Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t Dave Gadziala; Three months ago, WUWT reported on the MET issuing a new end of snow prediction. At the time I thought it was funny; but given the catastrophic failure of the electricity grid in Texas, and soaring heating bills in Britain, perhaps it is time to reflect on how much damage the people making such predictions might be doing to people’s lives.
From December;
Climate change: Snowy UK winters could become thing of the past
By Justin Rowlatt
Chief environment correspondent
Published6 December 2020Snowy winters could become a thing of the past as climate change affects the UK, Met Office analysis suggests.
It is one of a series of projections about how UK’s climate could change, shared with BBC Panorama.
It suggests by the 2040s most of southern England could no longer see sub-zero days. By the 2060s only high ground and northern Scotland are still likely to experience such cold days.
The projections are based on global emissions accelerating.
It could mean the end of sledging, snowmen and snowball fights, says Dr Lizzie Kendon, a senior Met Office scientist who worked on the climate projections.
“We’re saying by the end of the century much of the lying snow will have disappeared entirely except over the highest ground,” she told Panorama.
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Read more: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55179603
When you ask why politicians are so poorly prepared for cold, snowy weather, why Texas never properly winterised their grid, or why British people are suffering soaring power bills in the midst of bitter cold, I don’t think you have to look far for the answer.
“People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful.” – attributed to MET scientist John Mitchell.
So what would it take to introduce just a smidgeon of doubt into the fortress mindset of those who value models over observations? We have an answer to that question.
In 2015, then British Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd organised a meeting between the GWPF and The Royal Society, to see if they could resolve their differences on climate science.
The Royal Society rejected the idea that observational evidence which contradicted their predictions undermined the credibility of their climate models.
…
“We pinned them down on this hiatus… they were arguing that yes, there might have been a hiatus, but warming might be going into the ocean, or it could be due to volcanic activity. So we asked at what point would you begin to accept there had been no warming. If there is no warming for five years, or ten years?
“Finally they conceded they would wait fifty years.
“We asked would that be fifty years from now, or fifty years from 1997, when the hiatus started? They said they wouldn’t change their mind for fifty years from now.
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Read more: http://www.breitbart.com/london/2015/06/16/exclusive-well-all-be-dead-before-climate-change-orgs-admit-theyre-wrong-says-mp/
This is a group of people who openly admit they are unmoved by observational evidence which contradicts their worldview.
How do you change the minds of people whose view of climate science appears to be based on blind faith in computer models, rather than observations?
The answer is you cannot. There is no penalty for alarmist climate scientists clinging to scientific ideas which are not supported by observations. Any observation which contradicts their theories is immediately dismissed as black box “natural variation” – volcanic eruptions shielding the Earth, or the ocean swallowing the missing heat. I suspect most of them will carry their conviction that the world is on the brink of runaway global warming to the grave.
What we can hope to do is convince politicians and voters to stop taking alarmist climate predictions so seriously.
Thankfully politicians in advanced societies face a regular reality check, on a much shorter timescale than the 50 years proposed by The Royal Society. And voters can be pretty unforgiving when they are left shivering alone in the cold and dark, thanks to politicians making bad decisions about power grids – regardless of whose advice politicians claim they were following.
Please, the organisation referred to is the UK Meteorological Office, normally known as the Met Office (check out their website). Not the MET Office, and not ‘the MET’.
The latter usually refers to the Metropolitan (i.e. London) Police.
The Met Office still does good work on short-range weather forecasting, the website forecasts are usually spot on and get the arrival of changes of weather right to within the hour.
The ‘climate’ stuff, well that’s politics, so of nil value.
My late father worked as a forecaster for the Met Office for his entire career, so I know they do good work.
By all means slag them off for their ‘climate’ garbage, but at least get the name correct.
If you seem not be able to get that right, it just discredits otherwise sound arguments.
Met.
Nonsense, see newer posts. They are now a private company, they are not a proper Government organ at all, and why “office”, that was Civil Service speak many years ago when they used paper and pencils.
Politicians in all parties in the UK face organised campaigns by climate extremist groups to embrace the greenest agendas possible. I have no one I can vote for who might even want to think about challenging these idiots, as it would damage their electoral prospects. The BBC happily advances the green cause at every opportunity, thus exacerbating the process.
The real problem, David, is that the politicians themselves have become “climate change” activists. Witness Boris’ (the Prime Minister) ridiculous comments in the newspapers today about the threats from the impending, and totally fictitious, “climate emergency”. We are dealing with propaganda, pure & simple, and it pervades everything these days.
All of the Green lobby groups lobby using their maximum allowance (limited by statute) but, in addition to that, they provide ‘voluntary’ workers in many of the MP’s offices. These workers are paid salaries by the lobby groups which are then exceeding their limits on lobbying when the money for their lobbying and ‘voluntary worker’ wages is added together. If you want to stop some of these Green groups then that might be the way to do it – fine them for every year (backdated) that they have exceeded their lobbying limits.
I think the same thing happens in the USA so it could work there with a good government.
It’s the same in Australia and all over the developed world. These days everybody is actively green, pastoralists, grain growers, mining companies, banks, local councils, shops, public service, transport companies, everybody.
The problem is that the OP continues to call the Climate Priesthood scientists, when they are clearly not. Quit giving anyone cover who continues to behave as an acolyte, rather than a real member of the scientific community. Someone who understands that without measurements to check theories, those claiming knowledge are just poking once again in chicken entrails to predict the future. Over millennia that hasn’t had a good record.
The major reasons the hiatus was interrupted in 2015 was because of: the 2015~16 Super El Niño event (which still hasn’t been followed by strong La Niña event to offset it), the PDO cool cycle is overdue, and the AMO is still in the tail end of its warm cycle (but should soon reenter its cool cycle).
Once we finally get: a Strong La Niña event, the PDO and AMO cycles enter their respective 30-year cool cycles, and we get a VEI 5+ volcanic event, global temps will start falling again for at least 30 years.
Leftists will then have a very hard time convincing people the global cooling, growing Arctic sea ice extents, growing Antarctic and Greenland Land Ice, and falling/flattening sea levels are being caused by CO2 warming…
I’ve greatly enjoyed the beneficial warming we’ve had the good fortune of experiencing since the end of the Little Ice Age and dread the coming cold.
Remember, during the last PDO cool cycle (1945~1977) scientists predicted man-made global cooling would usher in a new Ice Age….
I believe the “Narrative” has met that challenge and moved on.
Most people, especially young ‘uns, now think in terms of “Climate Change” and “Extreme Weather” and any occurrence of either are their “observational proof”.
If you do mention “Global Warming” they will point to one record “hundred year high” that occurred somewhere on the planet last summer.
George-san:
Yes, unfortunately, most of our young people have been completely brainwashed by their public schools, MSM, Internet, Leftist political hacks, and Hollywood to believe the CAGW Hoax is an “existential” threat to all life on earth..
Leftists who rank years without trend data are childish, dishonest, and unscientific… The beneficial global warming trend since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850 is just 0.05C/decade which is of no concern.
The primary reason why the warming trend since 1980 is higher than the 170-year average is because the PDO and AMO are still in their 30-year warm cycles, and it’s interesting to note it’s about the same as the last PDO warm cycle (1912~1945) when CO2 forcing could not have been a factor,
Cheers!
“Our great computers fill our hallowed halls”
Every time it rains it rains….newspeak from somewhere.
GIGO. Climate models are open-ended unverified nonsense. The MET added “climate change” to the weather models, now the forecasts are nearly always significantly wrong in the UK! A few years back they were very good. Why, ah, I know “climate change”, both the reasons and the result!
A Planck once said “Science progresses one funeral at a time”.
“Thankfully politicians in advanced societies face a regular reality check, on a much shorter timescale than the 50 years proposed by The Royal Society.”
yeah, not so much anynmore.
Off topic, a very strong quake (5.6) just struck in Iceland. There was one foreshock then the 5.6 and 2 strong aftershock ( 4.6 and 4.8), all in the last 23 minutes. Maybe a volcano will go active.
Has anyone else noticed that since Christmas, they’ve been reducing the amount of sunshine they show relative to the actual weather?
My guess is that it’s all part of the delusional brainwashing over covid – got to keep the unwashed masses from planning to go out and get their vitamin – because if they get immune from simply having sunshine – why would they take a genetically alternating therapy (not a vaccine)
It’s time that anyone using a model to justify something should be thrown out of windows.
We could construct a model to show what happens to something thrown out a window if gravity is reversed…