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
Fears that cold weather can take lives in southern Norway.
Link (norwegian)
http://www.dagbladet.no/2009/12/29/nyheter/ver/kulde/9695957/
Health authorities (Folkehelseinstituttet) fear that life may be lost during the cold weather that is expected in southern Norway the next few weeks. Temperatures around 20 degrees below zero (Celsius) are expected in the entire southern Norway over the next three weeks.
– We can see from the statistics of death when there has been significant cold. We see an excess mortality from lung inflammation, and some will freeze to death when it gets cold, said Dr. Karin Rønning at the Folkehelseinstituttet to VG.
There is a change in climate!!
Im reffering to the debate climate.Only two weeks ago there where anger and high voices.Now its more “fun” and sarcastic, the great global swindle is allready exposed.The swetness of victory is at hand.I usually dont support to rubb it the face on the looser.But in this case am more than happy to make an exeption.
All the political correkt forces went “allin” on the profecy from IPCC.Well they lost all credability.Easy come easy go!!! They will try to govern the people like “buissness as usual”.But things have change!! They went into a corner and we are many that wont let them leave it.
Wheather bureaus became minarets of a new religion.How many now doesnt trust anything relatet to climate anymore?? 50? 100? 500 million? and counting.
Hahaha…these CRU folks would help themselves by keeping their mouths shut. They lose credibility with every communique.
England was having very warm winters during the late 1990s and early 2000s, and many people (including myself) believed that it was a trend. Since then, all thinking people have come to understand that climate is cyclical rather than linear.
Pity this weakens the public support for moral and ethical change…
but that’s what happens when hitching a moral vision to a science hypothesis.
The problem is deeper. Even if the current weather was “consistent” with climate scenarios, I mean, even if we were actually in a freakishly warm winter, all that the NGOs, The United Nations, The State of the World Forum, the Optimum Population Trust, and so on… all that they would be achieving is beating people into behavior change out of fear of consequences.
To be sure, beating people into change can work—there are famous Zen Masters who “broke the arm of the student” and induced spontaneous enlightenment at just the right moment… but then it takes a Master to get the timing exquisitely right. Most students just suffer abuse for years and don’t change, get nothing from it.
If the weather was currently freakishly warm, and AGW hypothesis/theory/reality was currently receiving wide public validation, all that that would be achieving from a moral and ethical dimension, is scaring people into behaving differently. From an ethical dimension, that is no change at all.
Consider, does instigating severe punishments against criminals, merely dissuade criminals from carrying out criminal behavior, or does the existence of harsh punishments actually force criminals to search their hearts and motivate them to radically change themselves and become, in their heart of hearts, honest people sensitive to not harming others?
As we’ve known for decades in liberal and left leaning thinking, punishment does not reform people, and the threat of bad consequences does not change men’s hearts. So why take this approach with humanity and the environment? Why try to change people using a message of dire consequences? Tell me, what’s the difference with capital punishment?
Surely, what many desire is that humans, individually, in their hearts, become sensitive and caring towards humans across national boundaries, and across ecosystems. What is desired is a new more ethical human. A new ethics of global mutuality and interdependency.
The core issue, now and forever more, will be the ethical dimension of humanity and how that develops. And can I just say, this has nothing to do with any science hypothesis (nor theory, nor reality.)
It is entirely an ethical issue. If you want people to change, teach ethics, not science. Science theories come and go. There is nothing self-evidently true about AGW—like any science theory, it could be disproved one day, there are always unknown unknowns. It also only holds for scenarios far beyond the time scales of short term weather cycles. It will be 50 to 100 years before AGW can show its really-real reality. That means this generation doesn’t have to face the consequences, and the next generation might also get away with ignoring the consequences. Remember, this is the very human nature that we are so worried about changing. This is like instituting a death penalty for murder, with sentence to be carried out in not this incarnation, not in the next incarnation, but the incarnation after that. We will hang you, in two lifetimes! So don’t do it!
By separating “environmentalist” from “climate change”, you can separate ethics from science, which gives you two things: it allows you to find greater depth of honesty in ethics, and greater clarity of objectivity in science.
Pierce Corbyn is interesting.
Lets focus on this onwards;
From the beginning of time there has been people trying to tell us what the wheather will be like. Regarding Pierce, what fascinates me is that he is mentioning cosmic rays. Thats something new in this occupation, isnt it?
Therefore its interesting, dont you think? I think so.
Is his hit-rate above or below 50% ? I dont know. But he got it right this time, and he got it right regarding Copenhagen too. Well, a couple of days late, perhaps.
I find it hilarious funny that he got a hit on Copenhagen. It was sooo funny when that journalist was complaining about the cold.
Sun – CO2 1:0
hehe
OT – but weather-related, and a bit surprising given the source.
http://www.thelocal.de/national/20091229-24233.html
“Exactly as Piers and co foretold at the start of December. How do I know? Because I, like many others, subscribe to and rely upon his forecasts.
If he was even moderately inaccurate we would stop paying. Forthwith.”
And I don’t subscribe to his forecasts – not that that proves anything either.
Again, lets see some assessment, some analysis not ‘he’s right because I say he is’.
If your predictions cover all possibilities, your predictions will never fail!
It’s a old trick commonly used by pseudoscientists.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Former NASA PI for Apollo
Peter Hearnden: That’s very rich, asking me for evidence. I have been asking the government, through bodies such as DECC, and its NGOs, such as the Met Office, to provide me evidence for AGW. Have I received any evidence from them? No, of course not, because there is no such evidence. All they have is computer projections and computer models are not scientific evidence. They are evidence of the computer programmers’ abilities to write computer code.
Perhaps you would be kind enough to provide me with some evidence.
As Stephen Richards has pointed out, Piers Corbyn’s record is based on being able to sell his forecasts. And you can’t do that if you repeatedly get it wrong. On the other hand, the Met Office gets millions from us taxpayers regardless. In fact, the worse it’s forecasts, the more money it claims it needs to have bigger and faster computers and to develop better models. There is no doubt the Met Office is not fit for purpose at the moment.
One of the best long term [ 2000 years plus ] historical weather sites I have come across which uses information gleaned from a very wide variety of historical writings and range of data and proxy sources is the UK’s own “Booty Meteorological Information Source”.
http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/metindex.htm
I believe the originator of this excellent weather and historical site is or was a meteorologist.
When you read the weather /climate history of the UK on this site, it really brings home to one just how changeable and variable the weather and climate really are when looked at in the long term historical sense and the realisation just what an impact weather and climate has had, not just on the UK but on the history and the destiny of whole human race.
Stephen and Peter
It is a mistake to believe the UK has ever had consistently cold winters (other than during the depths of the LIA)-we are on a predominantly westerly airstream and temperatures rise and fall according to its frequency.
The last very cold (snowy) winter was 1962/63 which was the coldest in turn since 1683. We have this delusion of freezing winters largely because of the writing of Dickens who romanticised the season despite living through the two warmest winters in the CET record since 1660
As Pepys said in January 1660/61:
“It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all; but the ways are dusty, and the flyes fly up and down, and the rose-bushes are full of leaves, such a time of the year as was never known in this world before here.”
This is what a farmer from Buchan in North East Scotland, one of the snowiest parts of lowland Britain, wrote in the agricultural section of his local newspaper during the exceptionally mild winter of 1933/34.
“1934 has opened true to the modern tradition of open, snowless winters. The long ago winters are no precedent for our modern samples. During the last decade, during several Januarys the lark has heralded spring up in the lift from the middle to the end of the month. Not full fledged songs but preliminary bars in an effort to adapt to our climatic change”
It then goes on to say
“It is unwise to assume that the modern winters have displaced the old indefinitely”
and also
“Our modern winters have induced an altered agricultural regime”
I suspect Peters Dartmoor records ( I live very close to him-Happy New Year Peter) show the same warming effect at intervals-indeed he will not be far from the Bronze age dwellings at Grimpound and Medieval ones of Hound Tor which had to be abandoned as the climate cooled.
The cyclical nature of climate should not be ignored and can be clearly seen here in these old records;
http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
Tonyb
The UEA/CRU finally get it right!
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_OoGClTz0_Lo/SxBOXaKVfQI/AAAAAAAAAyo/xmtxdOAXCOc/s400/cru+pear+shaped.png
“Chris Wright (03:32:10) :
There’s no question that, since the 1960’s, the UK climate became noticeably warmer, and some time around the nineties there was no snow at all.”
I am sorry Chris, the 1970’s in the UK were not warm, apart from the 1976 “heatwave”. Every other year in that decade was cold, in particular 1979.
Peter Hearnden (04:02:31) :
“Again, lets see some assessment, some analysis not ‘he’s” wrong “because I say he is’.”
Market driven economics. If you pay, one time, for a product that is shoddy you ask for a refund. If you pay continuously for a faulty product you are a fekkin eejit.
Farmers, supermarkets and insurers would not continue to pay Piers if he was accurate merely 50% of the time as the Met Office hover around that point and they distribute their forecasts free of charge.
We all agree, when purchasing the forecasts, not to divulge the contents.
If you hold a hypothesis regarding his accuracy the onus is on you to present evidence in its support, not upon us to disprove it – much like the case of the sickly thin stream of AGW spew.
Stefan (03:48:42) :
Consider, does instigating severe punishments against criminals, merely dissuade criminals from carrying out criminal behavior, or does the existence of harsh punishments actually force criminals to search their hearts and motivate them to radically change themselves and become, in their heart of hearts, honest people sensitive to not harming others?
When, in past times in Britain, people were hanged for sheep stealing, many people were hanged.
Peter Hearnden
I believe you were the first here to question the accuracy of Corbyn’s forecasts, We are still waiting for you to provide facts to back up that claim
You know the old tale of the three blind men who argued over whether they’d encountered a wall, a rope, or a tree? The point is they each had a partial/different perspective. So here is my question: how long will global warming last? What will the temperature be in 1000 years if we don’t reduce CO2 emissions? 5000?
Snow blankets London for Global Warming debate – first October Snow in over 70 years
You might say that the forces IPCC and AGWists claim to understand have it in for them, that the hand of Nature itself is taking pleasure in rubbing thier noses in it. It isn’t just Gore, he just happens to have an affinity for stepping in it and dragging it around.
Philip Bratby “That’s very rich…”
We’re talking about Piers (someone you brought into the discussion) , we can talk other things if you like but that would just distract us form the reality that no matter how many times people ask for verification, for some analysis, for something, anything, to back up Piers’s claims we never get anything in reply but assertion.
I expect that to continue but go on surprise me 🙂
If you want to know how to use weasel words in a forecast, this post from an hour ago can help you:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/updates-to-model-data-comparisons/comment-page-2/
Look at their ever-widening “confidence interval” in the graph! Now these are the prophets!
DavidE (02:14:24) :
tallbloke (02:02:58) :
Never mind Snow and ice in the new year. We’ve had it on the ground for well over a week already. I can’t remember snow staying on the ground for so long before Christmas in my lifetime in Northern England.
You’re just not old enough mate 😉
Which neck of the woods are you from Dave? I’m 45, how about you?
“ Dave Johnson (04:41:33) :
Peter Hearnden
I believe you were the first here to question the accuracy of Corbyn’s forecasts, We are still waiting for you to provide facts to back up that claim”
You mean as the one asking questions here I have to defend the one I question? That’s a novel suggestion :))
Sprry, all I ask is for something better than assertion that Piers is the meteorological superman some here seem to think. I don’t see that as toooo much to ask?
Peter Hearnden:
Hopefully the BS you spout – in defending yours and the Meto’s Warming Agenda – will soon freeze over soon – just like the frozen stuff your Pigs are currently walking over on your pig farm in Devon…. (Despite being on the end of the Gulf Stream – that won’t save you from your Hog-Talk either) ;-|
gtrip (00:42:13) :
Ecotretas (00:12:09) :
That is not a controlled study. There will probably be more cold related deaths this winter just based on the economy, not the weather.
How do you do a controlled study on excess cold-related deaths?