By Paul Homewood
According to the Sun,
Britain’s winters are getting colder because of melting Arctic ice, the Government’s forecaster said yesterday.
Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo said climate change was “loading the dice” towards freezing, drier weather — and called publicly for the first time for an urgent investigation.
Prof Slingo said: “If you look at the way our weather patterns have behaved over the past four or five years, we’re beginning to think that there is something happening.
“Our climate is being disrupted by the warming of the Arctic that we have observed very dramatically since 2007.
“We should pull together the best scientists to see how we can detect the influence of the Arctic on the jet stream, and on weather around the world.”
So just how cold have Britain’s winters become? Well, according to the Central England Temperature series, not very! The winter just gone ranks an unremarkable 187th coldest in the 354 years since the index started in 1660. Figure 1 shows just how unremarkable it has been. The 2012/13 winter finished at 3.83C, a fraction above the mean over the whole record of 3.72C.
Figure 1
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
Slingo also talks about the 5 year trend, so let’s look at that as well.
Figure 2
There has certainly been a sharp drop away from the abnormally mild winters between 1998 and 2008, but this only takes us back to the sort of winters that were prevalent during most of the last century, and still much warmer than the 19thC. The current 5-year average is 3.6C, exactly the same as the average temperature from 1980-89. And from 1960-69, the average was, you’ve guessed it, also exactly 3.6C.
Previous Predictions For Milder Winters
So why is Slingo so concerned? To understand this, we need to look back at all of the predictions, made in recent years by the Met Office and others, of warmer, wetter winters.
These, of course, were based on the handful of milder winters around the turn of the century. There are too many to list, but here’s a few examples:-
1) In 2006, Met Office meteorologist Wayne Elliott told the BBC
“It is consistent with the climate change message. It is exactly what we expect winters to be like – warmer and wetter”
2) In 2011, Slingo signed off the Met’s “Climate: observations, projections and impacts” Report that had this to say about the extreme cold in December 2010
It is considerably warmer than the winter of 1962/63, which is the coldest since 1900 in the CRUTEM3 dataset. In the absence of human influences, the season lies near the central sector of the temperature distribution and would therefore be an average season.
3) Myles Allen told the Telegraph in 2009
“Even though this is quite a cold winter by recent standards it is still perfectly consistent with predictions for global warming. If it wasn’t for global warming this cold snap would happen much more regularly. What is interesting is that we are now surprised by this kind of weather. I doubt we would have been in the 1950s because it was much more common. “
4) DEFRA’s Climate Change Risk Assessment Report, issued last year, states
“In the UK, we currently expect a shift towards generally wetter winters…..and an increase in winter rainfall volumes of between 3% and 70%.
5) In December 2010, Slingo , talking about the cold weather, told the Independent,
“Global warming is continuing and we know that from the global trends. There will, of course, be large local and regional variations from year to year. So this event that we’re currently experiencing is not unprecedented.”, adding “A final complication is that a regular pattern of natural climate change over the North Atlantic, called the multi-decadal oscillation, may be about to enter a cooler phase, just as it did in the 1960s, when Britain also experienced colder-than-normal winters.”
6) And the Met’s own private briefing for the Environment Agency last summer admitted
If low levels of Arctic sea ice were found to be affecting the track of the jet stream, for example, this could be seen as linked to the warming of our climate – but this is currently an unknown.
7) And in 2010, Slingo presented a “Briefing on the likelihood of severe winter weather over the next 20-30 years “to Sir John Beddington, which concluded
a) Prolonged snowfall and low temperatures, comparable with conditions seen during November and December 2010 are within the range of natural climate variability observed over the past 50 years.
b) The latest available regional climate projections for the UK (UKCP09) indicate a reducing likelihood of severe winters in future, due to the long-term warming climate. Natural climate variability implies that severe events remain possible but with reduced likelihood.
And we won’t even have to mention David Viner’s famous “Snow is a thing of the past”.
Backtracking
It is understandably embarrassing for the Met Office to see so many of their predictions blowing up in their faces. But, instead of simply accepting that they were wrong in misinterpreting a few years of data in the way they did, they are desperately searching for a way to pin the blame for a return to normal winters on global warming.
It is hard to see just how much credibility they have left when it comes to predicting climate, or even understanding past climate. As their Chief Scientist, Julia Slingo must surely accept overall responsibility for this sorry state of affairs.
According to the Met Office Accounts for 2011/12, Slingo was paid a salary of £135000 – £140000, with an additional bonus of £25000 – £30000. This is a cost that can no longer be justified.
She should go now.
I think this post has not only broken a record for most ad Hominim attacks per hour, but also the record for highest ratio of ad Hom’s to scientific information.
A person can often learn a lot from WUWT comments. Unfortunately, this is not one of those cases. JP
Bob Tisdale says:
April 12, 2013 at 2:13 pm
For that salary, I’d be happy to replace Julia and say, “Global warming caused the cold winter”. I believe I could keep myself from laughing as I said it–maybe not.
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I know it was a joke.
Is it possible to sell your soul more than once, or is there a limit ?
Just two points, for conversation, not controversy: Julia? Obama’s campaign poster girl and Eric Blair’s heroine in 1984. Hmmmm
Next, study two essential elements of the human condition: the growing of wine grapes and war. The first chronicles the sweeping effects of the climate changes that have occurred in just the last three hundred years; the second, the human suffering of brutal winters in 1918-19 and 1945-46, both not entirely freee of the effects of industrialization, particularly in Europe.
John Parsons says:
April 12, 2013 at 5:57 pm
I think this post has not only broken a record for most ad Hominim attacks per hour, but also the record for highest ratio of ad Hom’s to scientific information.
A person can often learn a lot from WUWT comments. Unfortunately, this is not one of those cases. JP
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When the empirical evidence is overwhelming and you fail to admit your mistake, how do you get your point across? With mules a 2X4 was needed to first get their attention. With Climate warmists they frown on this practice.. So all we can do is point and laugh at the sheer stupidity..
Do people like her know just how silly they look?
John Parsons says:
April 12, 2013 at 5:57 pm
I think this post has not only broken a record for most ad Hominim attacks per hour, but also the record for highest ratio of ad Hom’s to scientific information.
A person can often learn a lot from WUWT comments. Unfortunately, this is not one of those cases. JP
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You don’t have to like it.
In fact, you don’t have to read it.
Your call.
Julia is the worst kind of denier – she is steeped in self-denial and is likely the only person left with an interest in climate who doesn’t think she’s profoundly incompetent.
So why in the wordl would you blame cooling on warming and instead look back at the record and blame the sun or some patttern present last time it cooled? It’s called science, try it Slingo.
“According to the Met Office Accounts for 2011/12, Slingo was paid a salary of £135000 – £140000, with an additional bonus of £25000 – £30000. This is a cost that can no longer be justified.”
All that support and to my knowledge she has contributed nothing to our understanding of natural variability. It’s concerning and even painful to see money being wasted at that rate. This money could be efficiently divided over a number of frugal investigators productively exploring natural climate variability, still leaving Julia with more than enough to comfortably avoid poverty.
I always thought failure was a requirement for job retention. Apparently they think so too.
John Parsons says:
April 12, 2013 at 5:57 pm
I’d wager that the number of people who have died from Slingo’s brand of “CO2 conservation” exceedes the number of ad hom attacks per hour, John. By an order of magnitude or two.
What’s happening is a real catastrophe (now and not in 100 years) and it is man-made, hence anthropogenic. Unprecedented numbers of people are dying world-wide–a genocide!
That’s why I label people like Slingo, Mann, and other “climate scientists” Catastrophic Anthropogenic Genocidal Warmistas.
Obviously, you’re one of them, too.
Does your comment not demonstrate hypocricy on an unparalleled scale? I’d suggest you think about it, but you’re so steeped in “climate science” propaganda that you’re beyond hope, unfortunately. Admitting you are wrong is as far beyond your capability as admitting Slingo is also wrong, but both are glarringly obvious.
She says these dumb things to the public because she knows full well that the AGW conjecture does not support her belief that some open water AROUND the margins of a large ice cap in the WINTER (yes, it is well covered in the winter time) does not really make it colder a thousand or two miles to the south colder.
Me thinks that the good Prof Slingo should join with the FFF (story preceding this) and enjoy analog cluster multi-variate simulations of the ‘climate system.’ 😀
AlecM says:
April 12, 2013 at 3:45 pm
Dangerous to spout such heresy here at WUWT where lukewarmers predominate, AlecM, but I unreservedly side with you.
No need to torture a false confession out of mathematics, physics and temperature records – Nature has already performed the experiment and it’s there staring at us. I’ve said all this before, many times.
If back radiation exists for carbon dioxide then it must also exist for, and be exceeded by, methane – most agree with this hypothesis. Now consider Titan and Ganymede, two giant gas planet moons of comparable size and mass.
Ganymede has effectively no atmosphere and is much further from the Sun than Titan (Jupiter is farther away than Saturn, obviously). You would reasonably think it was much, much colder than Titan. Fair enough. Ganymede’s average surface temperature is -174.3C
Titan has an appreciable atmosphere, about 1.5% of which is the dread greenhouse gas methane (most of the rest is nitrogen). So you would reasonably expect it’s average surface temperature to be much more than that of Ganymede. In fact it is -179.2C.
So: in spite of being much closer to the Sun, and being blessed with a greenhouse gas rich atmosphere, Titan is if anything marginally colder than Ganymede.
Oops, embarrassing.
This is why I agree with you, AlecM. Such empirical evidence as there is seems to demolish the greenhouse theory.
I really do wish that more people knew this, then we could all get back to a normal life. But some fat chance.
LG
I fully agree with Sligo…
“Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo said climate change was “loading the dice” towards freezing, drier weather — and called publicly for the first time for an urgent investigation.”
So who is doing this investigation and who is paying for it and why do we need it when the Met Office and especially Sligo are so certain that global warming causes all this cold weather which is occurring all across the Northern Latitudes and not just in the UK. Surely they must have forecast this decades ago.
It looks to me like Sligo is suggesting that somebody else should be doing her job.
I fully agree with Sligo.
As Karl Popper explained in “Conjectures and Refutations”, a theory that explains everything cannot be tested and is therefore “psuedoscience”. One wonders if people like Julia realize the harm that she is causing to real science. She worries about a warming world when she should be much more concerned about her destructiion of science.
this guy had the answer way back in 2009 all about sun spots and climate change http://www.oneminuteastronomer.com/1054/sunspots-global-warming/
Pat Michaels says:
April 12, 2013 at 9:10 pm
As Karl Popper explained in “Conjectures and Refutations”, a theory that explains everything cannot be tested and is therefore “psuedoscience”. One wonders if people like Julia realize the harm that she is causing to real science. She worries about a warming world when she should be much more concerned about her destructiion of science.
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John Parsons – do you not understand that this post and Anthony’s evisceration of the points this person makes are not ad hominem attacks. They are a sound destruction of her science. Commenters have moved on from this and questioned her abilities, ethics and motives.
For example, if I question her motives and call her a climate science whore, that’s because I believe her to be a climate science whore, with her “fee” being paid for, most likely unwittingly, by the British taxpayer, via the pimp government. The science is already destroyed based on Popperian principles. No one is saying her pronouncements are wrong because she’s an idiot and climate science whore. They’re wrong because they’re shit science. The fact that she appears to be an idiot and climate science whore is perhaps what makes this so, but not necessarily.
On the other hand, of course, this is all deliberate shit science, and many of the voting sheeple will believe the sound bytes, so she’s probably not an idiot. In fact, I would hazard a guess that she’s a very intelligent climate science whore.
I just caught this @ur momisugly bishop-hill on Mann’s suit.
“Apr 11, 2013 at 2:46 PM | originalist
“If Professor Mann’s oral arguments are postponed until June, can he still continue to make anal arguments?”
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/4/9/mann-libel-case-postponed.html?lastPage=true&postSubmitted=true
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Now that’s funny!
cn
I lost the header:
“Mann libel case postponed”
cn
Pat Michaels says:
April 12, 2013 at 9:10 pm
As Karl Popper explained in “Conjectures and Refutations”, a theory that explains everything cannot be tested and is therefore “psuedoscience”. One wonders if people like Julia realize the harm that she is causing to real science. She worries about a warming world when she should be much more concerned about her destructiion of science
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I believe there are many out there that would be fine if science stopped right where it is or may be even went back a few centuries. They think technology has gone too far, already.
cn
LevelGaze says:
April 12, 2013 at 8:31 pm
> Ganymede has effectively no atmosphere and is much further from the Sun than Titan (Jupiter is farther away than Saturn, obviously).
Care to try that one again?
Mother very easily makes jelly sandwiches under no protest – Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and [need a new mnemonic] Pluto. My Very Easy Method: Just Set Up Nine Planets.
It’s ironic that she is using the “loading the dice” metaphor, since that is exactly what she is trying to do, rather than come up with a plausible explanation for the cooling that is going on. The hystericalists have been loading the dice for at least two decades now and it doesn’t look like they are going to quit any time soon. Feeding the public silly unscientific theories that have no empircial basis should be anathema to a true scientist.
Has any peer-reviewed paper been written yet that persuasively argues that warming in the Arctic causes cooling in Western Europe? There may be, but I am not aware of it.
From what I could see of the newspaper article, somehow global warming at the north pole is pushing the colder air south. This does not make any sense. Why is it warming preferentially at the pole compared to lower latitudes? Warm air is lighter than cold air. Why would not the denser cold air come in underneath the warm air causing the warm air to rise drawing the colder air further north? How does warmer arctic air make it colder elsewhere?
At least some sort of causal relationship should be given that would stand up in an introduction to meteorology , other than warmer air is pushing the colder air south.
Her ‘bonus’ is FIVE YEARS of my personal pension income. 🙁
Are these people for real, just desperate, or delusional? You can’t have it “every way”.