The Met Office, eyes wide open

Ah, but just you wait until this minimum is past. Then you’ll all roast in hell, you heretics.

Calling it “the so-called Maunder Minimum” is odd. Are they implying that this terminology is incorrect? Also I think that they mean to say: this could be an ominous signal for icy winters ahead, despite the expected increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Even the statement of “50 per cent of the variability from year to year” is somewhat misleading since increased carbon dioxide is usually predicted to uniformly increase temperature and not produce variability. I think that the choice of words betrays prior assumptions.

They’re embarking on a “god of the gaps” argument, which goes like this;
CS “CO2 is the sole driver of climate change.”
SA “What about sunspots?”
CS “Ok, sunspots have a small effect, but the rest is CO2.”
SA “What about changes in albedo,… and clouds?”
CS “OK, sunspots, and albedo and clouds all play their part, but the rest is CO2.”
SA ” What about irrigation? And the ozone layer? And cities?”
CS ” Yes, sunspots and albedo and clouds and irrigation and the ozone layer and cities all have their effects, but the rest is CO2.”

The ship is sinking fast, so who is going to jump off first? The Met are leading the charge so as not to get swamped in the rush.

Well Crap… I don’t want to… But… Now I hope we have dry winters, just to further make the MET look like idiots!

So, after years of maintaining that solar activity has only a minimal effect on climate, AGW protagonists are now expounding the theory that future cooling, if it occurs, will be the result of, wait for it, reduced solar activity.
That merits a rousing three cheers in my book. All together now :
Hyp! Hyp! Hyp-ocrisy!

Or, as has been said by some, and pertaining to Nic Lewis’s posts, the sensitivity is probably less then 3* C for a doubling of CO2.

From the linked article:

For Young’s boss, chief meteorologist Ewen ­McCallum, today’s uncertainty about what will happen in three days’ time illustrates the improvement in forecasting over the past generation. When he joined the Met Office 37 years ago, forecasters frequently faced similar or worse uncertainty about what would happen the next day.
“A four-day forecast today is about as accurate as a one-day forecast was when I started,” says McCallum, in an accent as Scottish as his name. “Then, we had no operational access to weather satellites, no radar and very slow computers.”

The Met Office must have been rather dreadful even back then. It was quite some time ago, but I seem to recall our local meteorologists here in Pennsylvania could make reasonably dependable forecasts for at least the next two or three days. Isn’t the Met Office supposed to do forecasts for shipping? I would think shipping companies and ship owners would have wanted something better than “Tomorrow is likely a good day to leave port!”
Uh-oh, this doesn’t sound good (bold added):

The first key ingredient is the fundamental physics of the atmosphere and how it interacts with oceans and land masses to produce weather. This is encapsulated in increasingly sophisticated models, as computing power grows. The £33m Met Office supercomputer – a twinned IBM Power 6 machine installed in 2009 and about to be upgraded – can carry out trillions of calculations a second. It sits in two huge halls, shrouded by what look like plastic shower curtains. These are intended not to preserve the modesty of the energy-guzzling machine but to reduce the need to cool in the immediate vicinity.

Wow, high-tech “Greenery,” using plastic curtains to minimize the area needing the extra-pricey cooling. And their big iron already needs upgrading?
Compare that to what the US Air Force accomplished (Dec 2010 article):
http://defensesystems.com/articles/2010/12/14/condor-cluster-spreads-its-wings.aspx

The Air Force has long taken an interest in using video games for simulation and modeling, but it’s now using their underlying technology for supercomputing.
The Air Force Research Laboratory’s Condor Cluster project is using video game console components to make a supercomputer. Built from off-the-shelf components, the guts of the Condor Cluster consist of 1,716 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles.
Speaking to reporters at a DOD Live Bloggers Roundtable, Mark Barnell, director of high performance computing and the Condor Cluster project at the AFRL, the computer is designed to operate at speeds around half a petaflop, or some 500 trillion floating-point calculations per second. He added that the cluster is currently the 35th or 36th fastest computer in the world. With some tweaks, it could be bumped up to around the 20th fastest machine, he added.
But raw speed is not one of the Condor Cluster’s goals. It’s a green machine, designed to demonstrate new ways to use supercomputing resources while using less energy. It is currently the greenest computer in the world, Barnell said.
The computer is also designed to be affordable. The cluster cost $2 million to build and is much less expensive than general purpose supercomputers, whose prices begin at $50 million. (The PlayStation 3 sells for $299 on Amazon. com, so the retail cost of 1,716 of them would be $513,084.)

Was also mentioned here on WUWT.
Faster, Greener, at a fraction of the cost. The US Air Force, with their share of the enormous US Defense budget, decided to be frugal and wisely selected “the most bang for the buck” they could get. The Met Office is planning on upgrading a £33m machine installed just two years ago. What is their problem? Too many broken CFL’s in a confined air-conditioned space?

Implied but not stated is that if solar is responsible for so much variability — not just annually, but over the centuries, as suggested by the Maunder Minimum/Little Ice Age quote — then empirically, greenhouse gas warming must be lower than thought and lower than in the models. The climate sensitivity — the temperature increase due to a doubling of CO2 — must be less. Certainly not zero, but probably in the 1 to 1.5 degree range, as suggested by people like Richard Lindzen, who recently was elevated from “denier” to “dissenter” by the mainstream media, as more of the IPCC BS comes to light.

Someone at the Met Office will be dragged over the burning coal for this…

Hehe – this is how they start to retreat from GW. They cant yet bring themselves to admit they were badly wrong. I’ve noticed even the BBC have stopped blaming GW for every weather related piece of news.