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.