Forecast for warming revised downward.
The UK Met Office has revised one of its forecasts for how much the world may warm in the next few years.
It says that the average temperature is likely to rise by 0.43 C by 2017 – as opposed to an earlier forecast that suggested a warming of 0.54C.
The explanation is that a new kind of computer model using different parameters has been used.
The Met Office stresses that the work is experimental and that it still stands by its longer-term projections.
These forecast significant warming over the course of this century.
The forecasts are all based on a comparison with the average global temperature over the period 1971-2000.
The earlier model had projected that the period 2012-16 would be 0.54C above that long-term average – within a range of uncertainty from 0.36-0.72C.
By contrast the new model, known as HadGEM3, gives a rise about one-fifth lower than that of 0.43C – within a range of 0.28-0.59.
This would be only slightly higher that the record year of 1998 – in which the Pacific Ocean’s El Nino effect was thought to have added more warming.
If the forecast is accurate, the result would be that the global average temperature would have remained relatively static for about two decades.
Blog suspicions
An apparent standstill in global temperatures is used by critics of efforts to tackle climate change as evidence that the threat has been exaggerated.
Climate scientists at the Met Office and other centres are involved in intense research to try to understand what is happening over the most recent period.
The most obvious explanation is natural variability – the cycles of changes in solar activity and the movements and temperatures of the oceans.
The forecasts are based on a comparison with the average global temperature over the period 1971-2000A Met Office spokesman said “this definitely doesn’t mean any cooling – there’s still a long-term trend of warming compared to the 50s, 60s or 70s.
“Our forecast is still for temperatures that will be close to the record levels of the past few years.
“And because the natural variability is based on cycles, those factors are bound to change the other way at some point.”
The fact that the revised projection was posted on the Met Office website without any notice on December 24 last year has fuelled suspicions among bloggers.
However the Met Office says the data had been published in a spirit of transparency as soon as it became available from the computer that produced it.
Future forcings
It describes the decadal projections as part of an experimental effort launched in 2004 to fill the gap between daily weather forecasts and century-long estimates for climate change.
But this is an emerging and highly complex area of science because of the interplay of natural factors and manmade greenhouse gases at a time when a key set of temperatures – in the deep ocean – is still relatively unknown.
One aim of attempting to project the climate on this timescale is to be able to rapidly check the accuracy of the models being used.
A paper published last month in the journal Climate Dynamics, authored by scientists from the Met Office and 12 other international research centres, combined different models to produce a forecast for the next decade.
It said: “Decadal climate prediction is immature, and uncertainties in future forcings, model responses to forcings, or initialisation shocks could easily cause large errors in forecasts.”
However the paper concluded that, “in the absence of volcanic eruptions, global temperature is predicted to continue to rise, with each year from 2013 onwards having a 50 % chance of exceeding the current observed record”.
Scrutiny of Met Office forecasts and climate science generally is set to increase in the build-up to the publication of the next assessment by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in September.
Source:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20947224
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Re: that last paragraph, with the release of the IPCC AR5 leak #2 today, ya think?
Fluctuation of global average temperature anomaly within 0.8 and 1 degree celsius and the alarmists are in a panic! One can only wonder how life exists in Central Australia where temperature can be 0 degrees C (or lower) early morning and reach 20 degrees C by lunch time. How “Centralia” has avoided a climate catastrophe only God knows!
Al Jazeera reporting severe cold in Syria causing grief in the refugee camps. COLD weather, bad weather and “non stop rain” getting into the tents causing fights in the aid centers.
Who knows, it might even convince them to stop killing each other for a while…
Wonder how the BBC will report it…
King of Cool
What looks to have helped to set up the heat wave in Australia is the fact that the SH Polar jet has pushed well to the south during your summer this year. So it has spent much of the time been to the south of Australia and so blocking off the cooler air from coming up from the south.
Up here in the NH the weather looks set to go the otherway. Because as we move into the second half of January the jet stream pattern looks to be going into “lce age” mode. l expect to see some very bitter winter weather turning up in europe with the USA also at risk.
The phrasing “likely to rise by 0.43 C by 2017” has already been criticized, as it should have been.
However, another of Shukman’s statements is equally inaccurate. He wrote that compared to HadGEM2’s 0.54C anomaly, “the new model, known as HadGEM3, gives a rise about one-fifth lower than that of 0.43C.” The context for “rise” should be “over the projection period”, not relative to the base period. In that context, the HadGEM2 mean projection over 2013-2017 shows a rise of about 0.15°C; the HadGEM3 mean increases by about 0.05°C over those years. That is, the new projection suggests an increase which is *two-thirds* less than the prior one, not merely one-fifth less.
[One could make it out to be even smaller by comparing absolute temperatures: the average is now projected to be 288.43 K rather than 288.54 K, a reduction of about 0.04%. 😉 ]
So that’s two points on which Shukman is misleading.
No problem, next week the data compliance team IPCC TM, will recalculate the estimated global average temperature for 30 yrs as 13.5 C to 100% accuracy, oopes better make that 12.84C .+_0.003C..
Now its warming like never before, the models are perfect, followed by repent oh carbon sinners.
MET, experimental models mistaken.
I would like to think I am being sarcastic. But its govt run climatology.
Our sickening canadian weather channel is all over the catastrophic heat wave in Oz, Floods in Israel, Cold and snow?? nope none of that.
I’m sort of puzzled, assuming naively that everything has an underlying physical explanation. There was the hypothesis of CO2 that was causing the atmosphere to warm, and the hypothesis of a feeback mechanism that made it warm the right amount. What cause temperatures to “stall” and why will they resume? Maybe I missed that explanation.
King of Cool
You maybe interested in having a look at the BBC weather web site where they have got a piece about the heatwave in Australia. They are saying its due to the ending of the recent La Nina.
After 10+ years of reporting AGW will the BBC back down, or even state that they got it all wrong? I doubt it, too many overinflated egos, too much money in the pension fund riding on this story. They daren’t let it fail now.
No they will take every opportunity to propagandize and pump-up the rhetoric. Though if you have the means to watch where the BBC pension fund gets invested you will know when the story will be killed off.
“with each year from 2013 onwards having a 50 % chance of exceeding the current observed record”.
Which means a 50% chance of being less that the current observed record.
Which is another way of saying “we don’t have a clue what the temperature will be”.
Their new high tech computer simulation, flip a coin.
It also means, if true, with half the temperatures being greater than right now, and half less, that for the forseeable future, the average temperature will stay the same as it is now.
Their projections factored in all known variables which affect the climate. They didn’t just discover that solar output varies and that internal variability exists, so if we’re travelling outside the 95 % confidence bounds then they must admit this is not what they expected.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has also just made a humiliating backdown, after announcing that it needed ‘new colours’ for its weather maps to represent unprecedentedly high temperatures.
Sounds to me a classic diversion technique.
Current big story is humungous cold in Asia and searing heat in Australia.
Europe is very boring this winter, very boring.
Mark Luedtke says: January 8, 2013 at 3:22 pm
I agree entirely with Mark Luedtke here.
All this “unprecedented … since the last time it happened..” talk needs to be torn apart.
This is in a few of the articles that were posted in links above:
“This rise would be only slightly higher than the 0.4-degree rise recorded in 1998, an increase which is itself attributed by forecasters to an exceptional weather phenomenon.”
0.4 in 1998??? I thought the record was 0.55 (bozec above) in 1998? Are they revising 1998 down to 0.4 now so they can eventually get another record in the next 5 years?
So where is the left half of that chart.
As in before 1950?
Bet it was cooling.
mpainter says:
January 8, 2013 at 5:05 pm
“We will hear more of the “deep ocean”, I predict.”
Quite so. Almost anything can be claimed for those since there is no multitude of independent observers to catch falsehoods (not on the relevant scales like hundredths of a degree in global averages).
Leif Svalgaard says: January 8, 2013 at 1:28 pm “within their stated uncertainties there is no difference between the two predictions…”
That’s nonsense Leif. The lower end of the range has dropped from 0.36 to 0.28. The upper end from 0.72 to 0.59. There is no equivalence of the two predictions in these non-overlapping parts of the prediction intervals. These are significant differences between the two, so the predictions certainly are different.
It’s not a good sign that lay person needs to help you understand this point.
taxed says:
January 8, 2013 at 7:50 pm
King of Cool
What looks to have helped to set up the heat wave in Australia is the fact that the SH Polar jet has pushed well to the south during your summer this year..
You maybe interested in having a look at the BBC weather web site…
Thanks taxed. The Sky Weather Channel also gave an explanation to-day in that there has been a lower than normal level of cloud across Northern Australia because of the late onset of the wet season resulting in a large pool of hot air accumulating over the middle of Australia and every time we get a synoptic situation causing northerly winds this hot air is moved down to the south east.
Although a southerly change has hit the SE, the hot air will take some time to dissipate. But there is now a cyclone (Narelle) forming off the NW Coast so the whole situation may well change within a week or so and even result in much needed rain in the west.
Yep, we will be glued to every weather forecast down here with much added interest this year. The good Lord is coming. What we really need is a visit from Al.
“50% chance of exceeding….”
That’s like the Shelbyville Sharks beating the Springfield football team “almost half the time”.
🙂
Climate scientists at the Met Office and other centres are involved in intense research to try to understand what is happening over the most recent period.
Keep on trying to understand, lads.
E.M.Smith says:
Al Jazeera reporting severe cold in Syria … Wonder how the BBC will report it…
BBC are leading with “fires in Australia don’t kill anyone”.
Not as bad as some indian press who are reporting: “severe cold around Himalayas is yet further proof of global warming!”
At no stage have I read any report from the BBC along the lines of ‘Hoorah, warming has slowed/stopped, and we can all relax a bit!’ or ‘No current warming means we may not know what’s happening!’, etc, – and yet we still get all the usual suspects mentioning AGW in their various programs – it really gets my goat…
Oddly enough New Scientist…in 2008.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn14527-climate-myths-global-warming-stopped-in-1998.html
Oopsie!
And The Daily Telegraph back in…2006
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3624242/There-IS-a-problem-with-global-warming…-it-stopped-in-1998.html
Just to note how the depicted global temperature graph in this article is misleading, as usual, actual global temperature history since the late 19th century is more like the following (inexact, quick, sloppy, and not fancy as I am otherwise busy, yet illustrative):
http://postimage.org/image/wg75gb919/
That is just made by combining a global marine air temperature plot from the inscribed source published before the CAGW movement’s dominance (hence not deliberately dishonest) with satellite global temperature data for subsequent decades.
Particularly since almost nobody is going to click on this buried link and see the image anyway, I didn’t spend much time, not even exactly aligning the pixels in splicing, though the scale is about right. (I did it mostly for myself). But it is still blatantly different from the usual propagandist graphs which give the impression of twice as much meaningful global warming since WWII.
Unless it disappeared into obscurity of the type someone would not find in a thousand hours, nobody (not WUWT nor any other site in the entire internet or offline) ever, ever, ever has bothered to make or publish a global temperature plot which simultaneously has all of the following basic desirable aspects of (a) over more than 3 or 4 decades while (b) global average temperatures more directly than like a O-18 or local tree-ring proxy reconstruction (c) while extending up to include recent years within the past decade, without such being from the known-dishonest well-funded propagandist sources like Hansen’s GISS or the CRU of Climategate.
The quote from the report “It says that the average temperature is likely to rise by 0.43 C by 2017 – as opposed to an earlier forecast that suggested a warming of 0.54C.” is a classic piece of misreporting by the BBC and designed to fool casual listeners. It was also used on the brief segment on this on the BBC 10 O’Clock news last night. It is intended to give the impression that the temperature will rise by 0.43 C by 2017 and I believe is intentionally misleading. In the report above, you have to read a long way down before they start to mention that it is the anomaly they are talking about and that a figure of 0.43 C essentially means flatlining temperature for about 20 years.
In the BBC 10 O’Clock news they showed graphics with a huge up arrow with 0.54 C then a second graphic with a huge up arrow of 0.43 C and then claimed that the the update was therefore small. This is grossly irresponsible reporting designed to give the casual viewer the impression that temperature will rise by 0.43 C by 2017. I do not recall any mention in the broadcast item last night that thihs was an anomaly and therefore temperatures are flatlining. Also, they did not show the flattening temperature graphs, just the big up arrow graphics. BBC bias at its best.
I believe that it was just a few years ago that Trenberth?Jones? were stating that 17 years without statistically significant warming were sufficient to falisfy AGW…
And now they have to admit that they have not accounted for all natural processes in their models. As other commentators have noted, that equally means there could be a natural process acting that has given us the slight warming since 1970, nothing to do with CO2. That’s called a null hypothesis.