Bishop Hill Climate cuttings 47
Jan 5, 2011 Climate: Cuttings There is still quite a lot of new material around on the climate front, so once again, here are the links catching my eye this morning.
Steven Hayward notes climatologists' recent explanations of the factors that are (allegedly) making global warming cause so much cold weather in parts of the northern hemisphere. If this is so, he asks, why didn't they include these factors in their original models?
Tom Crowley has issued an apology for misrepresenting his early correspondence with Steve McIntyre. Five years after the event is a long delay, but the correction is welcome nevertheless. I will have to add a footnote to future printings of the Hockey Stick Illusion.
Paul Hudson notes that in the UK, December was the second coldest since 1659. Things are not looking so hot in the USA either, according to Steven Goddard. Or Asia.
Roger Pielke Jnr notes the continuing failure of the disaster records to pick up a global warming signal. With weary inevitability, Joe Romm is unimpressed.
One for the statisticians among you - Barry Brook looks at Phil Jones' claim that there has been no significant warming since 1995.
Chris de Freitas looks at public understanding of climate science.
Much fun is still being had at the expense of the Met Office. Anthony Watts has a round-up here. Matt Ridley thinks the weather guys at the Met Office would be better off separating themselves from the climate people.
Reader Comments (12)
Robin Horbury has some interesting insights into Roger Harrabin's impartial (cough)
reporting of CAGW at Biased BBC.
http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2011/01/jaw-dropping.html
"December was the second coldest since 1659"
So do we now know where 2010 figured in the overall results? Much was made at Cancun of its being the warmest ever, or at least runner-up, but that was in November...
James P
The RSS and UAH data have 2010 as 2nd warmest globally. See WUWT.
Loved the WUWT graphic of the Met Offices new Supercomputer 501- Flying Start.
A dartboard! Julia must be ecstatic.
Just hope that they'll find time to renumber the board with positive AND negative anomalies.
If the Met Office continues to foul its doorstep by contaminating pragmatism with idealism- Weather versus Climate- then they'll really have to get rid of Robert Napier.
Maybe they could replace him with Phil (The Power) Taylor?
He can certainly throw a straight arrow and that's got to be an improvement on the diet of curve balls that the Met Office have been feeding us with.
"See WUWT"
Phillip - I have now, thanks. If all else fails, read the manual... :-)
The Met Office is about to reach - maybe has already passed - a tipping point. Once the whole organisation (rather than just Michael Fish) has become a laughing stock with the general public, it has lost its reason for existing.
At least the MET Office is admitting their report was politically motivated. That's a step forward.
A question for Met Office employees;
A performance-related pay policy is introduced at time of privatisation. The formula to be used gives 90% of current pay for normal 24 hour forecasting, additional 15% for an accurate 1-week forecast and a further 20% for an accurate monthly forecast. Only 24 hour forecasting is on a rolling basis because your customers will be making plans at time of issue of forecast. Pay is calculated on a daily basis and paid monthly in arrears. Therefore, you have a chance of being paid 90%, 105% or 125% of salary each month. Do you celebrate or strike?
@simpleseeker
Celebrate (standard operating procedure at the Met Office is to make several predictions - some public and some secret - these predictions span all conceivable possibilities). This procedure insures predictive robustness. Incidentally, should you be interested, Julia has already warned Cameron of an impending plague of frogs in the Shetland Isles. (This may occur anytime in the next 10,000 years).
@ZT
Without sarc tag, quite believable - particularly plague of frogs caused by AGW.
;)
From the Steven Hayward article:
The climateers have swung into action, and have explained why cooling is really warming. Judah Cohen, a private “seasonal forecaster,” took to the pages of the New York Times to explain how the warming arctic led to more snowfall over the Siberian land mass, which in turn cooled the air circulating over the northern hemisphere, and there you have it, big cold weather storms in the United States and Europe. Or, as Mr. Cohen puts it, “the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes.”
I have heard or read things along this line so many time that, as a symmetrical person (I hope), I have to ask: If global warming causes cooling, does global cooling cause warming? And how would you know the difference?
FWIW the local news tells us that December was the coldest on the Cote d'Azur since 1950, one of the wetter ones (beaten by last year and the year before IIRC) and one with about two thirds of the normal hours of sunshine (90something vs 140something)