Thursday
May262011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Met Office hurricane forecast
May 26, 2011 Climate: WG2 The Met Office has just issued its hurricane forecast for the 2011 season in the North Atlantic. At 12 storms and an ACE of 151, it's apparently going to be absolutely normal.
Reader Comments (90)
So, with the world having warmed 0.4 deg in the past 30 years, and living in the hottest decade of the past 200 years at least, and with the Met Office's campaign to talk up the problems of climate change, their forecast is....er....normal.
It's worse than we thought!
Last year saw 19 tropical storms and the most likely number for this year is 13. Does this not infer a reduced energy budget which I would extrapulate as less of a heat exchange between ocean and atmosphere therefore a cooler period, or am I reading too much into the output of a prediction model?
It will be interesting to compare against those predicting a double dip La Nina which is attributed to the increase in tropical storms last year.
Another forecast that could have been made by a ten year old, with a calculator, with an equal chance of proving accurate.
And if wrong, blame it on the weather
I've done a bit of Internet research on this topic and as far as I can tell no one places much credibility on the May hurricane forecasts from the MET or NOAA NHC. The August prediction is about fifty percent accurate and the November prediction is usually, but not always, spot on.
The idea that we can predict hurricane activity months or years in advance could be discussed in great depth with Dr. Curry, I assume, but I couldn’t find much support for it on a casual Internet search.
The short term path accuracy, however, is claimed by the NHC to have improved with modeling this year, and they are reducing the area of their three and five day cones by some 7.5%.
"Another forecast that could have been made by a ten year old, with a calculator, with an equal chance of proving accurate.
And if wrong, blame it on the weather"
May 26, 2011 at 1:52 PM | golf charley
There is, on another thread, a discussion of the tone taken by many commentors at this website. This is a prime example of what is wrong with so many.
It adds nothing positive to anything whatsoever.
Its tone, is, well, not quite abusive, especially as it refers to an institution rather than a person, but it does seem rather unpleasant and unkind.
There's no fact, no science, no reference, no evidence. In fact, it amounts to little more than a childish slur.
I'm often reproached by commentors here for not focusing on the science enough, although I suspect many of them would reproach me whatever I posted, as I'm on 'the other side'. This attitude to people who don't agree with you all, can be seen in the other thread to which I allude.
However, this site has more comments of this nature, than almost anything else. No science, nothing constructive at all. The real doozy, is that they are rarely, if ever, challenged by the other commentors.
I repeat this until I'm blue in the face, but that's because it's correct and you all assiduously avoid mentioning it. If you were actually as sceptical as you pretend to be, you'd come down on comments such as this one like a ton of bricks.
The logic seems to run:
- is it critical of something which agrees that AGW is the correct theory?
- if so, I support it.
- end of analysis.
Comments like this reflect upon you all, because if you were actually sceptical, you'd examine these, just as much as you examine postings from Paul Nurse/the MO and the like.
So howcome you are so uncritical of Sir Paul Nurse, the Met Office, CRU etc. who all take our money and yet are so reluctant to let us see their workings? Could it be that you are just as craven to their agenda as you accuse us of being to our criticism of it?
As we’ve said before Zed, pots and kettles, or motes and beams if you prefer a Biblical tone...
The Met Office sets itself up for ridicule. It doesn't matter whether its volcanic ash plumes or winter forecasts such as "there is a 70% chance of near average or colder conditions but there is a 60% chance of near average or milder conditions". Does anyone believe there is any science behind their forecasts? And we mustn't forget the wisdom of John Mitchell of the met Office:
So when the Met Office forecast is rain and I look out of my window and see the sun shining, I am expected to believe the model forecast and not my eyes.
"The real doozy, is that they are rarely, if ever, challenged by the other commentors"
"The logic seems to run:
- is it critical of something which agrees that AGW is the correct theory?
- if so, I support it."
If something has failed to be challenged (i.e. ignored) how can is be said it has been supported?
Logic Fail.
May 26, 2011 at 2:53 PM | James P
That's known as ducking the issue James. It's generally done be people who are being evasive.
May 26, 2011 at 3:21 PM | Frosty
Tacit support is too advanced a concept for you then?
@ZedsDeadBed
Every single time one should step back and reassess the science, but people tend to act like people and as a result lean away from impartiality.
I deal with scientific methods for my day job, but in the end, you still have to convince the powers that be that your science lowers the risk of a particular decision making event the powers that be have to make.
And thus, the fervent arm waving, advocacy masquerading as scientific analysis.
It's not unlike convincing someone to go out on a date for the first time. You can show her/him all the reasons why, but in the end sometimes it's the passion that wins the day. I've seen this in scientific endeavors as well as in the social scene.
We all want to see the pure science on this topic.
But you have people commenting on it, and people are people.
To the topic of hurricanes, I'm wondering how this season will compare to other seasons with a La Niña influence.
And a question: What was the La Niña / El Niño influence during the last major tornado outbreak in the US (1974) and how might match up to our current status?
May 26, 2011 at 3:17 PM | Phillip Bratby
Crazy question for you here Philip. If the MO are so bad at their job, why do private shipping/aviation etc. buy forecasts from them, to make decisions upon which lives depend, rather than the other weather forecasters out there?
Might it be that they are the best? And that your biased anecdotal evidence might be worth precisely zero, when assessing the performance of the Met Office?
Zed, I manage to ignore your your posts 99% of the time, please don't think I have tacit support for your posts when I do.
I have no tacit support for that entity who regularly posts ads to sex toys and designers handbags in old threads here either, I presume you do.
“That's known as ducking the issue James. It's generally done be people who are being evasive”
I know what ‘ducking the issue’ means, Zed. Given the number of times you’ve been asked for solid evidence of AGW and failed to provide it, I’d say you were its prime exponent here.
Zed
It irritates me as well. But so do you, popping up with the usual science/reference/evidence free sniping. If you could be bothered to do some reading, you might be taken more seriously.
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/
http://www.coaps.fsu.edu/~maue/tropical/global_running_ace.jpg
Walt Stone.
Good post.
However true the majority of your comment is, there are sufficient negative, substance-free posts going unchallenged on this site, that it clearly progresses beyond the scenario you describe.
When science is at the root, when emotion takes things too far, observers will eventually step in to calm things down. Those observers rarely, if ever, step in here. Suggesting (a) that science may not be the motivator for many commentors here and (b) that this blog frequently strays into the realm of the unpleasant.
I saw one commentor here offering to have the hosts of a website intimidated by the IRA. Nobody except me took umbridge with their comment, and that commentor still posts happily here to this day.
ZBD
If the MO are so bad at their job, why do private shipping/aviation etc. buy forecasts from them, to make decisions upon which lives depend, rather than the other weather forecasters out there?
Once again you show your rank ignorance. Many commercial enterprises use private forecasts because they are more accurate. Here's one for your neck of the world: UK weather
A ten year old with a calculator could not have predicted, weeks in advance, the cold and snow at the end of 2010. The Met Office did not either, having previously stated that such events would be very rare. Joe Bastardi did, at no cost to the UK taxpayer
How many millions does the Met Office cost the UK taxpayer?
Apologies to those who were unable to follow the logic of my previous brief post
Zed
And just to help you along (I am a kind, thoughtful soul, as you know), the explanation for the reduction in frequency and ACE is the reduced thermal gradient between the equator and the Arctic caused by an increase in Arctic temperatures over the last few decades.
Be careful about the attribution for this, as the measurements are tricky (eg GISTEMP interpolation of land surface temperatures over ocean), few in number, and may also reflect other forcings, eg black carbon both as aerosol and surface deposit on ice and snow.
There's enough information on Maue's site to get you started with addressing Walt Stone's question about the influence of La Nina.
Have fun.
Frosty
If you understand the concept of tacit support, then why did you make a post which suggests it's a foreign concept to you?
Neither I, nor whatever else it is you refer to you, are the dominant theme on this website. Voicing nothing, does not give the overall impression that you are supporting a specific minority theme - namely my comments here.
I hope for your sake, you're just being deliberately disingenuous, otherwise you may wish to take some time, and think about who's exhibiting this 'logic fail' of which you speak.
"Once again you show your rank ignorance. Many commercial enterprises use private forecasts because they are more accurate. Here's one for your neck of the world: UK weather"
May 26, 2011 at 3:47 PM | Don Pablo de la Sierra
Aha - the very commentor that likes to make terrorist threats.
Nice and abusive as usual, I see.
Also, evidence-free as ever. Nothing in your post suggests that either:
(1) shipping and aviation don't use MO - they do.
(2) that commercial enterprises (I note you have to steer clear of the ones that absolutely depend upon a good weather forecast, like shipping and aviation), use other providers. Any evidence that the ones you refer to actually made that choice for reasons of quality and not of cost? Not a shred of evidence? Well there's a surprise.
Please could everybody make an effort to be more civil.
This is relevant to your conversation.
Zed, the trouble is IMHO that climate skepticism is more an act of faith than other forms of skepticism. Take f'rinstance this page where numerous commenters suggest that a prominent historian and proponent of AGW is less than truthful . Ive asked to for the commenters to be more specific and support their arguments but they haven't done so. The ad hom argument will do.
Hengist
I provided you with more than enough WRT the MWP being global - not NH as misrepresented by Oreskes.
You not only do not admit this, you actually claim that no such substantive response was made. Numerous others provided referenced comments also illustrating the global effects of the MWP.
And yet you have the utter gall to come out with this:
You are dishonest, and anyone who wants to can check.
BBD
"the explanation for the reduction in frequency and ACE is the reduced thermal gradient between the equator and the Arctic caused by an increase in Arctic temperatures over the last few decades. "
Pls could you point me to the reference in Dr Maue's work that supports this statement. I did suggest a week ago that that was not what Maue was saying and you havent come back to me. Thx
I was just thinking it had been a while, but then along comes ZDB with a post telling everyone what they should post, and that it's everybody's duty to censor and indeed censure every post that departs from what ZDB has decided we may post.
How delightfully Soviet! It's like a breath of stale air.
It's very much a feature of the totalitarian left (if you'll excuse the tautology) that there's only ever one acceptable view on any subject, which is determined on high and handed down. The left's failure to grasp that normal humans don't think this way is exactly why they've lost the public on this.
A substantial body of public opinion, even before Climategate, thought "Well, the science looks broadly plausible, but is this really the best way to spend all that money?"
The ecofascists' instant reaction to this piece of mild common sense was to shriek "Denier!!, "Big Oil!" and - for all I know - "Witch!"
The idea that there is a spectrum of disagreement with the ecofascist agenda is obviously literally incomprehensible and plainly intolerable to ecofascists. ZDB has had this pointed out God knows how many times before, but it simply doesn't sink in.
To this day, the likes of ZDB still don't "get" that this strategy is counter-productive, that shouting louder makes them less credible not more, and that screeching "I hate you" tends to win you more enemies than converts. ZDB certainly hasn't absorbed that sceptics here generally figure others can say whatever they like, even though it's on this basis that s/he herself is tolerated here.
It would be difficult to come up with a robust experiment to verify it, but I suspect that ZDB and the the frankly deranged commentariat at CiF do far, far more for the sceptic cause then even people like McIntyre. You can win by doing nothing if the other side goes all out to lose.
There are certain people - Eddie Izzard, David Baddiel, Ed Miliband - who you want to disagree with as soon as they open their smarmy stupid gobs, whatever the subject. If Steven Fry told me 2 + 2 = 4 I'd want to disagree with the fat smug pillock.
Ecofascists fall for me into the same category, and would do even if they didn't insist that by 2100, 2 + 2 will make 37 owing to feedbacks.
Hengist, first let's deal with your truthfulness problem.
My response to the dishonesty above at 4:13pm was at:
May 22, 2011 at 8:14 PM
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/5/22/oreskes-and-dr-karl-part-2.html#comments
As for the temperature gradient hypothesis for reduced cyclogenesis - WTF? It's the 'consensus' re-think on why all those nasty storms haven't happened. How bottomless is your ignorance?
Zed - pedantic, I know, but do you think you could get 'commenter' right? IIRC, you recently took 'Mat' to task for having the wrong number of t's in his name...
J4R
:-)
Your Grace, a comment from your link points to this which is not entirely off topic:
http://news.uk.msn.com/environment/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=157824673
Accurate wind data 'cuts pollution'
The indication from the report is that the National Grid have had to design their own system to monitor the wind speed.
'The new system has been in development since September 2008 and has been tested alongside the old "Windy Millar" forecasting tool for the past two months.'
A couple of paragraphs from the report are quite interesting though:
'By 2020 onshore and offshore wind is expected to generate 28 gigawatts of power, almost a third of the UK electricity supply.'
And later in the report:
'Alan Smart, National Grid energy operations manager, said: "At the moment there is about 5 gigawatts of installed wind generation in the UK and this set to grow by about 2 gigawatts a year for the next five years.'
So by 2016 there should be 15 gigawatts of wind energy available leaving 13 gigawatts of wind energy to be found in the last 4 years to meet the 2020 target!
Why do I get the feeling that whenever the subject of windpower raises it's head that the figures are not as essential as the concept?
“about 5 gigawatts of installed wind generation in the UK”
Except when the wind isn’t blowing, of course, when there is precisely none.
Zed
WRT to weather forecasts and their purchasers, you ask:
“Any evidence that the ones you refer to actually made that choice for reasons of quality and not of cost?”
You do know that the BBC put their contract out to tender last year and although the MO got it, there was a distinct possibility that they might not have? It may have been a negotiating tool by the Beeb, of course (we don’t know the figures) but the fact that they were considering a New Zealand company to provide UK forecasting does rather suggest that the MO had suffered something of a fall from grace.
The same NZ company, Metra, already supplies forecasts to Tesco, Sainsbury's, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose, to help with sales predictions and weather-related distribution issues. Do you think that they are only concerned with cost?
I check this website 'cos I want to know if climate skepticism is scientific. And I am very reassured by the comments here that it is not. Comments like 'How bottomless is your ignorance?' are just ad homs, I don't find them persuasive, at all. Probing of your position is usually met with indignance or evasion, I still don't see where Oreskes is s'posed to have lied, cos her opinion about the geographical extent of the MWP is a statement of opinion - not fact. And I still don't see whether this theory about cyclonic energy being transported across the globe is founded in the scientific literature or the blogosphere.
By overstating your case you lead me back to my original thought that *climate skepticism* is more an article of faith than reason.
Hengist McStone said: "the trouble is IMHO that climate skepticism is more an act of faith than other forms of skepticism"
The basic problem that most of climate sceptics have is that they cannot find any real-world data that proves the predictions of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) in an unambiguous manner.
In fact, the only real-world data that could prove the case (e.g. detection of a tropospheric 'hot spot') seems to do just the opposite, which suggests that those proclaiming that CAGW is true are acting more on faith than on any form of scientific truth.
Since 2008-9 the Met Orifice commercial customer base has shrunk by 17.3%.
http://autonomousmind.wordpress.com/2011/05/25/met-office-losing-commercial-customers/
ZBD - many Scottish climbers and hillwalkers, whose lives depend on accurate weather forecasts, have been using private meteorological companies rather than the Met Office for nearly 2 decades now.
Hengist - agree with BBD - I also posted about 6 links on that thread which demonstrated that the MWP was global. You are being dishonest.
Lord Beaverbrook - indeed, no numbers seem to add up when it comes to the actual or proposed output from the wind industry. The official targets for Atlantic off-shore wind and wave/tidal capacity are similarly hallucinogenic - to date only the Germans have built an off-shore wind turbine in water up to 30m deep, in sheltered waters. How these 200m high structures will withstand vibrations from wind and waves is unknown. None have been tested in a winter storm. The average wave height off Tiree is 2.5m - iirc Lloyds will only insure personnel landing boats in waves up to 2m. They can't use helicopters for obvious reasons, so even building the support infrastructure is a problem. The Tiree reef (20-50m deep) is apparently scoured clean by wave-driven boulders every winter, and they plan to bolt these structures to the rocks? Madness, and it is time the engineers grew some and told their bosses and idiot politicians to wise up. Sadly, as the engineering reality, construction and insurance costs dawn, the result will mean more relatively easy on-shore schemes, so more ruined landscapes and heavily subsidised landowners, while consumers freeze to death in cold spell blackouts.
I'd be interested if ZDB can identify any shipping or aviation companies who use MO long term weather forecasts.
If you want a 5-day weather forecast for the English Channel, then in fag packet terms you just look at what the weather's doing 5 days away from the English Channel in the usual directions and that's your forecast.
Note the carefully constructed lie in ZDB's post where the horizon of forecasting is ignored and grateful buyers of MO forecast are handwaved into existence.
Quelle surprise that an authoritarian should be so impressed by authorities, but then they're not called ecofascists for nothing.
@lapogus
Six links to other skeptic blogs is hardly proof
So if I understand you correctly holding an opinion that is counter to the skeptic position is dishonest. Reason doesn't come into it in the topsy turvy world of the *climate skeptic*
zed
I think the word you are looking for is 'umbrage'. 'Umbridge' is where the Urchers live.
Hengist
So, we have moved from you defending Oreskes from the calumnies of the deniers to you admitting that she is both opinionated (on air) and entirely incorrect.
Progress indeed.
WRT the next statment:
- You are confusing theory and hypothesis
- You haven't looked very hard
Both of which confirm that you are a vexatious, sloppy commenter whose primary intent is to disrupt rather than contribute. Any ad homs you garner are thus richly deserved.
Stop whining - or up your game.
'Thx'
Dreadnought wrote:
'Umbridge' is where the Urchers live."
Umbling it is - that they're still going, now then, Umbridge sounds quite nice though........let me see, ah yes - turn right on road to Attoxeter.
"Umbridge is where the Urchers live."
:-)
It's wonderful, though, isn't it? Our most irascible and pedantic* contributor here has difficulty with spelling! I hesitate to correct this state of affairs, but since the likelihood of his taking any advice from me is negligible, and it may help others, I recommend a neat and free program called WordWeb, which is readily available for download (Windows only, AFAIK).
This provides definitions, synonyms, and antonyms of any word that the cursor is over in most applications and is an instant check if you're not sure. Of course, you have to know you're not sure, so it may be of limited use to some...
*Although Hengist seems to be catching up.
BBD I've not said she is incorrect, you misrepresent me.
Don't rise to it, BBD. You'll be here all night.
Hengist, you fool no-one but yourself (and I'm not even sure about that, these days).
Actually, I rather enjoy ZDB. I am a psychologist by training. Professional interest, you know. She is really amusing at times -- such a today.
"I have no tacit support for that entity who regularly posts ads to sex toys and designers handbags in old threads here either, I presume you do."
I know, what's with that?
:)
Hengist McStone claiming people have not posted prove of things when in fact they metaphorically smacked in in the face with it , could be called 'dishonest' behavior but only if we are being kind. Otherwise we could just say your just trolling or to stupid to understand that facts when there given to you.