Met Office Science Chief Attacked For Climate Claim
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. –Ben Jackson, The Sun, 11 April 2013
Bungling weather bosses predicted a drier than usual winter, it has emerged. The Met Office’s staggeringly inaccurate forecast was made at the end of November last year – just a month before the record-breaking deluge began. –Tom Newton Dunn, The Sun, 11 February 2014
The chief scientist of the Met Office has been criticised for claiming that “all the evidence” indicated climate change had played a role in the recent storms and flooding. Some scientists are said to be concerned that the remark has been interpreted as drawing a strong connection between climate change and the exceptional winter weather when the evidence is incomplete. Her speech came after the Prime Minister said he “very much suspected” that there was a link. “What Dame Julia says goes, at least by implication, beyond what most climate scientists are willing to say,” one academic said. “I find it very hard to look inside her mind as to what made her think that was a sensible thing to say.” –Oliver Moody, The Times, 18 February 2014
Instead of defending Julia Slingo’s statement on the floods the Met Office have defended the original report. This is very interesting: it seems that the Met Office is unable to come up with any defence of its chief scientist’s public statements. Yesterday I suggested that Slingo’s statement had misled the public. This clarification doesn’t seemed to have changed anything at all. It looks bad. Very bad. –Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 17 February 2014
A study by the Met Office and Centre for Ecology and Hydrology concluded that “it is not possible, yet, to give a definitive answer on whether climate change has been a contributor or not.” At the launch of the report, the Met Office chief scientist, Dame Julia Slingo, seemed to go a bit beyond what appeared in print. She said: “All the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change.” Not some of the evidence, but all of it. The Met Office scrambled to produce a statement to assert that there was no disagreement. It also confirmed the “uncertainty” about the storm track in the North Atlantic but did not address whether the chief scientist had gone beyond the conclusions of their own report. Does this leave us any wiser? No. In my experience scientists always disagree – that’s how research advances. –David Shukman¸BBC News, 18 February 2014
In the row over whether climate change is causing the current floods and storms, the sceptics are the ones who are sticking to the consensus, as set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — you know, the body that the alarm-mongers are always telling us to obey. And it is the sceptics who have been arguing for years for resilience and adaptation, rather than decarbonisation. While the green lobby has prioritised decarbonisation, sceptics have persistently advocated government spending on adaptation, so as to grab the benefits of climate change but avoid the harm, and be ready for cooling as well if the sun goes into a funk. –Matt Ridley, The Times, 17 February 2014
Most of the climate sceptics operate on self-employed shoestrings and cost you nothing: Andrew Montford, David Holland, Nic Lewis, Doug Keenan, Paul Homewood, Fay Kelly-Tuncay. There is only one professional sceptic in the entire country — Benny Peiser — and he is not paid by the taxpayer. –Matt Ridley, The Times, 17 February 2014
Extreme weather events being taken as signs for the coming end unless sinful ways are repented is as old as civilization. Today’s climate panic is merely just the latest relapse to a very old mental disorder that has afflicted mankind for thousands of years. The only antidote is reason and knowledge. –Pierre Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, 17 February 2014
This Newsbytes is from The GWPF and Dr. Benny Peiser
I saw that Met Office forecast at the time, and a few weeks ago tried to recover it but couldn’t find it — frustrating! Their record of haplessness is astounding — you couldn’t achieve such futility if you tried with supercomputers, but they did.
dbstealey says:
February 18, 2014 at 10:45 am
and
dbstealey says:
February 18, 2014 at 10:56 am
*
Thank you.
You are right, of course. The blinkers are well and truly off for most people now, not just some. The alarmists in their tight little clusters turn a blind eye, award themselves money and shiny things and trip off to sunny wherever to pretend everyone is following them after all and think of them as heroes. They are glimpsing discord, but close their eyes and repeat the mantra – it worked so well before. If they can just convince the people that they have won… then they have won, they just have to say it often enough. So they ignore or belittle everything that contradicts them, especially the facts.
For many of them, the crash that’s coming will be brutal.
I am pleased to see that the BBC’s Shukman, who was for many years a cheerleader for AGW, is now hedging his bets and looking at and presenting both sides of the argument. I get the feeling that many commentators are starting to become embarrassed by their tunnel vision and are now starting the process of subtle repositioning which is affording them a broader view.
Mardler says:
February 18, 2014 at 10:26 am
I’m afraid Slingo et al are proof that the game is won.
We lost
100% correct. Think about it. If their chief scientist can get away with utter crap like that without being challenged in any way shape or form then how the hell do we think we are going to persuade the 99% numpties to go along with our science.
dbstealey says:
February 18, 2014 at 10:45 am
Exactly! And never, ever miss an opportunity to point out the Met Office’s batting average for weather forecasting is around 0.000. A chimp with a dart board could make better predictions.
Make these clowns stand on their record!
They are WRONG nearly all of the time!
The climate is changing, because the sun falls asleep since 2005. This is normal. It was already in history.
Peter Plail says:
February 18, 2014 at 11:53 am
I am pleased to see that the BBC’s Shukman, who was for many years a cheerleader for AGW, is now hedging his bets
What BBC are you watching. Be careful. While Shukman is pretending to know what he is talking about the wanderer Palab Ghosh is out smacking the BBC travel card (£10 million last year) preaching the AGW meme. The BBC has no intention whatever of changing their sermons and I’m not even sure they are able to without a complete change of personnel from the top down and that just is not going to happen.
They know they can continue to win this discussion. You can’t talk to Barry Oblarny or Cameron they can.
What I find truly depressing is that MSM can publish the statement that the Met Office’s super duper new models can better analyze weather events and quote its Chief Shaman as stating that the global warming was responsible for the floods without pointing out that the Met Office had forecast a dry winter. Did they not use their super duper model when they made that forecast, or had their Chief Shaman not yet prophecised that global warming would lead to floods.
Through the end of September 2008, the sun was “spotless” on 200 days of the year. Not a single sunspot flared up on those days. The Earth’s reaction to this period has been dramatic and directly observed for the first time. In addition to observing the nearly clockwork response to coronal holes opening up on the sun’s surface, SABER has also observed the Earth’s upper atmosphere’s muted response to the sun’s lull – one of its quietest periods in half a century.
SABER, operating since 2002, has been approved for four more years of operation, which should allow for a critical 11-year data set. That would cover the radiative activity of Earth’s upper atmosphere for the entirety of an 11-year solar cycle.
In addition to the “breathing,” the atmosphere’s response to the sun’s sometimes furious, sometimes-quiet activity has surprised Mlynczak in a number of ways.
In the quiet solar year of 2008, for instance, the upper atmosphere’s ultraviolet radiation emissions have dipped to levels 10 times lower than when SABER’s observations began in 2002. At the same time, SABER detects far more short-term changes in solar activity than previously thought.
“It looks noisy,” Mlynczak said. “But it’s not statistical noise, it’s not instrument noise. It’s geophysical noise.”
SABER also spots massive spikes in energy flow that rise and then dissipate quickly. The atmosphere, it turns out, can dump radiation into space extremely efficiently to respond to a burst of solar activity and maintain Earth’s radiation budget.
Kozyra has been fascinated by the role the sun continues to play in Earth’s upper atmosphere even during one of the quietest solar periods in centuries. She expected that this solar minimum would allow for study of how the troposphere influences the rest of the upper atmosphere without solar interference.
“What we actually found was that it didn’t happen. We were seeing the atmosphere was being very strongly driven by the sun,” Kozyra said. “That’s very surprising. We’re learning more about what space weather looks like, and it wasn’t what we thought.”
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/AGU-SABER.html
After i read this post, i change my thing about the climate, and now i gonna change my actions to help the problems with climate and the world, the dry is not good
Was Adam Smith really from that place or just an exile from it?
Well, it’s not like weather changes from year to year. This uptrend of extremes sure has come a long way since just last year. Here is the Met Office annual summary for 2013 to be found at:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/2013/annual
“The following represents a provisional assessment of the weather experienced across the UK during 2013 and how it compares with the 1981 to 2010 average.
The annual statistics for 2013 are generally near average and unremarkable. However, there were some significant weather events through the year. A late winter and exceptionally cold spring, with unseasonably late snowfalls, lead into a warm and sunny summer. October and December saw Atlantic storms that brought rain and at times very high winds, causing widespread disruption.
The UK mean temperature of 8.8 °C was 0.1 °C below the 1981-2010 average. This is identical to the 2012 value. March was the equal second coldest March for the UK on record. Both March and spring overall were the coldest since 1962. In contrast July was the third warmest in the series and it was the warmest summer since 2006. The July heat-wave was in marked contrast to the run of recent poor summers from 2007 to 2012.
The UK annual rainfall total was 1086 mm (94% of average), drier than average but not exceptionally so. May, October, and December were the only months to record above average rainfall for the UK. In both October and December, some parts of the UK received over twice the normal amount of rainfall for the month, and it was the wettest December on record for Scotland.
Overall it was a sunnier than average year (104 %), but again not exceptionally so. It was the sunniest July since 2006 and the third sunniest July in the series from 1929.”
Make these clowns stand on their record!
They are WRONG nearly all of the time!
YES we know but how many times in the last five years have you read or heard the MSM mention their utterly useless seasonal forecast. How many time has the MSM challenged their monthly forecasts. For crying out loud it isn’t difficult. They have failed at every forecast. Dry summers are wet summers, dry winters are wet winters, warm springs are cold springs but they have never been challenged by anyone in the public eye or MSM. They claim to make their seasonal forecasts with the same climate model as they use to advise government policy. Prof Betts needs this model to keep his job. He preaches to students how wonderful and accurate these models are and YET ……
No global warming for many years and therefore without climate change there is nothing different that can be blamed on weather since the late 1990s. What has changed now compared over the past decade+? The answer is nothing to do with warming and if the warming period prior this had caused these weather changes, then they would have occurred 20+ years ago not now.
Blaming the jet stream moving into a more southerly position and very cold air moving south into the North Atlantic, has got nothing to do with global warming and the nonsense alarmist term climate change. This behavior of the jet stream is opposite to what a warming world in alarmist theory fairy land should be. Julia Slingo blames everything on global warming because she cant back it up with science. Talk is cheap scientific evidence is everything, but over recent years the primary role for the chief scientist is environmentalist propaganda.. If it had been medieval times Julie SIngo would had been blaming it on a local girl/lady near her. (the witch did it)
Fear the coming climate stagnation! Man’s insistence on remaining addicted to fossil fuels inevitably enhances the greenhouse effect thereby reducing temperature differentials spatially and temporally. Temperature differentials drive weather dynamics; therefore the weather will become more stagnant. Less hurricanes, tornadoes, summer breezes, thunderstorms, trade winds, monsoons, rain, currents, rivers, etc. will drive civilization to collapse and threatens the very survival of 90% of all species on earth that depend on dynamic weather for their livelihood. The end is nigh! Repent now! Denounce fossil fuels! Reduce your carbon footprint before it’s too late! Think of the grandchildren!
(/sarc)
David L. says:
February 18, 2014 at 10:46 am
hunter says:
February 18, 2014 at 10:41 am
Mardler,
———————–
I hope you are right and Mardler is wrong, but I fear Mardler is right 🙁
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
They can only be right if you allow them to be right. You have the ability to choose. I choose happiness over depression; no matter what.
“Most of the climate sceptics operate on self-employed shoestrings and cost you nothing: Andrew Montford, David Holland, Nic Lewis, Doug Keenan, Paul Homewood, Fay Kelly-Tuncay. There is only one professional sceptic in the entire country — Benny Peiser — and he is not paid by the taxpayer. Matt Ridley, The Times, 17 February 2014”
This has perhaps been the case in the meteorology oriented public civil service, including academia. On the other hand, while AGW has been basking in generous public funding, necessary activities have been run on shoestring.
I cannot exclude that the most competent and ambitious peers have already started exposing the alarmists’ Potemkin villages. This would explain the last act of desperation from Met Office chief scientist Julia Slingo.
They really are an impressive bunch are they not—these quango queens The country is riddled with them.
It is a real pickle when you have only the term climate change for the answers to all variations in weather in short-, medium-, and long-term cycles. But I guess that does not hinder some unprofessional types riding on activists and settled policy types for support. Only the vague, disconnected user group suffers. Can you say tenure?
Isn’t it a bit unfair (& perhaps profane) to keep referring to the silly little gal as “Damn Julia Slingo”?
Oh. s/n/e… Err, never mind. Well, here in the old US (of A, not M) we have Article I Section 9 to fall back on.
Still, I’d like ol’ Damn Slingo to state conclusively that I will not be winning the lottery any time soon. Please?
In reply to:
Bungling weather bosses predicted a drier than usual winter, it has emerged. The Met Office’s staggeringly inaccurate forecast was made at the end of November last year – just a month before the record-breaking deluge began.
The chief scientist of the Met Office has been criticised for claiming that “all the evidence” indicated climate change had played a role in the recent storms and flooding. … ….Her speech came after the Prime Minister said he “very much suspected” that there was a link.
William:
‘all the evidence’ What evidence? When will the AGW madness end? Enough is enough.
The warmists will not discuss the observations and analysis that unequivocally disproves dangerous warming. Rather than scientific discussion concerning ‘climate change’ (past, present, and future that identifies key issues, includes data, graphs, analysis and so on) and a discussion of the costs and benefits of spending money on green scams, they resort to name calling and rhetoric propaganda, every weather events proves we must waste trillions of dollars on green scams.
John Kerry: “perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.”
Kerry described those who do not accept that human activity causes global warming as “shoddy scientists” and “extreme ideologues”. (Great, Kerry creates a strawman and then attacks the strawman. The issue is not any warming, it is dangerous warming.)
Kerry: “One of the arguments that we do hear is that it’s going to be too expensive to be able to address climate change… … Serious analysts understand that the costs of doing nothing far outweigh the costs of investing in solutions now. (The world has spent almost $2 trillion fighting the war on climate change. What is the benefit? Will there be an end to weather?) You do not need a degree in economics or a graduate degree in business in order to understand that the cost of flooding, the cost of drought, the cost of famine, the cost of health care, the cost of addressing this challenge is simply far less — the costs of addressing this challenge are far less than the costs of doing nothing.”
Meanwhile. the AMO plunges.
Climate science in the year 2014: make a prediction that turns out to be utterly wrong, ignore that and claim that the outcome is “because of climate change”. Added bonus: claim that you were never wrong about any of it.
David L. says: @ur momisugly February 18, 2014 at 10:46 am
I hope you are right and Mardler is wrong, but I fear Mardler is right 🙁
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Remember “They” own the regualr media but as the obvious more and more penetrate the brains of the Sheeple and thanks to the internet alternate views are available, they lose credibility that they will never regain.
Once the blind fold is off people start questioning a lot of other things. Foreclosuregate was a real eye-opener for many in the USA. We had a grass roots reaction – the T(ax) E(nough) A(lready) Party that made a major dent in the elections. So the comeback was the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement only they lost control of that and ended up passing Anti-Occupy Law to protect politicians from protesters.
Even before that The US government was running into trouble with trying to push people around and getting pushed back.
People are increasingly fed-up with BOTH political parties.
Other polls are showing the same thing. No longer can a party count on blind loyalty of voters. Now they have to be convinced and thanks to the internet the propaganda is working less and less.
We saw that in Canada and Australia we are seeing that in the UK ans well as the USA.
The chief scientist of the Met Office has been criticised for claiming that “all the evidence” indicated climate change had played a role in the recent storms and flooding.
Henry says
Actually the chief scientist isn’t even wrong
The climate is changing, naturally, as I found:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/
We are currently globally cooling from the top down
as my results from Alaska
http://oi40.tinypic.com/2ql5zq8.jpg
and ice from Antarctica are showing
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/22/nasa-announces-new-record-growth-of-antarctic-sea-ice-extent/#more-96133
We already SEE the results of this global cooling
As the temp. differential between the equator and the poles grow, we will have more rain around the equator (flooding in Brazil, Indonesia, Philipines) and the jets are staying further south (flooding of England). Anyone with a brain can predict what will happen next. There will simply be less moisture around to go to the higher latitudes….that means droughts. We will have serious droughts coming up soon. In fact I calculated that the dust bowl drought of 1932-1939 will be back on the Great Plains from 2021-2028.
So, if we could just get everybody off their CO2 warmed horses, we might actually prevent a greater disaster, by getting the farmers to all move south, to Africa and South America, where there is more rain and warmth during a global cooling period.
Or you can also stay in England and enjoy the bad weather…