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
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A C Osborn says:
“They should spend a few days over at Steve Goddard’s site looking at all those old newspaper clippings which totally debunk all the modern “Unprecedented” weather stories put out by Climatologists, Greenies, the Met Office, the BBC and the rest of the MSM.”
In reading that I heard ‘MSM’ as ‘miasma’.
“cui bono says:
March 24, 2013 at 2:54 am
5000 extra people dead in UK so far this winter. Meanwhile, Earth Day! Let’s switch off all that evil energy!”
Earth day in the UK will shortly be self-fulfilling as there won’t be any power to switch off.
What’s the point of the UK demolishing coal power plants when China and India are building about 1000 coal power plants and have over 10 times the population as the UK?
I love the ‘liz from the met office quote’ the weather presenters have all been saying, that the cause of our cold spell is that the same high that caused the warm weather last year has shifted north this year……..
Utter lunatics are running the uk government.
SanityP says:
March 24, 2013 at 1:22 pm
fobdangerclose says:
March 24, 2013 at 12:45 pm
I see. A knew club is forming and only the anointed are invited.
_____________
Why don’t you chill… you’ve been posting this sort of thing in more than one thread. You know full well what is happening, just like the rest of us.
True Paul, the Summers were cooler, but cool dry summers are a lot more reasonable than slightly warmer wet ones. But that’s subjective and I take your point.
Gareth Phillips says:
March 24, 2013 at 3:02 pm
“True Paul, the Summers were cooler, but cool dry summers are a lot more reasonable than slightly warmer wet ones…..”
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Not if you want to feed people or is that an issue not deemed to be worthy of consideration?
William Astley says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/23/trend-to-colder-winters-continues-in-uk/#comment-1255710
Henry says
Your post was interesting. did you see mine?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/23/trend-to-colder-winters-continues-in-uk/#comment-1255622
I just don’t agree with you why the cooling is happening.
I have been able to correlate the dates that are specific to the end of cooling and end of warming with the start of decreasing – and increasing ozone, respectively. Not only O3 is created TOA by the e-UV but als HxOx and NOx which then subsequently back radiate more f-UV if there is more of and this means less heating for the oceans, in a cooling period such as now.
Gareth Phillips,
You have fallen into the correlation trap. This is why we are in this mess right now concerning co2. As you can now see the correlation has gone. Be careful about seeing correlations.
I remember the summer of 1976. It was a wonderful heatwave and I presume the Arcitc was near its maximum extent. Then in 1979 we had a terrible winter.
PS
The timescale you are talking about (less than 10 years) is the weather and not the climate (30 years of data). The same goes for the recent sharpish warming period which caused the massive alarm.
Paul Homewood – thanks for checking and crunching numbers.
You have got to laugh. It is the only thing you can do. We are faced with a group of people who stand to profit greatly from persuading the population that the planet is warming and that they are the cause of it, when in fact the planet has not warmed for 17 years and we are stuck in the snow! Yet they continue to insist the planet is warming.
Were I a cartoonist, I would draw a cartoon of Hansen and Gore holding placards warning against global warming… only they have been frozen solid by the freezing conditions.
The problem is that the UK is using celsius instead of fahrenheit. Fahrenheit has much larger and hence warmer numbers. Sorry, I forgot to refrain from inhaling.
Jimbo says:
March 24, 2013 at 3:49 pm
PS
The timescale you are talking about (less than 10 years) is the weather and not the climate (30 years of data). The same goes for the recent sharpish warming period which caused the massive alarm.
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Thats the bit I don’t understand the MSM failing to grasp:
15 – 20 years of warming = a confirmed man-made trend that we need to stop
15 – 20 years of no warming = too short to mean anything / natural variability
I can understand the politicians, and even the scientists, overlooking the flawed logic – they have too much invested for AGW to be wrong. But press reputations are made by questioning the orthodoxy – are there no ambitious journos or newspapers out there anymore?
When things get bad enough power-wise, there will be massive pushback from the public to re-open shuttered power plants and to hell with the EU and its mandates. This is very foreseeable. It is a sign of how arrogant and out of touch warmist crusaders are that they thought they would be no pushback from their plans to massively boost power prices and lower its availability. (Walter Russell Mead has made this point strongly.)
Ditto for the EU with its vain imagining that its paper manipulations and unwelcome regulations could keep the Euro afloat, and that there was no risk in the bonds of wobbly EU sovereigns, encouraging their country’s banks to lever-up.
Joe says:
March 24, 2013 at 4:16 pm
You are witnessing an Authoritarian view dominate over commonsense.
“Authoritarianism is a form of social organization characterized by submission to authority as well as the administration of said authority”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism
rogerknights says:
March 24, 2013 at 4:43 pm
When things get bad enough power-wise, there will be massive pushback from the public to re-open shuttered power plants and to hell with the EU and its mandates. This is very foreseeable. It is a sign of how arrogant and out of touch warmist crusaders are that they thought they would be no pushback from their plans to massively boost power prices and lower its availability. (Walter Russell Mead has made this point strongly.)
Ditto for the EU with its vain imagining that its paper manipulations and unwelcome regulations could keep the Euro afloat, and that there was no risk in the bonds of wobbly EU sovereigns, encouraging their country’s banks to lever-up.
Knowing the EU they have already mandated destruction of the old power plants to prevent them being reopened. I would not be at all surprised if as soon as the systems were switched off they had demolition/salvage teams move in for just this purpose.
Well spotted Joe. This entire batshit is weather observations.
I feel that it’s time we asked Warmists about what they see as a sign of global warming in the UK. Are colder winters a sign of global warming?
Are warmer winters a sign of global warming?
Are average winters a sign of global warming?
1979 saw maximum Arctic ice extent and a bloody cold and snowy UK winter.
2012 saw a low Arctic ice extent and a bloody cold and snowy UK winter.
Which of these is consistent or inconsistent with AGW theory of warming or not as you head towards the north pole?
Jimbo says:
March 24, 2013 at 5:09 pm
Well spotted Joe. This entire batshit is weather observations.
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Thanks, but doesn’t take much to spot that! And there’s more…
They say that the trend while the warming was happening was too steep to be natural variation. But, if that’s the “true” trend of AGW then, according to their own statements, natural variation is capable of creating a (negative) trend of much the same magnitude and duration to have cancelled that out and paused the warming since. The fact they may not understand the mechanisms fully doesn’t avoid that obvious conclusion.
Therefore, the warming trend was NOT too great (in magnitude or duration) to be natural.according to the believer’s own assertions 😉
@Joe Kirklin, good point. I’d been thinking the same thing.
Does anyone know how many year of warming there had been when Hansen began proclaiming in the mid-late 80’s that the end of the world was nigh (and that the West Side Highway would soon be under water)?
OK, here is my final comment (for tonight). It is clear that they promised us milder winters. This has not occured. Now they say they actually have a model run that shows colder, snowy winters. Yet if we have milder winters again they will pull their nonsense back out and say they have a paper showing milder winters. THIS IS THE SIGN OF A SCAM. Be wise and don’t fall for it.
Several people have referenced Christopher Booker’s excellent article in the Sunday Telegraph. He has been warning of this energy crisis now upon us for almost twenty years now. It was all so predictable, but the politicians wouldn’t listen and neither would the voters. Instead, they call him a madman.
Some of the hundreds of comments under the piece are informative, including this one, regarding our power stations currently being closed to comply with EU diktats, by a practicing engineer (who posted several astute observations):
“Kingsnorth 2000MW closed Christmas.
Didcot A 2000MW closed this month.
Tilbury @900MW closes July.
Ironbridge 1000MW closes circa July.
Cockenzie 1200MW closed this month.
Total = 7.1GW out of 23 GW of coal plant
“All these plants have 10 – 20year life left in them but are closing primarily due to the European ‘Large Combustion Plant Directive’. Even if you passionately believe the tosh about AGW would any sane rationale person destroy the current energy infrastructure before the green energy alternative was built commissioned and proven. I retire from the industry in October, I hold a senior Engineering position and have over 35years working within generation. I am afraid an electricity shortage leading to supply interruptions is a mathematical certainty, see the following link you can watch it happen real time next winter, right up to the point your monitor goes dead”
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
Well its almost April here in the UK, and 18 foot snow drifts herald Spring, with no let up at least until next month.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21914538
global warming comes in white, so next time those chuckle brothers at the MET issue warnings about Malaria outbreaks because of heatwaves, we can assume they’re just trying to humour us
JDN says:
March 24, 2013 at 7:49 am
“… And don’t get me started on the lack of proper insulation.”
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The UK government is living in cuckoo land with insulation.
The UK has very old housing stock. Approximately 60% of UK housing is pre war. Nearly all of this is single brick construction and cannot easily be insulated, eg., by way of cavity wall. Of course it is possible to build inside a second dry wall skin but that would take about 6.5 inches, and this could reduce room size by upto 13 inches depth and width depending upon room layout. This would create a practical problem since room sizes in UK houses is small. The loss of this dimension would mean that many double bedrooms would become single bedrooms. It would also require the house to be rewired unless plug sockets are to be recessed remaing in their original place and not brought out to the skin wall. Costs of conversion would be very expensive.
About 23% of UK housing is post 1980 and these houses are already well insulated.
The bottom line is that there is only about 17% of housing whose insulation could be significantly improved by better insulation.
Double glazing is not the wonder it is hyped to be. First not so much heat is lost through the windows. Second, people often open a window even when it is cold outside to get fresh air. Third, fitting double galzing to old houses often creates damp problems, at least unless air bricks are put in in each room. Putting air bricks in nullifies to quite a large extent the gains that double glazing would otherwise yied.
Of course loft insulation is the cheapest means of improving insulation. However, even savings in this regard are over-hyped. Many already have loft insulation. Those who do not probably have loft space full of rubbish, old carpets, rugs, old clothes, books, papers, cardboard boxes full of stuff and the like. All of this ‘rubbish’ provides reasonably effective loft insulation. Don’t forget that ‘tramps’ often sleep under cardboard boxes or even newspaper. On a snowy winters day it is rare to walk down a road and see roofs devoid of snow. So although many homes may not have the latest thermal loft insulation, practically, the homes are reasonable well insulated.
Marcos says:
March 24, 2013 at 5:38 pm
@Joe Kirklin, good point. I’d been thinking the same thing.
Does anyone know how many year of warming there had been when Hansen began proclaiming in the mid-late 80′s that the end of the world was nigh…”
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Yes. About the same length of time that the globe has no longer been warming! In fact arguably even a shorter period of time, say the 12 years of warming between about 1976 to 1988.
Funny that, about 12 years worth of data showing warming is proof of global warming by CO2, whereas 15 or 17 or even 22 years (depending upon data set) of no warming is not proof that CO2 has little or no effect on global temperatures.