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.
Slingo must be fired without a pension for all the damage she has done to the UK and world.
@LevelGaze April 12, 2013 at 8:31 pm
Yes, correct, there is no empirical evidence of ‘back radiation’. What’s more, it’s easy for this grizzled old metallurgical engineer turned applied scientist to prove that there is near zero net CO2 surface IR emission, subject to thermal incoherency. The same goes for all major GHG bands. If this did not happen, we could never get radiative thermal equilibrium. In order to understand this, I devised three rate equations to explain coupled convection and radiation to the dim climate alchemists, and they truly are dim to believe the guff they spout.
Here’s something I wrote to Roy Spencer:
It’s time someone nailed back radiation by linking to the basic physics [Goody and Yung is the source].
Basically, climate alchemy adds 134.5 W/m^2 radiative warming out of thin air by assuming the energy leaving the Earth’s surface is 3.1 times greater than that which arrives.
This is justified by 333 ‘back radiation’, which does not exist except as a potential energy flux to a sink at absolute zero. They claim they measure this by a pyrometer which internally converts the ‘temperature’ of the lower atmosphere via the S-B equation to its potential energy flux – pyrgeometers. This is a 50+ year old mistake from meteorology.
Exaggerated warming of sunlit oceans is offset by exaggerated cloud albedo so they get the ‘right temperature’ in hind-casting. Because of the exponential evaporation kinetics there is vastly increased evaporation in sunlit oceans yet average temperature seems OK. This gives the imaginary positive feedback.
They then give themselves Nobel prizes for being very good a cheating.
Recently, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele himself, the vice-president of the IPCC, said on a Belgian television that the recent abnornal cold winter in Belgium was due to global warming, and that we must expect more “extreme weather” in the future.
Idiot!
Re the Margaret Thatcher debate I can’t help but notice the irony of the socialist/greenie brigade demonising fossil fuel use whilst at the same time villifying her for closing the coal mines!
What a silly woman. Has she forgotten her colleagues equally crazy statement of 2000 when he proclaimed that our children would not have the pleasure of seeing snow in the years to come.
richardscourtney says
I appreciate what you said in your post and we must agree to disagree but with regard to what you said below:
“I appreciate your mourning and you have my genuine sympathy. However, using this thread to express those feelings is not appropriate. It threatens to create the same divisions on WUWT as are apparent in the UK.”
The people who want to “celebrate” the death of Margaret Thatcher, a frail, ill, old lady are of the left wing. They are a particularly nasty, unpleasant breed of people who resemble very strongly the extreme warmists. They are both politically very left of centre, they are not Socialist in the context of wanting the best for their fellow man, which is a view I strongly respect (although I don’t always agree with the means, by which they try to attain this ideal). What these left wingers want is control, they are not interested in how many people suffer or die (in fuel poverty?) in the process. As long as they can control society including thought (deniers?) that is their aim.
Margaret Thatcher reduced the power of the trade unions to what they should be, representatives of workers, not organisations dictating government policy and threatening to bring the country to it’s knees if the incumbent government does not comply with their demands. She also supported Ronald Reagan to restore democracy in Eastern Europe and break up the USSR making nuclear armageddon a lot less likely. Had she been in power now, I am convinced that she would have realised that the advice she was given about AGW was wrong and people like Julia Slingo would not have jobs.
This is why she is so hated twenty three years after she left office and no doubt her funeral will be turned into a violent, undignified occasion by the extreme left, who will once again demonstrate their unsuitability to govern a country or to dictate energy policies.
As a Brit, I’d love to comment, but the WUWT snip filter would send it straight to the bit bucket. On Slingo and Thatcher both.
Meanwhile, the sun’s out here. Probably that d#mn Arctic ice.
Paul, I think your thread title should refer to Britain’s winters, or the UK’s winters. Regarding England as being the same of the UK is a bane for for the people of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. After all we don’t refer to the US as a substitute for North America, or do we? As you know we have devolved governments in the UK making us to an extent a federal state, and as such different countries have different policies. Labelling to all countries as England can cause confusion in who’s policies you a referring to.
mojomojo says:
April 12, 2013 at 5:13 pm
Greenland ice core shows Arctic was warmer than today during the MWP.
That Arctic warming never caused cooling in Europe.
Er….. was not the MWP followed by the little ice age?
[snip . . OT . . mod]
Since CAGW has effectively been invalidated by empirical evidence by the fact there’s been no global warming trend into its 17th year (despite the most manmade CO2 being emitted in human history during that time) the CAGW grant whores have renamed their hoax to Climate Change, which is an IMPOSSIBLE “theory” to invalidate because that’s precisely what climate does; change….
If global temperatures go up, it’s ClImate Change, if they go down, it’s Climate Change and if they’re static, that’s Climate change, too, because prior to stasis, temps were either warmer or colder…
As this insanity continues, governments around they world continue with their various Cliamte Change rules, regulations, subsidies, mandates and taxes that make the world: less efficient, provides less energy, further impoverishes the poor, lowers standards of living, misallocates resources, destroys the industrial sectors of countries foolish enough to believe this tripe, makes what products and services remain uncompetitive and runs up debt and money printing to pay for it all.
Future generations will look back at this era as a time when the world collectively lost its mind and will be flabbergasted how it lasted…
It feels like this hoax is losing momentum, but it’s like a zombie that’s dead, yet continues to terrorize the neighborhood…
Slingo need to invest in an Ouija board.
P Solar,
I cannot sit back an allow this nonsense to be spouted about Thatcher. Since the mods allowed this comment, off topic as it is, I feel I have the right to respond.
You write “She sold off all our national assets to foreign investors.”
No she didn’t. She sold them to the British people, at a discount. The government made an effort to prevent falling into foreign ownership by retaining a “golden share” which effectively meant veto right. Unfortunately, some of these golden shares were sold by later governments, and finally ruled illegal by the EU in 2003.
Manufacturing output actually fell from 25% to 23% of gdp during Thatchers term – much less than people think. It subsequently fell to 11%, mostly under Blair’s watcher.
You then write “The deregulation of the banks resulted in the current mess where we just about doubled our national debt in ONE year with bank bail outs.”
The deregulation was known as the “big bang” and was sorely needed. At the time the financial centre was an archaic system, with brokers forced to go through “jobbers” to process transactions, while itself being almost a closed shop. Without dwelling on detail, it was a backwater in world finance that had changed little since the 19th century. What Thatcher did was throw it open to international competition, and it was a great success.
You interpret this as the cause of the recent financial crisis, but this is a grave misunderstanding. It was not “free” markets that caused the crisis. Free markets do not have governments and central banks inflating asset bubbles, underwriting financial institutions with guarantees of taxpayers money. The roots of the crisis began under the Bush/Greenspan administration, partly by taxpayer funded mortgage guarantees and the bottom put under the stock market, known as the Greenspan put. The removal of moral hazard was one of the things that lead to excessive risk taking, and the eventually banking crisis.
If you know anything about Thatcher, you would know she was a follower of the Austrian school of economics, which abhors the kind of central bank interventions seen over the last decade, as being highly distortive of free market functioning. Thatcher thought so too.
AlecM says: April 12, 2013 at 3:45 pm
The root cause of this humongous mistake has been ‘back radiation’…
LevelGaze says: April 12, 2013 at 8:31 pm
… I unreservedly side with you…
Me too. I checked out the mathematical equations used by IPCC for the radiative flux and realized that the IPCC equations were totally flawed and postulated an “atmosphere-less” temperature for Earth that was far too high. “33 degrees useful warming due to GHG” is transparent rubbish. I realized that evidence for this mistake was staring us in the face, both from temperatures at high altitudes on Earth and from temperatures on the Moon’s surface. Why in Heaven’s name had others not spotted this and spoken up?
That was one bridge too far for most at WUWT. Then I went even further, in connecting this mistake with another mistake made by a scientist for whom I have otherwise huge respect both as a scientist and as a man… James Clerk Maxwell.
After realizing all that, and even writing it up nice and clearly here for people to understand, I stood back from Science. It was too big a burden for me to carry alone even though I know that the science I found is correct… and that Graeff deserves the Nobel Prize for his almost-completely-unknown work…
All this “discovery” awaits a younger generation.
Translation:
Send more money now, we need a bigger computer as well. 😉
What we really need is for Julia Sligbat to be urgently fired from her job.
I think Julia can stop panicking now.
The sun’s out, temperatures are spring like, I’m off on holiday, and its even going to rain next week. Just another English April!
Must be global warming!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/
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.
===========================================================================
Snowless winters forecast for Wales as world warms up
30 Jun 2007 By Darren Devine
Former head of the Met Office Sir John Houghton, who is one of the UK’s leading authorities on climate change, said all the indicators suggest snowy winters will become increasingly rare.
He said, “Snowlines are going up in altitude all over the world. The idea that we will get less snow is absolutely in line with what we expect from global warming.”
Piers Corbyn, director of London-based forecasters WeatherAction, said the idea that snowfall would drop in Wales by 80% was “complete nonsense”.
He said that although between 1910 and 1998 global temperatures were rising, they had fallen for the last nine years.
“It’s complete nonsense and is not based on any scientific method or evidence. Since 1998 world temperatures have gone down and WILL CONTINUE TO DECLINE while carbon dioxide release has been accelerating during that period.”
SEEMS PIERS CORBYN GOT IT RIGHT IN 2007.
http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/snowless-winters-forecast-wales-world-2247457
Anthony, who complains of being harshly treated by his critics has a “moderation” policy that allows these through:
Seriously how often must a public sector employee fail in their job before being penalised?
And no one is firing these idiots, or laughing them off the planet.
Screw it. I give up. I’m old enough that I won’t see the worst results of their insanity anyway. Let ‘em drag the human race back into the Stone Age, and then extinction.
This is just speculation from somebody with a credibility of zero
Time to go Mrs. Slingo – your flatulent rambling; incoherent oratory, schoolgirl-like dire excuses, pseudo science and boneheaded adherence to a political fiction [CAGW] are becoming a tad tiresome, just bu88er off to somewhere where your bogus delphic climate divinations can inflict less damage to the British economy and what remains of our industrial base.
Maybe she’s just angling for an even-bigger computer.
Is her bonus linked to her BS quotient?
Julia Slingo knows that Tarot cards are much better than science. Why use science when it does not give you the answer you want. Why do a real PhD when the university will just give you an honorary one anyway.
the results of zombies like this dead beat speak for themselves.
My god; and this halfwit is their senior scientist. No wonder they are such a shambles. For crying out loud someone close that b”é””dy nest of vipers.
What the hell wouldn’t be the fault of global warming in the eyes of these fruit loops?
We should nickname Julia the ‘Red Queen’.
The world over, we need dedication to the truth and the presentation of evidence, not starlets waving a graph they just made up.
170,000 pounds per year + provision for retirement in keeping with the manner of her professional life + general overhead for her supercomputer, + secretaries, + personal travel to Bali, + a team of statisticians who really, really know how to run Excel and understand the word ‘significant’. This climate change parasite is costing the saps in the UK millions…and her only achievement is the death of a few thousand saps a year who cannot afford to heat their homes properly. But that is better than the alternative – no free money and conferences in warm places for Julia.
Slingo called for an urgent investigation. I think we know who should be investigated.
She she be now known as JuLiar Slingo from now on, the utter crap she spews is sickening.
So, despite being utterly incompetent and irresponsible, her job is safe.
Could you be any more illogical or unscientific ?
What does a “chief scientist” get a 30k bonus for? Showing up on time, counting on both hands? Perhaps it is based on some Wall Streetesque logarithm of performance based on how many suckers you can bamboozle.
There is so much money involved in this scam that Im very doubtful that the North Pole information is even true.. Their little playground where the only witnesses are the Inuit (promised huge sums of money to help them deal with the warming)..
BTW, she also was instrumental in starting the CO2 scam as one of her top ministers: Leon Britten stated in the “The Great Global Warming Swindle” . She opened the Met Office Hadley Climate Research Centre, where the above mentioned Ms Sling-ya-hook is currently chief climate propagandist.
She’s a twit.
Julia…what a muppet.
its just that I sweat heaps when I lie.”
Soon to be former Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo says: “I look forward to my forced retirement when UKIP is elected, as it will free up my days to research the most optimal placement for tinfoil around my cranium.”
Yes indeed Julia, your life will be well spent on that pursuit. Carry on…
Go now, Julia. (That’s two Julia’s who should go now)
The more I see people like Slingo blame everything on Global Warming the more I am convinced that there is some sort of mental illness at play, or ar least some sort of phobia.
Is it possible to sell your soul more than once, or is there a limit ?
So all we can do is point and laugh at the sheer stupidity..
Do people like her know just how silly they look?
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.
I always thought failure was a requirement for job retention. Apparently they think so too.
That’s why I label people like Slingo, Mann, and other “climate scientists” Catastrophic Anthropogenic Genocidal Warmistas.
It looks to me like Sligo is suggesting that somebody else should be doing her job.
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.
Feeding the public silly unscientific theories that have no empircial basis should be anathema to a true scientist.
Are these people for real, just desperate, or delusional?
Slingo must be fired without a pension for all the damage she has done to the UK and world.
They then give themselves Nobel prizes for being very good a cheating.
Idiot!
What a silly woman.
Slingo need to invest in an Ouija board.
What we really need is for Julia Sligbat to be urgently fired from her job.
Off topic?
Rubbish. How can commenting on the comments made and addressing the topic be off topic?
And yet Anthony has the gall to say he doesn’t censor comments. A lie.
[you stated that the position of this weblog was anti women, you based this on the comments of some posters here . . you have listed these comments without attribution in another comment . . I used OT in the hopes that you would moderate yourself and reduce your hyperbole regarding the whole blog . . why not do so instead of simply trying to smear the blog and Anthony? . . I have no intention to get into a debate with you, however saying Anthony has a censorship policy is incorrect however insulting all of the participants is unacceptable . . mod]
I think that paper is here.
Another theory is here
I do wonder what caused the past severe winters such as those of 1946–1947 and 1962–1963 when co2 was at the ‘safe’ limit? The UK winter of 1979 was also another bad one when Arctic seas ice extent was at its record level on the satellite record. WUWT?
Vince Causey says:
April 13, 2013 at 2:24 am (Edit)
I know it is fashionable to blame everything on GW Bush but I am afraid I have to disagree with you here. The deregulation of the banks, particularly with regard to mortgages was the brain child of W J Clinton. It was a scheme that would drive ever expanding economic activity using home equity. Blair and many others adopted the model and G W Bush certainly saw no problem with it. But problems there were and so 2008 happened.
The Bunker Hunt twins encountered the same problem while trying to corner the silver market. Eventually it costs more and more to get less and less. With the Bunker Hunts it was money for silver, with WJ Clinton and his acolytes and successors it was more and more risk for reducing returns. The rest, as they say, is history.
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.
John, it is frustration, we have a woman in charge of the Met Office gatting paid over £270,000 to do the job badly. Incompetence is not a strong enough term to describe all these freeloading warmists, who attribute warmth, cold, drought, floods to global warming. I am paying £1.38 a litre for unleaded, my energy bills for heating our home, have gone through the roof (forgive the pun) but we are lucky, because we have not died due to fuel poverty as many others have. I am paying a fortune to fly anywhere and we are threatened with power cuts, because our wonderful EU has told us that all fossil fuels have to be taxed and unreliable “green” energy is to be subsidised.
The science of AGW is not ony woeful, it cannot be debated because it’s proponents resort to insults and tell us it is settled, when it clearly isn’t. Even the basic science to combat it’s alleged effects is dodgy. telling us that electric cars are clean? What is clean about using a vehicle that takes electricity from the mains to charge the vehicle using a power source which is 97% fossil fuel based. Energy from chemical to heat to motion to electric to chemical to electric to motion. A petrol car uses chemical to heat to motion. A lot fewer stages of energy loss than for the green vehicle.
Where is the logic in shutting down a coal power station that provdes 10% of our electricity to turn it green by taking tons of wood, turning into sawdust, moulding it into pellets, transporting it to cargo ships and then sailing it across the Atlantic to be transported overland to be burned, to produce less power?
Wind turbines need to be in remote areas so roads have to be built to erect them and they each require 800 cubic metres of concrete to stop them toppling over. They only work wind the wind is blowing, but not too fast! The CO2 released in the building, erection and maintenance of these monstrosoties is not factored into the CO2 saved?
I am heartily sick of the whole scam, the idiots who perpetuate it and the politicians wno tax us because of it!
You did not allow my comment but allowed all those, which provide strong evidence of my assertion. Are you seriously going to claim that isn’t censorship? And how are those comments relevant to the scientific topic?
I don’t want or need to debate you. You are wrong.
The MET’s failings . which have lead to them longer making long or mid term forcasts public , can be laid at Slingo’s door. Addictited to fixed view point over AGW they proved unable to allow the date to speak for its self in the way real sceincetists should .
Yes but this is about her solution to the mystery, have the government fork over huge piles of cash to her office to line the pockets of scientists that believe in CAGW to explain it with poor science hidden from auditing.