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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PS, while on the subject of MWP, why is the claim that this was a localised event still being made? Or more to the point why is this claim allowed to go unchallenged?
Peter Hearnden (00:45:04) :
I think Dr Viner and the article is (like all the science) broadly right.
BROADLY right?
The alarmists have been consistently predicting an ever more elusive disaster for 30 years. The seas have risen only at the incremental, steady rate they have have for centuries. The poles haven’t melted. Islands have not submerged. Snow hasn’t ceased. Some glaciers have sublimated, some have grown. We’d have better luck using fortune tellers.
Until the Met Office and CRU begin to evince scientific traits such as transparency, replicability, falsifiability and independent verification, they will be rightly scorned by those who value truth more than mooing with the herd.
“David Corcoran (07:15:08) :
[…]
Yet according to satellites there hasn’t been a sea rise since 2005, and before that sea rise was proceeding at the same rate it has since the mid 19th century (New York Harbor measurements)… about 3.2 cm/yr or so.”
According to the presentation by Jasper Kirkby the long term mean is 1.7 mm/yr.
http://indico.cern.ch/getFile.py/access?resId=0&materialId=slides&confId=52576
see Slide 20
Peter, I seem to remember from years back on ClimateAudit that you were always up for some banter, I hope I haven’t misjudged that.
I have made no predictive claim about the temperature of the 09/10 winter as you state; my commentary was on the number of sleet/snow days in 2009. This is relevant to the discussion as this was a specific claim made by the Independent article above. I can assure you I’ve personally witnessed rather more than the 0.7 days average quoted in that article, but that is anecdotal.
I had a look on the met office web site but unfortunately they seemed to stop updating this statistic available as a gridded download in 2000, making it difficult to verify the explicit claims made by the scientist above. The metric is still monitored; I found an article on Scotland in which someone plots these data for a region up to 2006. Interestingly, the article observed no trend in the number of days of sleet/snow up to 2006; but they did detect a downward trend in number of days of snow lying. This is just one region in Scotland though; why no data for England?
Strangely, the downward trending data has been updated by the met office to much more recent times. Funny how people seem to find more time to update data which confirms their own preconceived opinions. If you have any better luck in locating the data, I’d be most grateful for some pointers.
rbateman (05:45:10) :
“Funny thing in all of this: I don’t see the daily forecasts with percentages thrown in any more. Like we used to get with 10% rain, 50% rain, etc.”
You can always try here (enter your zip code)
http://www.weather.com/outlook/travel/businesstraveler/tenday/USCA1027?from=36hr_topnav_business
As a geologist, my perspective is on the order of thousands of years as far as climate is concerned (I view these minor 20- to 30-year perturbations as mere noise in the overall scheme of things). So since we’re talking about the future, I can tell you what will happen: We’re going to have another glacial epoch. It is unavoidable.
We’re at the end of this current interglacial, as the following graphs indicate:
http://www.daviesand.com/Choices/Precautionary_Planning/New_Data/
Generally, interglacials last about 10,000 years, and we’re at least 10,500 years into this one–up to 12,800 years by some accounts. So the timing is a bit uncertain, but we’re at least 500 years overdue. And the switch from interglacial to glacial only takes a few years; some evidence shows it happens within 4 months.
I don’t know whether it will happen next year, in 10 years, 100 years, or 1,000 years, but it will happen. And there isn’t anything we can do to stop it. It’s just climate.
And it will be devastating.
“Wakefield Tolbert (06:35:34) :
grow crops in Greenland
[…]
But as to Greenland, I think the very name was actually cooked up by the Vikings as a slick sales gimmick to attract other settlers. It was always cold and never green so far as I’ve been able to find.”
For some reason they didn’t like fish and did agriculture yet still managed to survive for quite a while. You could try to get the book “Collapse” by Jared Diamond:
2005 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking Books. ISBN 1-586-63863-7
It discusses 5 examples of collapsing societies, one of them being the Greenland Vikings.
I think I know what happened to my stock portfolio. CRU went into the business of stock market forecasting and came up with this doozy in 2006:
“Stocks have reached what looks to be a permanently high plateau.”
Yeah, thanks guys.
Thanks Charles, sorry for posting twice… I wasn’t sure my earlier comment “took”. Please delete the duplicate.
Wakefield Tolbert (06:35:34) :
Wine was widely grown in England during the MWP, have a look in the Domesday Book for example, there are a number of vineyards mentioned. Most english vineyards were in the southwest, but some were as far north as Yorkshire.
And yes, barley was grown on southern Greenland during the MWP, though it was only marginally profitable. This is mentioned in historical sources, e. g. Konungs Skuggsjá (13th Century). Barley was grown on a much larger scale at the same time in Iceland, even inland at a considerable altitude (at Skálholt for example). This is also mentioned in historical sources, and has been confirmed by palynology (pollen analysis). The inland farmlands were abandoned in the fourteenth century and coastal fields about a century later. No grain was grown subsequently on Iceland until the (exceptionally warm) 1930’s.
If warmer weather increases water vapor, which increases snow, which increases snow cover, which increases albedo (the whiteness of the earth), which increases reflection of sunlight, doesn’t that make it cooler? Isn’t this the run away albedo effect that causes glaciers to build and cause an ice age? That’s what I learned in grade school in the 60’s.
The warmists argument that warming causes snow doesn’t hold water because more snow causes more cooling.
And thus, because of the Met Office and CRU, Britain has been unprepared for bad weather and it has cost the economy.
A C Osborn (07:00:28) : Said
“TonyB, did you notice the major difference between the “Little Ice Age Thermometers – Manhatten readings and very strange ones foe the UK?”
I wrote an article on the Manhattan temperatures-what do you mean the ‘very strange ones for the UK?’
tonyb
Perhaps we have indeed prevented an ice age by relentlessly plowing and salting our roads and parking lots.
Peter Hearnden
We could all argue forever and go round in circles. Physics, climatology and any other ology woun’t mean a thing except for what is happenning with the weather and climate over the coming years. You are probably “alarmed” that things seem to be chilling out; why should you be? You should be happy upon news of ANY cooling event because it would mean that AGW is wrong and we are not all going to fry.
Read this:
“Modellers have an inbuilt bias towards forced climate change because the causes and effect are clear.”
General circulation modelling of Holocene climate variability, by
Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Drew Shindell, Ron Miller, and David Rind,
published in Quaternary Science Review in 2004.
http://www.meteo.psu.edu/~mann/shared/articles/Schmidtetal-QSR04.pdf
CO2 is a well mixed gas throughout the atmosphere [IPCC]
NASA now says no it’s “lumpy”
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2009-196
Is there a logical explanation for publication of stuff like this ? “New quantitative evidence of extreme warmth in the Pliocene Arctic ” from here http://micropress.org/stratigraphy/
Surely the exposure of the fiddle with data by CRU and its fellow criminals puts paid to all the guff about 3.5* higher temps. as forecast by the IPCC?
Wakefield Tolbert (06:35:34) :
The Romans grew grapes for wine in the UK. To say they didn’t is to revise history.
The Vikings grew crops in Greenland. To say they didn’t is to revise history.
You cannot grow grapes in the UK and crops in Greenland now because it is colder on earth now than it was in those times.
Greenland was green. The Vikings were there for ~400 years. You say they were tricked into going there by being told it was green there. What would be even sillier than that would be to say they decided to stay there for 400 years after they found out it really wasn’t green.
BTW, I didn’t say ALL of Greenland was green.
Ashtoreth (06:44:20) :
The met office graphic is for 30 year averages. I exceptional year will not make significant difference. The exceptional years are all part of the climate anyway so should the not be included?
Correction:
“You should be happy upon news of ANY long term, consistent cooling events because it would mean that AGW is wrong and we are not all going to fry.”
Mack (07:17:16) :
Nice!
Pollen and macrofossils have been determined in samples from the Norse midden and from a peat section one km away, covering the periods A.D. 1000-1200 and the past two millennia, resp.
Henry chance (06:50:47) :
Meltdown Mann is also there.
HAHAHA, best yet. Meltdown Mann, just loaded. sCrutape Letters, Climategate….Goracle…
Pay no attention to the Mann behind the Carbon Curtain.
“Looks like plant food to me”. Audrey Jr. Little Shop of Horrors.
hmmmm.
Does MWP-deniers really exist? Seems like it.
Photon, the statement was partly in jest based on what’s been passed around on the Net as the counter to the “denier” crowd, with the final back-up being that this was a localized warming due to shifting ocean currents. And yes I’m also aware that those darling little fuzzy-wuzzy polar bears (apparently) survived periods where the ice extent was much less than today.
But it’s still curious. I mean, REALLY, Greenland today is colder than a brass….well…somthing….
So the warmer period must have been more than just slightly warming. We’re talking at least TEMPERATE climes for much of the year. Grapes are fussy plants, ya know.
But thanks for the info and the others who’ve provided the links.
meemoe_uk (01:44:48) :
“Anyone compiling a list of failed AGW predictions? AGW scare storys often have time parameters of 10,15,20 years. Since they started making runaway warming claims back in the 1980s, many of these failed predictions are ready for havesting. Time to look through all the AGW articles from the ’80s and early ’90s.”
Plenty below and please read Peter Hearnden 🙂
Failed Predictions And Forecasts
http://www.c3headlines.com/predictionsforecasts/
Global Warming Predictions Questioned By NASA Researchers!!!
http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/global-warming-predictions-invalidated
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;326/5953/716