Guest post by Paul Homewood
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/anomacts
Figures released by the Met Office show the UK mean temperature for the 2012/13 winter finishing at 3.31C. This is below the long term 1981-2010 average of 3.83C.
Figure 1
The winter ranked 43rd coldest since 1910, and continues the trend towards colder winters. In the last five years, only 2011/12 has been above the 1981-2010 average. The average over these five years has been 3.03C.
Interestingly, the average winter temperature for 1911-2013 stands at 3.52C, so by 20thC standards the last few years have been genuinely cold.
The mild winters between 1998 and 2008 increasingly look to be the exception rather than the rule, as Figure 2 shows clearly.
Figure 2
Rainfall
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/anomacts
After claims and counterclaims of floods and droughts, the winter has been remarkably normal in terms of rainfall.
Total rainfall amounted to 346.7mm, against the 1981-2010 baseline of 330.5mm, although there have been regional variations, with NW Scotland being notably dry.
Figure 3
Met Office Predictions
I am quick to criticise the Met when their 3-month outlooks are so far adrift, so I’ll give them credit this time for forecasting below normal temperatures. Their prediction for rainfall of slightly below normal was not far off the mark either.
I was drawn, however, to this statement in the precipitation outlook:-
“The risk of snowfall over the UK is related to the occurrence of cold winter weather. As probabilities favour for this year a colder season than last year’s, the risk of snowfall is enhanced.”
It appears nobody thought to tell them about the new theory that snow is caused by warm weather!
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/k/a/A3_plots-temp-DJF.pdf
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/j/i/A3_plots-precip-DJF.pdf
NW Europe
It seems it is not just the UK that has had a run of cold winters. NoTricksZone reports that Germany has had exactly the same run of 5 cold winters, and, as they point out, what applies to Germany usually applies to much of Central Europe.
What makes this situation even more remarkable is that we are still in the warm phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, that began in the mid 1990’s (and, of course, coincided with the onset of milder winters till 2008).
As NOAA say
“The AMO has affected air temperatures and rainfall over much of the Northern Hemisphere, in particular, North America and Europe.”
We might be in for a few more cold winters when the AMO turns around.
References
All data from the UK Met
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries
De Bilt (Netherlands) shows a decrease of winter temperatures (d-j-f) since 1988.
See http://klimaatgek.nl/wordpress/2013/03/01/wintertemperatuur-de-bilt/
Lineair trend during this period is -1.3 °C. The cpc nao-index (d-j-f) also shows a downward movement as graphics at the same site prove. De Bilt is within a stone’s throw from the UK.
R Taylor says:
March 24, 2013 at 6:40 am
In a democracy, you must blame the voters.
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The founding father’s of the US recognized that for democracy to succeed you need an “informed voter”.
Once a government is in power however, they quickly recognize that the informed voter is not in their long term interests and spend considerable amounts of time and money to ensure the voter is misinformed. Thus, except for term limits, you can almost never get rid of the incumbent.
Dementia?
R.Taylor, you write “Don’t blame the scientists, whose paychecks are signed by the politicians.”
I have no data, but I would,be very surprised indeed if ALL the Fellows of the Royal Society were paid by the Government.
Thank God for this colder weather. It is the life saver for spaghetti.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/11/1168955/-Climate-Change-The-End-of-Pasta
Paul Homewood says:
March 24, 2013 at 7:14 am
Could our cold winters actually be due to a cooling globe? Now there’s a revolutionary thought!
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/cold-winters-caused-bycold/
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thanks Paul…..spot on
Stephen Rasey @9:21 pm on the 23rd. Mar 2013:
In the same manner that ‘higher’ temperatures were depicted in Australia this year? Sarc/
The UK, the whole UK, is going to run out of gas? I’m assuming the unusually cold weather has not taken the Scots by surprise. Just the English then. Wot a shocka!
May I just point out that this entire winter, shopkeepers have been heating the outdoors all over the UK by leaving their doors wide open as well as heating sidewalk restaurants, all using gas. There’s no shortage of gas, just incredibly inefficient use of the stuff. And don’t get me started on the lack of proper insulation.
Come on everyone, it’s time to face scientific fact around here. The world is warming, globally, just not in the parts where any of you live.
There must be some remote island somewhere that’s getting seriously warm by now……
Phillip Bratby says:
March 24, 2013 at 3:14 am
“An increase in fuel costs and the extended winter means that more people are going to suffer, and more will be unable to afford to eat and heat their homes. It’s a scary prospect.”
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wouldn’t the best solution be to reduce the price of heating fuel and electricity? why are we doing everything we can to make these more expensive when modern life cannot exist without them? by all means make these as clean as possible so long as they are affordable. if you make them so expensive that no one can afford them, it makes no difference how clean they are.
why is this simple logic so hard for politicians to understand. nothing in life is perfect and if you try and make something perfect you cannot afford it. how much would it cost to build a car that never needed repairs and lasted forever? How about a TV or a pair of shoes that lasted forever? What would they cost? Even nature/god cannot build a perfect animal that emits no pollution or waste products. How is it we expect humans to be able to build things to a higher standard?
Couple of Warmists were in Hell, and one says to the other “do you suppose we might have been wrong”? Suddenly, Satan sails by on iceskates.
Here is how HadCet in March 2013 stacks up against all the other March(s) going back to 1659.
This is not supposed to be possible in a global warming world (keeping in mind volcanoes and the Little Ice Age in the record back to 1659).
http://s16.postimg.org/d2321czn9/Hadcet_March_Temps.png
The winter temperature anomaly for the Northern Hemisphere as measured by Hadcrut3gl shows a negative linear trend for 18 years since 1995.
The year 2012 was the 4th snowiest since 1967, the start of hemispheric snow extent records.
The winter temperature departures from 1961-1990 mean normal for land and sea regions of Europe have been flat or even slightly dropping for 22 year or since 1990
The winter temperatures for Central England (CET) have been slowly declining since 1988 or 26 years and very noticeably after 2008
Yes.
Trends as “x per century” never continue for a century. There are ups and downs.
Paul Homewood says:
March 24, 2013 at 6:40 am
Gareth Phillips
There seems to be some pretty good correlation between colder winters with wetter summers and the drastic reduction in the Arctic ice cap
There was also good correlation between colder winters and growing ice cap during the 60′s and 70′s. And also good correlation between milder winters and reducing ice caps in the 90′s and 2000′s.
Correlation is not the same as proof.
Garethman
Quite right Paul, correlation does not prove causation, but you’d be a fool to ignore it. Smoking and cancer, sun and melanomas,poverty and ill health, they are all correlations with varying degrees of reliability. With ref to the size of the Arctic and the cold winters we have been experiencing, I don’t think the Arctic has been as small as this in modern times, and while the weather has varied and always will, it is only relatively recently we have had the ability to accurately assess the extent of the Arctic through satellite technology etc. I also suspect that the increase in Eurasian snow cover may alter the albedo and paradoxically cool things down in a fairly dramatic way.
Ian,
I could make an argument both ways as far as the way they chose their number scale.
It kind of makes sense to say that +/- 0.5 is normal and then show increments going out both directions. But you are right, it might mask even greater parts of the country below the average.
But if they do this the same way for when it is warmer, that is ok. It’s only if they make their color schemes a different way when it is above average to accentuate that it is warmer that it is a problem. It would be interesting to compare to a few years back when it was above average or to a recent warm summer and see if the same people are plotting things the same way or not.
I also agree with someone above that grey would be much better than white.
I’m reminded at times like this of Mike Lockwood suggesting the link between low solar activity and the blocking highs that give the UK the chills…
http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/28365/1/286_Lockwood_SurvGeophys2012.pdf
Peter Stroud says:
March 24, 2013 at 2:07 am
I am in Hampshire, UK, and I am looking out the window at the settled snow. Yet we are listening to the BBC, quite happy to report the demolition of functioning coal fired power stations. The lunatics really have taken over the asylum.
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Correlations and Causation: Clearly the cooling in the UK is caused by the disassembly of the coal fired power plants. It is clear that they must have been spewing huge amounts of heat out of their steam stacks since it is now cooling. QED. But my cousins in Farnham are really happy to have a 300 year old house with a wood fireplace in every room so they can stay warm – seems the smell of wood smoke is becoming more common in the country … will it be enough to warm England back up? /sarc offf
Bill Illis says:
March 24, 2013 at 8:18 am
……………..
CET-March 1659 – 2013
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/CET-March.htm
data from
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/cetml1659on.dat
Joe Bastardi at Weatherbell made an interesting point yesterday. In Europe, January’s avg temp was below normal. So, far in March, the Avg will be LOWER than that of a below normal January.
Can anybody cite when this may have happened before, or how many times it’s happened?
Interesting.
In reply to Gareth Phillips
Gareth Phillips says:
March 24, 2013 at 1:16 am
There seems to be some pretty good correlation between colder winters with wetter summers and the drastic reduction in the Arctic ice cap.
William:
The extreme AGW paradigm pushers do not have a physical explanation as to why a reduction in arctic summer ice cover would result in reduction in cold winters in the US, Europe, Russia, and China.
It appears the planet has started to cool, due to the abrupt change in the solar magnetic cycle. It will be interesting to hear the imaginative stories the extreme AGW paradigm pushers create to explain a cooling planet. The cooling of the planet is not due to a reduction in summer Arctic sea ice.
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
The Arctic sea ice will make a recovery. See record Antarctic sea ice and ocean surface temperature cooling in region of the South Atlantic geomagnetic field anomaly where the geomagnetic is reversing and the field strength has been reduced by 30%. Obvious a reduction in arctic sea ice cannot cause cooling in the southern hemisphere.
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2013/anomnight.3.21.2013.gif
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_timeseries.png
http://ocean.dmi.dk/arctic/meant80n.uk.php
There are cycles of warming and cooling in the paleoclimatic record (Dansgaar-Oeschger cycle) that correlate with cosmogenic isotope changes which indicates the cycles of warming and cooling are caused by solar magnetic cycle changes.
The solar magnetic cycle changes and changes to the earth’s geomagnetic field modulate the amount of galactic cosmic rays (GCR, high speed protons) that strike the earth. The high speed protons create isotopes that are deposited on the ice sheets and in the sea floor sediments. The high speed protons create ions in the atmosphere which affects the amount of low level clouds (Directly proportional, i.e. More GCR more clouds. Low level clouds reflect sunlight off into space which cools the planet) and the amount of cirrus clouds (Indirectly proportional, i.e. More GCR less cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds warm the planet by the greenhouse affect particularly in high latitude regions.)
The cause of the Dansgaar-Oeschger cycle is the sun and geomagnetic field changes.
Arctic Ice Melt Could Mean More Extreme Winters For U.S. And Europe (William: Please! The extreme AGW paradigm pushers are grasping at straws. If the planet cools the gig is up.)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/arctic-ice-melt-extreme-weather_n_1878833.html
There are cycles of warming in the paleoclimatic record.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dansgaard%E2%80%93Oeschger_event
Temperature proxy from four ice cores for the last 140,000 years, clearly indicating the greater magnitude of the D-O effect in the northern hemisphere … ….Dansgaard–Oeschger events (often abbreviated D–O events) are rapid climate fluctuations that occurred 25 times during the last glacial (William: and continuing into the interglacial) period. Some scientists (see below) claim that the events occur quasi-periodically with a recurrence time being a multiple of 1,470 years, but this is debated. The comparable climate cyclicity during the Holocene is referred to as Bond events.
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/Mar1/Bond%20et%20al%202001.pdf
Persistent Solar Influence on the North Atlantic Climate During the Holocene
Surface winds and surface ocean hydrography in the subpolar North Altantic appear to have been influenced by variations in solar output (William: The mechanism by which the sun changes planetary temperature is not solar output, TSI, but rather changes to the solar magnetic cycle. As shown below based on changes to cosmogenic isotopes the solar magnetic cycle was at its highest level in 8000 years at during the latter half of 20th century.) The evidence comes from close correlation between inferred changes in production rates of the cosmogenic nuclides carbon-14 and beryllium-10 and centennial to millennial time scale changes in proxies of drift ice measured in deep-sea sediment cores. A solar forcing mechanism therefore may underlie at least the Holocene segment of the North Atlantic’s “1500-year” cycle. … … A solar influence on climate of the magnitude and consistency implied by our evidence could not have been confined to the North Atlantic. Indeed, previous studies have tied increases in the C14 in tree rings, and hence reduced solar irradiance, to Holocene glacial advances in Scandinavia, expansions of the Holocene Polar Atmosphere circulation in Greenland; and abrupt cooling in the Netherlands about 2700 years ago…Well dated, high resolution measurements of O18 in stalagmite from Oman document five periods of reduced rainfall centered at times of strong solar minima at 6300, 7400, 8300, 9000, and 9500 years ago.”….
The following is a link to Palle’s earthshine paper that provides data to support a reduction in planetary albedo (due to less planetary cloud cover) 1994 to 2001, which Palle states is equivalent to a forcing of 7.5W/M^2, based on observations. The reduction in planetary cloud cover (as shown in Palle’s satellite paper) is at the specific latitudes and over the ocean as predicted by Tinsley. (The atmosphere over the ocean is ion poor as compared to the continents, as the continental crust is slightly radioactive. The solar wind bursts create a potential from ionosphere to earth’s surface at a specific latitudes.)
Earthshine paper.
http://solar.njit.edu/preprints/palle1266.pdf
“Our simulations suggest a surface average forcing at the top of the atmosphere, coming only from changes in the albedo from 1994/1995 to 1999/2001, of 2.7 +/-1.4 W/m2 (Palle et al., 2003), while observations give 7.5 +/-2.4 W/m2. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 1995) argues for a comparably sized 2.4 W/m2 increase in forcing, which is attributed to greenhouse gas forcing since 1850.”
Regarding the map categories mentioned by IainC (@8:54) and Paul Homewood (@4:13):
Automated cartography will have a default setting (or method) for presenting the shadings and boundaries of the categories. These may have been devised by the software company or established by the user when the mapping software is first installed. It might be a committee decision or a single individual. Then one feeds the data in and, presto, a map comes out. These things can be tweaked. One looks at the initial map and says something like “I want more or fewer categories.” Or, “I want reds and pinks rather than blues and greens.” Or, “I don’t want bright white, I want gray.”
Every decision of the tweaking type has to be justified – even if you don’t tweak after having done so the day before and just let the defaults have their say. The person (or persons) making maps on a daily basis do not want or need the grief. So feed the data in, and presto!
Mongolia, extreme cold.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8509143.stm
My solar based forecast for March has two intense cold signals happening during the first half of the month, and continuing for much of the month. Next winter has also has a cold shot of significant intensity and duration.
Tallbloke say what a lot of us in the UK feel.
But the time for niceties has passed. Britain’s people face a looming disaster of epic proportion. Britain’s political class needs to act swiftly to minimise the damage which cannot be wholly averted at this late stage. Successive governments have set the stage for the impending denouement, so this is not a partisan rant, but a cross-party appeal to common sense. People are dying by the thousand as a direct result of botched energy policy and we must act to save lives. Now.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/