Met Office 2008 Forecast: Trend of Mild Winters Continues
Met Office, 25 September 2008: The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.
Reality Check: Winter of 2008/09 Coldest Winter For A Decade
Met Office, March 2009: Mean temperatures over the UK were 1.1 °C below the 1971-2000 average during December, 0.5 °C below average during January and 0.2 °C above average during February. The UK mean temperature for the winter was 3.2 °C, which is 0.5 °C below average, making it the coldest winter since 1996/97 (also 3.2 °C).
Met Office 2009 Forecast: Trend To Milder Winters To Continue, Snow And Frost Becoming Less Of A Feature
Met Office, 25 February 2009: Peter Stott, Climate Scientist at the Met Office, said: “Despite the cold winter this year, the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue, with snow and frost becoming less of a feature in the future.
“The famously cold winter of 1962/63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850.”
Reality Check: Winter Of 2009/10 Coldest Winter For Over 30 Years
Met Office, 1 March 2010: Provisional figures from the Met Office show that the UK winter has been the coldest since 1978/79. The mean UK temperature was 1.5 °C, the lowest since 1978/79 when it was 1.2 °C.
Met Office July 2010: Climate Change Gradually But Steadily Reducing Probability Of Severe Winters In The UK
Ross Clark, Daily Express, 3 December 2010: ONE of the first tasks for the team conducting the Department for Transport’s “urgent review” into the inability of our transport system to cope with snow and ice will be to interview the cocky public figure who assured breakfast TV viewers last month that “I am pretty confident we will be OK” at keeping Britain moving this winter. They were uttered by Transport secretary Philip Hammond himself, who just a fortnight later is already being forced to eat humble pie… If you want a laugh I recommend reading the Resilience Of England’s Transport Systems In Winter, an interim report by the DfT published last July. It is shockingly complacent. Rather than look for solutions to snow-induced gridlock the authors seem intent on avoiding the issue. The Met Office assured them “the effect of climate change is to gradually but steadily reduce the probability of severe winters in the UK”.
Daily Express, 28 October 2010: IT’S a prediction that means this may be time to dig out the snow chains and thermal underwear. The Met Office, using data generated by a £33million supercomputer, claims Britain can stop worrying about a big freeze this year because we could be in for a milder winter than in past years… The new figures, which show a 60 per cent to 80 per cent chance of warmer-than-average temperatures this winter, were ridiculed last night by independent forecasters. The latest data comes in the form of a December to February temperature map on the Met Office’s website.
Reality Check: December 2010 “Almost Certain” To Be Coldest Since Records Began
The Independent, 18 December 2010: December 2010 is “almost certain” to be the coldest since records began in 1910, according to the Met Office.
Met Office Predicted A Warm Winter. Cheers Guys
John Walsh, The Independent, 19 January 2010: Some climatologists hint that the Office’s problem is political; its computer model of future weather behaviour habitually feeds in government-backed assumptions about climate change that aren’t borne out by the facts. To the Met Office, the weather’s always warmer than it really is, because it’s expecting it to be, because it expects climate change to wreak its stealthy havoc. If it really has had its thumb on the scales for the last decade, I’m afraid it deserves to be shown the door.
A Frozen Britain Turns The Heat Up On The Met Office
Paul Hudson, BBC Weather, 9 January 2010: Which begs other, rather important questions. Could the model, seemingly with an inability to predict colder seasons, have developed a warm bias, after such a long period of milder than average years? Experts I have spoken to tell me that this certainly is possible with such computer models. And if this is the case, what are the implications for the Hadley centre’s predictions for future global temperatures? Could they be affected by such a warm bias? If global temperatures were to fall in years to come would the computer model be capable of forecasting this?
A Period Of Humility And Silence Would Be Best For Met Office
Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 10 January 2010: A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”. In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
Bertram Felden says:
December 20, 2010 at 11:03 am
Katabasis, where can the data about output from the UK wind farms be found?
http://www.ref.org.uk/images/PDFs/wind.overview.2008.pdf
http://www.ref.org.uk/images/PDFs/REDs10/Wind%202010%20v1.pdf
The web reference for the BBC article on the MET OFFICE is
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8462890.stm
The old cliche is when you lie, you have to keep lying to cover up the original lie – and you have to remember all the lies so as not to trip yourself up.
By creating the false trends through the adjustment of the actual data that supports their hypothesis, they are lying, and that is why their forecasts are so far off. They forgot to keep lying.
The people running these propaganda offices were obviously born with no shame.
That one or some people were overwhelmed with shame would explain the release of the climate gate emails.
A method must be developed to shame these people, for gaia is shaming them big time, yet they still preach the mantra.
Real investigation by real media would have sorted them in the public eye years ago.
First shame the media then all else will follow.
How does a Climate Scientist at the Met Office know when he’s got a flat tire (tyre)?
It goes “tera flop flop flop flop…”
Three weeks ago when the first Arctic cold blast hit it was obvious that the Met Office could not even accurately predict the maximum and minimum temperatures for the next day; ie forecasting an overnight minimum 0f -2 for midland towns when it was -7.
We know that the Met have allowed an AGW expectation to creep into their seasonal weather forecasting program, rendering it hopelessly inaccurate and in particular the temperatures too high.
I now suspect they have allowed an AGW component into their short term weather forecasting program, also resulting in the forecasts for the next few days significantly underestimating the brutal conditions at hand.
If this is true, the science of the Met Office is not only politically compromised by green zealots, its forecasting is downright dangerous.
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded.”
They brought all the thermometers inside because it was too flippin cold to go outside to read them.
I’d bet a kwh worth of Scottish Power electricity that “Norwich Tony” was just “having a larf” with a work of satire.
He simply omitted the /sarc ending because he didn’t think it was required (that’s typical UK SOH as I see it)
Nice one mate that’s well worth a pint or two!
Keep your head down, though, otherwise Norfolk’s finest may try and stitch you up for an “unsolved” “Cyber-Crime” that happened in your neck of the wood last November:)
“As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
They don’t realize that Winter is only 3 months long and begins in late December? I must have missed the ‘new winter,’ or these people are stupider than Al Gore.
LeeHarvey says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:05 am
@Ian L. McQueen- If you’ll permit an aside, I believe that the headline is in line with the standard British English practice of referring to a plural group (team, office, group, etc.) as a plural entity even when it’s referred to by a singular noun.
LeeHarvey-
I accept and understand your explanation. It can be confusing. In my own defence (and excuse the off-topicness), I offer a quote: “The Met Office, using data generated by a £33million supercomputer, claims Britain can stop worrying about a big freeze this year…..”, which indicates that the writer considers the Met Office as singular.
I was also acting out of sensitivity to the number of times that I have seen the word “lead” used when the correct one was “led” (and similarly for mislead/misled)- substituting the name of the metal for “led”.
IanM
[Yes, in England, collective nouns take the plural. (And the crowd are going wild.) ~ Evan]
Here’s some clarification/more info about the 15 measurements:
http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2010/01/however-cold-it-gets-this-is-officially.html#reply
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/03/aviation-pioneer-and-master-engineer-burt-rutan-on-global-warming/
Looks like either a comment taken out of context or an intentional goof meant to wreck havoc on the credibility of the MET.
Good for a wild goose chase if nothing else…
Monbiot explains the cold spell – it’s because of global warming and White ice and snow relecting solar rays heating the atmosphere. And something
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/20/uk-snow-global-warming
Mycroft says:
December 20, 2010 at 1:27 pm
CRS, Dr.P.H…
And come it did,this morning woke to 8 inch’s of snow here in Exeter
Cars and lorries having great problems moving.Met O got it right with the fact snow was coming it’s just the amount and intensity that they got wrong..oh and our now famous Haldon Hill fiasco occured again with lorrys stuck and gritters and snowploughs stuck behind them.All this in the warmist part of the UK..for the third winter on the trot
—-
REPLY: Mycroft, I have many dear friends & clients throughout Devon, and having dealt with this awful white-stuff in Chicago for the past 50 years, you have my sincere sympathy! I cannot believe the news photos & reports I’m getting from over there.
This is where the rubber-hits-the-road…..public policy (global warming-inspired fuel taxes etc.) is on the wrong path, resulting in tremendous economic hardships for the average citizen in terms of higher fuel bills, inadequate weather abatement (gritting equipment, ploughs etc.) and emergency services.
Sadly, we are now starting to see the price-tag for investment in the precautionary principle of CAGW. This is not likely to end well.
The MET says that they are a Public Weather Service, and do weather forecasts.
Including advance warning of extreme weather.
When you go to the MET website, About US, What We do,
They clearly say that they do day to day and long range weather forecasts.
=======================================================
Public Weather Service
The Met Office provides a range of information under the Public Weather Service (PWS), which is funded by the UK Government. This includes generating everything from day-to-day site-specific forecasts to long range forecasts.
We are also responsible for the National Severe Weather Warning Service, which aims to give advance warning of extreme weather to the public, businesses, emergency services and Government.
The aims of the PWS are to:
*
Produce weather forecasts which help the UK public make informed decisions about day-to-day activities.
*
Warn people of extreme weather to mitigate its impacts — contributing to the protection of life, property and infrastructure.
“we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average”
If they also took the lowest 15 readings we could have the hottest and coldest winter this year!!! Now that’s science 🙂
Just watched the BBC evening news, featuring of course a main article about the weather, in the middle of which was an interesting statement from Peter Gibbs, a Met Office forecaster. After sundry others were shown asking the question of whether the extreme cold was evidence that the UK weather was undergoing a ‘step change’, meaning that winters like this would become more common (whatever happened to ‘our children won’t know what snow is’?), Mr Gibbs said that, regarding our ability to forecast what the climate was going to do decades hence, that it was all but impossible and that the science was ‘new’ and ‘in its infancy’. Excuse me, but I thought that’s exactly what warmists have been doing for years – by such-and-such a year all the glaciers will be gone, whole countries will be flooded, it will be hotter/colder/wetter/dryer/windier….etc. Interesting! By the way, after the news My Gibbs gave the weather forecast – possible lows of -20C! Yes, that’s correct – minus twenty!!! Warmest year ever my @ur momisugly#*%!
@ur momisugly John from CA
“Maybe geo-thermal plants in Iceland vs wind?”
The idea of construction an undersea power cable from Iceland to Britain to supply electricity generated from geo-thermal (and possibly also hydroelectric) power plants has been proposed at various times in the last few decades but nothing has been done.
The international banking crisis caused the collapse of the main Icelandic banks all of which owed a great deal of money to British depositors. That would have been an excellent opportunity for the British government to negotiate a deal with the Icelandic government whereby the British would cancel the Icelandic debts if Iceland paid in kind by supplying electricity over a certain number of years. After the equivalent value of the debt had been paid the Icelanders would be free to charge the going commercial rate for future energy supplies.
I wrote letters to the Times, Guardian and Telegraph with that suggestion at the height of the dispute between the British and Icelandic governments but not one newspaper published my letters or even drew attention to Iceland’s energy resources despite the fact that it is common knowledge that Britain will face severe energy problems in a few years owing to the decline in the output of natural gas and oil from the North Sea, the closure of conventional power plants to meet the EU’s targets for reductions in CO2 emissions, and the closure of nuclear plants that are reaching the end of their planned lives.
Earlier this year, however, the Planck Foundation produced detailed proposals for the repayment of Iceland debts to Britain and the Netherlands in the form of energy.
http://www.planck.org/projects/iceland/geothermal/
The alternatives to getting more of our energy from Iceland would be:
1) hope that “global warming” takes off to such an extent that the demand for energy in winter is greatly reduced.
2) import a lot more natural gas from Putin’s Russia and/or the Middle East.
3) build tens of thousands of wind turbines and hope that the wind blows when they are needed.
Unfortunately the British government seems to be relying on all three of the above.
Anything is possible says:
December 20, 2010 at 12:46 pm
‘See what happens when science is hi-jacked by those persuing a political agenda?’
Oh yes, indeed we do see. Can you?
Advice for met office computeers.
If the state of their “science” is inadequate to provide reliable policy advice for traffic maintenance operations a couple months in advance, what would suggest that it would not be orders of magnitude worse at providing policy proscriptions for energy and climate manipulations many decades into the future?
Re Steveta_uk
Ah, but this winter is already reaching 1963 values. And I remember 1963 – skated on the Fens – too brittle now sadly! Me that is, not the Fens.
TonyK says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Oops! I can just imagine when Peter Gibbs turns up for work tomorrow.
DaveE.
The Met Office were consulted by the UK Department for Transport in a report out in October concerning preparedness of the transport infrastructure for winter. In October they were projecting a warmer than average winter with around 70% confidence. The Met Office advised that there was a 1-in-20 chance of a severe winter this year, or any year. In 2008, then, there was thus a 1-in-8000 chance that we would have three consecutive severe winters. The Met Office complain that the general public don’t understand risk and statistics, but I have to say that I don’t favour 1-in-8000 odds, i.e. the likelihood of three severe winters in a row only likely to occur once every 8000 years. I’m afraid these are actual Met Office statistics. If THEY understand statistics and risk, they should be repenting in dust and ashes by now because those odds are just way too long. Something is driving the weather/climate that they have absolutely no idea about. Now, we know that the models that the Met Office use for climate change projections are the very same models as they use for weather forecasting – you might think they’d be different, but they categorically claim that they are the same.
With odds of 8000:1 I’m prone to question whether there is some bias or tomfoolery going on, and with the Met Office that’s a dead certainty. They are headed up by an eco-fanatic and are part of the UK Ministry of Defence.
Here are some extracts from the DfT report ‘The Resilience of England’s Transport Systems in Winter’ (July and October 2010):
“We have discussed these issues in some depth with the Met Office and their climate research team at the Met Office Hadley Centre…we are advised to assume that the chance of a severe winter in 2010-11 is no greater (or less) than the current general probability of 1 in 20…The probability of the next winter being severe is virtually unrelated to the fact of just having experienced two severe winters, and is still about 1 in 20. The effect of climate change is to gradually but steadily reduce the probability of severe winters in the UK…we need to understand and accept that the chance of a severe winter is still relatively small…the probability of next winter being severe continues to be relatively small.”
Remember – based on the Met Office models (on which the whole climate change scam is based), three severe winters in a row has a probability of 1-in-8000, or 0.0125%. Or, put it the other way, in 2008 the Met Office would have been 99.9875% certain that we would not have three severe winters on the trot. Start looking at these probabilities stacking up and understand that the global warming mantra is a scam.
We are always being reminded that weather is not climate. Fine. But when once-in-8000 year ‘weather’ events turn up you really do have to start asking questions. When the Met Office in their UKCP08 report were projecting much warmer summer and winter temperatures in UK to 70% and 90% confidence, that same year they would have put 99.9875% confidence on there not being three extreme winters on the trot.
@ScientistForTruth
A fantastic post. 8000-1! With links, worthy of a thread on its own that should be sent to every politician in the UK.
And the Chief Scientific Advisor too.
Awesome!
Christopher Booker writes for The Sunday Telegraph and consistently shows up the fallacies espoused by the warmists as well as the decisions that the UK’s politicians make on these same dubious bases.
As far as the Daily Telegraph is concerned, Louise Gray just seems to report unthinkingly the propaganda that she is fed. I think that Geoffrey Lean is the Telegraph’s real dangerman although his smugness will probably eventually be his downfall. Why does he have to preface some of his references to ‘climate change’ with the weasel adjective ‘dangerous’?
Then again, with reference to the BBC’s Met Office weather forecasts, in November before the recent snow conditions, the standard 10.30.p.m. report contained statements like ‘with clearing skies tonight, temperatures will fall sharply’.
Don’t they know that all the carbon dioxide is presumably still there?
Chas