F (4°C)
The forecast follows a spell of snow, sleet and ice which has gripped Britain for more than a week but relented in most parts over recent days.
It is so good to see in The Independent that the CRU is living up to its justly acquired reputation for accuracy.
I’ll also point out that this “very rare and exciting event” happened in London last year also.
Snow blankets London for Global Warming debate – first October Snow in over 70 years
Above: London 10/29/2008
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@ur momisugly Phil. (09:41:57) :
Grapes are now widely grown in the UK, about 350 commercial vineyards I believe. The Domesday Book in 1085 recorded about 40.
It appears to be you who is trying to rewrite history.
Surely you are not seriously trying to make a direct numerical comparison between the modern vineyard with its support mechanization and the vineyards of nearly a thousand years ago where all the tilling, planting and harvesting would be by manual labour? With a population of at maximum one thirtieth of the modern UK?
Fascinating.
Now then, let’s put the Brit grapes aside for the moment *oof*
Right. There we are.
Pour some wine from the Bordieux region, kick back for the moment and see what you think of this little ditty:
http://littlegreenfootballs.com/article/35468_Video-_The_Medieval_Warming_Crock
NW Calif: I think we have been SWIPped by a Piers Corbyn forecast.
The local forecast said snow level of 4000 feet and Piers said 28th-30th an event period.
Snowing down to 2500 now. Coming down pretty good.
Thanks Professor Corbyn.
With the UK government officially supporting AWG,
Where is your nationalism? The UK government should be supporting BWG.
The last time I pulled up a list of wine makers in Great Britain, none of them were older than about 40 years old and most were closer to 10, and one bragged about how wine had not been made in commercial quantities in Britain in 500 years in their advertising.
Wine making is documented into the 17-19 century but it had declined substantially to mostly experimental gardens by aficionados not commercial operations. It is not clear what the cause of the rapid decline was, but many suspect climate. Even today it is not reliable to get good harvests. Wine making essentially stopped until the 1960’s.
http://www.english-wine.com/history.html
Larry
“I don’t think Dr Viner is cherrypicking”
Dr. “Viners”…..picking……discussions of grapes..
OK. Give it up, gang…
One can speculate where the Greenland Vikings ended up. But they were never a large population. It is said they were around 4000-5000 in total, the largest Austerbygd (“East village”) and the smaller Vesterbygd (“West village”).
Today Greenland has a population of ~57000.
That is, according to Wikipedia http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gr%C3%B8nlands_historie
Hasse@norway (00:48:27) :
The fact is we can’t explain the amount of snow that we’re reciveing. And it’s a travasty that we can’t…
Well said Kevin,… whoops, I mean Hasse!
More eco-energy madness from the EUSSR whilst Europe suffers another real Winter.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/lithuania/6904781/Lithuania-power-crisis-looms-as-nuclear-plant-shuts.html
Bob Kutz (06:35:36) :
Pamela Gray (00:42:55) :
No, the plural of weather IS IN FACT CLIMATE.
And as to the Knicker twisting; I think this is all in good fun. Your side has been making asinine statements for long enough now that some of them are proving to be false.
Your side has made it’s bed, now is the time to contemplate lying in it.
Another prime example was Mann’s office in Manhatten; should be underwater by now, according to his predictions ( I think I’m getting that right, be sure to let me know if I’ve got the man or the location wrong). Of course the scaremongering works, for a while. But the best part is when it becomes common knowledge that it is in fact only for effect.
Your side’s credibility fades by the day. Soon the science will catch up and prove you for the charlatans you’ve become. The good news is that at that time, the science will reinvest itself, and useful knowledge will thereby be obtained.
Bob Kutz,
Your “prime example” is obviously an exaggeration but it in fact stems from fantastic and outrageous predictions made by Hansen about twenty years ago.
See
If Hansen were correct, the West Side Highway in Manhattan would be under water by now. So who is the real scaremonger?
As to the credibility of skepticism fading “by the day”, tell that to the public (as revealed by polls) where skepticism is slowly growing as temperatures refuse to rise. If Mojib Latif (IPCC lead author) is correct in his fear that temperatures will remain flat for another decade or two, do you really expect the skeptical credibility to fade away. And do you, Bob Kutz, have the cojones to remain on message in the face of a generation of flat to cooling global temperatures?
Indeed, it will be good news if science were to “reinvest itself” by divesting itself of politics and return to its ideals.
One of the things that made me look into the climate issue in more detail was a May 2008 quote in the Norwegian paper Aftenposten where Hansen was quoted as saying that tha sea level would in fact rise by 75 meters and that it was a “guaranteed disaster”. My employer at the time repeated it in public, and I found a new employer…..
Here is the Aftenposten quote,
http://www.aftenposten.no/klima/article2353729.ece
It was referring to this article in The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/apr/07/climatechange.carbonemissions
“If you leave us at 450ppm for long enough it will probably melt all the ice – that’s a sea rise of 75 metres. What we have found is that the target we have all been aiming for is a disaster – a guaranteed disaster,” Hansen told the Guardian.
Stefan (03:48:42) :
Well said. Unfortunately, the conflation of ethics with science is driven by political and financial agendas that are divorced from both, and enabled by a general logical poverty of public discourse that fails to make use of well grounded distinctions in language.
It is not a cold winter we shoud be worried about, it is the following cold summer. If we were to have a cold summer due to, for example, volcanic activity and the snow and ice thaw didn’t happen, this could precipitate an iceage due to the albedo effect.
Peter, Dr Viner’s cherry picking is clear to see. He chose a bizarre set of seven years – starting with 1988 (why?) and finishing in 1995 (five years before the article – why not more recent?). His values for snowfall are 2x lower than the 1980s and 3x lower than the 1990s for December snowfall alone. The values he quotes are credible values (the 1930s saw 0.3 snow days in December), but clearly inconsistent with the typical values for these decades. The most probable explanation (absent actual data) is cherry picking, with the odd start and end dates really giving the game away. I have to admit, it strikes me you are a little bit in denial on the cherry picking topic.
As for trends, I’ve managed to locate a few graphs for limited sets of UK snowfall data (not the full set yet) and so far *none* of them have shown any significant trends. Perhaps the real data (preferably 1900-2008) would show something different, but until I’ve seen it I have valid reasons to doubt Dr Viner’s claims and analysis.
I agree this is not the place to discuss widers issues of AGW, so I won’t go there.
John Finn:
Wine produced in the MWP was of poor quality.
Seriously, what credible evidence do you have for this? And also, given that there was no welfare state for people with failed businesses in mediaeval times, and that there was far more to loose from failure (e.g. your life), what makes you think they were not profitable?
Given that one man’s wine is another man’s vinegar, and given that any wine that has survived near 1000 years is probably not a fair test, I would love to hear how people know the wine was “of poor quality”. It must have been competitive with alternatives (ales, honey wines/mead, berry wines, nettle wines, ciders, etc. etc.) to justify the existence of so many vineyards for a much smaller population.
AndrewWH (12:15:24) :
@ur momisugly Phil. (09:41:57) :
An appeal to “authority” perhaps. The New Scientist, ha ha ha. How sad.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11644-climate-myths-it-was-warmer-during-the-medieval-period-with-vineyards-in-england.html
Sorry for having posted that link on here for the third or fourth time. It is a gem though.
Although there is a huge focus on Greenland, the Orkney Islands also are the subject of some pretty well documented human settlement information. Having visited these islands a few years ago, I have several books, including one by Ronald Miller (published 1976) entitled “Orkney”. In Chapter 4, he describes the early settlers. For example:
…. but from about 5,000 B.C. the climate became better (the sub-Boreal) than now and Orkney nurtured birch, alder, willow, oak, elm and pine in sheltered spots.
and:
…. The islands, it would seem, offered a very suitable habitat for the early settlers of 2 – 3,000 B.C., with their sheep, cattle and ponies.
Also, in “Tomb of the Eagles” (a well known archaeological site), by John W. Hedges (1984), there is much discussion on the farming of Orkney, including the cultivation of hazelnut trees.
These islands are definitely worth a visit, if only to see the fabulous prehistoric monuments and, if you got your weather information from the CRU and didn’t pack enough warm clothes, you can always elevate your core temperature at the most northerly distillery in Scotland (Highland Park) or at the Scapa distillery.
There is masses of information about climate change at the Met Office website, with a tab labelled “Climate Change”: http://www.meto.gov.uk/climatechange/
For all the info in a neat brochure, “Climate change – the facts” is available at:
http://www.meto.gov.uk/climatechange/guide/downloads/quick_guide.pdf
On page 12 it states:
“Are computer models reliable?
Yes. Computer models are an essential tool in understanding how the climate will respond to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, and other external effects, such as solar output and volcanoes.
Computer models are the only reliable way to predict changes in climate. Their reliability is tested by seeing if they are able to reproduce the past climate, which gives scientists confidence that they can also predict the future.”
Then look back at page 4 to see the climate model prediction added to the old hockey stick (no MWP or LIA). And I thought the hockey stick had been discredited?
It’s really funny to see so called climate scientists parading across the world claiming the world is still going to warm catastrophically when in fact it’s hasn’t significantly departed from a longer term trend of very gradual warming over thousands of years. Even their own data shows this is true. If the current world cooling continues for just a few more years, we can say that the global temperatures have dropped significantly over the last 100 or so years. What then? Do the so called climate scientists start re-writing history by deploying memory holes as described by George Orwell? Or do they flip and claim a new little ice-age is coming? When will such hypocrisy going to end?
A weather event does not climate make. But, when does a series of weather events become climate?
seasons greetings,
siberian weather continues here in carnoustie. minus 10 C yesteday.
does any one have phil jones’s phone number? i want to know when this global warming is due to start. the golf course has been shut for two weeks now, and i am feeling deprived. this is the longest shut down for almost twenty years. i realize we are north of moscow, but i have run out of red (golf) balls.
Peter Hearnden (12:11:12) :
Oh, and <i. some AGW isn’t a bias but a scientific reality. The real question (for another thread, and I’m really not about spending much time here – this blog really doesn’t welcome views like mine, debate with us and talk of IPCC’s and the rest, so people like me recognise that and these days tend to stay away) is it’s how much it is ‘fedback’.
Peter, I don’t think there’s anyone who follows this blog regularly who doubts basic physics. Of course increased CO2 has some effect, but if the feedback is small or negligable, there’s nothing to worry about. No alarm to be raised, no costly measures to take, no need to bury trees for carbon sequestration, no need to put cows in space suits to capture methane, no need to eat our dogs to prevent them from exhaling. None of that insanity.
That’s why I always refer to those pushing the panic button, like those at the CRU, the Met Office or NASA GISS as “alarmists”. They are not mere purveyors of AGW, they push catastrophic anthropogenic global warming. Because the leaked emails show a long-term fraudulant conspiracy, I no longer view that crowd as merely wrong, but positively evil… and a threat to humanity.
Tony Brookes (05:31:45) :
If we are to assume that weather forecasting is the ouput of computers and that the Met Office models used are clearly defective at short range, why on earth are we apparently accepting their long range outputs ? Even the Telegraph has a correspondent Geoffrey Lean who doesn’t seem to understand that point. The media have been thoroughly duped and should be ashamed of themselves.
“thoroughly duped”? – or complicit?
REF: http://climatedepot.com/a/4681/Wash-Times-trashes-APs-Seth-Borenstein-over-his-reporting-on-Climategate–Cites-Climate-Depot
David Corcoran (11:11:51) :
I’d have to do some digging, but I think the disconnect here is if we reach 450 ppm in decades, then Greenland will loose ice each year. Suppose 10 feet (or meters, I’m just grabbing a plausible number) melt per year – it will still take centuries for all the ice to melt.
Instead of trying to find who is lying about what, perhaps we can spend a little time checking the implications of various claims first.
I live on the West Coast of Scotland, warmed by the Gulf Stream we do not get the severe snows of further north or the frosts of further south. Wet, windy and mild is normal winter, if it snows it only stays on the ground for a few hours before melting. We have yucca trees growing in gardens and further south palm trees.
Well this winter the snow has stayed and is currently in its 10 th day, rarely is it above freezing at any time of the day. Its the coldest spell locally for 30 years.
Lee Kington (10:55:50) :
Ryedale Vineyards are the most northern … not far outside of York. They were not planted until 2006.
Well, Ryedale is lovely, and vines are hardy to winter snows. It’ll be interesting to read about the crop quality next year.
As I said earlier, the way to make a small fortune is to start with a large one, and buy a vineyard in England.