Thursday
Dec302010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill A hundred years of freezing
Dec 30, 2010 Climate: Surface Professor Mike Lockwood says that even in a warming world we could have one or two centuries of frigid winters to come here in the UK. He even says it with a straight face.
Reader Comments (74)
Apparently the brain dead geniuses at skepticalscience are supposed to give this as an answer to a skeptic who says "it is the sun".
How come they did not pause to consider the simple idea that the low in the Sun's activity has coincided with a 15 year streak of a plateau in global temperatures?
Green Sands:
If I could claim any technical expertise it would be in trend analyisis, especially in the prediction of peaks/troughs having spent many years in the data analysis end of scientific instrumental analysis. Savistsky-Golay smoothing is part of my nature, and it's exceptionally suited to detecting the turning points of complex data sets. Current data speaks 'peak' leading to 'downturn' so clearly that I'm almost ready to start a business selling snow shovels. If only those politicians that parrot "but the science says" would only listen to what the scientifically trained (with no vested interest) say...
Brent Hargreaves: "Question: Is there no political grouping which would benefit from challenging this obscene hoax, even as the public turns ever more sceptical?"
The people, Brent, as in 'demos'. I cannot think of a single political party that now represents the average thinking of the 'man on the Clapham Omnibus' better than the 'man in the pub'. Or to put it more clearly, the political classes are now as far removed from the man in the street as they ever have been. I think I now have more in common with His Grace the Duke of Northumberland (who owns a lot of the land around here) than I do with the four MP's who cover this neck of the woods for the three main political parties. When in response to a personally addressed, specific and locally targeted email to my constituency MP I get a reply which is a cut-and-past of three separate party press releases I know the 'man in the street' is on a hiding to nothing.
Where's me pitchfork...
Meanwhile, Bobby Farrel is dead. The song "Daddy Cool" somewhat makes it relevant to the blog, if not "Rasputin" (He died in freezing St. Petersburg). To me, he was bigger than Micheal Jackson. RIP.
In what sense are we still discussing IPCC led climatology as science? It's unfalsifiable. It's cold because it's warming and it's warm because it's warming. This is pseudo-religion not science.
Global warming theory predicts warmer winters (1), colder winters are confirmation of global warming (2). Hence 'global warming' theory is unfalsifiable, and so ceases to be a scientific theory.
(1) Any number of scientists have said this.
(2) http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/biting-winters-driven-global-warming-scientists (see Petoukhov quote)
So the LIA was regional?
It is, of course, an interesting problem when we have been told (indeed, shown in the graphics) that each year has been getting progressively warmer than the next and then suddenly have record cold, not just in one region, but widespread across the globe. It was an extreme winter in 2010 in South America. New Zealand reports there has been no warming in the past 50 years. NOAA's NCDC reports continental US average temperatures dropping at a rate of 0.9 degrees F per decade since 1998.
How can that be? Sure, it can be colder, it it can't be both colder and warmer at the same time. This summer was the coldest on record for the San Francisco Bay area. We are also having a cold winter. This year so far approximates the weather we last saw in the middle 1950's. We are only a few days into winter and already have 64% of our annual snow pack on the spectacular Sierra Nevada mountains.
Europe is cold, South America is cold, North America is cold, Australia is cold (snow on the first day of summer and a summer so far of terrible flooding), New Zealand is not warm.
There must be some spot on this planet where the heat is so blistering hot that it counteracts all of this cold. Has anyone heard where that spot might be? I think we should like to go there for a visit. We went to Phoenix this week to possibly get a break from the winter gloom in the San Francisco Bay area. It snowed today.
Cumbrian Lad : count yourself lucky that your MP even replied to your email. Mine just ignores me, and then the political classes wonder why the populace holds them is such low regard. Few of them have the nouse to glance out of the window and ask whether nine inches of snow and temperatures of minus 17C can be reconciled with an earth which is warming. Furthermore, few of them seem to have any insight into science, so are incapable even of asking the right questions. They merely listen to whichever special interest group is currently fashionable.
Have any of these "climate scientists" of consensus fame ever come out and said:
George in Cali, the Arctic around Hudsons Bay, and the western part of Greenland are boiling!
:)
"What is that big word which describes the state of simultaneously believing two diametrically opposed theses?"
proctocraniosis?
Brent Hargreaves: "Question: Is there no political grouping which would benefit from challenging this obscene hoax, even as the public turns ever more sceptical?"
UKIP, of which Monckton is a member.
Cumbrian Lad :
FZM :
Mine (Derby South) doesn't have email as far as I can tell.
@Sandy
Try this link to get hold of your MP. You may, however, get the sort of reply I got last time when I wrote to mine, for the third time, about the government's climate policy
"Your comments have been noted".
http://www.writetothem.com/
Cumbrian Lad
Thanks for your comment re trend analysis, my knowledge is sparse but has served me well over the years. Basically being that a trend will continue until it changes direction and that the rate of any change tends to be significant.
Time will tell.
sHx Dec 31, 2010 at 12:15 AM
Shub, Lockwood is entitled to change his opinion, except that he doesn't seem to have changed it. He still pays tribute to the CAGW cult. Incidentally, I think he looked quite embarrassed in that interview. So few scientists are rushing to the media for an explanation at the moment. It is not like they can attribute the exceptional cold to global warming that easily. CAGW scientists seem to have gone in hiding... or hibernation until the next summer heat wave.
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AGW is very like Lysenkoism, the bogus genetic theories which were official dogma in the USSR from the early 30s to the early 60s, which cost millions of lives. No dissent was tolerated. They fitted with Soviet political dogma and told the government what it wanted to hear.
Most scientific papers published in the biological sciences in the USSR during those years would have a preliminary paragraph genuflecting to the great Lysenko; to omit this would have been
unwise at best.
Global Warming..bla bla bla bla!
They just make up stuff as they go.Start an international green tax strike!!!!!!!!
Neal Asher: You rightly point out that UKIP is the only party sceptical of AGW. But voting for them has its price: sanctioning their other policies, which personally I couldn't do.
We need a hero. Some major politician prepared to stand up to the hysterical hippes, the face-painted banner-toting activists whose street protests influence the politicians. Boris Johnson might just be our man, one who resists the pernicious motto "anything for a quiet life". If somebody of his stature demonstrates that there are votes to be had in contesting the AGW hoax, others will join in.
WIth any luck, Chris Huhne will end his days planting optimistic vines near Aberdeen, with a big sign to greet visitors: "No, but it's Gonna." He'll chuckle and mutter to himself, "I'm the only person to spot this unique business opportunity."
George of Califonia: "...New Zealand is not warm."
New Zealand has been experiencing unseasonably warm temperatures over the past couple of months. From the National Institute of Water and Soil (NIWA):
"Monthly mean temperatures for November as a whole were more than 2°C above average across the entire South Island, and many long-term November temperature records were broken there. It was also warmer than usual across most regions of the North Island, with temperatures between 0.5°C and 1.2°C above average."
And: "The New Zealand national average temperature was 14.7°C in November (1.0°C above the 1971–2000 November average)."
http://www.niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/publications/all/cu/new-zealand-climate-update-138-a-december-2010/current-climate---november-2010
Over the longer term, NIWA reports:
"The 2010 NIWA review of long-term trends in New Zealand’s annual mean temperature showed a rise of about 0.9 degrees Celsius over the last 100 years (0.91 +/- 0.3 degrees C per Century)."
http://www.niwa.co.nz/news-and-publications/news/all/7-station-series-review
I say that even in a cooling world we could have one or two centuries of warm winters to come here in my part of the world. I even say it with a straight face.
Don Pablo de la Sierra For those of you who wish to see a real live example of the "Coprophagic Smile" well known to politicians and "climate scientists" who are left out in the cold by reality, I do suggest you examine Professor Mike Lockwood as he explains why his kids are seeing a white Christmas.
a.k.a. "a shit-eating grin"
Many years ago I saw the 1986 Bob Hoskins movie, Mona Lisa. One of scenes that had many of my friends laughing took place on a UK beach where people were sunbathing in the summer. But Hoskins and a few others were wearing overcoats because the weather was actually cold. Why the hell would the British be worried if their summers got a bit warmer again? Are they really so dense to prefer the cold wet summers that they usually get or to have snowfall and cold snaps close roads, bring down the electrical grid or make the heating oil distribution system incapable of meeting demand? It seems to me that most Britons need a reality check.
I presume that His Grace suppressed Anoneumouse's opening comment because of the latter's mealy-mouthed tergiversation. And, indeed, Anoneumouse's failure to include forced public video confessions and waterboarding, prior to the summary executions, was a travesty, unworthy of the moral clarity and unblinking search for truth and justice that other commenters here consistently exhibit (trolls excepted, of course).