From Not A Lot Of People Know That
JANUARY 2, 2021
By Paul Homewood
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/index.html
The annual data for 2020 has now been published for the CET, with the mean temperature ending up at 10.76C.
No doubt we will get the usual hysteria from the Met Office about the “third warmest year on record”, “nine of the ten warmest years since 1990”, blah, blah!
However this will be no more than an attempt to cover up the highly inconvenient truth, which is that warming stopped in 2006. The 10-year running average shows this clearly.
We can get a clearer picture of this by zooming in on the period since 1991. The 10-year average rose slowly during the 1990s and early 2000s. But since then they have gradually declined, having reached the peak for the 1997 to 2006 period:
Which all leads us around to the question of what is the “normal” climate for England?
The Met Office would say this is the 30-year average, but this is only an artificial construct for convenience. Currently the 10-year average on CET is 10.40C, which is barely above the 1991-2020 average of 10.25C. The difference is well within any margin of natural variation.
After all, annual temperatures rose from 8.86C in 2010, to 10.72C the following year, purely because of variations in “weather”.
The chart below, which plots the highest and lowest monthly mean temperatures for each month since 1991, shows just how variable English weather can be:
If the “hottest” months all occurred in the same year, the annual mean would be 12.8C. And if the same applied to the “coldest” months, the annual mean would be 7.3C.
The next chart shows this range, when overlaid on the actual annual temperatures:
Although such an eventuality may be exceedingly unlikely statistically, I see no reason meteorologically why it should not be possible.
To sum up, the idea that there is a “normal” annual temperature, or for that matter climate, in England is unscientific. Indeed, it is no more scientific than a claim that there is “normal” weather here.
What still dominates English “climate” is the variability of its weather, on a day-to-day, month-to-month, and even year-to-year basis. Any underlying climatic trends are drowned out in the noise.
According to the CET, annual temperatures rose by about 0.7C between the 1940s and 2000s. But how much of this was related to the underlying climatic conditions, and how much was due to weather?
Perhaps the best clue we have is to compare the warmest years. Whilst 2014 was the hottest at 10.95C, the year of 1949 was not far behind with 10.65C. Go back further, and we see years such as 1733, 1779 and 1834, all above 10.4C.
This suggests that most of the warming seen in the last three decades is related to weather, rather than climate change.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/mly_cet_mean_sort.txt
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Downloaded CET monthly from MET
If you go from 1997 – 2020, leaving off the January (coldest month at both ends so you don’t have a mis-matched cycle….. we don’t have January 2021 yet)
you get this….
If we look at yearly averages, rather than 10 year running mean, we see the jump at the end actually happened in 1988.
Would be interesting to know what cause that step-like change.
I think that when you look at Ulrics graph in his 6:35pm post ..
… the one on hours of sunshine.
You can see the cause exactly
And its absolutely NOTHING to do with atmospheric CO2
With a sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) event brewing above the Arctic, the UK’s and northern hemisphere’s winter will get colder yet:
https://watchers.news/2020/12/23/major-sudden-stratospheric-warming-january-2021/
Interestingly, the trend in CET from 2006 to 2020 inclusive is around 3°C / century. I’m surprised there haven’t been more articles worry about these 15 years of rapid warming.
Of course, the reason this doesn’t mean anything is the same reason all the “7 years of cooling” or “15 years of pause” articles are misleading. You have to look at the trend lines in context.
“around 3°C / century”
Only a complete mathematical imbecile extrapolates dates out past the data they are using.
Just as well I didn’t do that then. I think my second graph makes it clear I’m not extrapolating anything except the specified ranges.
And if you are only complaining about the use of a per century scale, fine lets call it about 0.3°C / decade, or an increase of 0.45°C over the 15 years of the data. But I’d hope you’d be just as critical of, say, Lord Monckton’s use of a per century to describe 7 years of cooling.
We have been told continually that the average earth temperature is 15 C. It seems as though Paul has shown that England is below average.
A better way would be to look at all the data. Between 1990 and 2020 the trend is 1.2°C / century, and is not statistically significant.
But if you look over longer periods the rise becomes more significant. Over the last 50 years the warming rate has been 2.2°C / century, and looks significant.
The claim here seems to be both that it’s impossible to be certain that any warming wasn’t just the result of random weather events, and that there’s some significance to the lack of warming over the last couple of decades.
The CET start date was 1659 the longest temperature record in the world, no cherry picking. Since 1659 the temperature has risen 1.1DegC over 361 years. That is 0.03DegC per decade. Considering the start of the series was during the Little Ice Age it is natural for temperatures to rise when the recovery started in the 1740’s. A perfectly natural situation.
Why is it that so many seem to want us back to the “optimum” climate of the LIA?
From the graph of the coldest and warmest monthly averages over the past 30 years, we see that there is the most inter-year variation in December, and the least inter-year variation in the summer months.
If absorption of infra-red radiation by CO2 was the driver for climate, one would expect that temperatures would rise most in the summer, during the time of maximum insolation. However, the largest inter-year variation actually occurred in December, the month of minimum insolation in England.
England has an unusually temperate climate for being located above 50 degrees north latitude, with relatively low seasonal variation in temperature (relatively mild winters and cool summers). At a comparable latitude, Edmonton Canada (for example) has much colder winters and somewhat warmer summers.
The climate in England is principally driven by the Gulf Stream, responsible for the mostly mild, wet winters, with prevailing winds from the southwest. Occasionally, if the jet stream dips south of England during winter (or a strong anticyclone over Scandinavia), winds out of the north can bring cold temperatures and/or snow from the Arctic to England, which can account for the sharp variation in December temperatures.
Any lasting, permanent warming in England would probably be due to rising temperatures over the nearby Atlantic (which would bring warmer air to England) rather than increased CO2, while most of the short-term variations are due to shifts in the jet stream, particularly in winter.
How much has the UK population increased in the last 30 years? How much more land has been tarmacked over?