Guest essay by Eric Worrall
There’s been a lot of fuss in green leaning news outlets, that we have breached the 1C threshold, and we are halfway to the precipice of Climageddon.
For example, according to the government supported climate alarmist BBC;
Global temperatures are set to rise more than one degree above pre-industrial levels according to the UK’s Met Office.
Figures from January to September this year are already 1.02C above the average between 1850 and 1900. If temperatures remain as predicted, 2015 will be the first year to breach this key threshold.
The world would then be half way towards 2C, the gateway to dangerous warming.
The new data is certain to add urgency to political negotiations in Paris later this month aimed at securing a new global climate treaty.
Difficult to measure
For researchers, confusion about the true level of temperatures in the 1750s, when the industrial revolution began and fossil fuels became widely used, means that an accurate assessment of the amount the world has warmed since then is very difficult.
To get over this problem, the Met Office use an average of the temperatures recorded between 1850 and 1900, which they argue makes their analysis more accurate.
…
Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34763036
Leaving aside the questionable methods of some of the world’s temperature estimates, my big question is – So what?
Just like the big noise about breaching 400ppm CO2 for the first time, this is a big deal about nothing. There is a distinct lack of extreme weather, when compared to the historical record. Crop yields are at an all time high, thanks to CO2 fertilisation. Arctic sea ice has proven to be embarrassingly resilient. And of course, lets not mention the Antarctic.
Climate alarmists can’t even produce a genuine climate refugee. Greens tried really hard, but the climate refugee case fell apart when real courts reviewed their “evidence”.
So why does the BBC, which was once the gold standard for honest reporting, stoop to what is in my opinion such sloppy partisanship? I have a theory. I believe the BBC are in a lot of trouble, and are desperate to maintain a perception of their legitimacy, in a world which has moved beyond needing their services.
The BBC is funded by a compulsory subscription. Unlike TV networks in most parts of the world, if you don’t pay your BBC license fee, people come round with clipboards, armed with extraordinary legislated powers to enter your property without a warrant, to look for televisions. Even if you don’t watch the BBC, in Britain, if you own a television, you are supposed to pay a compulsory TV license fee, to fund the BBC. The license fee might only be a few hundred dollars per year – but for poor people in Britain, already struggling with skyrocketing energy and food prices, in no small part caused by Britain’s climate insanity, this is now a real issue.
There is a growing community backlash against the BBC’s funding model, and some of the alleged bully tactics used by license fee collectors, extracting a few precious pounds of savings from the poorest people in Britain.
If the BBC can’t continue to demonstrate their relevance, within a few years they will be finished. Top level British government ministers are already talking about scrapping the license fee. Stripped of their compulsory, government enforced license fee, the BBC’s top heavy pyramid of well paid middle managers will likely topple under the pressure of real commercial competition.
So the BBC have to stay relevant, they have to provide a service which ensures their continued support from Britain’s political establishment. I think you can see what strategy I believe the BBC chose, to ensure their continued “relevance”.
To much attention is being paid to the thermometer and what it shows apart from the fact that taking the temperature of the whole surface of the earth at any specific time and arriving at 1 figure is ridiculous .
A better approach would be if there is AGW and it is affecting the earth right now what is the evidence for this ie in what we actually “feel” “see” of what has been predicted by the warmists over the last 20 years or so.
1/ Are the seas rising ? Yes but very slowly and below “Normal” Not affecting any population on Earth.
2/ Do we feel hotter during “Hot” weather? . Nahh! not really , 1year is different to the next , Like “Normal”
Some places have “Heatwaves” which history shows are quite normal .
2A/ Do we feel “warmer” during winter : Yes , sometimes , up and down . Some winters very cold ,lots a frost, other winters not so cold ,just a few frosts, this winter very cold and also days were very cold , unusual !
3/ Are there mores storms,hurricanes,typhoons , tornados etc ?. No ! In fact they have dropped below “Normal” for the last 10 years or so.
4/Is the arctic or the Antarctic shrinking or melting ? Well the Arctic did for a while diminish but has come back and is just below “Normal” again. The Antarctic has actually got colder and grown in total Ice volume considerably .
5/Are polar bears dying out ? Hardly , they have tripled in number over the last 10-15 years and have actually become a tolerated pest in the arctic , especially to the oil companies .
6/ Has snow disappeared especially in England and central US as predicted ? No! , I wish , in fact over the last 4 winters snow has become a major problem to many cities and countries around the world and seems to be coming earlier and earlier every year and deeper and deeper .
7/ Are deserts increasing in area? No ! Quite the opposite , some say the increase in CO2 has actually decreased the size of some deserts around the world by allowing for more prolific plant growth .
8/ Are food crops becoming untenable in some areas ? No ! Same as for deserts , some scientists are saying that the earths plants may actually be “starving” for more CO2 , the CO2 level in our atmosphere maybe to low for optimum plant growth. The increase in CO2 concentration has pointed to this over the last 10 years or so with an increase in the rate of plant growth .
9/ Has the increase in CO2 levels in the atmosphere lead to any recognizable outcome that I can see and feel over the last 40 odd years . Only one I see or feel over my lifetime and that is slightly warmer winters (less frosts) since 1970 or so but that I think is slowly coming to a halt and now reversing , 2 winters ago we had 17 frosts , thats a lot for where I live . And again this winter was very different , cold , 10-12 frosts , but unusually very cold air during the day after a frost, usually after a frost the sun comes out and warms us up but no .
9 November 2015 – Met Office data for 2015 so far shows that, for the first time, global mean temperature at the Earth’s surface is set to reach 1 °C above pre-industrial levels
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/release/archive/2015/one-degree
For the first time ever? Really?
The NOAA and the Met Office are rapidly losing whatever credibility they had left after their latest temperature adjustment.
I suggest we do not add to their credibility by accepting any of this 1.0C non-sense.
This is not based on thermometer readings but is strictly sourced from some suped-up adjustment algorithm database stored on a computer in a random office at the NCDC. You are not allowed in this room to see how this algorithm works. Your role is only to repeat the values it generates to as wide an audience as possible so that others continue to believe in and genuflect in front of the climate scientists and their out-of-date 1979 theory about global warming.
I would question some of the points relating to the BBC made in the article. The BBC has become institutionally left wing over the last few decades. It is often described as the TV station for the Guardian newspaper – an uninformative, loss-making paper with declining copies and loved by the left for its ‘right on’ stance. The BBC probably buys more copies of the Guardian than anyone else and its news coverage seems to match the paper. Get seen with a copy of the Daily Mail at the BBC and you will most likely be escorted from the building.
As regards the licence – you only need one to watch or record broadcast tv. With the blurring of device capability, you can now watch catch-up services on your tv or from your tv box via an internet connection. Smart TVs are a form of PC now that function with no aerial or satellite connection. Licence chasers are not able to enter your property without a warrant from a court. Granting of these is extremely rare. It is a criminal offence not to have a licence if needed and you can be gaoled for non-payment of any fine if caught. Most people incriminate themselves by having the tv on and viewable when visited.
The BBC also only use to advertise job vacancies in that paper.
Your 2nd para is a little unclear. The trigger is watching (or recording) TV (even if that is not BBC channel programme material) that is simultaneously being broadcast live over the airways. The device used to watch or record does not have to be a TV, it does not need to have any monitor.
How live is live is not clear, but probably there needs to be a time delay of many minutes, and perhaps even an hour or so. For example, if a football game is being streamed on some catch-up service, and you are watching the start of the game, whilst in real time over the air broadcast, the game is running towards its end, say it is in the 88th minute, the Authorities may still be able to claim that you are watching live broadcast material notwithstanding the time delay. I am unaware of any legal authority on the point.
As you say, most people incriminate themselves, and this is often by the answers that they give to the inspectors.
The licence fee should be withdrawn, and the BBC should become a subscription channel. People should be free to watch TV, without payment of any subscription charges, of channels that raise their revenue by advertising, or if one pays a cable/satellite provider for the cable/satellite channels.
It is morally wrong to force people to pay a political donation to a political party (and the BBC is a political party just not one that has been elected) that they do not endorse, and whose views they may strongly disagree with, possibly even finding them offensive.
“Gerry, England
November 14, 2015 at 3:26 am
As regards the licence – you only need one to watch or record broadcast tv.”
Any LIVE broadcast, radio or TV. And has been since 1922. And now ANY device too. No need for a TV for the “law” to be applied. I used to tell ’em to poke it. Some 200,000 people are convicted each year for “licence evasion”, and some 1000 or so actually go to jail.
Granting of these is ex Licence chasers are not able to enter your property without a warrant from a court. Granting of these is extremely rare.
That is not true. TV search warrants are granted automatically at the request of the TV licence company. I had a policeman and two TV licence gorrillas arrive on my doorstep, despite the TV licence people having told me I would not be bothered in future. (I had a collection of non-working 405 line TV’s – obsolete British TV standard.)
In the end they sent me a cheque of around £200 compensation. (not sure of the exact figure without looking it up back home)
Its called a statutory right of entry. No warrant needed. Ester Ransen (Sp?) did an excellent skit on TV in her show in the 70’s.
You omitted to point out the hockey stick rise in global terrorism brought about by rising CO2.
I can certainly see a dramatic increase in this post the 1970s and as you know, Climate scientists frequently confuse correlation with causation.
I am sorry if such a sarcastic comment is inappropriate in the light of the recent Paris attacks, but we all know that there are no limits to the demon CO2, and of course many have linked the rising tensions and fighting in the Middle East with Climate Change (one well known singer, Charlotte Church, holds the view that Climate change has caused the war in Syria and the mass exodus and migration from that country).
Yea , right .
We knew the global mean temperature to 0.03% accuracy a century and a half ago .
I believe it’s fair to say we don’t even know it now, much less a century and a half ago. Putting a 1/100ths degree precision on a value like that is just absurd. Well, maybe 1/10ths is absurd, 1/100ths is downright offensive.
It’s really my biggest beef with the state of climate research, this radical overstatement of accuracy and precision, especially in data sets taken before the invention of the telegraph. Never mind the instruments weren’t calibrated and the scales were difficult to read, the data were aggregated using sailing ships and horse drawn carriages then manually transcribed by scriveners and clerks. There are all sorts of places errors can be made without even discussing the instruments used. It’s absolutely crazy to talk about .01 or even .1 degree precision. Completely unbelievable. I can’t understand why they make the claims, they discredit their work before they’re finished writing.
And then we have the paleo record…
The painful truth is that, if they were honest then they’d admit that the realistic error bars are bigger than the warming that they show since then.
But that would be too painful an admission so they go on ignoring massive sources of potential systematic errors. Ignoring some simply because they are in the unknown unknown category. Especially in relation to 19th century SST’s. It’s a massive guessing game. Who did what, when, where with what. Like a very boring murder/mystery. In which you have to infill much of the events due to poor coverage!!!
We certainly do not know the average temperature of this planet to +/- 1 degC. It probably could be anything between 13 to 17 degC.
But even the land based thermometer anomaly data set is useless since it is composed of data from a continually altering data set, so that one is never, at any given time, comparing apples with apples. in the 1880s there were only a few hundred stations which were used to collect data, in the 1960s this peaked at somewhat less than 6,000, and today there are approximately 2,500 stations being used to compile the anomaly period..
When one looks at this data set, one is not assessing how the anomaly as from 1880 has changed, since we are not today using the precise same weather monitoring stations as the source of data that was used to compile the 1880 figure. We are not today making a comparison between the 1880 station data.
It is akin to trying to ascertain whether there has been any change in the height of US males by looking at their average height as obtained from measurements taken in 1880 in the USA, and then adding in say Dutch men as measured in Holland in 1920, then German men as measured in Germany in 1940, and then adding in Scandinavian men as measured in Sweden 1960 and Adding in Norwegian men measured in Norway in 1980, and then in 2000 getting rid of all the measurements of Scandinavian men, but including the measurements of Italian men measured in Italy.
A data set that is based upon such a movable feast of underlying observational data, is useless since no comparison is being made with changes occurring from the same observational data set. It is not at all scientific, and is wholly meaningless for reasons which Richard Courtney often explains.
I feel the same. I am deeply suspicious of the comfort that some seem to obtain by applying complex analytical technique to a variety of data set with unknown systematic bias.
Without any reference point. Without any calibration then we don’t know what these old station data sets and SST records are telling us.
So many assumptions have been stacked up over time.
The assumptions now seem to lie hidden behind a vast edifice of illusory statistical precision.
I’m especially bothered by the assumptions that went into bucket SST analysis.
I was genuinely shocked when I went back and read the contents some of the early papers on SST’s and SST error assessments. It seemed like craziness to suggest that anything vaguely like 1 degree accuracy could be pulled out of that particular mess!!!
Most of the public have no idea just how flimsy this whole thing is.
From the article:
“So why does the BBC, which was once the gold standard for honest reporting, stoop to what is in my opinion such sloppy partisanship?”
My parents during WWII in Holland (as many did in those days all over occupied Europe) told me how they “staked their lives” on the BBC.
What the heck happened?
Anyone know if the Central England Temperature record is having its modern period jacked up by the Met Office or are they just leaving it as a heritage, un”homogenized data set? It would be a terrible tragedy if they are fiddling with it. It would be like painting a wristwatch and diamond earings on the Mona Lisa. For such a venerable series, there should be a court officer or independent, non British observer to validate the readings.
Tonyb (Climatereason) is the man to ask. He is an expert on CET and is making a reconstruction of it based upon historical records. From some of his comments, I gain the impression that whilst there are some homogenisation/adjustments to the series, these appear more reasonable, and do not particularly concern him. But that is just my recollection and impression.
he posted an interesting article on Dr Curry’s blog some years ago. This is well worth a read in which he notes that there is a warming trend in CET going back to 1658.
See: http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
I recall from his reconstruction, and from historical record, that the warmest decade in Central England (not including the MWP) is the 1530s/40s, and I recall making a comment to him, some years back, noting that when I watched the Tudors (it was a repeat of a series that ran for 4 series between 2007 & 2010) covering the short marriage between King Henry VIII to Catherine Howard, it was historically accurate in that it included some scenes depicting how unbearably hot it was, and without rain. I recall that there was a scene where Catherine Howard and her ladies in waiting dance in the rain, and splash around in the mud when the rains finally come (this was 1540 or 1541; she was executed in early 1542)..
He has some wider reconstructions of data from a much larger area, which again is well worth looking at.
See: http://climatereason.com/LittleIceAgeThermometers/
One cannot begin to understand Climate until one gets a proper perspective of what the Climate of a region is not over some short arbitrary period such as 30 years but rather over centennial, or multicentenial period. Since there is strong evidence of a ~1000 year cycle, possibly over millennia. I have made a number of comments above about Climate and what this is and you might like to have a quick look at them
If you started counting about 15,000 years ago when my Michigan USA property was under a mile or two of ice, is it not true that there has already been well OVER 2 degrees C. of warming (perhaps +6 to +10 degrees C.? … which melted a lot of the ice … and now I can get around the neighborhood without ice skates.
Here they go again…….
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34800829
Subtract out the non-GHG radiative imbalance component and it makes things interesting. I’d be quite surprised if the actual GHG radiative imbalance component ever exceeds 2 deg C. It may not even exceed 1.5 deg C when all is said and done. At some point the GHG radiative imbalance component will peak and start to decline. Eventually a noise floor will be reached where all remaining warming is other non-GHG radiative imbalance components. With peak population having been reached and barring further significant increases in surface/near surface thermal flux, albedo mods, etc, even that noise floor will begin to decrease along with population. Then, Mother Nature takes over again. End of Interglacial, here we come!