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.”
D Lawson says…
“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.”
I cannot believe I am reading this. Do they really believe people are stupid enough to appreciate his methods?
Interesting comment today on the BBC news, from a Met Office representative. Asked why they could not forecast 2 months ahead, he replied: “it is increadibly difficult to forecast so far into the future.”
The BBC interviewer failed to then ask how the Met Office can confidently give us an exact climate/weather prediction for 50 years ahead (that says the UK will be 6 degrees warmer.)
.
Incidentally, all this snow disruption we see at London Heathrow, Gatwick and on UK roads was directly caused by Greenpeace, the WWF, the Grauniad, the BBC, the CRU and New Scientist. Their shrill cries that “snow would be a thing of the past”, prevented any managers from investing in new snow-clearing equipment. Anyone who dared, would have been vilified, have their mug-shot in the newspapers, and perhaps even lose their jobs.
In recompense, I think that all of the above organisations should be fined substantial amounts, so that a snow compensation fund can be set up. The BBC should be fined $900 million, the charities $400 million and the newspapers $250 million each. That will teach them to meddle in politics.
.
I do hope the MET office budget was slashed ahead of the cuts in education, right? They should not be rewarded or spared with combination of bias and error.
The link for the Paul Hudson article is broken. Here is one that works:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2010/01/a-frozen-britain-turns-the-hea.shtml
Sadly, for the U.K. the institutional momentum behind AGW is to much to stop right now. The same thing may be happening in the U.S. as well, as we have already committed to the ridiculous U.N. program of sending taxpayer monies to third world countries for that asinine ” Green Climate Fund “. Short of a real full blown Little Ice Age beginning the AGW proponents will go into hibernation for a while and then return in 6-8 weeks and start cherry picking some anomalous temp. record in Timbuktu to bolster their case and the whole silly merry round will start again until next winter.
A smidgeon of cog-diss from the Independent’s Steve Connor? He mentions that the Met. Office’s Julia Slingo couldn’t get into work yesterday due to the snow, but then fails to question her “it’s only the UK that’s cold and look how mild it is in Greenland just now” bollocks:
The UK may be cold, but it’s still a warm world, says Met Office chief
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
She may have been one of the many thousands of people who failed to get to work yesterday because of the snow, but Professor Julia Slingo, the Met Office’s chief scientist, is adamant that the current cold weather is merely a natural fluctuation – and does not mean that global warming is all a myth…
…Last October, the Met Office warned the Government that Britain is likely to experience a colder-than-average start to the winter. But long-term forecasts are still notoriously difficult to make with any accuracy, as the Met Office discovered with its “barbecue summer” prediction. Professor Slingo said: “The key message is that global warming continues.”
full article at http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-uk-may-be-cold-but-its-still-a-warm-world-says-met-office-chief-2165492.html
(some interesting comments e.g. snow in Australian mountains, cool in California & Hawaii, -7C in Florida, and note that the now infamous “Snow is now just a thing of the past” page is still at number one in the Environment section).
So how come they don’t take the bottom 15 measurements and then average them out with the top 15? Surely that would produce a more accurate figure? Oh wait, accurate and unbiased temperature readings isn’t what we pay the Met Office to do, is it.
My bad…
The whole problem is that climate has now gotten into the weather (Heidi Cullen), now we’re really in trouble.
/sarc
The Met Office used to be a joke, but its become a real menace. It is now killing people. The problem is that this crazed warm bias leads to forecasts which are believed and acted on by public authorities and the public. We then have masses of people totally unprepared for the real weather as it happens. We have local authorities out of road grit, people running out of fuel to heat their houses, not enough plows and snow clearing equipment.
The most penetrating remark about this was made by the transport secretary Philip Hammond, with a subtlety that few will have understood what he was saying. He said in an interview that whether it made sense for Britain to spend more on winter preparedness depended on the advice given by the Chief Scientist, and if the advice was that this sort of weather was going to be more frequent, rather than just a one off, of course more money should be spent on preparation.
Get ready, finally, for a serious investigation of this stuff in the UK. There is finally a politically acceptable excuse for getting to the bottom of it. When the airports are closed, you have temperatures for weeks below zero, and the UK climate science community is still bleating on about the warmest year ever, and people are dying, you have, finally, all the excuse you need.
It won’t start as an investigation of global warming. It will start as an innocent attempt to learn from experience and decide policy about funding preparation for hard winters. But there’s no doubt where it will end up.
Let’s get something straight. The Met Office is the going to keep spouting this rubbish about it being the “warmest winter” or the “warmest year” ever until they are paid as much to speak the truth as they are to spread these lies.
The statistics tell us that in some parts of Britain this is the coldest winter ever recorded. Those statistics are then gathered by the Met Office and massaged, processed, and “adjusted” until they come out the other end of their computer as “the warmest” or “one of the mildest” years in “a continuing trend” of “underlying warming” due to “climate change”.
It’s just a pity that in an hour’s time another nine British pensioners will not be able to read this post because they will have died from the effects of the “underlying warming trend”.
To be honest, I’m not sure what to think of the met office any more, since their paradoxes. eg:
a) With global warming UK winters get milder.
b)Cold winters are predictable as the global climate gets warmer.
a) It will be a predictably mild winter because of global warming his winter (2009/10)
b) It would have been even colder had it not been for global warming. (an actual Met office comment after the coldest winter for 30 years)
become more and more the stuff of Alice in Wonderland, so its no surprise that even a parody may seem convincing to even the most astute mind.
If you do a search on Google News, you’ll notice thousands of reports of bad weather in the British Isles, but few if any mentioning any relationship even tangentially with the failure of AGW theory. If on the other hand though this were an unusually hot summer or warm winter I’m sure many hundreds or thousands would be seeking to make that connection very explicitly. Yet another example of how “objective” journalists skew their determination of what is “news” to serve the prevailing ideology.
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.
When I was at school ‘Data’ was considered a collective noun and took the singular. e.g “the data is correct”, in the case of sheep, the flock was in the field, not the flock were in the field. These days you would say “the data are correct” and to me it sounds terrible. Surely data is a collective noun describing a set of data points and should therefore take the singular.
Whilst I am off topic why do Americans shorten the science of mathematics to math and not maths?
Again it sounds terrible to our English ears.
Kate says:
December 21, 2010 at 12:29 am
“It’s just a pity that in an hour’s time another nine British pensioners will not be able to read this post because they will have died from the effects of the “underlying warming trend”.”
Take a look at how many we kill in the UK
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574
Last year just over 25,000, the year before 37,500. Pity help us this year.
Off topic, for the last 24 hours in the UK our wind generation capacity was approx 10% of our needs but only generated 0.1% of our needs.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Thanks for the link Katabasis.
Bookmarked 🙂 http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Is that “strike three, you’re OUT”?
oldgifford
‘Surely data is a collective noun describing a set of data points and should therefore take the singular’
No. Data is the plural of datum. It means ‘things given’. It’s not a collective noun. Whoever taught you it was a singular or collective was a sloppy teacher (and one who certainly did not have any idea of Latin). The teachers is wrong.
Richard K says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:23 am
A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office. No, no, no. I want to hear all their predictions, every single detail and them explain the minor difference was cause by the Y2K bug or Wikileaks.”
I agree! Please MET, don’t shut up. Keep forecasting. Please. More forecasts, more detail! How’s Jan. and Feb. looking???
Jeff says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:23 am
it only makes sense, if you are trying to measure the “warmest winter” then taking the top 15 measurements over the course of 150 days of winter makes sense … of course if you are looking for the “coldest winter”, then taking the fifteen lowest measurements would also make sense … seems like you could have both the warmest and coldest winter in the same year which of course tells us nothing about the average … thats some solid scientific method you’ve got there …”
There are good statistical sampling tools to help reduce bias such as SRS: simple random sampling. Every junior college student knows thus. Sadly it doesn’t appear they are interested in nonbiased sampling schemes.
Brian H says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:41 am
DAE;
Don’t think so. Remember that the models use a median, not an average, for each day’s measurements. Medians just care about highest and lowest.”
Actually the median is the middle value of a rank order. It’s less sensitive to the low and high values. That’s why you use median…closer to the middle of the distribution if you have extreme outlier. For example, the median of 0,1,1000 is 1
we are all in the same boat in australia they could not forcast when thay need to go to the dunny
Oldgifford
‘Data’ is the plural of ‘datum’, and so ‘data are…’ has always been the correct construct, although rarely used other than by pedants (my boss…).
Anyway, back to our experience – I agree with the earlier comment about the weather forecasts seriously understating the minimum temperatures. The overnight minimum the night before last (in east Hertfordshire, between London and Cambridge) was forecast as -4 deg C, whereas my wife’s car indicated that even at 8.30am it was -10, and was already rising. OK, last night wasn’t particularly cold by recent standards (only about -2) and was in line with the temperatures that were being forecast yesterday.
It is a remarkable change from the winters in 05-06 and 06-07, where frosts were a rarity (iirc, we had only 2 frosts all winter in 06-07 just north of London). Yes, it’s weather not climate, but surely it must have some of the more scrupulous scientists at the Met Office taking another look at their predictions and models.
I can’t believe that Peter Gibbs’ comments from the news last night were entirely correct – how can you possibly model the weather in the UK if you ignore the effects of the ocean currents in the north Atlantic? That is THE dominant driver or our weather.
But other experts maintain we are in for another big freeze. Positive Weather Solutions senior forecaster Jonathan Powell said: “It baffles me how the Met Office can predict a milder-than-average winter when all the indicators show this winter will have parallels to the last one.
“They are standing alone here, as ourselves and other independent forecasters are all predicting a colder-than-average winter.
“It will be interesting to see how predictions by the government-funded Met Office compare with independent forecasters.”
Sir David King (a well-known global warming doom monger) was on this morning’s BBC Today program. He did sound quite subdued and, amazingly, did not mention climate change as such. But what he said about the climate models was bizarre. He said that weather and climate predictions made by the climate models were excellent. Naturally the Today presenter didn’t have the wit to challenge him on this, despite the Met Office’s recent mild winter forecast and all the other dud forecasts from these ridiculous climate models.
King finished by making a plea for the government to spend much more on ever bigger and shinier super-computers, in order to improve the forecasts.
Sigh. I don’t know what world Sir David inhabits, but it’s not this one. Maybe he’s on Venus, where global warming really is a problem.
But here’s a hint about the world we ordinary people live in: GIGO.
Chris
Katabasis says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:41 am
“Thanks to that lunatic Huhne, Britain is expected to provide 30% of its power via “renewables” by 2020. He plans to reach this target primarily by wind power.
The 3149 turbines we currently have are providing 0.1% of our electricity as I write this, just when we need it most in cold weather. The national power supply is currently creaking with a demand touching 60GW, and pulling almost 2GW across from France via the interconnector. ”
The figures right now from NETA are zero for current value and last half hour, 0.1% for last 24 hours. So, as closely as can be measured, the current UK wind power contribution is zero. And this at a time when we need all the energy we can get.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: what utter nonsense. How long before the idiots in charge start to realise what is really happening?
We have Chris Huhne (who once said that the ERM was working well for Britain) in charge of our energy. Now that’s what I call a real climate disaster.
Note to our American friends who may not be familiar with the ERM. The ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism, in which our interest rate was effectively set by Germany) turned out to be an utter economic disaster for Britain and we were eventually forced to get out of it. Once out of the ERM, Britain’s economy started to recover.
Chris