It seem airport operator BAA has realized that Global warming has really dumped on them the last two years and rather than be caught with their pants down again, they 3x increased their equipment and staff ready to clear snow.
From BBC: Heathrow airport triples snow clearance fleet
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-15105627
Heathrow airport has tripled the number of snow clearance vehicles to tackle severe winter weather.
Operator BAA also has three times as many staff ready to clear snow compared with last year.
Thousands of passengers were left stranded at the airport as 4,000 flights were cancelled over five days for heavy snow before Christmas.
But BAA said it now has 185 snow clearance vehicles and has 468 staff per shift, compared to 117 last year.
The operator said it has invested £32.4m so far to tackle severe weather.
BAA had been criticised following last year’s disruptions and a report accused the operator of a breakdown in communication and lack of “preparedness” for the bad weather.
After the publication of the Winter Resilience Enquiry Report, BAA promised to invest £50m to avoid facing disruptions on a similar scale.
Announcing its “winter resilience programme”, the airports operator said it has introduced a new “reservist” role whereby up to 950 staff will be deployed to the terminals to help passengers during disruption.
h/t to WUWT reader “rg” in France
@ur momisugly stephen skinner
I have emailed the bbc to try and get a correction to the ‘incredibly warm’ winter story and have also asked why the journalist would have said such a thing. December 2010 was the coldest December in over 100 years and the winter as a whole December 2010 to February 2011 was the second coldest since 1985/86. If I get a reply I will let you know……Please, no holding breath.
Latimer, thanks for the explanation/comment. In today’s world, it gets harder to tell whether a government entity is making a bad business decision because: a) it’s incompetent; b) it’s cost cutting and gambling things don’t go wrong; or c) it’s politically motivated AND incompetent. Reason b) I can live with because in today’s economy sometimes we have to cut costs and sometimes we gamble and lose. Reasons a) and c) I can’t live with – government incompetency hurts us all, financially and far too often in human terms. Unfortunately, the AGW hoax has the U.S. and U.K. governments wasting billions of taxpayer dollars (US) and pounds (UK) and making energy costs skyrocket. So I’m going to assume BAA was simply gambling and lost.
Thanks to Juraj V. at September 30, 2011 at 12:03 am.
An interesting chart though there does look like a bit of an upswing in the 70s. I remember the UK had a major heat wave and drought in 1975 which would tie in with many days of high pressure together.
60 years ago in a small montana town a fellow from philadelphia came to town and bought the local weekly newspaper.
he had nothing for his lead artical and asked the local folk what the weather was going to be like. he was directed to the local medicine man joe manyhorses who sat on the steps of the local bank and dispenced great wisdom.
and so he asked joe how the winter was going to be. joe replied that it was going to be a terrible winter.
and so our intrepid reporter puts that on the front page right up at the top.
as a result the local coal hauler (located right across from manyhorses’ place of observation) hired most of the town football team rented a couple of trucks and started selling coal like it was going out of style.
a few months of this and the reporter figures he better check with joe again and so seeks him out and asks him the question “how do you know that its going to be a terrible winter?”
joe replies “white eyes put much coal in celler.”
and so friends thats how a lot of this stuff goes.
C
@mwhite That link (http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/climateexperiment/whattheymean/theuk.shtml) is awesome.
“The graph below speculates what might happen to global temperature with different emission scenarios.
This graph shows global temperature change over the 21st century for several scenarios. The temperature change is calculated based on predicted greenhouse gas emissions for each scenario.”
How can anyone have written those two sentences one directly after the other, impressive how “…speculates what might happen…” morphs into “…shows global temperature change…”
I’ll try to get on tomorrow and cache the entire contents as it looks truly awful.
Met Office UK monthly temperature anomalies for the last 12 months wrt 1971-2000:
September 2010 +0.5C
October +0.2C
November -1.6C
December -5.0C
January 2011 -0.3C
February +1.9C
March +0.6C
April +3.7C
May +1.0C
June 0.0C
July -0.7C
August -0.6C
Those are the facts. Now everybody can make up their own minds as to whether the BBC were spinning them in a misleading way……
Its rather amusing how believers of AGW will cite that EVERYTHING is because of it, yet can not support that assertion with facts… It appears that the folks at the airport are asking real scientists in the private sector for answers as the MET/CRU/EAU are UN-trustworthy and come from the corrupt government sector…
Hmmmmm… do you suppose we have this problem too?
..
Anything is possible says:
“Met Office UK monthly temperature anomalies for the last 12 months wrt 1971-2000:
…December -5.0C…”
The December anomaly is the biggest of the lot. That doesn’t compute. The global December trend is flat.
OK, I reacted too fast. The December anomaly was probably below the 80 year average. “Below” being the salient point.
Here is a chart of the global monthly temperature change.
Is it time to panic yet?
Today the record has been broken for the wormest ever October day in England – 29.5 in Gravesend in Kent.
But, as we all know, weather is not climate…
no doubt the worms are ever so happy on this warmest day 😉
I don’t think we will have a very cold winter in the UK this year again,perhaps all the preparations being made will be a waste.
Uh huh.
Up in the hills of North Carolina (that is really far south) on October 1st….there is snow flying.
http://www.highcountrywebcams.com/webcameras_BeechSlopeside2.htm
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Hard to tell. The graph doesn’t even finish off 2010, much less 2011 to date.
_______
£50 million is peanuts compared to the costs of shutting down air travel for days or weeks. I’d say Heathrow is being both penny and pound-wise. To be even wiser, they should convert the equipment to run on NG.