It’s not like there haven’t been clues. Like for example as I pointed out the Arctic Oscillation has gone strongly negative.
The article says:
“The cold weather comes despite the Met Office’s long range forecast, published, in October, of a mild winter. That followed it’s earlier inaccurate prediction of a “barbecue summer”, which then saw heavy rainfall and the wettest July for almost 100 years.”
Excerpts:
Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century with temperatures hitting minus 16 degrees Celsius, forecasters have warned.
They predicted no let up in the freezing snap until at least mid-January, with snow, ice and severe frosts dominating.
And the likelihood is that the second half of the month will be even colder.
Weather patterns were more like those in the late 1970s, experts said, while Met Office figures released on Monday are expected to show that the country is experiencing the coldest winter for up to 25 years.
On New Year’s Day 10 extreme weather warnings were in place, with heavy snow expected in northern England and Scotland.
Despite New Year celebrations passing off mostly unaffected by the weather, drivers in parts of the country, particularly areas of Northumberland, Cumbria and the Scottish Highlands, were warned not to travel unless absolutely necessary.
The continued freezing temperatures did not signal bad news for everyone however. CairnGorm Mountain said it has had its best Christmas holiday season in 14 years.
With heavy snow in the area, the resort said that over a four-day period following Christmas Day it has had more than 8,000 skiers and snowboarders using its runs – including 800 on New Year’s Eve.
h/t to David Corcoran
Perhaps they are just engaging in a stab at reverse psychology. After predictions of warm and getting cold ……….
I have been noticing that there seems to be more ice in the Baltic Sea than there has been for this time of year in the last, say, 5 years. One wonders if the Gulf Stream may have lost some of it’s oomph. Last year WUWT had a series of forecasts of Arctic sea ice extent for September 2009; one such was Wang who wrote an article for GRL. Is it possible for someone to persuade the owners of models which forecast Arctic sea ice extent to run their models and predict maximum and mimimum extents for March and September 2010 respectively?
Sort of OT but Cryosphere Today just changed their current SH and NH sea ice charts from 1979-2000 mean to 1979-2008. Gives it a whole new perspective.
Here’s the NH:
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png
Thanks, Anthony, for keeping the facts out there fo all to see!
There is no better way to defeat false propaganda.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
There has been a volcanic eruption in the Congo, Africa. How likely is it that it might add to this winter’s cold, just out of curiosity?
Has the NYT found its climate cajones ?
“Apocalyptic scenarios are a diversion from real problems — poverty, terrorism, broken financial systems — needing intelligent attention. Even something as down-to-earth as the swine-flu scare has seemed at moments to be less about testing our health care system and its emergency readiness than about the fate of a diseased civilization drowning in its own fluids. We wallow in the idea that one day everything might change in, as St. Paul put it, the “twinkling of an eye” — that a calamity might prove to be the longed-for transformation. But turning practical problems into cosmic cataclysms takes us further away from actual solutions.
This applies, in my view, to the towering seas, storms, droughts and mass extinctions of popular climate catastrophism. Such entertaining visions owe less to scientific climatology than to eschatology, and that familiar sense that modernity and its wasteful comforts are bringing us closer to a biblical day of judgment. As that headline put it for Y2K, predictions of the end of the world are often intertwined with condemnations of human “folly, greed and denial.” Repent and recycle!”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/opinion/01dutton.html?ref=opinion&pagewanted=all
It’s just a pity that I can’t enjoy an “adjusted” temperature when I’m out on my bike.
For warmistas, their safest strategy is to be very quiet. If they do decide to speak, they do need to admit is cald and nasty and will be for a while this winter. They lose face posting warmest on record stories when it is record cold.
Predictions are much easier when one looks out the window and sees snow drifts. Then one can predict that it must have snowed yesterday. Maybe there will be snow tomorrow.
From the local forecast here in NC. Note the last paragraph at the bottom:
… PROLONGED PERIOD OF VERY COLD TEMPERATURES TO AFFECT CENTRAL NORTH CAROLINA THIS WEEKEND THROUGH NEXT WEEK…
AN ARCTIC AIRMASS WILL SURGE INTO PLACE ACROSS CENTRAL NORTH CAROLINA TODAY AND PERSIST OVER THE AREA THROUGH NEXT WEEK. HIGH TEMPERATURES WILL HOVER CLOSE TO FREEZING TODAY AND SUNDAY… WITH LOWS IN THE MID TO UPPER TEENS ON SUNDAY AND MONDAY. ADDITIONALLY… A BLUSTERY NORTHWEST WIND WILL RESULT IN WIND CHILL VALUES IN THE TEENS TO LOWER 20S THIS AFTERNOON… FALLING INTO THE SINGLE DIGITS TONIGHT. COLD TEMPERATURES ARE EXPECTED TO PERSIST THROUGH ALL OF NEXT WEEK… WITH HIGHS IN THE 30S AND LOWS IN THE TEENS TO LOWER 20S.
THE EXPECTED DURATION AND INTENSITY OF THIS COLD WEATHER WILL BE A VERY UNUSUAL OCCURRENCE. SEVERAL DAYS OF SUBFREEZING TEMPERATURES WILL BE POSSIBLE… PARTICULARLY IN THE NORTHERN PIEDMONT.
There must be a trick to hide it.
I wonder if the upper portions of the Thames river is starting to freeze. If this keep up we may have another frost fair this February!
The Article refers to an unnamed Met Office spokesmen stating the obvious and two weathermen:
Paul Michaelwaite, forecaster for NetWeather.tv
Matt Dobson, forecaster for MeteoGroup, the Press Association’s weather division
The two weathermen seem to have a clue. Does the Met Office have a clue? If the best they can do is pony up an unnamed spokesmen who fails to retract or amend their forecast then my vote is “still clueless”.
Mike Ramsey
But the Met’s global warming climate models say it is going to be mild winter in Britain. How can they be wrong? Where I live (eastern Canada) -16 isn’t bad — just a normal January day.
In my judgment there are several reasons why UK and European winter temperature will not be above average or milder than last year as predicted by the Met Office:
1] Atlantic Ocean SST’s is declining and ocean heat content rise has leveled off and is dropping
2] AMO has peaked and is likely to go negative or cool by January 2010. It is currently at 0.121
3] WINTER NAO is headed for more negative periods like the 1960’s to 1980’s where 17 out 30 winters had negative NAO. In the 1960’s, 8 out of 10 winters had a negative NAO [This December 2009 cold spell has a negative NAO]
4] PDO is heading for 30 year cool cycle and went negative/cool]-0.4] again Nov 2009
5] AO is at record low or negative level, allowing more cold Arctic air from north east to penetrate south
6]] The current moderate El Nino will be less warming than predicted due to the cool PDO in the Pacific. During the last cool period for Europe [1961 -1990], only three El Ninos raised European winter temperatures. Six others had no warming effect.
The current cool winter is the start of many such cool winters for the next 20-30 years. I see serious crop losses in the Northern Hemisphere during the coming decades starting this year and now also in Europe and Asia [ last year Canada lost about 20 % of crops due to late very cold spring and lack of spring moisture ] . Global warming will be seen for what it really is, a very flawed science that has caused the world to misallocate vital resources.
If there is any fairness in the system, these agencies should have been told that their funding will be severely affected if they can’t do a better job with forcasting. If the predictions don’t allow you to do any planning, then you’re better off just observing and reporting on the weather.
Nearly O/T …
Also in the Telegraph, their “environment” guru, Lean, continues to doom-monger on:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey-lean/6921900/Were-losing-the-riches-of-the-world.html
Has anyone noticed how the journalists only ever polemicise (is that the word?) or assert? Never a shred of evidence, proof, anything scientific to back up their drivel. Do any of them really understand what they are saying? I’m sure Lean doesn’t.
Hullo, Geoffrey! Looked out of the window lately?
They stand by their prediction that by 2100 it’ll be quite hot. We can hardly wait.
It’s amazing that an article like that can make absolutely no mention of AGW at all, yet if a similar thing happened in reverse in the summer, the papers would be full of doom-mongering. And given that the Telegraph is the most skeptic-friendly of the British MSM (after all, they do publish Christopher Booker’s columns), it’s especially tragic that they don’t at least give some lip service to the implications for flaws in warmist theory.
I will wait with bated breath for Booker’s Sunday column tomorrow – I’m sure he will make the link…
If AGW believers find a place with a heat wave, does that prove that they are right?
Well, that is not terribly precise. There were few cold winters in UK in 1950s & 60s, I just hope they do not imply winters of 1890’s, but that would be 120 years back.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET.gif
It might be a quite local stuff: in Belgium the December temperatures were normal. In Bulgaria the New Year’s eve saw an absolute record with more than 20 centigrades! I don’t know about the rest of Europe. The global UAH anomaly is very positive for December, so difficult to say where it all leads…
-29 below zero in MN on the Iowa Border this AM when I awoke……….Of course that is just weather not Climate……….John…
I for one quite enjoy the seasons and winter is back here in Britain, it is good for the soil and keeps vermin, crop diseases and pests in check, so say the farming community.
And I like cold dry days and winter walks.
It is cold here and probably going to become (much) colder, however reading some of the stats coming out of the States, the maritime influence over Britain is doing its job, if we were to the East of Asia, then we would be cold!
Thank heavens for the Coriolis effect, though Arctic and continental pressure systems are disputing with the prevailing winds at the moment.
I think it is a reality check, because if nothing more it serves as a stark reminder to some of our more nutty Global Warmists who oft’ point to the fact that we “no longer have cold winters in Britain” – a truly ridiculous statement, to which I reply,
“just be patient!”
We had ‘cold’ (everything is relative) weather last year and now we experience it once more.
I am concerned for elderly relatives and have advised some on purchasing appropriate clothing and footwear because I have had a feeling about this year (as mentioned before) but we should not be amazed.
Britain is at a high latitude (equivalent to Labrador) and we usually get away with it but now the land here in Britain is cooling and so too the northern hemisphere -AMO/AO etc.
I tell people who’ll listen, “better get used to it.”
After all we are still in an ice-age!
[I put this at the bottom of a (lengthy) previous cold-related thread, but wanted to put it here so as many as possible may see it. — H.A.]
Anyone who makes a habit of checking the DMI temperature graph for the Arctic north of 80 degrees latitude might be interested to know why the beginning of each year does not align with the end of the previous year. The reason is that the x-axis covers only 360 days.
It bothered me checking through the complete history that there was an alignment problem, so I wrote to DMI. They got back to me, explained the fact that the last five days of the year are not represented, and said that “a re-plotting of all graphs will be done as soon as possible.”
That was a little over two weeks ago, but as it has been the holidays and the project could take a little while.
I would rather roast than freeze. That being said, on to a more significant observation about the Met and various other “public service” government agencies.
Major weather (and climate) changes are potentially quite devastating in and of themselves and are made all the more so when government is inept (before, during or after the changes/events), or –much worse– totally incompetent. My greatest fears regarding destructive weather have nothing to do with the weather. It is the competence of the system ‘We The People’ have in place to handle such changes that most frightens me. Katrina was an eye opener. I fear it will not prove to have been an isolated case. When the Met or NOAA or DHS or any other government agency is ruled by a weirdo with an agenda, the public has much to fear.
PS: When ’We The People’ turn control of the government over to one party, we are to blame for everything, and deserve whatever we get.
I liked the way the article distinguished between “experts” and the met office.
I note the Met office has reviewed it’s prediction for a colder than average winter from 20% to 45%. I wonder if someone looked out of the office window. Deepest snow we have seen for many years in Snowdonia.
Bastardi threw down the gauntlet in front of the British public the other day, and the Met Office knelt rather than pick it up.
But the Telegraph has a bit of alarmism in another article
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/lifestyle/6917389/2020-vision-where-will-we-be-in-a-decades-time.html
“It will be the hottest decade ever as global warming continues, though individual years will vary. Renewables will boom, especially solar power, as new technologies and falling prices kick in. Nuclear power will make no real contribution; any new reactors will not come on stream before the end of the decade. Evidence that mobile phones endanger health will increase. Continued shrinkage of the Arctic ice-cap could provide the first climate “tipping point”.”
When someone says global warming will continue when it hasn’t continued for a decade and then says mobile phones endanger health when there is no evidence for it, you know the guy has to be fired from his position.
Following up on DMI polar temperature, I note that 2009’s x-axis appears to have been extended to 365 days. All previous years remain at 360 days for now.
Met is nothing more or less than a bad Monty Python script. Here in the states, the commercial weather forecasters that the commodity traders use predicted a very cold nasty winter in the NE at least. These guys got to get it right or they get fired. I think that as proper punishment Jones should be made to snow shovel most of London.
In Iowa, this was very nearly the year without a summer. Thirty years ago, I detassled corn in 100 degree heat. Last year, it rarely reached above 90. It sure saved on the air conditioning bills.
Right now we have an unusual amount of snow on the ground, and highs in the single digits. Iowa is the new Minnesota. Minnesota is the new Manitoba. I have been telling everyone I meet to expect a brutal winter. I did not want to be right, but so far, it is brutal.
God loves playing tricks on AGWers. At what they thought should be their moment of triumph, reality inconveniently intrudes.
By the way the sobbing sound you year from Australia is the fact that Australia is now getting significant rain. Barrie Harrop’s latest venture is going down the tubes like his photo kiosk chain.
Mayon Volcano may have calmed down but in the DRC “Nyamulagira volcano” is erupting ,(although wiki lists it as “Mount Nyamuragira”).
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100102/ap_on_re_af/af_congo_volcano
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Nyamulagira
BBC reports a Warwickshire community will have its electrical power turned off on schedule despite the freezing temperatures and resulting loss of heat and light for homes and businesses. Central Networks says the work schedule for trimming the trees to avoid damage to powerlines had been announced long ago and must be completed as scheduled while the birds were not nesting in them. Residents are seeking shelter….
Ah, but this is going to be a warmer-than-normal coldest winter in 100 years 🙂
Piers Corbyn of Weatheraction.com is saying UK and Ireland will be unusually cold for Jan and Feb.
http://www.weatheraction.com/displayarticle.asp?a=127&c=1
As for the Met Office prediction of a mild winter in the UK (on Nov 23rd), that was totally wrong. They are now saying there is a 45% chance it will be cold.
What the Met Office should do is buy a real prediction from Piers at weatheraction.
The funny thing is that earlier in December the BBC was at pains to tell us that the reason it was so cold was because it was winter…and its meant to be cold. Of course the reason the BBC was harping on in this manner was in defence of the debacle called Gropenhagen that was happening at the same time.
Mailman
I cant remember a winter like this where I live the year before last seemed bad, last year worse than that, and then this year the worst so far wonder what next winter will bring, but we still have to get the rest of this one out of the way.
If anyone regulary views the met office website they could be forgiven for thinking it was run by school children there warning system is a shambles. early today they warning us of 20cm of snow on tuesday now for my area no warning is out at all.
Jim,
I saw that too. I wonder if the NASA satallite temp data will go to a 30 yr basis as well.
Anthony,
(Off-topic)I was going to put this on the “Tips and Notes” page, but I’m not sure you’d see it. Plus others might be interested.
ICECAP is running an article by Tom Segalstad on the persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere that I found very interesting. It’s a guest editorial written to CO2 Science in August 2009, so maybe you’ve already run with it here, but in this post-Climategate environment maybe you’d want to run it again anyway.
I’d also appreciate your thoughts on it, as it appeared to me to be an effective critique of the IPCC process.
This is why copenhagen was the “last change to save the world” (i.e.: “to create a global governance system”). They knew it’s going to get awfully cold and no-one would want to make sacrifices to save themselves from global warming during the coldest period in decades.
Oh great now things are going to start getting warmer 🙁
G
See, Copenhagen is working already. lol
The current temperature in Norwich, UK (home of the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia) is 1 deg C or about 34 deg F according to the Weather Channel web here:
http://uk.weather.com/weather/today-Norwich-UKXX0103?fromSearch=true
Perhaps the independent investigators looking into the Climategate scandal at UEA will be motivated by the chilly weather to be a bit more skeptical about Phil Jones and his warmist team than they would be if it were a balmy winter instead.
Good news for us in the UK. Given their recent record, a cold weather forecast likely means It’ll be warm and I can get on the golf course again soon.
It’s time for the “sky-is-falling” crowd to dust off (or at least clear the snow off) their 1970 predictions that the world will end as a result of man-made cold. I would, however, advise them to keep the AGW documents available, because you never know what mother nature is going to do.
The whole “sky-is-falling” crowd can take solace in Robert Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice”
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
The weather has some nerve! To be so cold — in spite of the Met’s predictions for a very mild winter! It is time for the Met Office to call in some big guns from the IPCC and the Royal Society to put the weather back in its place. Perhaps Phil Jones has some time on his hands to deal with this unruly weather?
Throw another erupting volcano into the mix:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/africa/01/02/congo.volcano/index.html?eref=igoogle_cnn
I think the Met Office are looking a little lost like these poor souls:
http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/42555000/jpg/_42555341_ostrich.jpg
Well at least the MET office have some where soft to bury their heads!
Try and hide this decline.
Manatee mortality more than doubles due to cold. This probably goes under reported too.
http://m.news-press.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20091219/GREEN/91218070/-1/WAP&template=wapart
…Along with an uptick in deadly watercraft encounters, the state’s manatees this year faced a string of cold spells and an inexplicably high mortality rate among infant manatees. Biologists recorded 114 deaths of young manatees this year.
Cold-related deaths, at 55, were more than twice last year’s 21 deaths.
“There were these strange peaks of severe cold,” said Martine Dewit, a biologist for the state’s Fish and Wildlife Research Institute. “(Manatees) are extremely susceptible to temperatures below 68 degrees.”…
Jim Cripwell (07:29:05) :
I have been noticing that there seems to be more ice in the Baltic Sea than there has been for this time of year in the last, say, 5 years.
—–
There’s a noticeable increase in the ice extent into the Denmark Strait this year too, right off north west Iceland.
I’ve tried, unsuccessfully, to find by Googling, the last time the Strait froze over completely. Maybe this year ?? Maybe the Catlin Crew could get their butts up there and get some baseline measurements ??
I asked in another thread some time ago, but I think it might have got lost among the hundreds of comments. Does anyone know of a site with the recent snow cover for Europe?
The cold weather comes despite the Met Office’s long range forecast, published, in October, of a mild winter. That followed it’s earlier inaccurate prediction of a “barbecue summer”, which then saw heavy rainfall and the wettest July for almost 100 years.”
And they still call them experts, or scientists… what a verbal inflation!
Double post … put elsewhere too … can’t waste my creative genius, wot?
Off topic … sort of…. Had a creative spurt this morning …
Gore-Tex logo converted .. ☺ Does not really fit here… oh well. Maybe realted to wild Met Office’s forecasts. ☺
http://photoshare.shaw.ca/image/2/d/8/63987/goretalk4-0.jpg
REPLY: [ Just don’t “thread bomb”, ok? -mod]
“Ed Murphy (09:34:39) :
Manatee mortality more than doubles due to cold. This probably goes under reported too.”
Surely you must be wrong. WWF says: Polar Bears gone by end of century. Manatees? What’s a manatee?
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,5068671,00.html
I mean, the WWF are the experts, aren’t they?
Its the coldest winter since “Global Warming” started.
“anon (09:27:12) :
I think the Met Office are looking a little lost like these poor souls”
Funny photo, but ostrichs are actually quite cold-tolerant beasts. They once roamed europe.
Snow Cover
http://climate4you.com/
OT, but does anyone know why the AMSR-E graph hasn’t been updated in the last few days?
This paragraph at the article referenced got my attention.
“Meanwhile, a fleet of gritters in Perth, central Scotland, was grounded this week because it was so cold, leaving roads untreated in temperatures of minus 10 degrees. ”
Mick
Fish and Wildlife Research Institute
http://research.myfwc.com/features/view_article.asp?id=33589
Take a look at this image, Anthony.
http://research.myfwc.com/images/articles/33589/20091120_092038_30994.jpg
Manatee death is way up…
and this one.
http://research.myfwc.com/images/articles/33589/20091120_104922_31934.jpg
Met Office has a new predictive model.
They state they’re not sure why it’s so cold, but that the heat will return.
http://tinyurl.com/ydmjdxm
What is their excuse? Have they written any BS articles yet to explain away this winter as an “anomaly”?
Baltic ice:
http://produkter.smhi.se/OceanWeb/html/temp_ice.html
But it’s a rotten cold……
Erik (09:39:49) :
I asked in another thread some time ago, but I think it might have got lost among the hundreds of comments. Does anyone know of a site with the recent snow cover for Europe?
This might be what your looking for.
http://www.natice.noaa.gov/ims/index.htm
Or this.
http://moe.met.fsu.edu/snow/
They do much better forecasting what’s going to happen in 2050. Well, that’s what I heard.
The Met Office getting a clue? – “one of the coldest winter in 100 years”
Minor correction: “winters”, not “winter”.
You may delete this posting!
IanM
Last year we had a few inches of snow at the beginning of February. I heard it described as a 1 in 18 year event. Seems this could be the second one in a row.
The CRU/MetOffice models predict that global warming in Britain will lead to hot dry summers and mild wet winters. These cold winters becoming an increasingly rare event.
I still remember this waste of BBC licence payers money.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/climateexperiment/whattheymean/theuk.shtml
Government keeps telling us they can control the climate, and that they have the ability to turn England into a Mediterranean environment. Now would be a good time to demonstrate their warming prowess!
Erik (09:39:49) :
I asked in another thread some time ago, but I think it might have got lost among the hundreds of comments. Does anyone know of a site with the recent snow cover for Europe?
Try here:
http://nsidc.org/data/modis/data_summaries/index.html
Mike Ramsey
Not only that, yesterday held the record worldwide of being the coldest day of the current decade. In some areas that may be broken by today.
Nice article from the front page of the UK Met office about how things are worse than we thought!
It’s not hard to miss as it immediately follows the article about how cold this winter is.
If you can’t find at least half a dozen points to make fun of; you need to read WUWT and CA a lot more!
Here’s the link, enjoy.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20091218b.html
Gee, if we get global cooling, can we put the developing countries on the hook to pay us hundreds of billions of dollars in “thermal debt” for “using up all the heat”?
REPLY: [ Just don’t “thread bomb”, ok? -mod]
☺ ☺ Ten-four. Would never do that. Clive
Bastardi is calling for a major snowstorm across Europe for next week.
If I were a local council in the UK, I would pay attention to what he has to say.
Danes, look out! Remember 1658 when Karl X of Sweden came over the sea ice. Any day Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden may come the same way.
The Weather Channel (US) just aired a segment in which they said that the frigid air in the US and Canada is being caused by an unusally strong high pressure ridge over Greenland , where the temps are in the fifties farenheit (supposedly) . Therefore the cold in the US is a result of global warming . Seriously . Of course they didn’t say anything about Europe . I used to trust TWC , but no longer .
@Me
“not hard to miss”
Doh!!!
Or here – http://www.snow-forecast.com/maps/static/scotland/last7days/snow – This site is aimed at skiers and is usually fairly accurate.
It’s official,this blog is too popular.
I posted a quick off-the-cuff quip after reading the 4 (that’s FOUR) comments ony to come back and find my sarky wisecrack at about 54th position.
ShrNfr (10:45:49) :
Not only that, yesterday held the record worldwide of being the coldest day of the current decade. In some areas that may be broken by today.
Please supply the link to this. I’m interested.
I don’t know about Denmark but one might be able to walk from Iceland to Greenland soon.
P walker, I just saw the same segment on the Weather Channel. You can tell with a lot of those guys that they have a hard time saying it. But, for some reason it is TWC’s line….
Jim Watson (07:31:23) :
“Sort of OT but Cryosphere Today just changed their current SH and NH sea ice charts from 1979-2000 mean to 1979-2008. Gives it a whole new perspective.”
that is interesting. obviously, the new range is regarded to be a better reference, implicitely acknowledging the dominant natural cycle.
another reason may have been the increasing doubts about northern temperature records and loads of data suggesting that northern europe and russia have been just as warm or even warmer in the 1930s.
Manatee cold mortality count…
Media:55
Fish and Wildlife Research Institute:72
A number of other carcasses were too decomposed to say.
http://research.myfwc.com/features/view_article.asp?id=33589
Hide the decline?
Crosspatch has got it.
This is setting up to be a doozie of a storm and a winter like Europe hasn’t seen since 1956 and the UK since 63. My neighbours here in SW France say that it snow to about 45cm and stayed for 3 weeks which when you live close to the bay of gascoigne is quite something.
Hold on to your AGW beliefs this is going to be one hell of a ride.
The met office don’t even give forecasts in the sense of “here’s what the weather will be like this winter.” They remain straddled on the fence, hedging as they do by tossing probabilities around like confetti – and then changing them in mid stream.
First it was 7 to 1 against a cold winter. Now, apparently a cold winter has been elevated to 45%. What the hell use is that? Doesn’t anyone see that even if the rest of winter were to miraculously warm, they can still claim something like 40% was cold. If the winter continues to be cold, they’ll just change the probabilites again.
I wouldn’t pay these confidence tricksters a penny (or a dime) of my money, but unfortunately they are funded by my taxes. It’s time they were put on a ship to antarctica and left there until they come to their senses.
Whether or not the weather is cold, the climate still warms, so we’re told.
This is OT…but I ran across an interesting comment from Powelineblog.com on some of the stuff done in the 1990s to develop a “consensus”
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2010/01/025294.php
It’s hardly an apology–but at least it looks like a sheepish grin!
http://release.theplatform.com/content.select?pid=5mCzgDf_lCZ3uKBDkKLY2_dqmD4_S0yF&UserName=Unknown
This is for the Met and all the warmers out there. Better luck next time. 🙂
Christopher Booker has it all in hand at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6924898/The-Met-Office-gives-us-the-warmist-weather.html?state=target#postacomment&postingId=6925094
What really annoys me and has done for nearly 2 years now has been the UK MetOff piping on about their wonderful £30m computer and their latest high resolution model both of which would allow them not only to forecast accurately for 10yrs ahead but the same model would forecast precipitation intensity 12 hrs ahead.
They haven’t forecast anything correctlty all year. The recent floods in Cumbria which were forecast by Accuweather.com and by WeatherAction.com were not forecast by this wonderful supercomputer. I wonder if anyone at the UK MOD has considered the usefulness of the Metoff to be worth the £millions a year it cost to run when they could buy better and cheaper forecasts elsewhere. I am just soooo pleased that I am not funding Brown’s utter stupidity out of my taxes.
Incidently, the Metoff forecast a TOP 5 warmist winter not just mild, Oh No.
If you want the most reliable weather forecasts for Northern Europe, especially Scandinavia, I recommend Norway’s.
http://www.yr.no
For ice cover, see also http://retro.met.no/kyst_og_hav/iskart.html
Manfred (11:20:02)
Another reason might be because the world ice area/extent (I’m not sure which it is) has been approaching the recent average with expansion in the south compensating for reduction in the north. With the north now also expanding they need to include the big loss years around 2005 – 2007 in order to keep the norm in line with requirements.
Phillip Bratby (11:38:22) :
Christopher Booker has it all in hand at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6924898/The-Met-Office-gives-us-the-warmist-weather.html?state=target#postacomment&postingId=6925094
Thank you Phillip, you got in just ahead of me. Why don’t y’all mosey on over there and have a look? You might get the chance to wind up ‘slioch’ for whom this article will be a red rag to a bull. He’ll be along for a rant shortly, I have no doubt!
Our newspaper reported today that our area averages 28F in normal Decembers, last month average was 17F. Quite a drop! Fifth coldest December in history.
sorry anthony the words i want to use about the met office are banned , so lets just say they are very Foolish
Sam:
Oh yes, Slioch. When hell freezes over it’ll still be warm for him! It must be nice and warm where he is in Scotland.
P Walker (11:07:59) :
Well in a way Weather Channel isn’t quite lying. One station in southern Greenland did report +10 C 1200 Z today which is 50 F. To judge from the wind strength and direction this is due to Föhn effect (Chinook to North Americans). Other stations in SW Greenland reported temperature in the high 20’s or low 30’s, which is indeed rather warm for the time of year, though by no means extreme. Coastal SW Greenland is warmed by a branch of the Gulf Stream and usually does not get extremely cold in winter.
“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.”
-Niels Bohr
OT
Pope urges lifestyle changes to save environment
“The pope and his predecessor John Paul have put the Vatican firmly on an environmentalist footing. Last month, in a message sent to heads of state and international organizations, the pope called on rich nations to acknowledge responsibility for the environmental crisis and shed consumerism.”
…said the man in the golden hat.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6000G220100101
Oh Really? I just looked up Cairngorm mountain range mentioned in the article in Wikipedia to get a little more background and there is a section titled “Man-Made Threats”
“The effects of Climate Change are likely to be seen first in areas such as the Cairngorms that are at the edge of the range of possibilities for the latitude where they are located. The Cairngorms represents an unusually cold area of mountains in a maritime climate at 57 degrees North. It would be theoretically possible for the climate to become warmer and wetter, or drier under present climate change models. The extent to which this is a man-made threat is in little doubt, and is the over-riding concern for the long-term conservation of this area. Ptarmigan has been considered as an indicator species for this process, although the natural population cycles of this bird do not seem to have been disrupted as yet.
Other man-made threats include the problems of popularity in a country with limited wilderness resources and a large, relatively affluent urban population. These include various types of recreation and the associated trampling damage and erosion, disturbance, litter and threats to water quality.”
Huh?
yr.no is a good weather service. But there is little doubt about their AGW correctness…
“Well in a way Weather Channel isn’t quite lying. ”
I often see periods of down-slope winds being cited as evidence of “Global Warming” by people who don’t understand the principal. Those high average temperatures are evidence that the wind blew more from a higher altitude location toward a lower altitude location than it normally does. It is simply an indicator of wind direction, not “Global Warming”.
We can get the same where I live when the winds blow down out of the Sierra Nevada in an offshore flow. If a somewhat persistent pattern sets up and we get more of those days than usual, our average temperature for the month will be higher than usual but only as a result of wind direction.
From the MET
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/science/creating/improvements.html
How our forecasts have improved
Our three-day forecasts are now as accurate as our one-day forecasts were 20 years ago. (Translation: we were wrong 20 years ago and we are just as wrong now)
In addition to improving the accuracy of the one- to five-day forecast, research has enabled us to make forecasts that were previously impossible. (Comment: should be – research has enabled us to make forecasts that are unbelievable)
•We employ around 1,800 people at 60 sites across the world, most (about 1,400) working out of our headquarters at Exeter.
•450 work in Research Science
•730 in Forecasting and Observations
•290 in IT
•40 in sales marketing and business development
•280 in corporate and business support functions like Human Resources, Finance, Procurement and Communications
Unbelievable.
P Walker (11:07:59) :The Weather Channel (US) just aired a segment in which they said that the frigid air in the US and Canada is being caused by an unusally strong high pressure ridge over Greenland , where the temps are in the fifties farenheit (supposedly) . Therefore the cold in the US is a result of global warming . Seriously . Of course they didn’t say anything about Europe . I used to trust TWC , but no longer .
I saw that, too. “This is how record lows can be caused by global warming…” They said that the high pressure system over Greenland is “anomalous.” I don’t know if that’s true or not but I’m sure they probably left something out.
What is their excuse? Have they written any BS articles yet to explain away this winter as an “anomaly”?
They have already. In a way.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2009/2009GL041188.shtml
It has this gem
“We demonstrate that the anthropogenic impact in 2008 was to warm the region’s temperatures, but that it was overwhelmed by a particularly strong bout of naturally-induced cooling…”
Did you get that? There has been anthropogenic warming – it is just ‘hidden’ by the cold.
-29F this AM-And the low record falls-time to get the bubble mixture out and teach/show the grand kids how the bubbles freeze up. Good ice and the quest beings for the 15″ perch….
“Phillip Bratby (12:01:17) :
Sam:
Oh yes, Slioch. When hell freezes over it’ll still be warm for him! It must be nice and warm where he is in Scotland.”
Talked to one of my BILs in Scotland just last night and he was saying the cold is unbelievable.
crosspatch (11:04:58) :
It’s interesting to see Bastardi and Corbyn be in rough agreement on the detailed weather forecast, although they use different techniques. In a 30th December blog, Bastardi rips into the Met Office and Hadley.
The Met Office is now a busted flush.
Not only does it consistently predict warmist long-term forecasts, it actually gets +24 hour temperature forecasts wrong. The MO forecasts for my part of the world are consistently +3 degrees celsius above actual, some times they are out (and always positive) by +5 degrees. This is compared to both of my expensive German Min-Max thermometers (shielded against wind chill etc) and both of our car’s temp read-outs – which are surprisingly accurate.
And of course, there is also the real world: Fyvie Loch, – 20 miles north of Aberdeen, is now sufficiently frozen to bear the weight of both a golden retriever and 20 year old son: (I experimented with both specimens on the 31st of Dec)….
We noted footprints across the widest span of Fyvie Loch.
http://www.fyviecastle.com/
This is unusual, at least for the last 25 years.
There is something seriously wrong with the Met Office. Perhaps things changed for the worse when it took on a WWF activist as its director and added ‘Climate Change’ to its title.
The MO has gone from a reputable organ of the Ministry of Defense to a running dog of scientific fashion.
It can no longer be trusted.
Phillip Bratby (12:01:17) :
Sam:
Oh yes, Slioch. When hell freezes over it’ll still be warm for him! It must be nice and warm where he is in Scotland.
Phillip: Nowhere in Scotland is warm at the moment, believe me. Especially not where he is if my information is correct!
that followed ITS earlier inaccurate prediction
There is no need for an apostrophe!
Is anyone keeping a MET anomaly graph (MET prediction vs. actual occurence)?
As a U.S. Federal Meteorologist for 30-years, what we are seeing is much more than “weather is not climate”.
Stable and highly amplified atmospheric blocking is developing around the
entire Northern Hemisphere.
This will likely result in the most prolonged, deadliest, and extreme cold
seen since the GREAT winters of 1976/77 and 1977/78.
The Central and Eastern United States, northern Europe, Russia, and China
will be nearly simultaneously decending into a DEEP FREEZE.
The extreme power and energy demand for heat will have the “potential” to
drive the Economy back into Global Recession.
Many lives will certainly be lost due to this Historic Cold.
Heads up to Joe Bastardi on this one.
The AGW agenda and lies have been exposed.
Nature is about to crush them.
Sam:
I wonder how Slioch keeps warm then. He couldn’t possibly use fossil fuel derived electricity or burn gas, oil or coal; wind turbines don’t work in cold still air. Perhaps he’s a nuclear fan.
If we do have severe cold weather, how will this change anything. After all, the term “Global Warming” has already been dropped in favour of “Climate Change”, and if we have a bad spell of cold weather, it’s still climate change and we will need expertise to save the world. Now I wonder what they can tax on the grounds that it has caused cooling?
And it’s snowing heavily here in Edinburgh yet again. 2 and a half weeks of sleet or snow almost every day, and no end in sight. Not quite 1963, but the worst prolonged spell of this type of weather I can remember.
Oh, weather is not climate etc etc….
The two key metrics are how much sulfur the eruption produces and how energetic the eruption is (does the plume get high enough to inject the sulfur into the stratosphere where it has a long residence time to prolong its cooling effect.
It will take some time to evaluate if the eruption is significant in either of those regards.
Keep in mind that on a typical day there are several volcanoes world wide going through some sort of eruption phase, it is just that many are in very remote locations and are generally ignored by the media unless the eruption is spectacular or happens to effect air traffic corridors or a nearby population center.
Larry
photon without a Higgs (11:15:39) :
It was a joke – yesterday was the first day of the decade of the 2010s.
TWC
“The Weather Channel Companies are owned by a consortium made up of NBC Universal and the private equity firms The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital.”
@ Philip T. Downman (11:06:31) :
Danes, look out! Remember 1658 when Karl X of Sweden came over the sea ice. Any day Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden may come the same way.
——–
re.: GARS, Gustavo Adolpho Rex Suissa,
there is an alternative history series from David Weber/Eric Flint, “1632”/”Ring of Fire”,
and the sequels (some of them are for free, some have snippets to download
at http://www.baen.com) [@Operator, that’s no ad, I’m a reader]
In the alternative history, Gustav Adolf will not die at the Battle of Luetzen,
he will create the Confederate States of Europe, accompanied by a bunch of
Miners from West Virginia (don’t like to link to wikipedia, but that’s my
exception: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1632_series
Really interesting to read, especially because it comes from authors who are
history buffs.
During World War II weather forecasts in North America were classified information, so only the most general weather forecasts, devoid of important information, so no particulars on cloudy weather, precipitation, temps, etc. were printed in newspapers. In a similar situation, the MET would be encouraged to go all out on its current course; the problem is that nobody would believe the forecasts anyway.
O/T sort of, but T & N is crashing me
More Climategate in MSM
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/boffins-may-be-illegal/story-e6frg6zo-1225815349833
this just in……
[ The Met Office gives us the warmist weather.
By Christopher Booker
Published: 7:12PM GMT 02 Jan 2010
“Shortly after midnight on Friday morning, as 200,000 merrymakers were departing from the Thames after enjoying a spectacular fireworks show in sub-zero temperatures, flakes of snow began to fall on Whitehall. In light of the Met Office’s prediction that this would be a “mild” winter, with temperatures above average, it seemed an apt way to start the New Year. But hasn’t the time come for us to stop treating the serial inaccuracy of Met Office forecasts as just a joke and see it for what it is – a national scandal?” ]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6924898/The-Met-Office-gives-us-the-warmist-weather.html
Maybe, just maybe, if more news like this can get circulated around the world and into the homes of those sitting on the fence, the rising numbers of global warming skeptics will become impossible to ignore.
Might we see a return of the Frost Fairs to the Thames?
The cold is hiding the warming? Then it is exceptionally alarming…
It’s posted at Drudge, I tipped them this 12 hours ago. I’m sure others have to.
As I’ve been saying, unless the Met Office cleans its house, it’s going to remain the Mother of laughing stocks.
How stupid must one look before waking up?
Time for change.
http://climate.gi.alaska.edu/ClimTrends/Change/TempChange.html
My family and I live in the northern foothills of N C.We has 11 in of snow on Dec .18 .Even after a 1 1/2 of rain we received on Christmas day our yard for the most part is still white with snow and with high temps in the 20’s and low 30’s lt not going anywhere anytime soon.I know weather isn’t climate but isn’ t it odd when the temps are up the first thing you hear is climate change or global warming.You know i’m just glad we are having global warming because if we weren’t it would be cold like in 20’s and 30’s .Wait A minute it is that cold .I guess global warming must not be real after all and its just a cycle like back in the 70’s .
“Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels may have been lower in warm eras of the Earth’s distant past than once believed, scientists reported this week.”
http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091230/full/news.2009.1168.html
Now for a bit of reverse logic:
“Atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising today, and the new finding suggests that climate might be considerably more sensitive to changes in carbon dioxide than previously thought.”
Or, perhaps the Earth got warmer despite CO2 being low !
Photon without a Higgs….
I’m pretty sure that ShrNfr was using the populist definition of “decade”, rather than the logical definition. Therefore he/she would be regarding the current decade to start on 01/01/10 instead of what I regard it to be i.e. 01/01/01. Of course, the next decade will really start 01/01/11.
Ref – Rob Erhardt (12:46:37) :
“As a U.S. Federal Meteorologist for 30-years, what we are seeing is much more than “weather is not climate”…..”
___________________
Haven’t yet heard the forecast put quite the way you said. Any idea when the rest of the world is going to be informed? (Or at least “The Land of the Round Doorknob”?)
You need some perspective, I am certain in 4 or 5 years this winter will be much warmer than you think it is now while being mislead by raw temperatures. Once the temperatures have been properly adjusted you will see that this winter is too warm for snow.
“Another Ian (13:14:45) :
O/T sort of, but T & N is crashing me
More Climategate in MSM”
I think the CRU scientists, Mann et.al. should really be working on their communication strategy some more.
“It’s not like there haven’t been clues. Like for example as I pointed out the Arctic Oscillation has gone strongly negative.”
I think the 30 December is a litle late to be giving the Met clues. Perhaps if you had dug up something Joe had aid a couple of months earlier and then pointed that out , it would have helped the Met some.
But I’m sure with their super-computers and fine-tuned models, the Met will eventually get one forecast right.
Al Gore’s Holy Hologram (08:39:43) : “…When someone says global warming will continue when it hasn’t continued for a decade and then says mobile phones endanger health when there is no evidence for it, you know the guy has to be fired from his position.”
The heartbreak of proctocraniosis.
A small comet is grazing the Sun at spaceweather.com
stephen richards (11:40:19) : “What really annoys me and has done for nearly 2 years now has been the UK MetOff piping on about their wonderful £30m computer…”
Are they related to Bernie Metoff?
It seems to me that the UK could save a great deal of money by abolishing the Met and the CRU completely and using a small fraction of the money they had formerly spent by subscribing to Joe Bastardi’s service. I’m sure that Joe and his service would be willing to make whatever technical upgrades the UK would deem necessary.
Ed Murphy (13:36:32) :
“A small comet is grazing the Sun at spaceweather.com”
After carefully tracking back its position during last 24 hours (barely visible 24h ago),
http://sohodata.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/data_query_search_movie
and the angle it traversed during that time. I would dare suggest it is much closer to the LASCO orbit (and the Earth) than to the Sun. If it was anywhere near Mercury’s orbit it would be a really giant comet.
addendum to: KlausB (13:03:15) :
…accompanied by a bunch of Miners from West Virginia …
They are stranded there, due to a time slip … from 199x back to 1631 …
in the early time of the Thirty Years War…
OTOH, it’s getting freaking cold out here. Fortunately, I bought my heating oil
near a minimum price last year, it will lasting for 16 months on average. 2009 did end up with highest price for the year of ’09 here.
I’ve a decision tool for when to buy heating oil:
8-weeks running average of prices (heating oil),
15-weeks running average of prices (heating oil),
NAO/AO monthly averages,
32/33 months running average of Brent/WTIC,
12 months running average of monthly mean temperatures,
compared to the last 60 years,
freight rates of the Rhine and the Danube,
because freight rates from Rotterdam to refineries inlands
do influence prices by 5% to 15% .
Did use that model since ’98. It does give valuable decision points.
A working model.
Re: Comet
The link has failed: try this
http://sohodata.nascom.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/data_query
What do all those people actually do at the UK Met office? How many people does Joe or Piers have (or any of the other commercial forecasters who are getting it right?)
The number of people seem extraordinary to me.
The MET has about 290 IT staff – supporting about 1,500 – about 1:5 ratio.
They need better quality IT people.
A normal ratio range is 1: 25 to 1:100.
Maybe they have Harry’s problems?
And that is why they do not seem to know what’s up!
What does E.M.Smith have to add?
Well here in Australia the cherry picking season has begun and they are saying climate like the 60s and 70s but 2010 hottest year on record
http://twawki.com/2010/01/02/2010-cherrypicking-season-begins/
Phillip Bratby (12:47:17) :
Sam:
I wonder how Slioch keeps warm then. He couldn’t possibly use fossil fuel derived electricity or burn gas, oil or coal; wind turbines don’t work in cold still air. Perhaps he’s a nuclear fan.
Slioch doesn’t need an external energy supply to keep warm, he just keeps chanting “it’s warming, its warming, its warming” until he succumbs to mild hypothermia and loses rationality. It’s only then that he fires off another post to the Scotsman or Herald, the speed of his typing being just enough to keep him from full onset hypothermia. The process repeats itself, but the long term prognosis is not good.
“The cold weather comes despite the Met Office’s long range forecast, published, in October, of a mild winter. That followed it’s earlier inaccurate prediction of a “barbecue summer”, which then saw heavy rainfall and the wettest July for almost 100 years.”
Getting hard to take these people seriously.
LMAO – particularly considering the amount of resources they have (to accomplish so little).
Redirect ALL of the money-stream to Dr. Piers Corbyn and let him decide how taxpayers’ money should be spent productively on climate research.
UK is becoming a climate laughing-stock.
From the Met Office:
It was their earlier forecast of an 80% chance of mild to normal winter conditions in the UK that led local councils not to be a vigilant and stock up on sufficient amounts of gritting salt for this winter.
Back in July 2009 Piers Corbyn called the Met Office’s winter forecast “reckless misleading nonsense without scientific basis or skill”
There’s some serious housecleaning needed in some of those dinosaur weather agencies. Cut their funding, they are only as good as thier excuses, which are getting very old. Put the money into AccuWeather and WeatherAction.
Of course it will get warmer some time into the future, but that is not today’s business. It’s really getting cold out there.
P Walker, et al
FYI … Greenland temps here:
http://www.wunderground.com/global/GL.html
Three or four stations report to be just at freezing … the rest colder.
Clive
OK, for those who don’t know, I’ve got about 25+years of I.T. experience including titles like Chief Consultant, Director of I.T., etc. I also ran a supercomputer departement for a company with 15,000 (roughly) employees with about half of them in Engineering (i.e. not folks putting together keyboards on a production line… folks who demanded high end I.T. support.) The company will be nameless here, but many of you use their products that are leading edge technically (i.e. high demand for services high performance demanded engineers…) I’ve also done a lot of consulting gigs for high end companies (Schwab, Ericcson, Sun Microsystems – that class.)
I’ve also run my own company for a decade+ and been on the board of directors of another.
I’m going to approach this question as I would a consulting ‘first look’. What are the “big chunks” that shout for a look-see.
Steve J (14:16:50) : The MET has about 290 IT staff – supporting about
1,500 – about 1:5 ratio.
GASP! What in the world are those folks doing? All that can do is cause trouble with that many folks trying to justify their existance and trying to look busy.
They need better quality IT people.
In my experience, it’s the management that’s the issue, not the I.T. staff. They most often are just as agast as the outside observer (and often ‘spill the beans’ to the consultant with the slightest expression of sympathy for their plight…)
A normal ratio range is 1: 25 to 1:100.
Um, er, it depends a lot on the kind of company. If you have a clothing company, for example, the “I.T.” demand really comes from the exec staff and a few clothing designers. Counting the sewing machine folks would give much higher ratios.
That said, the “typical” Super Computer staff is on the order of 200 folks. Yes it can go higher, but it can also go lower. A “highly effective shop” (like the one I ran 😎 he smugly states 😉 can run on a lot less. We ran with a staff of 40 total. That includes the secretary, 2 levels of management, AND supporting all the desktop networking for those (roughly) 8 k “customers” in engineering. That was ‘world record low staffing’ at the time…
(Support of desktops themselves was from another department, but your 25:1 or 100:1 would be about right for that plus business apps.)
What does E.M.Smith have to add?
Glad you value my opinion enough to have sought it out!
Ok, we need to find the actual ‘customer base’ (exclude I.T. guys and janitors…) then find the ratio, then look for ‘excuses’ for an unusual ratio (i.e. clothing factory for low or designing nuclear reactors for high 😉
We also need to look at management “span of control”. One shop floor mananger may be able to supervise 80 sewing machine operators as they all do the same job and don’t need a lot of management input. One CEO might have a full plate with 5 guys each president of a different operating devision with major restructuring issues to work out. “Normal” is about 10. Any deviation from a 10:1 span of control ought to have an explanation attached.
Mal (12:25:45) :
•We employ around 1,800 people at 60 sites across the world, most (about 1,400) working out of our headquarters at Exeter.
•450 work in Research Science
•730 in Forecasting and Observations
•290 in IT
•40 in sales marketing and business development
•280 in corporate and business support functions like Human Resources, Finance, Procurement and Communications
OK, we have 1800 total with 400 being in ‘field offices’. 290 are the I.T. staff and 320 are in “Sales, General Mgt., and Administrative”.
That leaves 1510 as actual “customers” of I.T. but I’m going to make that 1500 to allow for a few janitors, plant waterers, sandwich fetchers, car drivers, whatever.
OK, about that 5:1 ratio. Waayyy out of line. They are most likely pointing at that “industry average of 200” for a supercomputer site to justify this level of staffing. As a first cut, we could put normals around it of 15 to 60 staff. The 15 is likely to be too low, given the nature of the customer base (lots of high demand researchers) but the 60 is quite “doable” (I’ve done it.)
It would require a more in depth look to get finer grained (i.e. does some other agency provide their “desktop support” or their “network support”?) But, bottom line, I’d take a contract to run their shop with a downsizing to about 100 I.T. staff with no more information than this. To commit to a 60 staff, I’d want a bit more information and an idea what budget was available for automating things… (i.e. fully automated self service backups, instead of manual. Tape robot instead of tape hanger operators. etc.)
The “Sales, marketing, business development” is 40:1500 or about 2.5% so that’s a little high, but not too bad (though I question why a government monopoly needs “sales” and “marketing”…)
G&A exclusive of I.T. and Sales / Marketing is 280? 18.7% What Are These Folks Thinking? Look, you have 1180 folks to manage (assuming the I.T. staff includes their managers) so that’s a 4.2 : 1 ratio. Gastly! Even if half of them are things like the “P.R. department” and “H.R.” folks, you still end up with a span of control on the order of 8:1 and I’d really want to know why they need so much “P.R.” support to forcast the weather anyway. With a staff that size, and a 10:1 turnover ratio, they ought to be hiring about 200 people a year. Max. So you need just a couple of H.R. folks. (Heck, you could probably outsource it easily, same thing for “P.R.” and “Communications”).
So I’d say that, off the top, you could prune about 1/2 of the G&A staff with better service as the result.
Finally: 450 researchers and 730 in Forcasting and Obs? For a country that is smaller than California? What are they all doing?
To get the weather right, you need ONE really good met guy, with a support staff of about a dozen. Now, IFF they are operating all the data collection stations too, you might need a couple of hundred guys to run around to them each day… but 730? Really? I smell about a 50% cut as ‘probable’ and more as a possible (but one would really need to look at what services are being provided and with what SLA’s to be sure.)
(Oh, G&A is “General and Adminstrative” – overhead folks. SLA is Service Level Agreement – what you promise to deliver to your customers.)
450 “Researchers”? What in the heck are you researching about the weather that takes 450 folks? Clouds? Wind? Precipitation? Ice? Waves? Temps? Equipment? (I’m running out of ideas here… ). With 10 major areas, that would be 45 researchers per area. As a first guess, I’d say another 1/2 could be pruned from here. Again, SLA’s need to be reviewed, but really…
Unbelievable.
Yup. It would be Very interesting to compare it to the staffing level of other Met Offices in other countries. Norway, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Russia, Japan. That would be my “off the cuff” set. A couple with similar sized islands or peninsulas. A couple with similar “world prestige” to guard. A couple with similar Anglo expectations from their weather service. And a couple from the non-similar group just for a full deck.
Just for fun, I’d want to solicit competative bids from Accuweather and Joe Bastardi and ask what their staffing was in the process. I’d then use those bids to:
1) Propose areas to outsource to them.
2) Bludgeon the folks who will scream saying I can NOT cut to that level and have a good product (can you say “existance proof?”… I knew you could…)
3) Have a benchmark for my own self measuring. (i.e. if they are 1000 folks, maybe I need to re-think. If they are under a dozen, maybe I need to re-think. If they are 50 to 100, well, that’s about what I’d expect when you include some operations staff.)
My guess is that you will find much of the world running a far more effective and far lower cost service.
Sidebar: Dear Met Office Supervision,
If you would like my services “cleaning house” I am available at modest rates. This is only my “first blush” look. With about a 1 week “operations review” I can be much more accurate. There may well be things that need keeping that do not show up in a set of ‘simple numbers’ like these, and such legacy operations need to be identified for preservation where appropriate. Yet every organization has obsolete or under performing operations. Should you wish help with this organization, just let the moderators here know. They can reach me if needed.
Sincerely,
E.M.Smith CDP
LPM (12:16:20) :
Oh Really? I just looked up Cairngorm mountain range mentioned in the article in Wikipedia to get a little more background and there is a section titled “Man-Made Threats”
….Other man-made threats include the problems of popularity in a country with limited wilderness resources and a large, relatively affluent urban population. These include various types of recreation and the associated trampling damage and erosion, disturbance, litter and threats to water quality.”
Huh?
The UN and guys like the chairman of the MET tried to get a treaty, United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, passed the US Congress. The treaty that would herd all humans into small areas and ban them from most areas that would be “rewilded”
“The Wildlands Project would set up to one-half of America into core wilderness reserves and interconnecting corridors (red), all surrounded by interconnecting buffer zones (yellow). No human activity would be permitted in the red, and only highly regulated activity would be permitted in the yellow areas. Four concerned conservative activists who now make up the board of Sovereignty International were able to find UN documentation that proved the Wildlands Project concept was to provide the basis for the UN Convention on Biological Diversity. They used this information and this map produced by Dr. Michael Coffman, editor of Discerning the Times Digest and NewsBytes and CEO of Sovereignty International, to stop the ratification of the treaty an hour before its scheduled cloture and ratification vote…”
http://www.propertyrightsresearch.org/articles2/wildlands_project_and_un_convent.htm
AGW is only one of several “attacks” on human freedom. The more research you do the scarier it gets. The global diversity treaty designed to patent all crop seed is another little known threat backed by the UN.
June 2006 Global Diversity Treaty: “Standard Material Transfer Agreement (SMTA) a standardized contract that will enable much easier access to crop diversity. [ germplasm for patenting] royalty payment (1.1% of sales) is paid only if product is unavailable for further breeding and research. funds will be devoted to conservation efforts.” Translation: Bio-techs Corporations steal seed from third world farmers, patents it and pay money to Bioversity International http://www.bioversityinternational.org/publications/pdf/1144.pdf
FAO is supporting harmonization of seed rules and regulations in Africa and Central Asia in order to stimulate the development of a vibrant seed industry …An effective seed regulation harmonization process involves dialogue amongst all relevant stakeholders from both private and public sectors. Seed quality assurance, variety release, plant variety protection, biosafety, plant quarantine and phytosanitary issues are among the major technical areas of a regional harmonized seed system. The key to a successful seed regulation harmonization is a strong political will of the governments involved” http://www.fao.org/ag/portal/archive/detail/en/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=5730&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=1886&cHash=7f04326e35
Just what we need 20-30 years of cooler weather and a grab for control of the world food supply. Coincidence? I do not think so.
These are from two years ago:
“….big investors are “hurriedly moving their wealth out of stocks and shares and into farmland….” The Times article suggests that, “Across the world, hedge fund managers, property developers and other investors” are all ready to buy up British farmland.” http://www.deepjournal.com/p/7/a/en/1237.html
“Barton Briggs, one of Wall Street’s most legendary investment strategists, is advising the rich and powerful to buy up farms and stock them with “seed, fertiliser, canned food. wine, medicine. clothes etc.” (and the “etc” would seem to mean guns to keep away the rest of us…)
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=almBVle3OMyo&refer=muse
The MET will continue to push AGW because the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity is what the chairman is really after. Humans confined to small areas so they do not “damage or disturb” nature.
Britain is bracing itself for one of the coldest winters for a century, what, like this.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/1947winter.gif
Remember that seasonal weather forecasts are based on statistics of earlier years and our knowledge of the parameters that normaly influence the weather for the next few months. But sometimes the weather don’t follow the statistics very well, forming weather systems affect each others and sometimes leads to large changes in the global weather-pattern in just a few weeks. This means that it is quite impossible to make a narrow forcast for the weather two – three months into the future. You can use the information I described above to make a statistical forcast of the weather. The result of a forecast of this type will show a possibility for all kinds of weather. The forecast will say that some weather types will are more likly than others, but doesn´t exclude anything. The forecast may favour mild and rainy weather, but still it will give a possibility for cold and dry.
So I don´t like to criticise the Met Office to much for the cold weather. I don’t remember what was written in the early winter forecast, but I am quite sure they didn´t say that a cold winter was impossible. Probably the forecast said that it was less likly. And even when something is “less likely”, it may still happen.
I hope my descriptions of the sesonal forcasting methods was correct but if I made any error I would be happy if you write a comment on it.
Try Norway then
From the yearly report 2008 (Norwegian)
http://met.no/Om_oss/Arsrapport/filestore/rsrapport_08_Nettversj..pdf
Page 29: “Meteorologisk institutt har 422 årsverk og 441 medarbeidere.”
i.e. the Norwegian Meteorological Institute has 441 employees (equivalent to 422 full time).
Page 25: “IT-divisjonen ved Meteorologisk institutt mål har rundt 55 ansatte med ansvar for meteorologiske systemer, utvikling, instituttets enorme server-park, operativ drift og infrastruktur. Stikkordet er uansett ÅPENT. I alle sammenhenger hvor det er mulig benytter instituttet seg av løsninger basert på åpen kildekode.”
I.e. “The IT division at the Norwegian Meteorological Institute has about 55 employees with responsibility for meteorological systems, development, the department’s huge server park, operation and infrastructure. The key word is OPEN. In all contexts where it is possible, the Institute is using open source based solutions”
Chairman of the Met office = Robert Napier, objective, believer in Empirical and pure science, advocate of ‘peer review’ esp’ at CRU and one of the world true ZEALOTS of AGW.
Nuff said.
•40 in sales marketing and business development
What are they selling? Those little beanies with propellers on top inscribed with the words “Met Office Boffin” ?
I live in Edinburgh, Scotland. We’ve had snow and ice on the ground for 18 days and its snowing again right now. Theres general agreement in the models for at least another 10 days of this level of cold or worse … so we’re looking at a months worse of continuous cold, snow and ice. I fully understand that *our* cold doesn’t match that of our North American cousins, but we’re an island stuck of the NW coast of Europe … our typical average winter climate is like that of Seattle or Vancouver. This spell would be more like southern Norway.
The UK MetOffice hasn’t seen this coming … and worse than that – the day to day forecasting of snow events up here has been abysmal. If they spent more time, money and focus on forecasting WEATHER … rather than what things might be like in 50 years … then they’d be doing their job properly. Sadly, they haven’t.
Mention “Global Warming” on any ice/snow bound street in this city and you’ll be met by ironic laughter … and possibly a punch in the face if this starts to intensify as is forecast.
Richard North from EuReferendum has a good article in the UK’s Mail on Sunday today explaining the reasons for the Met Office’s failings:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240082/It-gigantic-supercomputer-1-500-staff-170m-year-budget-So-does-Met-Office-wrong.html
Populists start counting with “1”. Number buffs (and computer jocks) start with zero.
crosspatch (11:18:20) :
I don’t know about Denmark but one might be able to walk from Iceland to Greenland soon.
How smooth will the surface be? For quicker travel the use of sail-driven sleds might be considered. After all, the increased use of wind power is being demanded, and PETA does not want our canine cousins to be enslaved for pulling sleds.
The CRU hackers are to blame!
Mike Core (12:34:29) :
“And of course, there is also the real world: Fyvie Loch, – 20 miles north of Aberdeen, is now sufficiently frozen to bear the weight of both a golden retriever and 20 year old son: (I experimented with both specimens on the 31st of Dec)….”
ROFLMAO!
Now that’s true science at work!
Here in the Scottish Borders we are enduring our 22nd day when the temperature has barely risen above zero and we have had continuous snow cover now for 15 days. There is no prospect of any warming in sight until at least the third week in January – and that may not happen. The snow has only been a foot or two deep but the rural backroads are not gritted and are largely only passable by 4WD. If we get even more snow – as is forecast – we will be in deep trouble. Down in Eastern Wales my sister has had 4 feet of snow in less than three days and had to hire a JCB to break a path to the main road. This is serious – the UK is not set-up to cope with such long term cold events; councils don’t have enough road salt or machines to keep all roads open.
“I note the Met office has reviewed it’s prediction for a colder than average winter from 20% to 45%.”
This prediction will be elevated to 100% at the last day of winter. Top gun forecasters, these MET guys.
Phillip Bratby (11:38:22) :
‘Christopher Booker has it all in hand ‘
And Gore changes his mind !!
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/copenhagen/article6959509.ece
Maybe the warming models have contracted a virus. Warm1Cold1.
The local forecasts on the West Coast have gotten erratic.
But, there is a cure for that: Pull the plug and hang a “Closed for ReModeling” sign in the window.
Ahhh the Met Office. The same “experts” who brought us “barbeque summer 2009” and “mild winter 2009/2010”. I would love to do a graph of their “expertise”. My expectation would be as funding and computer power increase, prediction success goes down, as computer models replace common sense.
” The more is goes on snowing, tiddly pom, tiddly pom, the colder my toes are growing, tiddly pom.” Winnie The Pooh.
This British bear of very little brain had more brain than the entire Met office combined.
Meanwhile here in Stowe Vermont the forecast is for it to maybe get as cold as -40°F with winds of 50 MPH. It is very windy already and snowing; it is about 10°F. It is forecast to snow until Thursday. Oh bother !!!!!
To E.M. Smith, these are government workers we are talking about here. I suspect that many are less efficient than you are thinking. In my own work we have government (permanent) employees and contract staff, when the work has to be done or requires innovation a contract worker is used, where it is not important then it is given to a permanent, if it is to be reported in the in-house journal or some other publication then a contract worker does it but a permanent is there for the photo.
I apologise if this link has been posted.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240082/It-gigantic-supercomputer-1-500-staff-170m-year-budget-So-does-Met-Office-wrong.html
Not until late November did the Met Office tone down its prediction by saying that there was a ’50 per cent chance’ of a mild winter.
Spinning a coin could have given the same result – not one you would expect from an organisation that spends nearly £170million a year, has 1,500 staff and a team of scientists operating a £30million supercomputer capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second, with a carbon footprint the size of a small town
> photon without a Higgs (11:15:39) :
> ShrNfr (10:45:49) :
>> Not only that, yesterday held the record worldwide of being
>> the coldest day of the current decade. In some areas that may be
>> broken by today.
> Please supply the link to this. I’m interested.
“Whoosh”… the sound of a tautology flying over your head. Yesterday (January 1st) was the first day of the 2010 decade. So it was obviously the coldest… and the hottest… and the median for the decade so far.
Peter Jones (08:01:41) :
If there is any fairness in the system, these agencies should have been told that their funding will be severely affected if they can’t do a better job with forcasting. If the predictions don’t allow you to do any planning, then you’re better off just observing and reporting on the weather.
Sadly, I think that the Met Office is doing exactly what the politicians, who desperately want cap-and-trade, have told them to do.
Giving an honest forecast would probably have cost them their funding if not their jobs. BTW, I have no sympathy for gutless apparatchiks who value their jobs over the truth.
Not the MET Office but the UK Government pretending to save the world again.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6973577.ece
“Twelve million low-energy light bulbs were posted to households over Christmas by an energy company as part of its legal obligation to cut carbon emissions, despite government advice that many would never be used.
Npower sent out the packages last month to escape a ban on issuing unsolicited bulbs, which came into force yesterday. The German-owned company saved millions of pounds by giving away the bulbs. Alternative ways of meeting its obligation, such as insulating homes, are much more effective but up to seven times more expensive.
It faced a fine of more than £40 million, or 10 per cent of its turnover, if it failed to meet its target for improving efficiency in homes under the carbon emissions reduction target scheme.
Households have received more than 180 million free or subsidised low-energy bulbs in the past 18 months. A survey in July by the Energy Saving Trust found that the average home had six unused ones lying in drawers and cupboards.
In 2008 the Government ordered the big energy companies to invest in measures for improving energy efficiency and cutting fuel poverty.
Companies can choose how to meet their obligations. Each measure they fund is given a score for the lifetime carbon savings that it achieves.
The scheme made assumptions about the usage of light bulbs that turned out to be wildly optimistic.
Companies were allowed to register immediate carbon savings from every bulb issued on the assumption that all recipients instantly installed them in some of their most intensively used light sockets. In reality, many people either stored the bulbs or threw them away, often because they were the wrong fitting or wattage. “
The problem is that there is no penalty for getting it wrong – they just say they need more money to buy a bigger, better computer, employ more researchers, etc.
Perhaps they should be made to dress for their prediction. If they say it will be a BBQ summer they should be made to ride their bikes (or walk) to work wearing summer clothes. If predicting a mild winter then they should be made to wear only mild winter clothes.
Perhaps then they would learn the difference between wishful thinking and real weather.
@Carsten:
Thanks! That’s exactly the kind of comparison that one looks for. So for a similar sized country in very similar location, we have numbers more or less in line with what I was proposing for the ‘after cuts’ size. Nice.
Get two more of these ( “3” is the magic number for “comps” – no idea why…) and put it in a write up. Show 1/2 to 2/3 budget savings. Put in a lead in chart showing Met Office failing to beat a “fair coin toss” and with Accuweather and Joe Bastardi comparative stats as “whipped cream on top”; present to “appropriate” Lord…
I foresee a spike in google searches for “MET Office”.
Try this google trend search for interesting seasonal effects:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22met+office%22%2C+bbq%2C+skiing&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
I would even say «Britain facing one of the most inefficient Met Offices in 100 years»
matt v. (07:59:46) :
I’ve been following the PDO for the better part of a decade, and correct me if I am wrong, but when the PDO is in a COOL regime, most of the continental US (all but SE) and most of Northern Europe get warmer. If the PDO went cool, then, expect warming to happen, at least what most of us experience.
I was WAY critical of the modelers, since the models were certainly not including the PDO, as of 5 years ago or so. It is so new, and even now they don’t really have any understanding of it at all. Hell, they don’t even have a clue what causes ENSO. They know THAT it happens, but not WHY? (i.e., why does the current flow the other way and where does the extra heat come from?)
The PDO regime went WARM early in the decade, and I am surprised to see it going cool again so soon. But I haven’t seen anything on it lately. I’ve had my mind on other things. Must be time to eddikait myself a bit more…
M.Simon
No matter what populists or number buffs start thier counts with, the fact remains, there was NO Year Zero, so the first decade of the modern era ended on Dec 31st 10 A.D. Every subsequent decade has ended with a year that includes a zero as the last digit, i.e 20, 150, 2000 etc. To call Dec 31st 2009 the last day of the “Noughties,” is to fly in the face of this inconvenient fact.
The MSM here in New Zealand, and no doubt elsewhere in the world, have fallen into the same routine that was trotted out ten years ago when they trumpeted the year 2000 as the beginning of the new millenium. Because people are tired of pointing out the error of their (the MSMs’ ) ways, the MSM continue on their merry way, promoting falsehoods and confusing the public with their ignorance.
Back on topic, the Met Service here in N.Z. must have been trained by their British counterparts. A high of 27 C was predicted for my area (Palmerston North) today. This would have been the first temperature over 25 C this summer (since Dec 22nd), but alas by my estimate it is lucky to be 21 C, if that. What’s 6 degrees C between friends. They also predicted rain for yesterday that didn’t eventuate either. May be they have one of those rotating dart-boards that the climatologists use, and the holiday staff don’t quite have the knack of spinning and throwing down pat like the regular staff would.
It is of no consequence though because we can rely on NIWA to make the appropriate adjustments later to bring those pesky “Palmy” numbers into line and save face for the the Met Service. Meanwhile holiday makers on this coast can escape to “Global Warming Land,” on the other side of the divide thanks to the Fohn/Chinook winds we call simply the NorWester. In the low 30’s (Celsius) over there. Just confirms the old adage, “If you don’t like weather, MOVE!” This natural dichotomy affects 2 thirds of N.Z. It does give us options when it comes to weather though.
Keep warm my northen mates. It isn’t shaping up as a hot summer here inspite of the east coast temperatures so far. The only cheery news for us has been an upswing in the SST’s around the coast of N.Z. in the past few weeks after 7 months of it being cold.
Thank you Mr. E.M.Smith.
I only have about 11 years in IT at 3 of the top 5 IT companies, my first guess was 100 should do it.
You should see what we managed with teams of 6-10.
I have had my own architecture firm and managing 6 highly productive brilliant architects is quite consuming – I can only hazard a guess re: the issues attempting to get 290 working in the same direction.
One wonders if some of those IT staff are somehow involved “fudging data” or otherwise making Harry’s life a bit crazier?
Yes, I realize “Harry’ is at UEACRU –
but then perhaps the MET is engaged similarly…
and has therefore gotten confused as to what data is “real” vs.”fudged”
and finds itself making forecasts from the wrong data set?
Wow, totally by coincidence I was over at WUWT, and found a great link to Reference: 450 skeptical peer reviewed papers, posted by Anthony on November 15th, and in the first 10 or so, I found this that discusses the PDO, among other factors. They apparently even included it in their model. Excellent!
My thanks to Andrew at Popular Technology. Hells yeah, Dude!
“Philip T. Downman (11:06:31) :
Danes, look out! Remember 1658 when Karl X of Sweden came over the sea ice. Any day Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden may come the same way.”
No worries – Danish police are used to pick him up. He’s not a fan of speed limits.
tty , Clive – Thanks .
Ian Cooper: “If you don’t like weather, MOVE!”
It’s been a great summer to holiday in my back yard – the Bay of Islands. Almost no rain since October as all the storms hit middle and southern NZ while we’ve sat under big fat anticyclones.
Tourists are welcome here, all you sufferers from global cooling.
This may be a cold winter but the AMSU daily temps seem to be rising in the last week or so. Apparently, somebodies enjoying warm weather.
matt v. (07:59:46) :
“The current cool winter is the start of many such cool winters for the next 20-30 years. I see serious crop losses in the Northern Hemisphere during the coming decades starting this year and now also in Europe and Asia [ last year Canada lost about 20 % of crops due to late very cold spring and lack of spring moisture ] . Global warming will be seen for what it really is, a very flawed science that has caused the world to misallocate vital resources.”
You are 100% correct.
And it is a travesty that we have been betrayed by the scientists who most have a say-so (the Met and NASA) and yet their political ideology offsets proper judgement.
We will survive however….and maybe we will learn.
In the meantime…get rid of these bozos: Mann, Schmidt, Hansen….all of them. They are USELESS.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Quote savethesharks (21:40:36) :
“You are 100% correct.
And it is a travesty that we have been betrayed by the scientists who most have a say-so (the Met and NASA) and yet their political ideology offsets proper judgement.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA”
I agree, Chris. But sadly I must also admit that nuclear physicists bear part of the responsibility for the current mess.
If they had recognized neutron repulsion in nuclear rest mass data, then solar and space scientists might not have been so insistent that the Sun is a ball of Hydrogen, and the variable nature of the Sun – Earth’s heat source – could have been taken into account.
Quote savethesharks (21:40:36) :
“You are 100% correct.
And it is a travesty that we have been betrayed by the scientists who most have a say-so (the Met and NASA) and yet their political ideology offsets proper judgement.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA”
I agree, Chris. But sadly I must also admit that nuclear physicists bear part of the responsibility for the current mess.
If they had recognized neutron repulsion in nuclear rest mass data, then solar and space scientists might not have been so insistent that the Sun is a ball of Hydrogen, and the variable nature of the Sun – Earth’s heat source – could have been taken into account.
With kind regards,
Oliver K. Manuel
Paul Vaughan (14:54:51) :
“The cold weather comes despite the Met Office’s long range forecast, published, in October, of a mild winter. That followed it’s earlier inaccurate prediction of a “barbecue summer”, which then saw heavy rainfall and the wettest July for almost 100 years.”
Getting hard to take these people seriously.
LMAO – particularly considering the amount of resources they have (to accomplish so little).
Redirect ALL of the money-stream to Dr. Piers Corbyn and let him decide how taxpayers’ money should be spent productively on climate research.
UK is becoming a climate laughing-stock.
Agreed.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Beijing’s turn now.
http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/149433/Snow-causes-travel-chaos-in-Beijing
M. Simon (16:23:45) : Populists start counting with “1″. Number buffs (and computer jocks) start with zero.
FORTRAN programmers start arrays at 1
C programmers start arrays at 0
ALGOL programmers start arrays at any number including negative…
I like FORTRAN, but my heart belongs to ALGOL: “Where would you like the decade to start, sir?”
GEEK Sidebar: The default array starting point actually has an impact on the compiler design. The hardware starts with empty memory locations, so it is a little easier to, by default, start an array at that empty zero point; and a little more efficient. Otherwise you always have to put a bit of code in that says “Memlocation+1” to start. “C” was written by efficiency geeks, so it starts with 0. FORTRAN was written by folks wanting to do math formulas so it starts with 1 (since that is what most real problem statements do: “Count how many trains?” does NOT go 0,1,2,3,4 the answer is 5 trains…) This makes the compiler a bit more complicated, but the day to day programming tasks are a bit easier (I declare an array of 5 items and count them 12 3 4 5 rather than the C way of 0 1 2 3 4 and needing to keep that straight in my head all the time…)
Then ALGOL comes along and says, basically, start an array anywhere you like, the compliler guy will get over it…
Since all those languages began, times have changed and the languages with them. Many compilers these days let you declare arrays that start wherever you like since dealing with negative numbers is common (FORTRAN even supports imaginary numbers…)
But their original biases remain in the basic language definitions… and in the minds of folks programming in those languages.
So it isn’t quite as simple as saying “computer jocks” start at 0.
And we won’t talk about COBOL, APL, PL/1, ADA, etc. It’s just too painful to take that path down memory lane. (And RPG is ‘right out’…) I still have bad dreams about the time I was assigned to an ADA project… Nor JOVIAL, the “evil twin” of ALGOL… (military real time embedded systems.. you know, things that go “whoooshh…. whirrrrr…thud BANG!” )
But yeah, “real people” tend to count starting with “1” and nerds with “0”.
(Me? I’m “location specific counting”. Like ALGOL, I can start counting anywhere I feel like starting… Sometimes I miss ALGOL. I downloaded the compiler, but I’ve not installed it. Not sure I want to make that retro leap…)
OBLIGATORY Climate / Weather Hook:
This, btw, is an example of the kind of thing that makes computer models “a problem”. No end of “bugs” pop up because the language expects an array to start at one point and the programmer expected it to start at another. It doesn’t help that folks have written some parts in one language and other parts in another language either.
So you have to go through every single line of every single program and “vet” it for proper declaration and then for proper usage with special attention paid to start number, end number and actual span. (i.e. did they declare it 5 long, then count from 1-5 when the computer had 0-4? Or declared 5 long then counted 0-5? Or declared 4 (thinking 0-4) and got 1-4? etc.
Until that is done, ALL computer code is just a basket of bugs waiting for you to descover the ‘edge case’ that tickles the bug. There are formal procedures to try to stamp out those bugs, but even they do not get them all.
And that, boys and girls, is why THIS geek drives a “classic” car with NO computer in it at all and a straight mechanical fuel injection system. No electricity need apply… I’ve had the “limp home” on blown oxygen sensor experience and friends had the ‘computer stops car’ issue. Just say no…
I certainly would not trust the fate of the world economy to a model. After all, look what the financial model wunderkind did with “mortgage derivatives”…
All computer models do is “inform our ignorance”. Either about the reality we do not completely understand (by divergence from reality) OR about the bug level of our code.
@ E.M.Smith (23:44:32) :
And if you are “Harry” or whomever, at which point when looking at old buggy code do you just say screw it and write new code you know will work?
I realize some systems may be using code that took decades to develop so people don’t want to simply chuck it. But so much “development” was for specific proprietary systems, optimizing scarce resources, creating certain functions and subroutines… Stuff that doesn’t apply with the current state of programming languages, with their vast libraries to draw from, with portable code, better iron, and other improvements. At which point when looking at an awful mess do you just ask what data are you using, what are you doing with the data, what output do you want, and go from there?
Poor Harry sounded like a complete outsider, hauled in to figure out what CRU was doing. Had to figure out the databases, how they were set up, what the programs were doing with the data… From the “read me” notes I’ve read, you’d think he was a “forensic programmer,” working alone after-the-fact to decipher how things were messed up, trying to un-mess them into something usable, recognizable, with no contact with the CRU crew. If he had simply been assigned to help them have better running code, I would think he would have tossed out the old junk pretty dang quick.
Purakanui (23:27:55) :
Ditto
Heavy snow brings Beijing to standstill
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE60204B20100103
E.M.Smith (23:44:32) :
“FORTRAN programmers start arrays at 1
C programmers start arrays at 0
ALGOL programmers start arrays at any number including negative…”
And in C-Sharp (C#) you dont need to count at all…
For (each train in trains)
{
do whatever you like for the train…..
}
hehe
As time passes and the IPCC models are found to be clearly way out of line (as usual) even to the most loony AGW believer, what then? Will they ask for more billions of funding to come up with the next false prediction? What a serious waste of taxpayers money. People who continue to play this game will hopefully one day find themselves in jail.
The abysmal performance of the UK Met Office receives more castigation from both Richard North of EUReferendum and Chris Booker.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240082/It-gigantic-supercomputer-1-500-staff-170m-year-budget-So-does-Met-Office-wrong.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6924898/The-Met-Office-gives-us-the-warmist-weather.html
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/
Thank goodness for a warming open fire.
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (15:52:58) :
You should have mentioned that the Norwegian weather service covers a large chunk of the Arctic in addition to Norway and consequently also has an ice service, a branch that can hardly be very large in the UK.
As a comparison SMHI, the Swedish Weather Service has 600 employees, including weather observers. SMHI is fairly heavily bureaucratized, and in my (and many other swedes) opinion the norwegian forecasts are more reliable.
XYZLatin 14:12:20
E.M. Smith 15:27:46
Re Met Staffing
Remember that the original Parkinsons Law (derived from British Admiralty estimates 1914 – 1928) was that
“Work expands so as to fill the volume of time available for its completion”.
More gems in that read too.
E.M.Smith (23:44:32) : FORTRAN programmers start arrays at 1 …
A beautiful piece, thank you, E. M. — my ignorance is legion, but I can still relate to a compelling story.
Henry chance (07:43:30) :
“For warmistas, their safest strategy is to be very quiet. If they do decide to speak, they do need to admit is cald and nasty and will be for a while this winter. They lose face posting warmest on record stories when it is record cold.”
Likewise, when the church of Al Gore and the rest of the AGW crowd are busy overheating their keyboards in the hot summer months of June, July, and August, AGW skeptics best keep a low profile and enjoy their summer frolicking in the pool, downing a frosty, and barbecuing delicious steaks.
Joe Bastardi’s forecast for Europe was for a major snow storm moving up from the south around the middle of this week. I’ve already checked the met forecast for England and so far all they have shown is light snow on and off for a couple of days. I wonder who will turn out to be right?
So how does the MetOffice make its seasonal predictions?
1 – Crank up the Computer. Global warming/future climate models suggest that Britains winters will become milder and wetter.
2 – Keep an eye on the weather, get outside, take plenty of smoke breaks. A warmer than average autumn builds confidence. Just about the end of November and hardly a frost to be seen.
3 – It’s December and winter has started, going out for those smoke breaks it’s getting jolly cold. Oh well we’ll put out a forecast for a cold January. Perhaps the weather will get it right for February it’s deviating from the models. A few “tricks” with the data should correct that.
4 – The SUMMER The Hottest Year ever
Winter forecast 2009/10
Tue 23 July 2009
Temperature
Early indications are that winter temperatures are likely to be near or above average over much of Europe including the UK. For the UK, Winter 2009/10 is likely to be milder than last year.
Rainfall
Early indications are that winter precipitation is likely to be near or above average over much of northern Europe. For the UK, Winter 2009/10 is likely to be wetter than last year.
Tue 29 Sept 2009
Temperature
Preliminary indications continue to suggest that winter temperatures are likely to be near or above average over much of Europe including the UK. Winter 2009/10 is likely to be milder than last year for the UK, but there is still a 1 in 7 chance of a cold winter.
Rainfall
Signals for precipitation slightly favour near or above average rainfall over much of northern Europe, including the UK
Fri 27 Nov 2009
Temperature
“For northern Europe, including the UK, there is a 20% chance of a colder winter, a 30% chance of an average winter and a 50% chance of a milder winter”
Rinfall
“For northern Europe, including the UK, signals for precipitation are weak, with near equal chances for each of the three categories. There is a 30% chance of a drier winter, a 35% chance of an average winter and a 35% chance of a wetter winter”
Wed 30 Dec 2009
Temperature
For the rest of winter, over northern Europe including the UK, the chance of colder conditions is now 45%; there is a 30% chance of average and a 25% chance of milder conditions.
Rainfall
For the rest of winter, for northern Europe including the UK, there are near equal chances for each of the three categories. There is a 30% chance of a drier winter, a 35% chance of an average winter and a 35% chance of a wetter winter.
kadaka (00:43:40) :
@ E.M.Smith (23:44:32) :
And if you are “Harry” or whomever, at which point when looking at old buggy code do you just say screw it and write new code you know will work?
Shortly after the maintenance contract runs out 😉
Seriously, though, it comes down to an unanswerable question:
WIll I introduce more new bugs than I remove old bugs?
Since in both cases the quantity of bugs is unknowable, the answer is a matter of faith, not reason. Most typically it depends on the degree to which you are certain you are a significantly better programmer than the prior person. In both cases, you still need an independent QA step to review the code…
But to your other points: Just about any legacy system with a “new guy” brought in, to have some maintenance work done, would be described the way you described Harry. The last guy left town for a better job, the other folks in the shop never read the code, you have been handed this bucket of worms: have a nice day… And EVERYBODY gets that urge to do a from scratch re-write. It is often in error…
Typically, the terms of the contract say “patch” or “re-write” and changing from “patch” to “re-write” after the fact is not easy (for reasons of negotiation and budget, not technically.)
FWIW, I’m up to my eyeballs in GIStemp. IMHO it would be best handled as a relational database with some data load scripts, some extracts, and a couple of reports. Far faster and more efficient (and less prone to bugs!) than the present design. But were I doing this work on contract at NASA the odds of getting that “signed off” would be NIL. Why? Because Hansen designed and, IMHO, coded (wrote) a lot of the program himself. He would never “sign off” on having HIS work tossed in the bin… And that’s the OTHER problem in asking to do a re-write… “Enhancement” sells better than “trash it” when talking about the bosses baby.
kwik (01:11:35) :
And in C-Sharp (C#) you dont need to count at all…
Yeah, “object oriented” guys are not into procedural things, like counting. Just ask the trains how many they are and their method will devine the answer “OOOOMMMMmmmmm” 5 sayeth the oracle… (though someone had to teach the method to grok the quantity of a thing…) But at it’s core, yes, I agree that the C# programs have trouble counting 😉
@roger Carr and Another Ian: Thanks, glad you liked it!
http://www.metcheck.com/V40/UK/HOME/
-20C in parts of Northern Britain this coming week.
Yikes!
Glenn Rowe (08:11:08) :
You have to make a distinction between the two Telegraphs. Although sister publications, they’re poles apart on climate change.
The Daily Telegraph coverage has been consistently biased and one-sided.
In contrast, the Sunday Telegraph has been far more balanced with a possible bias toward scepticism. It has published good articles by Christopher Monckton and Bob Carter – as well as a piece by Gore – and of course it is the home of Christopher Booker.
Having said that, I have noticed some changes at the Daily Telegraph. I almost fell off my chair when I read a news report which mostly consisted of comments by Monckton! And one of their top writers, Simon Heffer, has now declared himself to be a complete sceptic. It’s also noticeable that most climate-related letters that they print are sceptical.
*****************************************
Here’s a wonderful example of ‘it’s freezing because of global warming’ in todays’s UK Observer. The heading of the two-page spread: “Peru’s mountain people struggle as the winters grow ever colder”. In a mountain village animals and even children have been dying due to much harsher winters over the last few years.
This is very sad. But in a world that appears to be growing colder, people who live in marginal conditions such as these mountain villages may be the first to feel the devastating effects of global cooling.
.
But wait….
The next paragraph begins: “In a world growing ever hotter….”
You can guess the rest. It’s all caused by global warming and it will be worse because of the failure of Copenhagen. You couldn’t make it up….
Chris
For comparison against the UK, here is the Australia BOM staffing report from last year showing breakup of labour etc.
http://www.bom.gov.au/inside/eiab/reports/ar08-09/Appendix-3.pdf
Oh and just to approximate the major numbers :
1270 all up
190 IT staff
600 professional staff
460 technical staff
240 management
20 researchers
and most importantly,
5 janitors
All over the world, there is the Climate in total revolt.
The warmists went charging out there to find retreating glaciers, only to find the glaciers charging back at them.
The widely touted claims of global warming have given way to shieks of terrible blizzards, all caused by man.
For once, they are right. If they had remained calm and not gone running off into the rooftops of the world, they would now be observing from comfort and relative safety.
The stories from the big typhoon brings the behavior to light: As the ocean receeded strangely, the unwary and over-curios walked out where they shouldn’t have gone.
The warmists now find themselves out on a limb, snapping under the load, in too lofty of a place. They’ll never learn.
So, how long before global cooling is recognized by the mass media as the real threat to human civilization? If one had the choice of the two, global cooling would be far more devastating than global warming. I hope we do get some global warming soon or the world will be in serious trouble in just a few years, perhaps much sooner. What’s the media going to talk about? The climate on Venus to try and divert our attention from what’s really happening? Do millions of people have to die unnecessarily because of some political spin that got out of hand by our so called leaders? Isn’t it time now to get all relevant scientists to speak the truth and avert the loss of lives?
Text below from local meteorologist (Pitlochry, Highland Perthshire, Scotland):
————————————————
“DECEMBER 2009. The month saw temperatures around 3 to 4 degrees below the long term average. This degree of negative anomaly has been very rare for ANY month over the past 20 years or so & must give ammunition to the “no warming trend” lobby. There were 5 nights below -10 & on the 28th, a maximum of only -7.8. Rainfall amounts (more than half of it in the form of snow) totalled around 83% of average. A memorable month then, for the severity of the cold spell, which threatens to continue for some time into the New Year.”
————————————————
See http://homepages.tesco.net/barry.gratton1/ for source and http://www.aberfeldyweather.com/ for neighbouring MO station. Minus 14C again here last night, and as usual temperatures have been colder further west and north (e.g. Glen Lyon and Braemar).
Erik (09:39:49) :
“I asked in another thread some time ago, but I think it might have got lost among the hundreds of comments. Does anyone know of a site with the recent snow cover for Europe?”
_________________
If you don’t already have a better answer take a look at:
http://www.wetterzentrale.de/topkarten/fsdivka.html
Ian Cooper (19:11:58) :
I cannot help getting annoyed by this argument. It is true, accurate and logical. It is correct. But it is not beautiful!. If you want beauty and joy, you celebrate the new millennium on 1/1/200, and do not wait until 1/1/2001.
The world likes it, wants it, and it makes a lot of sense. Just because a load of religious nitwits never included a logical year zero that every child has apart from Jesus (and this is the only reason this logical argument holds weight) does not stop us being rational and pragmatic about our dates two thousand years later!
(sorry, but it does wind me up a bit 😉
I was not providing an opionon really, just stating the facts sought from the yearly report. Other relevant info (as considered by Meterorologisk Institutt) is found in the yearly report I linked to.
It is true that Norway has a vast sea and arctic area to cover. We also have less than 5 million people in total.
Geek response (I used to be a FORTRAN geek):
If my memory serves me, an array even in FORTRAN77 starts where the programmer defines it should start, for example, an array may start at -1:
REAL A(-1:6)
REAL B(8)
Both A and B array lengths are 8. A starts at -1 while B starts at 1. The B declaration is really just shorthand for
REAL B(1:8)
That is, if memory serves me correctly…
Actually, this feature does not exist in C or C++, where all native arrays start at 0. However, in C++ you have the much more powerful concept of containers and iterators. You really don’t need arrays at all 99% of the time.
SteveGinIL (19:29:27) :
> … found a great link to Reference: 450 skeptical peer reviewed papers, posted by Anthony on November 15th,
Ah yes, that’s a good one. In fact, you’ve inspired me to add a section to http://home.comcast.net/~ewerme/wuwt/ to record some blog posts that should not be allowed to fade into history as quickly as most posts.
Request to all: If you have some favorite WUWT posts that you’ve bookmarked or otherwise refer to every so often, post the link here and I’ll likely add it to my list.
For the time being, I just want WUWT posts, but at some point it might be worthwhile to create a new web page that casts a wider net.
‘Harry’ is presumably Ian (harry) Harris who has been on the CRUs research staff for the entire period of ‘climategate’. Think I’ve seen only one climategate email from him and that was to show the rest of the team that he knew how to sneer as well as they did.
DirkH (09:52:54) :
“Ed Murphy (09:34:39) :
Manatee mortality more than doubles due to cold. This probably goes under reported too.”
I think that report concerns last winter. It is still too early to have figures for this winter. It will be interesting to see if the Manatee have been able to adapt in any way, for it suppose to get quite cold down there the next few weeks.
Last summer a young buck Manatee said -bleep- to Florida and headed way up to Cape Cod, where he ran into problems in water below 68F. There was a flurry of excitement in local papers, and I think they rescued the fellow and shipped him back south.
As I recall, a few papers suggested a Manatee showing up by Cape Cod was a proof of warming. (Waters were actually warmer than normal, for a while, off the Cape.) If those papers had bothered research at all they would have seen the old news about so many Manatees dying of cold in Florida during the winter of 08-09. It’s hard to blame that on “warming,” isn’t it!?
Hopefully Greenpeace and WWF don’t get involved, for they’ll probably want the Manatee arrested for being “deniers.”
Well, having just tuned in after hearing about your web site, I would like to leave a non scientific posting from Kingston Upon Hull England:
Second winter (this being2009) and, what a second winter it is turning out to be!
Last year was the first “proper winter” I can remember in my life (46 years old)cold and frosty. This Christmas has seen weeks of sub-zero tempretures and snow, unprecedented in my lifetime. I, having swallowed the global warming concensus for many years, am beginning to feel rather foolish now, not only because of two very cold winters, but also because of all the information against man made global warming that is finally beginning to get through at last.
I would like to welcome myself aboard the good ship reallity!
Well, the results for UK December 2009 temperature are in…
Coldest December for 13 years.
Perhaps this will encourage a few more currently stuck in the CAGW camp to have a re-think?
Carl Skinn (08:47:03) :
Welcome Carl. Don’t beat yourself up – most of us were taken for suckers by the “team”. Different folk, different time-scales.
For me it was being told not to “trust my instincts” that set off my BS radar. I spent many decades out in the “weather” and the climate was doing what it always did – change. I thought I would look at the evidence, to find that there was plenty showing warming and exactly none showing that CO2 did it.
The team lied, bullied and stole, then they hid.
We will never forget.
Carl Skinn (08:47:03) :
> I would like to welcome myself aboard the good ship reality!
Welcome to the flagship of the fleet.
Mal (18:39:28) “The problem is that there is no penalty for getting it wrong – they just say they need more money to buy a bigger, better computer, employ more researchers, etc.”
Everyone’s schooling is wrong – “Let X1, X2, X3, … ~ i.i.d…” – that’s where it all starts going wrong – with the untenable base-assumptions underpinning everything — algebraic hypnosis is the monkey wrench in the wheel of common sense.
You are quite correct that putting more people and resources on a job based on FLAWED assumptions will just produce more complex JUNK — ironically, it actually makes it easier for the crooks to hoodwink innocents.
now another UK main stream paper has now published a critical article about the met office. First thing I have read in that paper for years that does not blame immigrants.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240082/It-gigantic-supercomputer-1-500-staff-170m-year-budget-So-does-Met-Office-wrong.html
tallbloke (02:59:46) “-20C […] Yikes!”
It has to be -25C with wind & humidity before it bites (for anyone who is appropriately-dressed & mobile), but I’ll admit it becomes tricky keeping hands warm while sea-kayaking at that temperature. The cost of home-heating – well, that’s another matter… and let’s not get into the issue of winter road “safety” as city councils etc. have put AGW into their long-term budgeting plans — the cost for jeopardizing public safety with wishful economic thinking must be TERMINATION. There is a(n exponentially) growing epidemic of DELUSIONAL “It will be over tomorrow” syndrome in winter road “safety” “management”.
Christopher Polis (04:18:03) says:
Wow, what’s with the sexism at the BOM in Australia? Only ~20% of employees are female! (According to that document, anyway.)
Yes it is very interesting that the Daily Mail, the most influential middleweight and middle England paper, circulation about 2 million, has turned so abruptly against AGW and it’s political nature. Note its attack on the Met Office as in the link above repeated here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1240082/It-gigantic-supercomputer-1-500-staff-170m-year-budget-So-does-Met-Office-wrong.html
Its once great rival the Daily Express has done so too, but has only about a third the circulation these days.
The downmarket Sun with the highest circulation. 3 million, has never been much interested but is clearly moving the same way even and its rival the Mirror has gone quite quiet on the subject. As has the Star.
Of the heavies with their relatively low circulations the Telegraph. 800,000, has always had space for anti AGW comment both in its columns and comment, under tis new editor the Times went resolutely green but again has suddenly fallen quiet on the subject, only the small circulation Guardian and Independant heavies ares till staunchly pro AGW.
It seems Grub Street is learning that in a recession greenery doesn’t pay especially if it has been done to death in the last few years with endless propaganda from the Gov’t.
The politicians are as usual well behind the curve insulated as the are from public opinion on the ground but I suspect that that will change.
I have seen a couple of major sea changes before in UK politics and it is starting to look that this may be one of them.
Kindest Regards
Now the cold has hit Asia according to newsdaily.com.
North Asia pummeled by icy snap
By Chris Buckley and Christine KimPosted 2010/01/04 at 2:54 am EST
BEIJING/SEOUL, Jan. 4, 2010 (Reuters) — Heavy snows and biting cold pummeled North Asia on Monday, with the unusually harsh winter weather snarling up transport across north China and South Korea but unlikely to deal any lasting economic damage.
Beijing began the working week after a blast of harsh cold and heavy snow blanketed the capital and surrounding cities over the weekend, paralyzing highways and forcing the cancellation of dozens of flights.
As the cold snap pressed east, swathes of the Korean peninsula were also hit by heavy snow on Monday, choking up the rush hour commute in Seoul, where the main domestic airport, Gimpo, canceled all domestic flights.
In China, there were no signs that the cold spell would trigger the weeks-long disruptions and power cuts that hit some parts of southern China in unusually icy weather in 2008.
http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre6030vf-us-weather-asia/
a jones (13:10:01) “It seems Grub Street is learning that in a recession greenery doesn’t pay especially if it has been done to death in the last few years with endless propaganda from the Gov’t.”
Nothing wrong with real greenery. Let’s not confuse climate alarmism with real environmentalism & real environmental problems.
I am quite happy not to be living in the UK right now. I recall the 1970’s cool period and although it was fun for me at that time, today, it would be a pain in the adz (Travel (I do know how to handle snow and ice on roads)/work/pain etc).
On the flipside downunder, it’s not been summer at all (Not even IMO and I am a PoME). Heat gone (Still humid tho…sticky), sun mostly gone, flies gone. What has happened to the Aussie summer? Gorebull warming affecting SH summer?
Last summer was hotter and humid too, but lack of flies as I noted lastime too, that is not a typical Aussie summer.
“Paul Vaughan (01:22:32) :
Nothing wrong with real greenery. Let’s not confuse climate alarmism with real environmentalism & real environmental problems.”
Shame most people just “see” the BS CA.
The Met’s “predictions” have been ridiculed since their 1987 “warning” (I was there) of a “bit of wind over night” in 1987. WOW! What a “bit of wind” that turned out to be.
I found my washing, and the washing of others in my garden. Concrete Roof tiles ripped off (Not the “flappy” things you have in the US) . I found many stout trees on my usual walk to work downed. Seven Oaks became One Oak. All due to a “bit of wind”. Hense Met Office predictions are, since then, have never met up with reality.
Sadly, what The Met predicts has no bearing on “weather”. It is a political organisation and has, and always has had, a political agenda, certainly since the mid-late 1980’s.
Weather? What’s that?
I can always tell the “weather” is humid, I mean like ~90+, my wife’s hair goes weired (I’ll get a slap for this comment).
Unfortuanetly, the telegraph seems to be selective in their comments section:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6924898/The-Met-Office-gives-us-the-warmist-weather.html
It’s only a debate if you are Allowed to have it..
I posted something this morning in the Telegraph comments section. It did not appear:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6924898/The-Met-Office-gives-us-the-warmist-weather.html
Someone called David Welch has been spinning it. I outed him before.
SO i posted the below just now.
If the Telegraph is going to allow professional spin media people to comment (without announcing who/what they are) please forgive this member of the public for being very annoyed.
When they have asked that person to identify there interests, and then NOT to have their comment published. It would appear that the Telegraph is now censoring facts?
David Welch, is apprently who I suggested he was: David Welch, Sport and Media Management.
Real people do notice this abject ‘spinning’ of climategate and it is commented on elsewhere. Trust in the main stream media is at an all time low. Let alone the BBC’s behaviour, tollatly biased and partial, in the AGW debate.
Please post my original comment….
The same character was outed on the other Booker thread, the greatest science scandal one. (AGW and climategate again)
The MetOff now see jan2010 as ‘extremely cold’. May warm fractionally later in the month.
a jones (13:10:01) :
“Yes it is very interesting that the Daily Mail, the most influential middleweight and middle England paper, circulation about 2 million, has turned so abruptly against AGW and it’s political nature.”
I’d hold off calling the Daily Mail skeptical just a bit longer.
The Daily Mail has this article up today:
‘Black Monday’ transport chaos for millions as Britain returns to work in the grip of the coldest winter for 30 years
By PAUL SIMS and SOPHIE FREEMAN
Last updated at 11:53 AM on 04th January 2010
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1239908/Britains-big-freeze-hit-return-work-forecasters-issue-new-ice-alert-drivers.html
While the article does give a thorough once over on the weather, the third photo down shows a gal sniffing flowers. At first i thought it was a advert or something, but the caption below it reads, ‘Ray of sunshine: In Brixton, Devon, Jess Vosper admires the first daffodils of the year. The flowers bloomed in the winter sun while the rest of Britain endured freezing temperatures.’
Interestingly enough, I thought I would visit:
http://www.holiday-weather.com/brixton_devon_gb/index.html
And what did I find ?
0°c (32°f) and the 5 day forecast calls for freezing temperatures for the whole week. Last I looked, 0°c (32°f) is freezing temperatures.
So, while you might say that the Daily Mail has turned the corner on climate change, they still cater to the masses with slight of hand optics and misleading captions.
Global Cooling in 2009
David Alan
I live on the South Devon coast around 30 miles from Brixton Devon. In the interests of scientific research I have just been into the garden to look for signs of daffodils. Any Signs. Any signs whatsoever. The smallest hint.
There are no sign at all of any.
Whilst it has been generally milder here than many parts of the UK that is purely relative-it has been struggling up to 2/3 C during the day and down to -4C at night. Frosts are very unusual here because of the influence of the sea. I can only assume the sea must be very cold but I’ve no intention of repeating my research by examining the ocean temperatures.
Tonyb
I read an article in the Mail on Sunday, being very critical of the Metoffice with regards to its long (and short range) weather forcasts. It was also very very critical of its bias with regrd to the backing of man made global warming. One interesting foot note of the article was that:
The Metoffice (on December 1st 2009), Predicted, a very hot summer for 2010, matching that of the highest on record, and that it stood by this.
They do seem to be looking a bit silly now!
Patrick Davis (02:53:04) “Shame most people just “see” the BS CA.”
Agree. We need to change this one patient conversation at a time.
There is a bit of a non-debate on this site at the moment. I mean, all writers agree with each other. The same is a bit true of realclimate website. Where can I go to read through discussions of the science between people who are on opposite sides?
REPLY: [ There is still debate here, though it varies by thread. Also, the AGW Side seems to have abandoned the field for a little R&R after the collapse of Copenhagen and the ClimateGate Affair. But don’t worry, they always return. Until then, there are lots of articles with heavy pro / anti debate in the ‘by calendar’ listing. Just pick a date prior to ClimateGate. -mod ]
@TonyB (08:12:40)
I know this might sound ridiculous, but you should look up Jess Vosper and find out when that picture was taken, if she works for the Daily Mail and determine if those flowers had just been recently planted. I could almost bet you the answers you would find would be one that the Daily Mail would be ashamed of.
The article you linked to states, “2009 was another year of global cooling,” but the temperature chart they provided applies, I fear, only to the US, since it’s captioned, “National Climatic Data Center,” and since the global sources (GISS and the guys in the UK) are claiming the global temperature warmed.
Well… the UK’s Met Office is predicting a long hot summer for 2010. Any takers….? Wellies of Barbeuques….!!
Say, what’s this going to do to UK vineyards?
Andrew Neil on BBC’s Daily Politics interview Met Office director yesterday. View here:
In reply to Fred Tiddlypop
FYI we have not issued a seasonal forecast for summer 2010 and will not do so until the spring.
There is more information on seasonal forecasting on our website http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/science/creating/monthsahead/seasonal/index.html
Reply: Based on the IP address of this post, it does not appear to originate from inside the Met office. Try again from the office and not your home computer if you are real.
Reply: Based on the IP address of this post, it does not appear to originate from inside the Met office. Try again from the office and not your home computer if you are real.
netname: BT-CENTRAL-PLUS
descr: IP pools
country: GB
admin-c: BTCP1-RIPE
tech-c: BTCP1-RIPE
status: ASSIGNED PA
remarks: Please send abuse notification to
mnt-by: BTNET-MNT
mnt-lower: BTNET-MNT
mnt-routes: BTNET-MNT
source: RIPE # Filtered
~ ctm