Note it: POST
Feb 3, 2012
Bishop Hill in Climate: other

The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology has published a briefing paper on weather and climate. I've had a quick glance, and this caught my attention.

Natural forms of climate variability are likely to be the main influence on the UK’s climate over the next few decades.

Who knew?

This seems really interesting to me in the context of the ongoing scrap over the plateauing of temperatures. If the claim in the POST paper is correct (the citation is to this paper by Hawkins et al), then that presumably means the plateauing could continue for decades, or even morph into a decline, and we would still be faced with arguments that temperatures are rising and that we only have 24 hours left to save the Earth.

Update on Feb 3, 2012 by Registered CommenterBishop Hill

Having had a look at the Hawkins paper, I think maybe POST has got the wrong end of the stick. Here's what he says:

Using data from a suite of climate models we have carried out a quantitative assessment of the contributions to uncertainty in predictions of regional temperature change. We have estimated the contributions to the total prediction uncertainty from internal variability, model uncertainty and scenario uncertainty. For lead times of the next few decades the dominant contributions are internal variability and model uncertainty.

Update on Feb 3, 2012 by Registered CommenterBishop Hill

No, I'm wrong. Ed tweets that POST are interpreting him correctly. A few decades coming in which natural variability swamps AGW.

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