By P Gosselin
Europe saw a dry summer this year and global climate alarmists claimed that droughts are becoming more and more frequent. This is the new normal, they like to claim.
However, a treasure of hard data refute this completely. A recent paper by Hawkins et al published by the Royal Meteorological Society delivers astonishing results tabulated from old, meticulously hand-written observations going back over 300 years.
Hat-tip: Die kalte Sonne here.
What follows is the paper’s abstract. The key statements are emphasized:
Recovering additional historical weather observations from known archival sources will improve the understanding of how the climate is changing and enable detailed examination of unusual events within the historical record.
The UK National Meteorological Archive recently scanned more than 66,000 paper sheets containing 5.28 million hand-written monthly rainfall observations taken across the UK and Ireland between 1677 and 1960.
Only a small fraction of these observations were previously digitally available for climate scientists to analyse. More than 16,000 volunteer citizen scientists completed the transcription of these sheets of observations during early 2020 using the RainfallRescue.org website, built using the Zooniverse platform. A total of 3.34 million observations from more than 6000 locations have so far been quality controlled and made openly available. This has increased the total number of monthly rainfall observations that are available for this time period and region by a factor of six. The newly rescued observations will enable longer and much improved reconstructions of past variations in rainfall across the British and Irish Isles, including for periods of significant flooding and drought. Specifically, this data should allow the official gridded monthly rainfall reconstructions for the UK to be extended back to 1836, and even earlier for some regions.”
It is truly stunning that such a volume of precious data would go ignored for so long by research institutes that are publicly funded to the tune of tens millions of dollars annually to reconstruct historical climate.
Now that it has taken 16,000 volunteers to come in and do this work, we have since gained a much clearer picture of the UK’s past climate. Some of the results are interesting, if not surprising, especially in terms of all the doomsday drought claims having been made lately.
The driest year on record didn’t happen recently, but in the year 1855. Moreover, as the chart above shows, the trend has been wetter, and not drier. Rainfall has averaged 10% more than recently then in the mid 19thcentury.
The dry years seen since 1950 turn out to be nothing out of the ordinary.
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Excellent report P. Gosselin, crucial information in language we can all understand. Reports like this is the only way we can convince the everyday person how much and how often the green devils are lying to them. Once they figure this out they are going to be mad.
“It is truly stunning that such a volume of precious data would go ignored for so long by research institutes that are publicly funded to the tune of tens millions of dollars annually to reconstruct historical climate.”
Bah. Who needs data when you have models?
The point is, they knew the data were there, knew they were struggling with resources, asked for help, took the help that was provided and updated their official data set.
Isn’t that how science should work? What’s the problem?
That it took so long to ask for help and they were reaching conclusions based on a database known to have deficiencies. That is not how science is supposed to work. Mistakes happen, and one can be forgiven for being human. However, knowing that there were problems with the data, and publicly announcing their tenuous analyses with the confidence of that shown by a “retired engineer,” is not forgivable.
Like they were doing nothing else?
Also, what is it about this additional data that changes anything?
They have been completely open about it.
Again, what are we supposed to be getting mad about?
Working with data that you know to be incomplete is the opposite of science.
nope. data is always incomplete. that is lesson 1.
engineers ARE the only people ( and bean counters) who
dont know how to work with the data as given.
with uncertainty
with fermi problems
Why is it that so much of the really good and important climate science work is done by volunteers and amateurs?
Because those who make their living at climate science are more interested in protecting their pay checks than they are in actually doing real science.
look ive linked to these volunteer efforts on wuwt, but you guys never help.
its hard work, transcribing written records.
colder is drier
drier is dustier
dustier is darker
probably a much larger danger to global food production than falling temperatures themselves
So that is why we in the UK can get away with NOT building any new water reservoirs to match our now bursting population!
I wonder if the increasing rain is tracking the population rise?
Just wait till some charlatan starts homogenising the dataset.
Please link to the data in the main post. This?
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/pub/data/weather/uk/climate/datasets/Rainfall/ranked/UK.txt
Should be tested last 12 months minus last 12 months a year back and also 11/22 years cycles and the shorter AMO cycles which seems to be half a solar cycle at 5.5 years. For the fomer, nothing alarming, normal difference in precipitation over a full year change from plus to minus ~250 mm over the cycle for 500 mm in total, widened to plus 440 mm to minus 320 mm for a total change of 760 mm.
So yes, in the language of acidification, we are having a severe draughtification.. A year or two from now, we should be back into drownification (sounds a lot more alarming than floodification, eh?)
Difference in precipitation over the 11-year cycle, up from minus 773 mm in 1978 via plus 1402 mm in 1999, generally in the minus 300 to plus 800 mm area, the latest reading to be in falling territory with 275 mm on the plus side (last 11 year minus previous 11 year).
Oddgeir
Awesome work citizen scientists!
I hope there is much more historical data like this available for other countries and for temperatures and other data.
It is truly stunning that such a volume of precious data would go ignored for so long by research institutes that are publicly funded to the tune of tens millions of dollars annually to reconstruct historical climate.”
data rescue is a favorite topic.
why?
when we build a global record what we are doing is building a prediction
we have records at x,y,z t. some location some time
because this feild is incomplete we have to do spatial and temporal interpolations
not averaging!!!!!!!! but interpolation
when you have a complete space and time series, then you can average.
so we interpolate at time z, position x1,y2,z3. the temperature would have been
15.67C if we were there to measure it precisely.
THATS what a spatial average is. a prediction of what would have been recorded
at all the locations where we have no data.
so when we rescue data we automatically check it against our old predictions
weve done this with a lot of “lost records” recovered by hawkins
“there are millions of records at noaa, that havent been compiled”
That sounds fairly interesting. What kind of records? How do you know?
Richard Feynman (and Einstein too for that matter) memorably said in one of his lectures that if a theory/hypothesis didn’t agree with experiment or observation then IT IS WRONG. Not nearly right or some such. So, why after this are we not seeing the teaching of Climate Science changing?