From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
The Met Office have now descended to knowingly peddling misinformation:
Extreme rainfall events could be four times as frequent by 2080 compared to 1980s.
For the first time, a high resolution model that captures the detail of convective, or extreme, rainfall events has provided 100 years of data, spanning the past, present and future continuously, to analyse the future risk of rainfall with the intensity that can cause flash flooding.
A version of the Met Office Unified Model, the same that is used for the operational UK weather forecast, has been run 12 times at a resolution of 2.2km (known as k-scale modelling) to give an ensemble of 100-year climate projections.
This is like starting 12 weather forecasts and running them for 100 years, except the researchers are not interested in the weather on a given day but rather how the occurrence of local weather extremes varies year-by-year. By starting the model runs in the past it is also possible to verify the output against observations to assess the model performance.
At this level of detail, it is possible to more accurately assess how convective downpours that can lead to flash flooding will change, for example when the intensity of the rain exceeds 20mm/hour. Thresholds of rainfall intensity like 20mm/hr are used for aspects of planning such as surface water drainage and flood risk.
The research, published in Nature Communications, found that under a high emissions scenario (RCP 8.5) rainfall events in the UK exceeding 20mm/hr could be four times as frequent by 2080 compared to the 1980s. Previous coarser model output (12km) predicted an increase of around two and a half times in the same period.
RCP 8.5 is a pathway where greenhouse gas emissions keep accelerating. This is not inevitable, but a plausible scenario if we do not curb our emissions.
An example of an intense rainfall event with 20mm/hr is London in July 2021, when 40mm of rain fell over three hours at Kew Gardens, flooding the underground and other infrastructure.
There is no actual evidence provided to prove that extreme rainfall is becoming more frequent, as their computer models say.
Indeed at stations like Oxford, where the Met Office say extreme rainfall will become three times more frequent, the opposite is the case.
https://www.ecad.eu/utils/showindices.php?3v2e59f6q4m5mu3n7rv7k0n0fl
The Met Office is specifically looking at hourly rainfall, which there is very little historical data for. Nevertheless, if this was getting greater the same trend would be seen in daily data; but the actual data shows this is not the case.
Their projections are based on the most extreme GHG scenario, RCP8.5, which they describe as “plausible”. This is false and undeniably implausible. The only reason for the Met Office to use RCP8.5 is for propaganda purposes.
To cap it all, the Met Office offer this as an example:
An example of an intense rainfall event with 20mm/hr is London in July 2021, when 40mm of rain fell over three hours at Kew Gardens, flooding the underground and other infrastructure.
But 40mm of rain in three hours is far from being unprecedented. Maidenhead, for instance, had more than twice as much rain in an hour. Indeed none of the short duration rainfall records have been set since 1989:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-climate-extremes
All in all this is a thoroughly disgraceful and baseless piece of scaremongering, even by Met Office standards.
Steady rainfall since 1850, it always rains in England.
http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/OxfordRain1.gif
MetOffice weather forecasting is either wrong or sitting on a fence.
Here is what they said less than three weeks ago (Feb 18) for 30 day forecast:
“Temperatures will most likely start off around average, but there is increasing likelihood of colder conditions (relative to average).”
Here is what I said on the WUWT on the same day:
“….another very cold Arctic blast heading for Canad, USA and possibly NW Europe.
… I suspect polar vortex is breaking down and losing control of the jet stream, which will turn from mainly zonal to pronounced meridional circulation, with cold Arctic air masses moving into southern Canada and the USA”
The Arctic cold blast did indeed hit the USA about a week later and as expected arrived in the UK during the last week, when unusually for this time of the year, the most of the UK including London was blanketed with snow.”
More details on my forecast here:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/02/18/no-nbc-news-giving-the-ocean-antacids-will-not-help-curb-climate-change/#comment-3682889
Even in the UK the best weather forecast for the next day is “pretty much like today except more/less rain” if there is a change and you’re questioned just say I was expecting that tomorrow
Somewhere in those models is built in a connection between a small rise in temperature and increased rainfall. That is, of course, the idea that ‘a warmer atmosphere can hold more water’. That is true, but ‘can’ does not mean ‘does’. Underlaying is the never mentioned assumption that relative humidity is somehow a conserved quantity. There is no observational evidence that that is the case nor is there any known physical mechanism why that should be the case. Thus, the increased rainfall in the models is an artefact.
In fact, we can turn Homewood’s analysis on its head and see it as evidence that indeed the assumptions about about humidity in those models is wrong.
“That is, of course, the idea that ‘a warmer atmosphere can hold more water’. That is true, but ‘can’ does not mean ‘does’.”
Holding more water doesn’t even mean that you will get more rain!
RCP 8,5, the most ridiculous and outlandish scenario
An egregious waste of electricity – with accompanying carbon dioxide emissions. They are shameless.
RCP 8.5 is as likely as an outbreak of flying pigs.
Even the BBC recognises RCP8.5 is unrealistic!
Even in light of the advancements in China, India, Vietnam, Pakistan, and other like minded folk?
Is the MO schizophrenic, or is it just covering all the bases?
“Driest February in England since 1993 signals drought ahead
The Met Office’s three-month outlook shows that hot, dry weather is likely this spring, and river flows across England are below normal, with some exceptionally low, according to the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology data portal.
A Met Office spokesperson said: “It has been dry. England has seen approaching a quarter of the rainfall that we would normally expect in February, although January was just over average. “
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/01/driest-february-england-signals-drought-ahead-experts
“As the climate continues to change as a result of greenhouse gas emissions, we are seeing increasingly hot, dry conditions in the UK and globally. 2022 has recently been confirmed as the hottest year on record for the UK with an annual average temperature of over 10°C, and this trend is projected to continue in the future. “
https://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2023/02/02/climate-change-drought-and-water-security/
“under a high emissions scenario (RCP 8.5) rainfall events in the UK exceeding 20mm/hr could be four times as frequent by 2080 “
There’s a word for studies like this. That word is bollox. Only the MO and the climate cult would even consider RCP8.5
“hot” weather in spring??? How does the Met Office define “hot”?
>5C
“… an annual average temperature of over 10C,…” OMG. This is terrible, especially when the GAST is over 14C. What will folks in the UK do? (BTW, when the MO says UK, does it mean the entire UK, or just the British Isles, or just Great Britain?)
“New research shows increasing frequency of extreme rain”
No it hasn’t.
A computer model has been programmed to show increasing frequency of extreme rain.
Reality was not involved.
Reality is never involved, not as a bug,but as a feature.
Cloud News Tip….
“A number of years ago, Bony and her colleagues discovered that small, fluffy clouds common in trade wind regions cause some of the largest levels of uncertainty in climate models. These clouds are known as trade cumulus.
While trade cumulus clouds are small and relatively unspectacular, they are numerous and very widely found in the tropics, according to Bony. Because there are so many of these clouds, what happens to them potentially has a huge impact on climate.
EUREC4A used drones, aircraft and satellites to observe trade cumulus clouds and their interactions with the atmosphere over the western Atlantic Ocean, near Barbados.
Many models assume that the structure and number of these clouds will change significantly as the global temperature warms, leading to possible feedback loops that amplify or dampen climate change. The models that project a strong reduction in such clouds as temperatures rise tend to predict a higher degree of global warming.
Good news
But Bony and her colleagues discovered that trade cumulus clouds change much less than expected as the atmosphere warms. ‘In a way, it is good news because a process that we thought could be responsible for a large amplification of global warming does not seem to exist,’ she said.
https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/clouds-sky-provide-new-clues-predicting-climate-change
Well, that’s one cloud type….
In a way it’s good news...
Bony sounds disappointed, maybe she was hoping to be able to get a ‘it’s worse that we thought’ headline out of the work (or maybe that’s just me being cynical). But who “expected” the structure and number of these clouds to change sufficiently to cause a large amplification of global warming, and on what basis? Surely not a biased preconception (or maybe that’s just me being cynical for a second time…)
“New worst case computer program suggests increasing frequency of extreme rain in 60 years time”
fixed.
Met Office: “RCP 8.5 is …….a plausible scenario.”
Completely undermining their credibility.
As to BBC weather forecasting:
On Friday 3rd March the BBC were forecasting that there would be heavy snow showers in my area on Saturday March 11th. Now (March 9th) they are forecasting that there will be sleet showers on March 11th.
It will be interesting to see what actually happens.
Heavy snow falling as I type here in NE Wales.
From the Oxford graphs it looks like nothing has happened yet. When does RCP8.5 predict the increases will start to appear in the graphs. There’s only 57 years left.
“When does RCP8.5 predict the increases will start to appear in the graphs”
Last week?
Next week,
Get it right next
Tomorrow (never comes)
[ Enter “answer questions literally” mode … ]
The RCPs are global emission “pathway” inputs for climate models.
Oxford is one city in the UK (/ central England).
The (peer-reviewed, published in “Nature Communications”) paper discussed in the ATL article covers the regions of “SE England”, “NW England” and “(the) UK”.
Unfortunately those various geographical regions are not directly comparable.
However, regarding the “detection” of climate change from extreme precipitation events for the UK that paper says (at the end of page 9 of the 14-page PDF file I downloaded) :
NB : The paper’s authors make the common mistake of “climate scientists” of conflating “data” and “the output of computer models simulating what the weather will be like in 70 to 80 years time”.
To me “data” ≠ “the output of computer models decades into the future”.
To me “the output of computer models decades into the future” equals either “part of the hypothesis” or “pure speculation”.
Reference 12 in this paper is to Kendon et al (2018), full title “When Will We Detect Changes in Short-Duration Precipitation Extremes?”.
While the 2018 paper only covers the geographical area of “the southern UK”, its “Conclusion” section is probably applicable to “the UK” as well. in any case, the new (2023) paper cites it as “supporting evidence” for its assertion that “changes in a less extreme measure of local hourly rainfall are expected to emerge … within the next few decades”.
That “Conclusion” section — written in 2017, published in 2018 — started :
On the geographical scale of “the UK”, the answer to [ the highlighted sub-section of ] the question you initially asked is “sometime in the 2040s”.
[ … Exit “answer questions literally” mode ]
“… convection-permitting climate model …”???? What idiots would run a model that didn’t “permit” convection?
And again, what is the “… geographical scale …” of the United Kingdom? Is it just Great Britain? Or all the British Isles? Or does it include the Falklands as well?
My understanding is that the standard answer begins “Ours not to reason why …”.
When it comes to “the experts / the (climate) scientists”, the only permitted attitudes are either :
1) Bowed down before them, kissing their … feet, or
2) Gazing worshipfully upon them from afar
Attached is Figure 7 from the paper, which shows the “standard” geographical scale for “the UK”, i.e. “UK = GB + NI”.
Note that this figure “proves” that the future “% increase in precipitation per K temperature increase” scaling coefficients are constant, with no relationship whatsoever to either latitude or topography …
… now, where has the button to add “sarcasm” HTML tags gone and hidden itself again ?
From the “Discussion” section of the actual paper (with highlighting, and some extra line-feed characters, added by me) :
Is the MET Office’s press office following the advice in the actual paper it is touting to “clearly communicate to the public” that the “individual record-breaking precipitation events” that will inevitably occur “over the coming decades” will most likely be “a manifestation of chaotic internal variability” ?
Are they “clearly communicating” that even if “periods of rapid local rainfall intensification” were to occur in the (near- to medium-term) future, that such an eventuality (as opposed to the speculative outputs from computer modelling of the future) “should not be taken as evidence for accelerated climate change” ?
Mark Twain Models The Mississippi River
The dry details . . . give me an opportunity of introducing one of the Mississippi’s oddest peculiarities—that of shortening its length from time to time. If you will throw a long, pliant apple paring over your shoulder, it will pretty fairly shape itself into an average section of the Mississippi River, that is the nine or ten hundred miles stretching from Cairo, Ill., southward to New Orleans, the same being wonderfully crooked, with a brief straight bit here and there at wide intervals . . .
* * *
At some forgotten time in the past cutoffs were made. . . These shortened the river, in the aggregate, seventy-seven miles.
Since my own day on the Mississippi, cutoffs have been made at Hurricane Island, at Island 100, at Napoleon, Ark., at Walnut Bend, and at Council Bend. These shortened the river, in the aggregate, sixty-seven miles. . .
Therefore the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cutoff of 1722. . . Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
Now, if I wanted to be one of those ponderous scientific people and “let on” to prove what had occurred in the remote past, or what will occur in the far future by what has occurred in late years, what an opportunity is here! Geology never had such a chance, nor such exact data to argue from! Nor “development of species” either! Glacial epochs are great things, but they are vague—vague. Please observe:
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period, just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
Mark Twain, Life On The Mississippi, 1883
If only Mark Twain were around today to comment on “climate change”…..what a delightful skewering of pomposity would follow!
Sadly, this approach is being taken literally by so many “science” institutions these days.
Michael Shellenberger has more about this –
https://substack.com/redirect/dbe91436-fd79-4956-9ea4-bf41f265ca9b?j=eyJ1IjoiMXRiNHJoIn0.O_7xWizDn6eoEqLAuvYVJsaFtWryPfXf-26WPDexOR0
“Extreme rainfall events could be four times as frequent by 2080 compared to 1980s.
For the first time, a high resolution model that captures the detail of convective, or extreme, rainfall events has provided 100 years of data….”
Could be four times as frequent? Could be anything. I don’t think Einstein or Newton every used words like “could”, “might”, “may”.
And, since when can a model provide data!
It’s scaremongering. But you are not allowed to contradict it.
Homewood needs to get his calculator out. 40/3 is not 20. I could even figure that out in my head.
Getting down to earth, though, 40mm of rain in three hours is hardly EXTREME. Most thunderstorms on the US can easily produce rainfall at that rate. That’s a half inch an hour for those metrically deprived. We had 17 inches in a half day here, several years ago. That’s extreme.
“…the same that is used for the operational UK weather forecast…”
Running weather models that have never been accurate for over 3 or 4 days “to give an ensemble of 100-year climate projections” and expecting usable results is bordering on stupidity. They probably think that if they take the 3 day output from the first run and feed that into the next run and so on for a dozen runs they’ll maintain prediction accuracy. Oh well… guess they have to justify all that the computer time some how :<)
I think you could delete the “bordering on”.
This is the abstract of a recent article of mine which seems to be appropriate for this thread
“Extreme flooding due to “Atmospheric Rivers” has been observed for centuries, but they are considered to be natural events, with no explanation for their occurrence.
However, it has been observed that they are always preceded by periods of higher temperatures caused by volcanic droughts (periods of 4-5 years without any VEI4 or larger eruptions), where there are no remaining volcanic Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) aerosols circulating in Earth’s atmosphere, or other instances where atmospheric SO2 aerosol levels have been reduced, such as during American business recessions (due to idled foundries, factories, etc.). With lower levels of SO2 aerosol pollution in the atmosphere,temperatures rise, and heat waves,droughts, famines, and torrential downpours happen around the world”.
https://doi.org/10.30574/wjarr.2023.17.2.0323
The Met Office is probably correct in predicting higher instances of downpours with higher temperatures.
“found that under a high emissions scenario (RCP 8.5) … RCP 8.5 is … not inevitable, but a plausible scenario if we do not curb our emissions.”
Is it?
we?
It’s telling they used 8.5 even though 8.5 is considered highly unlikely
It is bad enough that these clowns treat climate models as though they were science but to use the RCP 8.5 pathway is completely dishonest. Those at the MET who conducted the study should be fired, their bosses should be fired. The publisher, editor and reviewers at Nature Communications should all be fired. This dog and pony show must stop.
Joseph Goebbels
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”