I’ve been given a link in email today to a public forecast page for July by weather prognosticator Piers Corbyn, which you can investigate in full yourself here. I find his web pages and forecasts hard to read, and even harder to accept any more, because in my opinion, he presents them like a carnival barker with overuse of exclamation points, bright colors, over bolded texts, random font changes, and fantastic claims. It tends to set off my BS meter like some tabloid newspapers do. Here’s his USA forecast for July:
[UPDATE: 7/8/12 – The full USA forecast has been made available by Mr. Corbyn and is available here for your inspection: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/usa-1207-july-inc-public-summary-news-page-full-fc-key-usa-maps-and-extremes-slat8a-prod-29jun.pdf ]
Some people say however, that despite all that unnecessary gaudiness, he makes accurate predictions. Because he’s made a public forecast and advertised its availability, urging “people to pass the links on”, here’s a chance to find out if he demonstrates the skill that is claimed.
He made this bold claim yesterday:
“Terrible weather is coming the world over this July so WeatherAction has issued free summary long range forecasts for USA and for Europe…”
He sounds like Joe Romm or Bill McKibben talking about “climate disruption”. Of course, it could just be another July in the northern hemisphere. Here’s the rest:
The USA pdf link is issued today on July 4th to go with the Europe link issued the day before. We urge people to pass the links on.
“We also expect very serious near simultaneous solar-activity driven deluges and stormy conditions around the world during our top Red Warning R5 and R4 periods. Any communication of the forecasts must acknowledge WeatherAction”
– Piers Corbyn, astrophysicist WeatherAction long range weather and climate forecasters
WeatherAction Free Summary Forecast for July USA:-
“Could it get worse? Yes!” – Extreme thunderstorms, giant hail and ‘out-of control’ forest fires’
pdf link = http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews12No32.pdf
(or no links twitpic = http://twitpic.com/a3y28b/full )
WeatherAction PUBLIC warning Europe July 2012 “Off-the-scale” Flood & Fire extremes likely (WA12No31)
pdf link = http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews12No31.pdf
(or no links twitpic = http://twitpic.com/a3p7pm/full )
The USA forecast map he provides is a bit hard to read, since it seems he scanned it in from print…note the dot patterns in the graphics. I present it here from his PDF page.
Here’s his forecast page for Europe:
He lists “off scale” weather in NW Europe is one of the claims. I wonder how one should define “off scale” weather.
As Carl Sagan once said:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
So now that Mr. Corbyn has put forth some extraordinary claims, we can catalog here the evidence to support those claims, and revisit the results at the end of the month. I urge readers to continue to post both pro and con evidence here as the month progresses. I’ll put a link to this thread in the WUWT sidebar so readers can add information that might be relevant.
Since Corbyn is a fellow climate skeptic, let’s give him a fair but factual evaluation to find out if these claims hold up, of if he’s simply following the path of some prognosticators of the past, such as Jeane Dixon, who made claims so broad that even a small kernel of happenstance occurrences after the fact were used to justify confirmation of the prediction. According to the Wikipedia page on Dixon:
John Allen Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University, coined the term “the Jeane Dixon effect,” which refers to a tendency to promote a few correct predictions while ignoring a larger number of incorrect predictions.
I don’t know that is what is going on here with Corbyn or not, but since he’s put out an open 
forecast, let’s find out. Inquiring minds want to know.
UPDATE: here’s a video of Corbyn explaining his methods:
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Anthony, I’d encourage readers to post their own hyperbolic forecasts — and then verify all of them at the end of the month. Winners could be paid in gold pressed latinum.
In terms of the Urban Heat Island effect and record high temperatures: I propose we stop fiddling with the current data. Just accept it as 100% truth. Go back and adjust the older temperatures upwards instead. That’s the standard practice in climate science anyways.
To answer the question, posed I presume to an unthinking audience, “Could it get worse?”, of course it can and of course it will. Nature breaks records non-stop. This is tabloid weather at its worst. Reading past the headlines sucks knowledge from your skull – avoid it.
I would assume the “‘Out of Control’ Forest Fires” in the US for July would not include the ones already burning?
The Jeane Dixon effect:
I used to go to point-to-points in Hampshire, England with someone whose ability to have money on the winning horse was legendary. Some years later, someone tailed him as he placed his bets. He worked his way round all the bookies, backing every horse.
Well, what I can say from watching the weather here in Austria, it doesn’t seem to be any different than every other July before. It’s hot, pretty much as hot as it gets in the local climate here in Vienna, with occasional thunderstorms. They’re not yet cooling anything, since it’s July. They usually start having a lasting effect in August (and tend to be more severe too.)
As for the flooding that he expects, those wouldn’t be anything new, really. Every so and so many odd years we get hit by one of the big ones. And in endangered areas there are floods every year. Some regions here are even more prone to floods and massive thunderstorms with hail. For example, the areas south-eastern and southern Styria are well known to have massive hail every year, and that goes back as far as I can remember. I remember as a kid, in the early 80s, my family almost got into such a storm with dad’s new car. I expect business as usual for local fire brigades and rescue services. There will be damages, but honestly, I don’t think they’ll be extremely off the average of the past decades.
When Piers made a set of very definite predictions about the extreme weather we would experience in May, I decide to pay for May’s forecast and see if I could check it’s accuracy.
My thoughts on it – http://mrsean2k.wordpress.com/2012/05/09/weather-action-reports-8/ – include some samples from the more quantitative portions of the report without the hyperbole.
Note that the portions of the report I show are from public domain examples, not from the paid version, in keeping with the terms and conditions.
I came to the same conclusion WRT it’s presentation – in dire need of improvement – but more problematically, I just couldn’t see how the way he makes his claims can be evaluated in a consistent and objective way.
Piers said that May in the UK was going to be the coldest on record. It wasn’t!
I think he said 80% chance it would be coldest ever and 90% chance it would be a top 5 cold May. It was cool early in the month, but warm for the last 10 days or so, which meant we never got close to even a top 5 cold month. He is to be comended for putting his forecasts out there, but I haven’t yet seen him put his hand up and say, ‘I got that one a bit wrong’. But then who does!
So, he is a warmer now?
As an Englishman who has followed this site for a while, and never posted, let me just say that Piers is what we call lovably eccentric. However; it seems to me he is always more on the money than any Met office guess. Lets see, shall we.
If the jet stream holds current position, Piers will look golden. If it moves, he’ll be the goat.
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I like Ryan Maue’s suggestion. We can amuse ourselves while waiting to see how Corbyn’s predictions pan out.
I predict FROGS FALLING FROM THE SKY possibly in the midwest or thereabouts and possibly Algiers or Machu Pichu. At any rate, I’m sure they will be falling somewhere according to my general multichaotic nonlinear cat-circulation model (GMNCCM). My climate model is built on accurate observations of the general circulation of my 2 purebred Ragdoll cats as they nap, prowl, chase each other up, down, and all around as they beat the hell out of each other before passing out in a heap together. So far, it’s been remarkably accurate in forcasting hairsballs upchucked on the carpet and is consistent with rainy days.
We experienced record temperatures in several southern Ontario cities yesterday. Temperatures not seen since 1955. So what does this tell us? That its been at least this hot on July 4 in 1955 here. Big whup. That since 1955, the land mass of the cities in question have tripled(or more) in area of urban development, the bulk of which has been large scale urban/suburban residential and light industrial mix, acres of tar roofs and asphalt parking and roadways, including boxing the airport at which the readings are taken with square miles of heat entrapping materials. That the airport itself has had a probable increase of 10 fold in air traffic volume over its template. That the area committed to vehicular traffic and high speed highways mirrors the development of the airport.
So the likeliest conclusion? It wasn’t as warm yesterday as it was in 1955, in terms of climate driven temperature. Do we see UHI driven local convective activity? You betcha. Do we have more buildings to blow over and knock down? You betcha. Do we have more people to be affected and notice it all? A REALLY BIG you betcha.
To be fair, I think Piers said that it was possible that May would be the coldest “ever recorded”. I note also that the Met Office rounded up May with temperatures “around normal” for the time of year, requiring them to used every scrap of warmth in the last few days of that month, & probably night time temperatures as well to make it so! We shall see what develops, if he wasn’t any good at it he would have gone out of business by now!
Brian@ur momisugly 8:47 am has it right. Mr. Corbyn should be judged not by the pure accuracy (or not!) of his predictions, but whether they are MORE accurate than the next best thing. So that is now the question: Who else will throw down an alternative?
As a forecaster, I give Piers a ??
As a webpage designer, an F-. Absolutely putrid.
Well for the next best thing for NA? How about Farmer’s Almanac?
Grab a kilo of popcorn. You’ll need it.
This post is going to be fascinating.
I analysed Piers Corbyn’s prediction for May in the UK at http://www.chrishopepolicy.com/2012/05/how-cold-is-may/
Short answer: He was wrong. I will be interested to see how wrong he is in July.
@cwhope
Lets be fair and critical at the same time!
Ive followed Piers for many years now and I am very certain in my conclusions that Piers has some prediction skills far beyond standard meteorology. But hes a pure disaster when it comes to structure management and communication and is in desperate need of support ´with an organisation that mirrors his ambitions. Im very glad that he gets the attention that his SLAT method deserves and on WUWT we all get the fantastic access to knowledege and scrutany in an fantastic forum. Piers has really stuck his neck down in a snake pit and his claims is very controversial in both parts of the sceptic camp as well in the CAGW one. And I m sure Piers will be here to comment as well.
The last “Coldest May in a hundred years” has been critizised and Im trying to find any forecast that was better than Piers….. has anyone who did? Met office?? lol!!
Imagine you are a climate scientist (with access to modern computers , satellites, and other modern analytical procedures, etc) and you are experiencing the 30th year of the mini-ice age that the earth experienced a few hundred years ago.
You run some fancy schmancy computer analyses, etc etc and you proclaim with utmost certainty;
“there is simply no doubt that given the advance of the arctic ice sheets and below average – and remarkably consistent below average temperatures- over the last 30 years, we can expect much of the Northern Hemisphere to be covered in ice sheets in 20 years. In fact, there is simply no doubt that we are in the very early stages of a new ice age that should last at least several thousand years. Canada and the northern USA will be buried under ice sheets at least 5000 feet thick, as will much of Russia.
Of course, this climate scientist would have been totally wrong.
Extrapolating recent trends of the last 10 or 20 or 50 or even100 years always assumes that the future will unfold as the past. Yet, the earth’s climatic history has been shown to be unpredictable. A forthcoming ice age does not in fact become an ice age just because it has been cold for 50 or100 or 200 years. . A period of warming ends in cooling, not hotter and hotter climate and ever higher and higher CO2 levels.
If CO2 causes warming, than previous very hot periods that lasted thousands of years should have produced ever higher and higher CO2 levels that , literally, should have burned off our atmosphere. But it did not. In fact, all these really warm periods ended in global cooling or in an ice age.
Isn’t that forecast map from June and for June29th-July 1st?
It is in the pdf for the July outlook for the US, but seems to there to prove the June forecast was correct (see the arrow to the picture of the fire).
The actual July forecast seems vague, “searing heat will grip West/South” for where I live. How can you evaluate that, if only some areas have searing heat, if Arizona is hot will that count, even though it usually is?
It’s right and proper that WUWT should scrutinise Piers’s predictions with the same scepticism applied to the AGW religion.
The Hockey Team ‘keep the faith’ with each other in sordid collusion, never contradicting each other, keeping the Global Warming Gravy Train running.
True science is what’s left when all attempts at falsification fail. Good on you Anthony for holding Mr. Corbyn to the same standards as The Team. The truth is indivisible.
On the question of record heat/cold. One should expect that as our historical record data base extends with time the frequency of record highs and lows should diminish. If we had a set of weather records extending back 1 billion years, a series of closely spaced high or low termperatures might mean something. Unfortunatley the relative “abundance’ of headline weather extremes is simply indicative of a data base that is short in length, relative to the entire possible population of temperature measurements and therefore is essentially useless for determining the relative severity of a weather event(s).
Bastardi has the same over the top, ego driven style, though not as extreme. I really dislike this style of forecasting as it gives the impression of rooting for catastrophe. I’ve been following Bastardi for many years now, and there’s no question in my mind he roots for damaging weather events as a means to showing what a good forecaster he is. PLus, he just finds it exciting.
That said, he is good. One of the very best. So that’s the bottom line. I’m less familiar with Corbyn’s record.
Hello, I think we are returning to 1950-1970 climate conditions. The planet is cooling again, and extreme weather will be back like that times. Is very likely that we must live hard times in the next decades.
The more clever warmists knows that, and they are playing the game (more frequent weather extremes, blá, blá). This is the new challenge to sceptics. How explain this to ordinary peoples that have no memory about ? I think is good start to explain right now. Call Goddard!!! 🙂
For the USA, I agree with the prediction of “out-of control’ forest fires.” What else should we expect, after the Obama Administration gutted the U.S. Forrest Service’s aerial firefighting capabilities? Eleven months ago the Obama Administration abruptly cancelled the contract for the U.S. Forest Service’s best firefighting aircraft, “the backbone of the aerial firefighting arsenal.”
But the hand that taketh away also giveth: President Obama offered hugs and money to the victims.