BBC reported: Coldest December since 1981 (BBC, January 3, 2010)
It is still showing up in Google, but changes are afoot, odd that a headline like that can’t stand on its own:
And google news:
The URL for the story in the image above is:
but note the number of the story in the URL 8438408 now now goes to a different title, presto change-o!
Icy conditions lead to closure of Giant’s Causeway
Same URL:
h/t to Popular Technology
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Glenn:
Isn’t the real question as to whether the temps fall into the range of AGW models? There will of course be variability, right?
Wrong. Despite Smokey’s valid point, everything either falls into the “range of AGW models” or it didn’t really happen. Now are you beginning to see any better what’s wrong with this aspect of AGW “science”?
Oh, the weather outside is frightful,
To the ‘skeptics’ its so delightful.
The temps are dropping low,
Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!
Global Temps have now been dropping,
ClimateGate controversy’s not stopping.
“Hide the Decline” formulas have to go!
Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!
Al Gore promised Global Warming,
But instead, its cold and storming.
Sunspot activity is way down low,
Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!
And the skeptics are proven right,
CO2 does not cause Earth to warm.
Global Warming protestors are all uptight,
spoiled their protest with a big snow storm.
The Solar Cycle is still slowly dying,
And to Global Warming we are good-bying.
So as long as sunspot activity stays low,
Let it Snow! Let it Snow! Let it Snow!
There’s an interesting sidelight to the extreme snow events in Beijing. Scientists have been seeding clouds over Beijing to affect drought-stricken areas further to the west, and those efforts are now being blamed for the excessive snowfall in the capital. It occurs to me that there’s a long tradition of cultural “solipsism” (for lack of a better word) in China.
Blaming the scientists seems like just another variant of AGW, in my opinion. If this was a global weather event, as analysis here of the Arctic Oscillation shift suggests, weren’t cold and snow inevitable in most temperate latitudes?
“DirkH (09:39:42) :
MiniTruth (BBC) is busy constantly rewriting the linked article.
It still contains the sentence “The mean temperature was 1.5C, the coldest average measurement since 1981″.”
Article changed again. Mentioning of the record low continues its march downward.
Other news outlets will quote this article. What newspapers often do is they print as much of the original article as fits on the allocated area on their page, snipping off the rest.
That’s why AP et.al. structure their articles always from most important to least important.
So each time fluff is added at the top it will result in less people reading the low record mentioned.
Do i see a tendency here?
I recommend taking a look at some of the resources on the Armagh Observatory’s website e.g. http://star.arm.ac.uk/preprints/445.pdf
This one contains the following quote:
“Prior to 1820 we note that autumns and winters were cooler
by ∼1 °C. Later, we note a significant warming in the mid-19th century, which started in the late 1820s and
continued till c. 1870. A cool interval at the end of the 19th century was followed by a period of rising mean
temperatures that lasted till the mid-20th century. Finally, a slight cooling from 1960 to 1980 was followed
by a gradual warming over the past two decades. In spite of the current warmer conditions, annual mean
temperatures still remain within the range seen in the previous two centuries.”
Interesting, non?
@Snowmaneasy
“It looks like the Met office has placed a call to the BBC…..
Dear Snowmaneasy
I have posted below, if the nice moderator accept my post from the true Polar Bear story,previous post.
Please can you refer to them as The Mess Office as it is now official an they also mess up the weather forecast:-)
Slightly off topic but you heard it here second.
“The UK government has decided that the Met Office should have a new name to demonstrate their role in climate science. From 31st January 2010 the service is to be renamed the Meteorological Science Service. For ease of use this will be shortened to “The MESS”. A government spokesmen said this acronym truly demonstrates the services involvement and capability in climate science and weather forecasting.”
“All commentators and bloggers are welcome to start using the acronym from now on”
End of de press release.
No Polar Bears were available to comment on this and none were harmed by the making of this statement.
Bill Parsons (10:47:28) :
Which is why the weather should not be messed with.
Yes, it was a global event, but it was made worse in Beijing by the experiments to the West of it. That is the track record of ‘climate enhancement’ programs. The weather has so much to deliver, and robbing a portion of it in one place means that the next-in-line gets less. i.e.- weather may be defeated temporarily, but climate wants to even things out. In the end, all places get what they should have gotten, whether timely or not.
Only a fool would think that borrowing from tomorrows precip. is without cost.
I wonder if Paul Hudson (TV weather man for Yorkshire UK) is a fan of wuwt. Recently he bloged the NOAA satellite snow map which wuwt used only around a week or so before. Coincidence?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/
No hits for wuwt on the BBC website, where paul’s blog is, of course…
Michael Mann wrote: ( IIRC in reference to paul hudson ? )
>> extremely disappointing to see something like this appear on
>> BBC. its particularly odd, since climate is usually Richard
>> Black’s beat at BBC (and he does a great job).
ps. forgot to say ( 1st time he’s used the NOAA satellite snow map as far as I can tell )
maksimovich (10:26:07) : Thanks!. Can’t believe it!.
“Coldest December since 1981” is still showing up in Google, but changes are afoot.. the number of the story now goes to a different title, presto change-o! “Icy conditions lead to closure of Giant’s Causeway”
Jct: A neat trick to hide the decline is getting stale.
I live in Montreal and the winter so far is pretty normal strangely enough.
Looks like Seoul, South Korea is also experiencing a harsh winter. They are having their worst snowstorm since records started being kept 70 years ago.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100104/ap_on_re_as/as_asia_storms
Bing is best.
http://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?q=%22coldest+december+since+1981%22&d=181363278800&mkt=en-GB&setlang=en-GB&w=f14c4ae9,1bd2d2d5
I also went and looked at the Armagh Observatory data and found this interesting article http://star.arm.ac.uk/preprints/2007/494.pdf which summarizes the data since 1795. Perhaps a reader can fill us in on the physical location of the observatory.
The reported data is not raw data but according to the authors has been adjusted for TOB, instrumentation and “aspect”.
This data set is very interesting because it also has a long series of 30cm and 100cm soil temperatures.
Just to echo the above, the BBC’s Paul Hudson’s blog is well worth a visit.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2010/01/a-severe-start-to-2010.shtml
-18°C is -0.4°F. Perhaps the copywriter got confused by the -32°C in the next phrase. (And that’s -25.6°F.)
BBC NEWS @ur momisugly 1800 GMT
Reporter said that the weather was probably the coldest since 1995
also reported here
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8439087.stm
Svempa (07:05:51) :
Well, using the Monckton Formula to calculate the IPCC temperature increase from pre-industrial times (278 ppm CO2) until now (388 ppm) I get:
delta-T = 4.7 * ln 1.4
which gives me
delta-T = 1.6 degrees Celsius.
Is there a link to this formula? It looks to me like a calculation of the forcing (w/m2) rather than temperature. The CO2 forcing since pre0industrial times is, reportedly, ~1.6 w/m2.
Is this headline not a comment specifically on the Armagh temperature record?
The website is worth a visit. It is not far from me.
It is one of the very good surface records I suspect, being remote from large urban areas, you can view some of the hand written records http://climate.arm.ac.uk/
Wasn’t Paul Hudson the guy who supposedley received the climategate files on 13th October , and the BBC sat on them?
REPLY: No that is an error, some emails sent to him about his fall 2009 Guardian article from CRU were included in the FOIA2009.zip file, Hudson’s poor choice of words when he described the file contents as being authentic (becuase some of those emails were in it) led many people to conclude erroneously that he had the whole set prior to anyone else – Anthony
A word of caution about BBC news articles: As well as being an avid consumer of newswire stories they regurgitate other people’s press releases. In both instances it is quite possible the ‘coldest december since 1981’ story was from somewhere else and another story has been combined with it.
Anyhow,
I think there is an error in the BBC article. The Armagh Observatory press release states it was on average 3 degrees C in December 2009 and 1.5 degrees C in 1981.(If I’ve read it correctly) 1981 being really, really cold, 2009 just being really cold.
I think it’s a badly worded press release being badly reported. Even so, from the link to the Armagh data earlier in the comments here 1981 had a Max of 4 and a Min of -1.1. That is a prolonged cold period whereas 2009 (a Max of 11.5 and a Min of -6.6) would appear to have been massively variable.
OT Just a heads up… DMI does have a polar temp graph for 2010; the link in the sidebar sends you to 2009 where you can click on 2010 in the Arkiv for the latest graph.
This from Desdemona Despair:
The head of the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, Guo Hu, linked the blizzard-like conditions this week to unusual atmospheric patterns caused by global warming.
”In the context of global warming, extreme atmospheric flows are causing extreme climate incidents to appear more frequently, such as the summer’s rain storms and last year’s icestorm disaster in southern China,” Mr Guo told Beijing News.
Data from Armagh.
You dont want that cooked data from MET.
You want it raw baby
http://climate.arm.ac.uk/scans/
back to 1794, unlike the MET
http://climate.arm.ac.uk/scans/1794/12/179412.jpg