No it’s not a time warp photo of Dicken’s time, it’s from the NASA MODIS satellite imager this week. This is like one of those “spot the cow in this photo” images, looking for the UK in a sea of white.
It must be having quite an impact in the UK. According to UK resident and WUWT commenter “borderer”:
Every single newspaper in the UK has published the following satellite image of the UK today – it shows the entire country in glowing white – snow and ice now appears the entire British Isles from John O’ Groats at the Northern tip of Scotland – to Landsend in Cornwall.
Despite this – and we are now in our 25th day of sub zero temperatures – the MET Office put up a spokesman on Newsnight last evening claiming that their forecast for a ‘very mild winter’ had ‘only been a probability!!
In other news, the Met Head gets paid extra even for botched forecasting. Remember the “BBQ summer” forecast?
“Mr. Hirst, you predicted a barbeque summer for 2009 – we don’t remember that – and a mild winter for this winter, which hasn’t happened. Why did you get a massive performance related bonus?“
h/t to Kate at SDA
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
niphredilflower (08:34:20) : Just pray to Al Gore, and put in your prayers all the strength of hidden emotions toward him, tell HIM next time you will behave in a better and good way, not commiting carbon dark sins anymore against Mother Gaia.
What you see surrounding you it is not snow but an induced mirage caused by you evil denial thoughts. That is the consequence of reading such forbidden blogs as WUWT. Repent now! and you will see the open fields free rom ice and Saint Gore, your saviour, descending from unclouded and sunny skies.
What’s the big deal? It’s only rotten snow!
In England, we now find the councils running out of salt to clear the roads, they didn’t have very high stocks. Why not? Well, for the 2nd year in a row, the wonderful Met Office told them to expect a mild winter. Expect a vicious backlash to the warmistas in public opinion, once people can get out and about again.
If this carries on, we’ll all have to gear up for winter with chains, snow tyres, generators etc, like last time we had winter like this. 1963 I recall. Thank heavens for the “warming” since!
Now off to play in some 6″ of AGW and build me an igloo.
It’s hard not to notice fate’s fickle finger giving them the bird.
What’s nice about the picture is that you can see the large cities (Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff) clearly as urban heat islands. London too, though it’s partially obscured by cloud.
Great Britain is the official name given to the two kingdoms of England and Scotland, and the principality of Wales
As a New Zealander living in London, I am constantly amazed at the Brits inability or unwillingness to plan for the eventuality of snow and ice on the roads, ie dual purpose tyres, tyre chains, a tow-rope, jumper leads, basic tools and some warm clothing and perhaps a sleeping bag kept in the car. In the bits of NZ where the weather can turn very hot or very cold quite quickly and fewer people around to help if one gets into trouble, one learns to prepare.
I was interested to read this morning that the Ministry of Defence has just cancelled 25% of the Met Office’s budget without comment. The country is in deep financial mire and the Met.s incorrect guesses are incredibly expensive and way less accurate than non-government forecasters.
Currently, the BBC frontpersons prattle on with each news bulletin about the UK now being ‘cooler than the South Pole’ – none of the numpties has acknowledged that its midsummer in Antarctica and midwinter here – talk about comparing apples with oranges!
\and the drivel about ‘this is only weather, not climate’ is also fairly constant – they will have to cease treating the general public as simpletons soon, I hope!
“the MET Office put up a spokesman on Newsnight last evening claiming that their forecast for a ‘very mild winter’ had ‘only been a probability!!”
As I remember the MET Office set the probability for a cold winter this year at 1 to 7.
Maybe they put a few thousand quid on it and intend using their winnings to pay for Mr Hirst’s bonus. In fact if they had bet against all of their own recent predictions they could have made a killing.
Veronica (08:31:33) : You wrote: “…the reversal-in-direction-of-the-gulf-stream thing … Should I be worried? … ”
I’ve not actually seen this ‘warmist’ comment before and would like to know how this is supposed to work. I am not worried about it – just curious.
“The principle is that as the climate reaches infinite improbability, the weather passes simultaneously through every conceivable and inconceivable condition in every conceivable and inconceivable locale.” — Handbook of Man Made Climate Change
That is a genuinely superb interview in which Andrew Neill gives the Head of the UK MET Office a severe ‘handbagging’ (battered around the head with a large handbag).
However, the guy sits there like a STASI Apparatchik, smiling through it all because – although they have got 6 long term forecasts out of 6 WRONG – he STILL gets paid more than the Prime Minister – and even after forecasting a ‘very mild winter’ when in fact we have 25 days of freezing hell – he gets a ‘performance bonus’.
The message is: “if you are not one of us – you are always wrong’ But if you are one of us, you are RIGHT – even when you are WRONG”
Looks like another “very rare and exciting event” is occurring. The MET should invest in a dart board. It would increase their odds significantly.
I posted this elsewhere, but want to again here. The biggest standout point in the interview for me, I’m paraphrasing:
“We don’t just get performance bonuses for our forecasting, etc., but also for our business plans and models.” AKA, the more that the met office takes tax payer funds, private funds, etc. the bigger his bonus. Forget about forecasts, it’s about bringing in the dough!
I suppose sledding has replaced golf at Swinley Forest.
As cold as it is, I am perplexed by the AMSU daily readings. So far in January, they are at record high levels. If it’s this cold here in the NH, it must be really hot in the SH…..
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
8 January 2010
‘Wildlife in crisis’ in frozen UK
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8449089.stm
Britain’s wildlife is being pushed to “the brink of a crisis” as sub-zero temperatures continue to grip the nation, according to conservationists.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) is organising emergency feeding of several threatened species, including bitterns and cirl buntings.
24 March, 2009
Ruth Davis, head of climate change policy at the RSPB, said the charity was promoting the development of wind power because the evidence of the increasing impact of global warming on birds was “truly terrifying”.
“Left unchecked, climate change threatens many species with extinction.
“Yet that sense of urgency is not translating into actions on the ground to harness the abundant wind energy around us.”
She said the solutions were largely common sense, including a clear lead from government on where wind farms were built and clear guidance for councils on how to deal with applications.
28 January 2006
RSPB warning as wind turbines kill sea eagles
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/rspb-warning-as-wind-turbines-kill-sea-eagles-524866.html
Sea eagles, among Europe’s most magnificent birds, are being killed by the turbines of a Norwegian wind farm, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said.
Good link to the DailyMail article by Borderer @ur momisugly 08:23; great photos.
My sympathies to the good citizens of the UK, who are currently struggling with a pretty fair approximation of Maunder Minimum weather (at least in the short run), even if the Thames hasn’t frozen over (yet).
. . . Although have to admit when I see ”At -21c UK is as cold as the South Pole: Biggest freeze for 30 years”, I have to indulge in a bit of a wry smile:
Still-air temp here in northern ND this morning was 33 degrees below zero F = minus 36 C; a little chilly even for here, but not at all out of the ordinary for January weather: Pretty much the only thing between us and the North Pole is a barbed-wire fence. . . .
It’s a really beautiful image. It looks almost exactly like in an ice age – showing that for the eyes (and the albedo), it doesn’t really matter whether there is 1 centimeter or 1 kilometer of snow. 😉
Do you have a trick to distinguish the clouds from the snow? Is Northern Ireland covered by snow?
Unfortunately, it will take more than one unseasonably cold winter in the UK to derail the massive policy changes taking effect there. I feel for the average person over there who is just trying to stay warm.
Apologies if this has already been posted, but just come accross this:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1241209/BBC-probes-bias-science-coverage.html
Good to see so many fellow Scots pointing out the obvious. The satellite image is amazing, but there is one place in Scotlandn which has escaped the snows – Tiree – which due to its Atalntic location very rarely gets frosts or snow.
“Interesting also that on that picture you can see grey splodges where the cities are. At least I’ve told myself I can see Manchester, Stoke, Birmingham, Liverpool / Wirral, Leeds / Bradford and Aberdeen picked out from the overall whiteness.”
Veronica, I have friends in the Wirral and they are having to slide to work as they are demanded in and it is lethal. One has fallen twice already and he is in his 20s! Meanwhile in Leeds the river and canal have both frozen for the first time in decades and we have had snowcover since mid-December – it usually lasts for two days at most.
This spell is exceptional – http://www.climate-uk.com to see just how exceptional. People are just about struggling through and getting enoug to eat.
I dread to think of the stories we will hear when this all thaws – probably scores died trapped in buried cars and houses due to the deadly amount of snowfall.
But global warming goes on of course!
Lubos
not sure whether the image shows it but according to all the news reports N.Ireland has been hit pretty hard as well.
Someone said that Canada was having a warmer winter so “everything balances out”. This is nonsense. We are having one of the coldest winters in 25 years.
In fact, where I live in Edmonton, Alberta, we were the second coldest inhabited place on Earth but a few weeks ago at -46.1 C! Of course, there were a lot of people with unofficial thermometers in their back yards well outside the city recording temperatures below -50 C.
http://www.edmontonsun.com/news/edmonton/2009/12/13/12141366.html
As for this morning, my thermometer read -20 C.
The people in the Mull of Galloway must feel either extremely favoured or extremely disappointed. I’m not there, but I’m in one of the other very few spots to have no new snow since the fall a few days before Christmas).
Do you see the head of the dog? It has floppy ears, below you can see short front legs, as it is pouncing on Scotland. Amazing!
How did Scotland get away with less snow? Did the Scots sell it to the Brits, telling them the cold would mitigate the global warming damage?