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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Stefan,
Not in they way you might think.
Post Copenhagen (and China’s pyrrhic ‘triumph’) I think we humans will now burn more of the available fossil fuel than I did. Thus atmospheric CO2 is going to get well above 400ppm (and probably 500ppm) and that as a consequence we’ll probably see warming of several degrees.
I do think warming of several degrees has potential effects that, if it happens, would noticeably impact on humanity and all life. I (my opinion) don’t think we should let that happen, but, again, I do think we’re committed (more so than before Copenhagen) to this vast experiment with the atmosphere and climate. Indeed, I think we’re farther away now from curbing GHG emission than we ever have been. Many will see that as a triumph., I don’t. I hope the ‘sceptics’ are right, really I do _ I just can’t see how they (you?) are that’s all.
The truth about UK vineyards is that they have been operating for the last 20-30 years but it has taken some time to establish the right types of vines and get the fermentation conditions right. Unsurprisingly they make mostly rather thin and grassy whites but in the last few years some excellent champagne-style wines have been winning awards, beating the French at their own game. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1493165/English-sparkling-wine-named-worlds-best.html
These grapes may be adapted varieties but are emphatically not grown in greenhouses.
I’m considing buying some south-facing slopes in southern Greenland as a hedge against the days when it gets too hot in the UK to make any wines at all.
Veronica (11:37:24) : If you want to hedge your bets buy in southern Greenland and also in Sicily or Greece. You never can tell with climate.
Remember what happened to the Vikings?
interesting..
Deadly Cold Across Europe and Russia
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=42067
John Finn (02:28:39) : I’m not aware that the Thames froze over every year during the LIA. The unique feature of the LIA was that Frost Fairs were held from time to time and it is this that causes the confusion. However, up until the mid-19th century the river was wider and slower so even during the coldest winter ever recorded in 1962/63, the Thames never completely froze
Not every year but many more years than during the MWP. The fourteen weeks freeze of 1063, that you take as gospel, was probably apocryphical.
But if your point is that the MWP or LIA didnt exist – that is wrong. There is a huge amount of evidence, other than the freezing of the Thames, that they did.
During the Medieval warm period, when the Vikings settled Greenland, an Oberriederin (irrigation canal) was built in the upper reaches of the Aletsch glacier in Switzerland. This was over-run by the advancing glacier in 1215, as carbon-dated by the larches growing there at the time and unearthed now. The canal head is still covered by the glacier today.
@Peter Hearnden
Thanks for the reply. I agree it is very much an experiment.
My own scepticism, and this is mostly just intuition which I can’t help, is that anything could happen. We could see enormous and damaging climate change and, well, never know why it happened. Man could be doing something that radically damages the environment, and it might not even be CO2, but some other thing we didn’t realise until in retrospect.
Most of my anti-AGW sentiment is around what people are proposing to do about it. My own feeling is, civilisation needs backup systems. I know my hard disk will fail one day, and I know what might cause it to fail. Maybe it overheats, maybe it gets dropped, maybe it gets stolen, maybe there’s a power surge. But predicting it is practically impossible. So we have backups. It is that simple. (Consider the software writing the backups could also be corrupting the backups…)
This sort of puts me radically 100% opposed to “conservation”. I see conservation as reducing our spare capacity. Less spare capacity means no room to adapt when things change. It is like saying, this extra backup disk is a waste. Of course, in life, economics, development, it is a big messy thing, and we can’t just duplicate everything. Development needs to come in many forms. But “sustainability” does need rethinking, it seems.
A friend of mine complains that “life is too fast” and we need things to slow down, to rediscover the importance of relationships and community. Well it is true, life has speeded up. But where some think we need to slow things down, I think we need to speed things up. Africa needs to find ways to develop far faster than we ever did. I say the West but it could have happened in the Middle East (they invented the clinical trial, apparently).
Africa still needs to go through all the social and technological changes we went through, but much more quickly. I would question the notion that we need to get them to have fewer children, before they’ve developed to a stage where they naturally would prefer to have fewer children. Now that is messing with Nature, one could surmise.
When I lived in Africa it was really quite easy to accept that people can live in all sorts of conditions, and that in the West we have great abundance. But how far back does one go to define “sustainable” ? Who wants to give up electricity? You can certainly live without it, as people used to. But then there would be no information technology (and global communication). Well the rest of the world wants electricity and fridges. But you can live without them, so why not forget it?
There is a great feeling against technical fixes, like the green revolution that fed India. “But that just allows the population to increase!” Yeah well, good for them! Shall I say that agriculture was the worst invention because it allowed people’s numbers to increase far beyond what was sustainable on hunter gathering, meat eating? If I read the first issue of The Ecologist, it looks that way. But then we would have remained culturally at the level of semi conscious apes grunting tribal songs. Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, as such.
It is all an experiment. If you’re partial to Vedanta, it is life’s play of creation and destruction. Maybe we will build new technology that will take us to the next level, or maybe we’ll fail and crash.
Well with the great snow job being perpetrated by the EAU CRU; who needs any more snow in the UK.
Meanwhile, the DMI temperature graph took another jump off the cliff so that the whole arctic is now at 30 below (C) or only -22 if you prefer F.
Maybe the CRU is right, there is going to be so much ice up there in the Arctic, that there won’t be any moisture left for snow in the UK; So I guess CRU is going to have to manufacture it; perhaps by uncommenting out that patch that “hides the incline”.
Later in the article it says ‘Heavy snow will return occasionally, says Dr Viner, but when it does we will be unprepared. “We’re really going to get caught out. Snow will probably cause chaos in 20 years time,” he said.’
The article also doesn’t attribute the “within a few years” part directly to Dr. Viner. I mean it’s an indirect quote, not the words Dr. Viner actually used. Having been mis-paraphrased by journalists myself in the past, I find it likely that Dr. Viner’s contained nothing like the certainty conveyed by the pulled quote. I wouldn’t be surprised if he said something like “if the trend continues as it has been…” or something like that. One quote in the popular press really says little about the scientific consensus about what is happening with the climate.