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.
All GCMs project decreases of sea level pressure for the twenty-first century over essentially the entire Arctic, attributing very negative Arctic Oscillator conditions to reductions in ice extent is in full contradiction of that.
It is not hard to see that daily UK temperatures:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/download.html
and the jet latitude:
http://squall.sfsu.edu/scripts/nhemjet_archloop.html
change *before* ice extent does, like the late March 2010 increase in ice extent and the earlier (~7days) increase in UK temperatures.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_ext.png
or the drop in ice extent in April 2008, that’s about a week after UK temperatures dropped.
The warming from mid Feb 2010 UK+Europe is again ahead of the ice extent recovery.
Ulric Lyons says:
April 13, 2013 at 12:47 pm
Typo.. The warming from mid Feb *2012* UK+Europe is again ahead of the ice extent recovery.
Uric Lyons
Your comments could be right and interesting. It is my belief that regardless of who makes these misleading comments about what is behind our current climate , it is important that these questionable comments should be challenged each and every time that they are spoken by these individuals , other wise if they remain unchallenged, they may be perceived as the truth. I think it was Confucius who said that a lie told a thousand times can become the truth soon. There are people who read this blog who will soon realize, that if they accept these untruths and do nothing about them, they have no one to blame but themselves for not speaking up when the debate was taking place. As more and more people in UK speak up, change will happen sooner or later.
Mrs Thatcher closed coal mines because they were draining the country and producing poor quality coal – the same reasons given by the previous Labour government for closing some 300 coal mines. There is a lot of hypocracy around.
If lack of arctic ice caused the cold, then, as the arctic ice reformed during the winter, the effect would weaken. In actual fact, the winter got worse as the ice reformed.
Of course, Julia Slingo can just make up some new excuse. In a way it is like being hauled before the headmaster, and asked to come up with explanation for being somewhere you were not suppose to be. (In my own case I was suppose to explain why, when I was suppose to walk from an all-boy school to a store to buy pens and paper, I was seen far from my official route, at an all-girl school.)
It is amazing the bull the mind can come up with, in the stress of such situations.
(In my own case the headmaster knew what I was up to, however I assumed he was a complete fool. I cringe slightly, thinking how stupid I must have looked, avoiding truth and instead coming up with the most ingenious reasons for “just happening” to be passing the all-girl school.)
In the same way, Julia will someday cringe. However right now she assumes we are complete fools.
Margaret Smith:
Your post at April 13, 2013 at 4:54 pm says
Pål Brekke says:
April 12, 2013 at 12:15 pm
So aks them what caused the cold winters in the 60s and 80s???
——————–
That was when the weather was normal, now it is not normal. You see, CO2 goes into the atmosphere and really messes the weather up. In the 60’s and 80’s there wasn’t much CO2 about so that weather was normal. Now there is a lot of CO2 up there it not normal so it is global warming what else could it be ?
Got it ?
/sarc
Just a thought here – on BBC’s propoganda show,Countryfile, they are now comparing temperatures only back as far as 1910….. The meteoroligist in the Telegraph, Philip Eden, questioned this with the Met. Their response was that this is only for public consumption. The Met itself uses longer term figures! As the Scots say: Ay! Right!
It is said that public servants rise to their level of incompetence … Slingo has been quite successful in that regard. I can only assume that, like our Flannery clown here in Australia, the UK government needed a climate clown to do its bidding take the fall when the music stops.
Caleb says:
“In actual fact, the winter got worse as the ice reformed.”
I don’t think so, the most obvious recovery is at the end of Feb into early March, that was a warmer period in the UK. The ice reduces again slightly in the colder part of March, than recovers as it warmed early April. If March had been much warmer, the ice extent would up where it was in March 2012.
http://arctic-roos.org/observations/satellite-data/sea-ice/observation_images/ssmi1_ice_ext.png
http://www.weatheronline.co.uk/cgi-bin/klibild?WMO=03522&ZEITRAUM=08&ZEIT=13042013&ART=MAX&LANG=en&1365939478&ZUGRIFF=NORMAL&MD5=
Wow! I didn’t think this cross post would attract such attention.I wrote to Paul after I did some number crunching on Excel with the CET figures, he kindly credits me on his original post. It showed just how ordinary our recent 4 years of winter was, yet Slingo seems to be panicking. It really annoys me when we get the wrong information, or rather information skewed one way or another.We get the headlines that say coldest March since whenever but again look at CET and there were plenty of colder temperatures for March than our recent UK temperature.
Prof Slingo and some bloggers here seem to be implying that there is something wrong with the UK weather with last 5 -6 colder winters . The only thing that seems wrong is the MetOffice predictions for warmer winters and the CRU forecast of disappearing snow. There were similar multi year cold spells around 1917, 1929,1940,1947, 1963, 1979, just to name a few The Met office own graphs show the mean winter temperature to be mostly below the 1981-2010 averages from 1927 to 1987. Uk got spoiled by the warm spell between 1987 and 2007 which happened previously around 1910-1930
So it is quite normal for UK to have cold winters at least half the time and sometime even longer . Prior to about 1860, the winters were cold for at least a hundred years in a row. The cold winters are returning because, the solar cycle has been declining since 2000, the global oceans SST is declining, .Arctic Oscillation is mostly negative, there are more frequent SSW events and the jet stream pattern is changing. We are experiencing the pattern of 1880-1910 when we had similar situation with three low solar cycles and cooling oceans. That is why many of the winter records of this year are comparable to those about a100 years ago. The future trend of UK winters will most likely be cooler winters like the pattern of 1880-1910. It does not mean that every winter will be cold but the overall trend is more likely to be cooler than warmer
herkimer
I am regularly forecasting these deviations in land temperatures and jet stream position from solar factors, at very long range. So it seemed sensible to me that ice extent would be altered *after* the short term solar impact on the AO/NAO and jet stream position.
I think many of you haven’t thought this through. Slingo should have her employment renewed for 5 years, and her bonus doubled. It will take many more idiotic comments like hers, to bring the religion of AGW to its knees and ultimate death. We need more like Slingo, shovel in hand, to dig this grave, and finally bury the ACG monster. She’s her own worst enemy.
It’s hard to be patient, but science and mother nature are quickly debunking the theory of AGW, and we will once again call “climate change” just “weather”. Science will always triumph over speculation and conjecture.
The attched statistics below might put the Uk winters in a clearer perspective.
During the last two decades 1990-2010 there were only 6 winters[30%] below the 1981-2010 average winter temperature of 3.8 C for all areas of UK . During the 100 year period 1910-2013 there were 58 winters . [58 % ] During the last cold spell period of 1962-1987, a period of 26 years ,there were 19 winters [73%] So typically colder winters are part of the UK climate not just global warming . There have been 41 winters since 1910 colder than the 3.31 C the average temperature the last 2012/2013 winter in UK
So when Prof Slingo says “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. ” the something that she refers to is more correctly in my opinion a return to Uk typical winter flucuations and not the global warming winters that she perhaps predicts .These colder winter periods 1880-1910, 1962-1987 and again post 2007 happen when solar cycles are low , global SST are declining , AO is mostly negative and there are fewer strong climate altering El NINOS. These are further supplemented by volcanic eruptions ,sudden stratospheric warming, jet stream changesdipping further south and blocking, all of which can lower the winter temperaures further regionally when they occur
The general public here in the UK mostly has sufficient common sense to shrug their shoulders at the nonsense spouted by the Met Office. But our politicians these days are sadly deficient in that quality – and many of them on the make from green policies.
This is why it is so important to expose the lies and obfuscations from the likes of Sligo: politicians in need of taxes and climatologists in need of grants form an impenetrable loop
It seems to me that Scientist are graying the edges of research/facts to borrow from religion and ask us to trust their conclusions based on faith. Science is not hit or miss and so far, global warming theorist devise a reason to solve mysteries like exceptionally cold winters vs explaining them with fact. So, until they have their facts straight, I’ll just shrug it off as a green machine gone wild.
“In a new report entitled “Why was the start to spring 2013 so cold?,” the chief of the UK MET Office now admits that decreased Arctic sea ice or “Arctic amplification” was not responsible for the unusually cold spring 2013 in Europe..”
http://www.thegwpf.org/met-office-admits-arctic-sea-ice-cold-winter/