Have a look at these two juxtaposed news clips from the UK Daily Mail, one from October 28th, 2010, the other from November 28th, 2010.
and here’s today’s news:
Now have a look at what the Met Office issued on 10-28-2010:
That missive comes from this page where they gave up on seasonal outlooks, but they don’t actually tell you where you can find the “monthly outlook” forecast.
A search for “monthly outlook” yields nothing, pretty lame. But, there are some suggestions it may be a paid service.
Anybody know where to find it?
In other news, new records have been set.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/pr20101128.html
Big chill breaks November temperature records
28 November 2010
Last night saw November minimum temperature records fall across the country. Most notably both Wales and Northern Ireland recorded the coldest November night since records began. In Wales, temperatures fell to -18.0 °C at Llysdinam, near Llandrindod Wells, Powys. Northern Ireland recorded -9.5 °C at Loch Fea.
Scotland recorded minimum temperature of -15.3 °C at Loch Glascarnoch, whilst England recorded -13.5 °C at Topcliffe in North Yorkshire.
The UK’s lowest ever recorded temperature in November was – 23.3 °C recorded in Braemar, in the Scottish Highlands, on November 14, 1919.
The cold and snow is expected to continue to affect many parts of the UK today and through the coming week. Met Office forecasters are warning of further severe frosts, snow and icy conditions. The north-easterly winds, with a significant wind chill will also make it feel bitterly cold as daytime temperatures struggle to rise above freezing.
Met Office warnings and advisories of severe weather for snow and icy roads are in force for parts of northern and eastern England, parts of Scotland and Northern Ireland. Further snowfall is expected through Scotland and the north east on Sunday.
Met Office Chief Forecaster, Steve Willington said: “The very low overnight temperatures we have seen are likely to be repeated through the coming week as the cold and snowy weather continues. As winds increase into next week, it will feel increasingly cold with a significant wind chill to contend with by day and night.”
“Icy roads and snow will be a risk for many, and the public are advised to stay up to date with the forecast to make sure they have the latest information.”
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For an acccurate weather forecast, I don’t think you can beat those suspended stones you can buy on the internet..
‘Stone dry and warm – sunny weather..’
‘Stone wet – rain..’
‘Can’t see stone – fog..’
‘Stone swinging – windy..’
‘Snow on stone – snow..’
Etc. Works for me…
tallbloke :
November 29, 2010 at 2:50 am
I respect animal signals more and more. In our case, a night owl that winters in Egypt could still be heard a week ago, usually they leave in october.
Starlings have not appeared yet. We get thousands swirling above our heads in the winter. This tells me that the regions they come from from the north are not yet snow covered.
The lilac bush on my balcony is blooming.
The tangerine tree at the cottage is blooming 🙁 while the tangerines are still green, usually harvested in february.
I have read someplace that in Byzantine chronicles there was a year with two harvests. I have seen fruit trees bloom in December some decades ago. Maybe when the average temperatures drop the weather in Greece becomes more temperate and this could explain the great desire of all sort of peoples over the centuries to come down and invade us :).
It is not as if the MetOffice in the UK does not know all of this…NAO, AMO, mobile polar highs, jetstream (they didn’t have anyone working on the jetstream when I talked to them in 2008)….they have some very good oceanographers who are well aware of the nature of cyles. But it is an old story of an organisation that is an arm of government policy, and if they make any submissions that do not meet that policy, they are told to go away and revise them….and eventually they learn how to tell their masters what they want to hear. The screw is then turned from the top down and nobody dares get out of line.
This is now the third cold winter in a row – despite a major El Nino event marking a difference from last winter. With a La Nina likely to follow, the future looks even colder – and all this is predictable from ‘alternative’ theory of solar effects, UV and jetstream links that they have been made aware of (it is all in my 2009 book: ‘Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory’ which doesn’t seem to get much coverage in the US but has been up to no1 on Amazon’s global warming list in the UK). I have repeatedly made the offer to debate this material publically – but right now, Radio Leeds are the only offers, in fifteen minutes time, because they are under a couple of feet of snow and they remember a lecture I gave at their University nearly a year ago – that has been the only University lecture/debate, and then only because some of the staff knew me personally. There is a virtually complete blanket shutting out intelligent informed discussion.
Some very strange things have happened here in the north of Scotland this month. The leaves turned brown and fell from most of the trees.
Then in the past week we have had some heavy snowfalls. Are the two related? Have these falling leaves caused the snow to fall?
The UK Met office is crammed full of staff whose jobs depend on a continued belief in AGW. Read their mission statement and the instructions to staff, their mission is to communicate AGW belief to the population
Three cold winters in a row, when the MET office forecast mild winters, their forecasting credibility is now very low, but they still will continue to broadcast the AGW message.
CodeTech says:
November 29, 2010 at 12:04 am
But that’s my point… at the moment we can’t.
That’s a long way from saying we have to be insane to be able to predict future climate. The current cycle is following predictions, lets touch bases in 12 months and review your comment?
My favourite line from the Met monthly forecast page…
“The weather beyond about a week ahead stretches even the most experienced weather forecaster.”
If the climate-change priesthood weren’t on their way to Cancun – all 15,000 of them – we’d not be freezing now!
The same happened last year, didn’t it …
Looks like having them junket around is the best defense against globull warming.
🙂
As we know weather is not climate so we should not get too excited about a couple of weeks cold weather. Also remember it is not actually winter yet, so winter could indeed turn out to be mild (having got all the cold stuff out the way in Autumn : )
What is worse is the Met office statement that 2010 is on track to be the warmest or second warmest year on record. That CANNOT be right (remember last winter) but no one seems to be challenging it !
pat says:
November 28, 2010 at 4:54 pm
“We are the great gas guzzlers of the world. My aircraft carrier did about 12 inches to the gallon and burnt 20 tonnes an hour to launch and recover jets,” he said.
“That was sustainable costwise when it was $US30 a barrel. It would not be sustainable at $US250 to $US300 a barrel.”
The Rear Admiral has no need to worry.
Our Con/Lib coalition govt. are well ahead of the curve here. The two new aircraft carriers we are building at a cost of B£5 have been cunningly designed to cope with this problem – NO AIRCRAFT will be available to fly from them!!
Two more white elephants to add to the thousands of others blighting the landscape and at this moment producing 1% of electrical consumption.
Aren’t our politicians wonderful?
I live in Madrid. It is snowing a little bit today, in the city. I have never experienced such a thing in the month of November. Snow in the nearby mountains, not so usual but I have seen it sometimes. Snow in the city center, no. I had never seen it before December.
kzb says:
November 29, 2010 at 4:33 am
What is worse is the Met office statement that 2010 is on track to be the warmest or second warmest year on record. That CANNOT be right (remember last winter) but no one seems to be challenging it !
————————
Didn’t they have to import snow for the Winter Olympics?
Just because we had a few cold weeks doesn’t mean globally it was a cold year.
In today’s UK Telegraph is possibly the most ridiculous alarmist propaganda rubbish that I have ever read. The article is by poor dear deluded Louise Grey who is the Telegraph jopurnalist who gets to write some alarmist BS every day.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/8165769/Cancun-climate-change-summit-scientists-call-for-rationing-in-developed-world.html
ok this is anecdotal, but even in relatively warm london, i’ve suffered 3 days of frostbite, even when wearing thermal gloves. I’ve never seen this in November. My thermometer read 25F on saturday night 11pm and it’s predicted to get colder this week.
To paraphrase the MET office “It would be even colder had it not been for global warming” – chortle
CAGW, CAGW, CAGW, CAGW……..
http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01773/PF-gas-bills-small_1773733d.jpg
kzb says:
November 29, 2010 at 4:33 am
I would give this perspective th ebenefit of the doubt – except that Vicky pope said that the last year had shown the proof of AGW in the UK
“A search for “monthly outlook” yields nothing, pretty lame. But, there are some suggestions it may be a paid service. Anybody know where to find it?”
Bit disappointed in you. Took me all of 30 seconds to find it. Click on the Weather | UK option from the row of tabs running across the top of the site, then Forecasts, then UK Region and Location forecasts. Takes you to http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/uk_forecast_weather.html which has the information you’re looking for – although it’s not labelled ‘monthly outlook’; it is just the section with forecasts for the next month. Collated into one page here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/uk/uk_forecast_alltext.html
“Meteorological winter” starts Dec. 1. The other seasons are similarly shifted, as is the start of the “meteorological year” (to Dec. 1).
Steve E>
“If the Met Office still makes a seasonal forecast but doesn’t publish it who is it for? Why would they keep a secret seasonal forecast?”
It’s not secret, as such. They found out, though, that anything the publish, regardless of attached caveats – and there may have been a deficiency in that regard at times – will be treated as gospel by some. That doesn’t mean they need to stop producing their long-range forecasts; on the contrary, they need to keep working on them. The way to do this is to do your best to produce an accurate forecast, wait to see what really happens, and then try and work out why your modelling was inaccurate.
A lot of damage has been done to the reputation of bodies like the Met Office by a small cohort of politicised climate scientists in the ranks, but the vast majority of work done there has nothing to do with climate and everything to do with weather. The meteorologists are just trying hard to predict the weather, with understandably limited success, and although their results may be spun for political purposes, there is no reason to doubt their integrity.
The really interesting part of this whole discussion has been barely touched on. As I understand it, the long-range temperature map which seems so obviously erroneous – particularly in the DM’s misreading of it – is effectively an intermediate stage of the modelling process, providing an input for further modelling. The further modelling, despite the odd intermediate result, seems to be reasonably accurate.
Kate says:
November 29, 2010 at 3:00 am
Buried in an otherwise drab study on paleo – and proxy methods, Dr. Bogataj admitted to what skeptics have long been saying and what the ice core proxy data shows: that rises in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide are proven to mostly, if not always, occur after rises in temperature.
————————–
Come on Kate, it’s widely documented that CO2 lags temperature baed on the ice core record. The reason is simply:
“When the Earth comes out of an ice age, the warming is not initiated by CO2 but by changes in the Earth’s orbit. The warming causes the oceans to give up CO2. The CO2 amplifies the warming and mixes through the atmosphere, spreading warming throughout the planet”
To claim that the CO2 lag disproves the warming effect of CO2 displays a lack of understanding of the processes that drive Milankovitch cycles. A review of the peer reviewed research into past periods of deglaciation tells us several things:
•Deglaciation is not initiated by CO2 but by orbital cycles
•CO2 amplifies the warming which cannot be explained by orbital cycles alone
•CO2 spreads warming throughout the planet
ENSO conditions, depending on the action of each type of condition, naturally produces heat in one place, and cold in another. So I would agree with SteveE that just because it was cold in [insert country like Britain], doesn’t mean it was cold everywhere else. Where Steve and I disagree is that normal variation can cause cold temps to be more dominate one year, and then under the same conditions but different year, can cause hot temps to be more dominate. Which means that if this does end up to be the hottest, second hottest third hottest, etc global month, year, decade, etc, I am not getting my knickers in a twist over it. A global average is one of the most meaningless statistics in climate science and should only be discussed in the course of making jokes about it.
The reason for the Met Office’s non-self-fulfilling prophecy lies in its idiosyncratic interpretation of the scientific method:
Daily Telegraph 6 Feb. 2009:
“The forecast is put together using observations of sea temperatures in the preceding summer, data from the Met Office’s northern hemisphere weather modelling systems, those of the French national weather service and that of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting in Reading. That is then assessed alongside predictions about the North Atlantic Oscillation – a measurement of pressure patterns and seasonal variations in the jet stream across the Atlantic. THE MET OFFICE THEN RAISES THE TEMPERATURE PREDICTION FOR THE WINTER BY INCLUDING THE LONG-TERM WARMING SIGNAL CAUSED BY CLIMATE CHANGE.”
Brilliant. And now for our forecast for 2060….
“In defence of the Met Office, I would like to point out that their forecast for the next 84 hours is always excellent. Not surprising when a petaflop computer is available to do all the calculations.”
I don’t know which part of the UK you live in but ask my missus about watching the local morning forecast and putting out her washing. Expletives and other such Anglo Saxon expressions fill the air when the unpredicted rain comes or when she doesn’t do the washing because they have forecast heavy showers and all we get is sunshine.
We do like cycling so tend to look regularly at the weather forecasts and we have noted how inaccurate these have become since the summer – for Bristol UK
Pamela Gray says:
November 29, 2010 at 7:04 am
ENSO conditions, depending on the action of each type of condition, naturally produces heat in one place, and cold in another. So I would agree with SteveE that just because it was cold in [insert country like Britain], doesn’t mean it was cold everywhere else. Where Steve and I disagree is that normal variation can cause cold temps to be more dominate one year, and then under the same conditions but different year, can cause hot temps to be more dominate. Which means that if this does end up to be the hottest, second hottest third hottest, etc global month, year, decade, etc, I am not getting my knickers in a twist over it. A global average is one of the most meaningless statistics in climate science and should only be discussed in the course of making jokes about it.
———————–
I would actually agree with you that the natural variation could cause the same conditions to perhaps be cold one year and then warm the next. I think where we differ is on our opinions on CO2 effect, but as you’ve said in the past, it doesn’t matter how much that effect is, it’s still cold here (please correct me if I mis-quote you). I also don’t like the alarmist propaganda that you sometimes see on the tv and in the papers, however I do believe there is sufficient evidence to suggest that CO2 is causing global warming. What you do about it or what effect it’ll have is beyond my understanding. I try not to get my knickers in a twist though!
British have been always good comedians. You just don’t understand them; that was an intelligent joke.