George Monbiot probably burst a blood vessel when he read this. Congratulations to Piers, who doesn’t need a teraflop class supercomputer to render a forecast. This passage tells the story:
I have not a clue whether his methods are sound or not. But when so many of his forecasts seem to come true, and when he seems to be so consistently ahead of the Met Office, I feel I want to know more.
Maybe that’s why Mr. Johnson says London is prepared for snow, where others are not.
Here’s some excerpts:
Do you remember? They said it would be mild and damp, and between one degree and one and a half degrees warmer than average. Well, I am now 46 and that means I have seen more winters than most people on this planet, and I can tell you that this one is a corker.
Never mind the record low attained in Northern Ireland this weekend. I can’t remember a time when so much snow has lain so thickly on the ground, and we haven’t even reached Christmas. And this is the third tough winter in a row. Is it really true that no one saw this coming?
Actually, they did. Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.
And this:
The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun.
Full story here. Boris John is the Mayor of London, more here.
h/t to WUWT reader “Roger” aka “Old England”
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A documentary from 1990..
A must see!!
The Greenhouse Conspiracy.
Piers Corbyn is one of the scientists interviewed.
Also has Tom Wigley and Stephen Schneider making fools of themselves.
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I’ve been following Piers’ work for some time and if there is one single person that could break this whole AGW charade to smithereens, its Piers. Other astrophysicists must also work harder and aim to get more coverage in the MSM also to try and keep at the lay-person in the street (who only receive their education and opinion from whatever the nightly news, the tabloids or commercial current affairs programs say), that the Sun is the most significant influence on the global climate, not the small anthropogenic contribution to a trace gas that is an ancillary greenhouse gas who’s impact is negligible >200ppm.
Corbyn is even able to predict the MET office forecasts:
“Standard meteorology will consistently underestimate the lengths of cold periods and will grossly underestimate the severity of blizzard and snow deluges at times. ”
(From: http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No37.pdf)
Clearly Piers should be running the MET office.
The Arctic Oscillation creates these cold winters. The question is, does the Sun’s variations, as incredibly small as they are, have any relation to the appearance of these atmospheric conditions? The correlation is just not there through the Sun’s cycles. The AO likely has normal periods of positive and negative dominant cycles as well as daily, weekly, and monthly noisy bounces back and forth. Right now it is dipping into the -5 territory, meaning it’s a right deep one, and it is forecasted to stay negative for a while. I also think that it may be in a longer negative-dominant cycle.
I would look to the oceans for a driver before I looked at the Sun’s variations. These co-occurring oceanic and atmospheric cycles can be teleconnected rather easily in terms of mechanisms. And the awkward imbalances between and within them may keep the energy going to sustain periods of change and periods of stability without the need for a substantial external driver of those changes to cool or warm.
Yes Piers Corbyn uses his special Solar-Lunar weather technique to make accurate predictions from a log way off, and now the UK Met Office has a hard time catching up.
They are now reduced to making a running commentary of recent past events, and precipitation predictions no more than a few hours ahead, which anyone watching the weather radar could do for themselves.
I put the special “Battle of the Forecasters” page at the website linked to my name.
That page will be expanded over the next weeks, and see the Video Wall pages as well.
It is a Fraudulent Climate of Hokum Science, that we are all up against.
Piers Corbyn gets it right more often than the Met Office, so why are the UK taxpayer giving hundreds of millions to the Met Office then? It is like self-flagellation, surely.
Haha, hats off to Piers! When I first saw him in NYC last year during the Heartland 2nd ICCC, I was a bit amused because for me he resembled somewhat like Einstein — long and unkept hair, talking passionately and writing Greek equations to explain about the Sun and climate. Way to go, Piers!
The Sun went back to sleep again.
Sunspot number: 0
Updated 18 Dec 2010
http://www.spaceweather.com/
‘Never mind the heat, climate change is hoax by gravy-train scientists’
The UK met office is not in the business of actual weather forecasting, this basic work is beneath its dignity I suppose, far more important is the new ideal of saving the planet.
The met office with its modern state of the art buildings and new super computer and income reaching near to the billion dollar mark must feel that the boring nuts and bolts grunt work of weather forecasting is far too unimportant and lowly.
With the gigantic investment in computer technologies and the hiring of hundreds of computer whiz kidz there cannot be any money left to employ actual people with the required meteorological skill set.
I can just imagine the computer salesmans hard sell as he pitches his new super computer to the bigwigs at the UKMO. This computer is so powerful and fantastic that it will do all the boring tedious repetitive observations/predictions/calculations at the touch of a button the salesman croons and the UKMO bigwigs are reeled in like Brooklyn bridge marks.
At some point the met office became corrupted by politics and agenda driven compromise, they sold their soul for a gigantic ego machine called a super computer not realising that even a super computer staffed with computer programmers cannot hope to match the mind of a fully trained and skilled and dedicated meteorologist.
Now the met office is rich with cash but piss poor in integrity and honesty and pride and legitimacy and honour, its heads might well get a K for their services but it will be as worthless as a Nobel gong.
I can only imagine the utter shame of those employees who have seen their organisation fall from the position of premier world forecaster to the laughing stock joke it is today.
Thank you, Piers Corbyn you are a brave man….
Pamela Gray says:
December 19, 2010 at 10:12 pm
The Arctic Oscillation creates these cold winters. The question is, does the Sun’s variations, as incredibly small as they are, have any relation to the appearance of these atmospheric conditions? The correlation is just not there through the Sun’s cycles. The AO likely has normal periods of positive and negative dominant cycles as well as daily, weekly, and monthly noisy bounces back and forth. Right now it is…………
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
But from where do the oceans get their energy, or lack of it? From the moon? Read what CERN are doing-CLOUD project, latest news out was only last week and was on WUWT. It’s the sun, stupid, which is the main driver of all that happen to the hydro-, cryo-, bio- and atmospheres. The current freeze had been predicted years ago and now it is with us, could last for the next 30 years, could be for more, but the science was telling us so, and it is occuring. The science was, is right. The multi-million-dollar crystal balls, a.k.a. computer models at the MET office went completely off tangent.
Piers is right, the MET office was wrong and they should apologise. No wait a minute. They have caused endless unecessary hardships, suffering, injuries and deaths on the roads and elsewhere. They are criminals and they should be taken by their collective collar to the courts of justice accused with intentionally producing false predictions based on cooked climate records to suit their own personal agenda.
@Piers Corbyn: Great show. Finally you are getting what you deserve; acknowledgment of your science-based and highly accurate method of climate and weather predictions.
@Boris Johnson: You are the first British politician to stand up against the CAGW scam. Keep it up, do not look back and your place in the UK’s politcal history books is guaranteed.
You know whats scary, the cold winter in Northern Europe have nothing to do with volcanoes … what happens if one or two go off int he next year?
From Spaceweather.com:
“Earth’s stratosphere is as clear as it’s been in more than 50 years. University of Colorado climate scientist Richard Keen knows this because he’s been watching lunar eclipses. “Since 1996, lunar eclipses have been bright, which means the stratosphere is relatively clear of volcanic aerosols. This is the longest period with a clear stratosphere since before 1960.” “
Dr. Phil Jones of the CRU described Piers Corbyn as a “bit of a prat” ( or was it just “prat”). Prat in British English is a combination of a fool and a clown, at least that is the nearest I could get to it.
Piers’ chest must have expanded with pride when he read that in the climategate emails, a scientist who is doomed to scientific infamy, because history not rigged enquiries will be the judge of his work, calling you a “prat” should make you very pride.
Boris can see which way the wind is blowing (from a cold direction). He is reaching a tipping point.
Well done Piers. I base my preparations for winter on his long range forecast, and so far it has paid off handsomely.
Have you Americans discovered Boris yet? We think he’s wonderful. Even though my politics is opposite to his in most ways, he’s just great to listen to. Some American TV company should get him over for an interview. He bumbles along, usually saying something he doesn’t really mean, but he’s harmless and just a really nice guy.
Try this: http://thegwpf.org/best-of-blogs/2076-patrick-henningsen-another-record-breaking-winter-so-what-happened-to-global-warming.html
For those of you who are not fully up to speed on UK politics, Boris is a very astute, intelligent and well educated person. He is also a hugely ambitious politician of the centre right. My guess is that he has sniffed how the wind is shifting in the public mind and in some areas of academia. If he is the first mainstream, centre right politician to get on board with ditching global warming, er climate change, er climate disruption then he could stand to do his career no end of good.
As ever in UK politics, Boris is a man to watch.
I’m a computer guy. Most folks here know that already.
One of the major truths of the business is that bigger computers don’t give you better answers, they just get you to the wrong answer faster.
It’s always about the quality of thought that goes into deciding what to do, not about the machine that does it. As soon as I’d heard the spiel for a bigger computer I knew the Met Office was daft. A bigger computer doesn’t make your mistakes go away, it just makes them more exactly wrong, and wronger faster.
Sidebar on Efficiency:
There is an interesting factoid. (From a Ph.D relative who worked at NASA… no, the part that actually made things fly 😉 If you look at total improvement of hardware, it follows Moore’s Law. Doubling every 18 months or so. If you look at the total improvement in aeronautics computing, MORE comes from software. Improved methods and algorithms. Some guy figuring out a better way to do the problem.
There is a necessary corrolary to this: Crappy software can overwhelm Moore’s Law.
ANY improvement in hardware can be completely consumed, and then some, by poor software design. And that is exactly what we’ve seen. As folks have gone to less efficient Object Oriented systems, to massive linked libraries, to ever more bloated but quick to write software: At the end of the day your laptop or desktop box is about the same perceived “speed” as it was many years ago (from your perspective doing word processing and spread sheets). As memory grew from 64 kB to 64 MB and headed for several GB… as CPU speed has reached the point where it’s faster than the $40 Million Cray Supercomputer I used to manage… you find you are still waiting for that program to load and for your screen to display the answers. All due to a “sloppy and inefficient” approach to software.
I’m going to christen this “The Law Of Overwhelming Stupidity”.
Why this matters?
Because it’s that same truth, applied to organizations and goverments, that has a multimilllion POUND budget agency with God only knows how much staff and more compute power than is needed to design nuclear bombs ( or simulate plastic flow in a manufacturing die with 100% perfection) finds itself completely outclassed and outgunned by one guy who knows what he’s doing.
Piers Corbyn singlehandedly is besting them in every single contest. In California we had a tradition called “Racing for Pinks”. The title document for your car was originally pink in color, so was called a “Pink Slip”. You’d go outside town to where the 1/4 mile markers were on the road (usually with some number of hangers on, many with some degree of liquor involved) and have a drag race.
The loser handed their “Pink” and keys over to the winner.
“Why” you lose does not matter. Strict Darwinian Competition.
I have a modest suggestion: Hand The Met Office over to Piers. Just give him the keys and 100% budget and hiring / firing authority. Tell him it’s his now. Do with it whatever he wants. Then walk away.
I will guarantee you that the results will be a spectacular success.
That’s what “The Law Of Overwhelming Stupidity” guarantees. When you flush that stupidity and replace it with careful thought, you get orders of magenetude more performance.
Sun and oceans constantly varying their respective energy inputs to the troposphere and moving in and out of phase with each other to affect the tropospheric pressure distribution.
The Sun operating by affecting the the size and intensity of the polar air masses via the polar vortices. A more active sun provides a stronger downward flux of ozone depleting materials from a variety of reaction products produced by solar photon and particle impacts on the highest levels of the atmosphere. Such materials being maximised at the poles because a proportion of the incoming solar material consists of charged particles directed in to the poles along the Earth’s magnetic field lines.
The ocean operating by affecting the size of the tropical and sub tropical air masses via a variety of internal circulations modulating the rate of return to the troposphere of stored solar energy.
The jetstreams and cloudbands shifting latitudinally as a continuously variable negative response in order to always move the system back towards a temperature equilibrium between sea surface temperatures and surface air temperatures. That basic point of equilibrium being a function of pressure and density differentials at the point of contact between water and air.
All the other influences on climate are insignificant in comparison and as often as not just cancel each other out whilst overlaying short term chaotic variability on the background solar/oceanic drivers.
Piers’s primary achievement is to see that in order to discern the real climate trend one needs to first remove the assumption of a CO2 warming trend. That then renders any attempt at prediction especially at a seasonal level (and longer) far more likely to be correct.
As for forecasts on timescales of less than a season then in that area Piers is out on his own and I make no claim to match his work. Somehow he has to unravel all the multitude of short term weather influences and I leave it to others to judge how effective and useful his predictions are on those lesser timescales.
Given that the Met Office is failing on any timescale in excess of 5 days then he seems to have little competition.
The Met Office also conspicuously fails on any weather scenario that involves a non standard airflow i.e. any situation that involves a dominant northerly or easterly component.
In that respect they are no more advanced than back in early 1963 when they frequently anticipated a thaw but the arrival was often prevented by a reinforcement of the blocking setup.
I remember well often waking up to the crunch of boots on ice when the forecast had predicted temperatures above freezing.
Lank in the South says:
I wonder just how many ‘cold’ winters are needed before they can be used as evidence.
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An interesting question if asked in earnest . But I suspect that it is rhetorical.
Another interesting question is why you think a record cold winter or two is proof of global cooling, while you don’t think that a record hot summer or two is proof of global warming.
You do remember that blistering summer in the UK a year or so back don’t you? And not just the UK. Maybe the wishful thinking produces amnesia.
Does anyone know if Piers Corbyn predicted the heatwaves?
@johnnythelowery December 19, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Yes I found out about Piers’ work from Durkin’s film too and have been following it ever since, although I’m afraid the forecasts are beyond my limited means.
@Save the sharks December 19, 2010 at 7:52 pm
He had to say that, didn’t he? CAGW has gone too far now as a paradigm and very few politicians can be seen taking a definite position at present, but actions do speak louder than words. Boris will come in for a lot of flak for this. It’s not hard to predict a chorus of howls and imagine a lot of pens dipped in acid poised to rant about the “pet astrologer” or some idiocy of the kind.
But this will nonetheless have opened a definite chink in the warmist armour and Piers will continue to tread on a lot of toes (not least in this blog, I suspect).
I wouldn’t say the correlation isn’t there, only that the mechanism isn’t well understood. Someone else posted Kirkby’s lecture at CERN yesterday (or maybe Friday). I found it to be absolutely fascinating (much like Calder’s book on Svensmark’s hypothesis):
CLOUD – Cosmic Rays and Climate
Kirkby essentially lists the questions that need answers before it can be ruled out – and the physics will of course point scientists in one direction or the other, once the results are in.
Y’all can forget about Piers getting the keys to the Met Office.
The more likely scenario is he will be vilified somehow, his data and methods (private assets) will be demanded for verification, when he refuses, he’ll end up next to Julian Assange.