Thursday
Jan032013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Concerto for a rainy day
Jan 3, 2013 Climate: WG2 Climate: other The Met Office and Channel Four combine in spectacular fashion to produce what may be one of the worst pieces of TV science for quite some time.
I love the bit where Tom Clarke says there are "clear signals of wetter weather emerging" and then we hear from a scientist about what his computer model predicts. And the bit where we hear that the globe has got warmer since 2000.
Reader Comments (56)
I wondered what this was all about, because in my previous attempts to find out if the UK is getting wetter or nor didn't chime with what the Beeb (and others) were reporting. (My last attempt was here http://www.climate-resistance.org/2008/12/a-notional-trust.html )
The Met Office explain what they mean here: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2013/2012-weather-statistics
MO: >>An analysis of 1 in 100 day rainfall events since 1960 indicates these 'extreme' days of rainfall may have become more frequent over time.<<
So in 2012, the chance of a statistically-speaking 1-in-100 event occurred 1-in-75 days, with a tiny bit more rain.
This is climate change... A slight change in probabilities... All of which can easily be coped with... And all of which could be spontaneous and revert to the normal.
This is surely an attempt to keep the global warming story at the top of the headlines -- which is where it was. Shame on the MO and C4.
Ouch. I fear you're being too kind, Bish.
But?...........ummmm....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/14/met-office-arctic-sea-ice-loss-winter
"The Met Office and Channel Four combine in spectacular fashion to produce what may be one of the worst pieces of TV science for quite some time."
In about 15mins time the Met Office will be combining with BBC 1 with another bid. Mustn't prejudge. must keep an open mind.
I was infuriated by this broadcast. The BBC is bad enough but Channel 4 seems totally obsessed. Guru-Murthy seemed so smug that a report was out showing weather that might be blamed on AGW and he got his mates, Liam and Tom, round to back him up. They were equally cock-a-hoop. Who challenges this garbage? It takes someone like you and your learned chums, Bish. Why not take Jon Snow and Krishnan down to the pub and verbally knock some sense into them. I`ll buy the first round...worth it just to watch.
Dave G
Sky News had a pretty similar item during the day, quoting the rainfall figures, and the more extreme variations that scientists expect. They had pictures of a nearly empty reservoir earlier in the year, and now with it full, and had an admission from a water company spokesman that maybe they should think about building some more storage and pipework...
Using the MET Office's 'Actual and Anomaly Maps' page
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/anomacts/
see if you can spot the runs of wetter/drier summers/winters the report claimed. I can't.
The old boy in the report said it best "You cant judge Long term weather from a short term period".
So Tom Clarke thinks that 2012 -- the year in which we got subjected to a one-day-every-four-month every three months instead -- will be the year we realised what climate scientists had been telling him for years.
Meanwhile, Notrickszone says that MunichRe have a different analysis.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/01/03/reinsurer-munich-re-natural-catastrophe-statistics-report-2012-far-less-global-damage-from-weather-in-2012/
Turned out nice again, as they used to say.
The best bit surely is the summing up where predictions are improving too and that we are to expect both more wetter and drier summers. I think that covers it all.
I have an automatic weather station (aws) set up here in the east midlands - it's not a professional quality set-up, but I think it's good enough for me - in any case, comparing my records with other local aws's, I'm not far out. Last years' rainfall was shy of 900 mm (not yet got the exact figures, because I changed software during the year), so whilst there was a lot of rain, it was not "record breaking", or even close, for an annual amount. 75mm in the first 3 months was extremely low, admittedly, but from about April 5th, we had quite a splash. Highest month was June, with 130mm, followed by December (120) and August (97). We had local road closures due to "flooding", which lasted a day or so, but no major "incidents". So much for "most of the country" . I was inconvenienced a couple of times by flooding at known local "blackspots" (can I say that ?), otherwise Oh bla di, oh bla dah!.
regards
xplod
From a Met Office press release 8 March 2012:
BBC news at 10 leading with weather hype. Claiming more future rain as a fact.
It's just show business really isn't it? Nothing more.
Whether cynically or just by habit these weather gurus just come across like fairground fortune tellers nowadays. The techniques seem familiar –
Exploit any current awareness the punter may have e.g. we all know we have just had a wet year.
Distract from any previous failed predictions e.g. forget the earlier ominous drought predictions made in the same tone.
Salt the future with alternate predictions - just in case e.g. “We might see a flip back to having drier summers”.
Also at the end of the report I had to laugh at this gem:
"Predictions are improving too … like cycles of more extreme wet and dry summers”
How useful is that?
This isn't science, it is charlatanry given the sheen of mainstream kudos.
Who wants to listen to scientists just bleating that it’s all getting “weird”? That’s the only message they want to send. It’s pathetic.
I despair of the media. I clearly have too much time on my hands because I have tracked down the England and Wales rainfall series on the Met Office web-site that goes back as far as 1766. The Met Office press release helpfully gives a preliminary estimate of 1205mm of rain for England and Wales in 2012. This makes it only the FIFTH wettest in the record - compared to 1284.9mm in 1872; 1247.3mm in 1768; 1232.5mm in 2000 and 1213mm in 1852. I guess 5th wettest doesn't sound so scary...
Then there is the question of whether the trend is upwards as the global warmers claim. Seems to me from looking at the data that there are repeated cycles of 'wet' and 'dry' years across the period 1766-2012 and little obvious pattern. Our most recent run of very wet years (consecutive years with E&W rainfall above average) is the five years 1998-2002, but there were NINE consecutive wet years in the 1870s (1875-1883). Also our most recent 'decade' (2003-2012) has a mean rainfall of 936.9mm, but this is overshadowed by the decade 1874-1883, with a mean rainfall for E&W of 1017mm
As Richard Feynman once put it, Science is built upon a three-stage process : Guess; Calculate the Consequences and then Compare with Experiments.
The MO is world-class at guessing.
WWF et al are superb at calculating the consequences.
Sadly, Moma Gaia is total crap at doing the experiments that produce the required data!
Worth remember why the MET stop given in public their long range forecasts, because they got them so badly wrong and by lucky chance always in AGW favour,so often that it became embarrassing.
Indeed they still do them , the long range forecast for cold winter this years was I believe has 33% colder , 33% percent warmer and 33% the same . Given that you have asked do they really need millions more for computing power when flipping a coin would be so much cheaper and almost as accurate .
I moaned on unthreaded about Julia Slingo on the BBC1 6pm news, then I saw the Channel 4 news at 7pm..... Fortunately, my brother came round and took me to the pub, otherwise the post that I would have made would have probably been an imprisonable offence.
Unequivocal evidence for man-made global warming is all that I can remember - this from the clowns whose CO2 driven climate models predicted terrible drought for 2012 just nine months ago, and whose Orwellian doublethink tells us: "During 2012 our decadal prediction system was upgraded to use the latest version of our coupled climate model. The forecasts and retrospective forecasts shown here have been updated to reflect this change...... The forecast of continued global warming is largely driven by increasing levels of greenhouse gases."
So there you are - a retrospective forecast can re-write history. He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
Ask yourselves, who has the power to get this garbage onto television news? Who wins and who loses? Follow the money.
After the unexpectedly rainy April last year, the Met Office blog said this:
And:
Today's C4 item is definitely one for the time capsule. Did you notice Tom Clarke's: "It's no wonder a lot of us have been thinking something weird is going on with the weather, and now the scientists agree. What we used to consider traditional British weather - it's a thing of the past".
Fatal turn of phrase. Charles Onians is probably watching this and going "Noooooooooooo.... Don't say it!"
Too late!
Three points to make. First, is there any reference to the Met Office predictions in early spring of 2012 about continuation of the warm dry weather straight through to summer. (I recall seeing these predictions in early April.) The second is a presentation that was picked up on the net today about solar modulation leading to more blocking highs during weak solar activity. The auther is Sarah Ineson from the UK Met office in fact. http://lasp.colorado.edu/sorce/news/2012ScienceMeeting/docs/presentations/S2-01_Ineson_sorce2012.pdf Should more variability in the weather be expected as a result of this solar influence? And third the climate models have been completely incapable of predicting the ocean modulations and the historic weather record has long been correlated to these, particularly extreme weather.
Enough to turn one into a cynic...
Who exactly in the UK broadcast media can be trusted to do honest reportage and diligent investigation?
Laziness and stupidity are out of the running, willful delusion and our old friend policy based evidence making are running strongly as is mendacious misrepresentation. There is something deeply odious about the way this agenda is being pushed and the way it arrives in waves. Let's not forget that we are forced to pay (OK some of us in the UK) to have this contrived and transparently dishonest bilge force fed to us / served up in our homes. I don't like the menu.
When the proffered story is so easily contradicted by some relatively straightforward research (thankfully shortcuts provided by pooling spadework on BH and elsewhere) - yet it still keeps coming, they get knocked back, but regroup and start up again with adjusted tactics and vocabulary. I do wonder about vampires - in both in terms of sustenance and permanent remedy.
Yes, I will always look back on 2012 as England's second-wettest year.
One just sighs at the levels the mfm has sunk to in support of its new found meaning in life! All day yesterday all I saw was "2012 MAY be wettest year in history" splashed across the BBC (I couldnt avoid it as there are large screen tv's by the coffee area at work!!!).
As Ive said previously, I really really REALLY hope we plunge in to a new ice age just to shut the catastrophiliacs up once and for all!
Having said that, I would bet that even if England was covered in 6 feet of snow the learned scientists would still be saying that the recent cold is merely masking the underlying catastrophic warming!
Mailman
If 2012 is only the second wettest year on record, does this mean there's a trend towards drier weather?
;-)
Having said that, I would bet that even if England was covered in 6 feet of snow the learned scientists would still be saying that the recent cold is merely masking the underlying catastrophic warming!
Not quite, the excuse for the last cold winter was the record low in the Arctic Sea Ice moving the cold air down combined with the extra moisture from Global Warming. The logic failed when you look at the rainfall over the the same cold period which was lower than the average, when you melt 12" of snow to measure the equivalent rainfall it melts to sod all.
An average value would be 6.25 inches of snow for 1 inch of water.
Drought/flood, mild winters/cold winters... As usual, the clueless climate scientists and modellers are just making it up as they go along, curve fitting the latest weather to suit.
I stopped watching C4 News five years ago - Jon Snow and most of his team are avowed warmists who like many others have abandoned their journalist training, and are happy to provide a platform for the modellers in the Met Office. I sent them (C4) a couple of emails during Climategate1 to ask why there were not asking serious questions about CRU and the AGW CO2 thesis, but I did not get very far. (an invite to a studio discussion with Milliband - I would have been the sole and token sceptic if I had been able to make it. In that discussion, Jon Snow turned to a victim of the recent Cumbria flood, and said (I paraphrase): "well you have already experienced global warming first hand..." ). Up to that point I had always respected Jon Snow's journalistic integrity, but his blatent scientific illiteracy and gullibility on AGW ended it there and then.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-18367583
Few years ago i watch this documentary about Sir Francis Drake and the Spanish Armada
Historical myth about Drake Playing waiting to complete his game Bowls before he set sail to engage the Spanish.He saw the change in wind direction and waited and completed his game of Bowls
.
So using modern day computer modelling historians have calculated back the position of all the Planets in the Solar System and sure enough it was a bad day if you were Spanish and suffered from Sea Sickness.Drakes intuition proved correct.Stormy seas in the Channel and the Spanish were thwarted from making a landing.
Yesterday Channel Four or Channel were gloating about how Man made warming in the Atlantic forcing the Jet Stream Northwards causing a Low Pressure system over the UK Bringing Rain and flooding.
Then man made warming melting the Arctic Ice throwing the Jet Stream South Causing UK Droughts and Hose Pipe Bans .
I am no Meteorologist but the only thing big enough to divert the something as big as the Jet Stream is the Gravitational pull of another Planet say the size of Jupiter or Saturn.
Astro Physicists telling us the effect the Rotation of the planets in our Solar System has on our Weather and Climate systems.Employing Astro Physics and corolating historicIc normal and Extreme weather patterns against planetary rotation.
This whole UK Rainfull flooding Hurricane Katrina and Sandy thing really is the nuts and bolts of the Global Warming Argument.
Like Sir Francis Drake now we really are going toe to toe with the Enemy.Queen Elizabeth 1st said after the battle "I may have the body of a frail old woman ,but i have the heart and spirit of a brave Englishman".
Non-statistician layman here, so apologies if this is dealt with upthread in language I don't understand, but:
This was reported yesterday in terms similar to: "there seems to be an increase in the frequency of events that would be expected to occur every 100 days". Surely that is a circular definition? All it tells us is that the 100 day expectation was too long? Or am I missing something?
So, if there's lower than expected rain this year, and the reservoirs are empty at Summer's end, we can expect the MET office (with the usual suspects) on TV and in print apologising for predicting more rain.
No? Thought not.
The BBC was utterly disgraceful yesterday, rolling out the usual suspects Shukman, Harrabin et al. Historical ecords suggest that other years particularly 1911 and others in the 1920s gave rise to spectacular flods including my village which does NOT flood today owing to various improvements to the river and transport network. The main irony was when one rather keen hack from the News Channel was in Exeter, oblivious to the magnificent flood alleviaton scheme behind him which had saved thousands of homes from being flooded. I have been an avid supporter of the BBC but objectivity and indeed background nowledge are at a premium these days. I grow tired at mentioning the clothes of Emperor Pang.
Of course, we have to remember that the warmists choose to ignore good historical records of severe rainfall events and floods. e.g. here's a comment of mine from the Myle's Fludd thread about some historic peak river flows which make anything we have seen in the last 30 years seem rather minor:
There is documented historical evidence of the River Tay flooding Perth going back to the 13th century, which an academic at Stirling University collated in the 1990s (think it was Gilvear).
Here are some other links of interest:
Flood Dee and Don - 30 year intervals - historic floods Scotland - 1839: Severe Floods Hit Scotland At 30 Year Intervals - http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/1839-severe-floods-hit-scotland-at-30-year-intervals/
Severe Flood in England 1894 - http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/1894-severe-flood-in-england/
I am sure there are many many other records of historical floods. Shame that the Met Office and media are so ill-informed and gullible.
There are "clear signals of wetter weather emerging."
Tom Clarke is quite right about those clear signals. I have seen them too. As the (first two verses) of the song goes:
Raindrops keep fallin' on my head
And just like the guy whose feet are too big for his bed
Nothin' seems to fit
Those raindrops are fallin' on my head, they keep fallin'
So I just did me some talkin' to the sun
And I said I didn't like the way he got things done
Sleepin' on the job
Those raindrops are fallin' on my head, they keep fallin'
Jamspid
Are you quoting Queen Elizabeth the First's speech BEFORE the battle? To be pedantic (but also poetic) she said: "I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too...."
Lest we forget, drought hysteria courtesy of your impartial (ho-ho) BBC as of 12 March 2012, little more than, ooh, 2 weeks before the wettest April EVA:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17340844
Choice quotes:
BBC Weather meteorologist Nick Miller said: .... "The required sustained period of rainfall for the worse affected areas simply isn't in the immediate forecast."
and
Heavy rains could yet stave off the worst of the impacts, but forecasters are predicting drier than average conditions for the next few months.
Fast forward one week to 19 March (less than two weeks to wettest April EVA) and the impartial (ho-ho) breathlessly reports on the DroughtFlood impacts of climate change on wildlife:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17424729
In particular:
Environment Agency national conservation manager Alistair Driver said: ... "Nature is very resilient, but given that we are seeing early summer droughts like this happening more frequently, then we can expect to see the real impacts of climate change on the numbers and distribution of some of our more susceptible wildlife."
Ah, I see, so the "real impacts of climate change" are early summer droughts becoming more frequent, er, no, hang on, I mean early summer floods, or, er, er, whatever weather it is that we've just had - yes that's it - whatever weather we've just had - that is the inevitable impact of climate change.
FFS.
And they just keep coming! Here is the BBC on the DAY BEFORE the start of the wettest April EVA:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-17571709
Quote for your entertainment:
"Environment Agency water resources head Trevor Bishop told BBC Radio 4's Today programme the situation was becoming more serious.
"If we see a continuation of dry weather, which is now very likely, these conditions will probably extend further westward over the next couple of months."
Ah yes, a continuation of the dry weather, was, the day before the start of the wettest April EVA, according to the experts "very likely".
And, in the middle of the wettest April EVA, we get this double-header from the impartial (ho-ho) BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-17690389 [Drought to last until Christmas]
Quote:
"Head of water resources at the Environment Agency Trevor Bishop said: "A longer-term drought, lasting until Christmas and perhaps beyond, now looks more likely."
"The agency said while rain over the spring and summer would help to water crops and gardens, it was "unlikely to improve the underlying drought situation"." :-) :-)
The weather forecast VT embedded in the link is also worth a spin as our BBC weatherman explains why all the rain in April "Ain't gonna make much difference" to the drought.
Then there's this BBC Q&A on the drought, also from 16 April 2012:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17731573
Where we get the question:
"Are droughts likely to become more frequent according to climate change projections?"
To which we get the answer:
"Current climate change projections for the UK suggest that by the 2050s, under the medium emissions scenario, summer temperatures may increase and summer rainfall may decrease.
"Short-duration droughts (12-18 months) are likely to become more frequent, so that droughts like 1976 could be more common despite the increased resilience of public water supply and more winter storage."
So summer rainfall will probably decrease and droughts will probably become more frequent ...... unless summer rainfall increases and floods become more frequent, in which case flooding will become more common as well, or instead, or both, or none. All due to climate change.
On 1 May 2012, after the wettest April EVA, the imipartial (ho-ho) BBC is still persisting with its drought meme:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17875456
It's the aquifers, you see. A few April showers aren't going to be enough to replenish the aquifers.
In the body of the article, we get a scary chart showing the monthly rainfall deficit for southern england, 2009-12 with this absolute belter of a caption:
"April’s heavy rain runs AGAINST the LONG-TERM TREND for southern England" [my emphasis]
So, when we have drought, the trend is for more drought. A few months later, after loads of rain and floods, a trend towards rain and floods is suddenly discovered.
I really do think they must believe their audience has the attention span of a goldfish
It is getting hard to know what to think when the majority of establishment bodies seem to project what they wish onto what is, and will try and turn what no one knows into what 'may' be.
That some in the course of just a year appear content with spinning a full 180 to 'explain' everything to suit a desired outcome simply makes the whole sorry bunch hardly worth bothering with.
Shame then that they all get, and consume, so much public funding (often uniquely) to keep on doing so.
When we have a longish period of dry weather the Met Office says we can expect more of it in future. When we have a longish period of wet weather the Met Office says we can expect more of it future.
That does not tell us very much about our weather but it tells us a great deal about the state of climate science.
I intended to post this yesterday but thought I had missed the moment.
Mastermind Wednesday evening. John Humphrys asks John Hammond, MO forecaster, about possibly the wettest year and global warming.
Hammond's reply " AGW may not manifest itself as warming in the UK at all, but we should certainly expect much colder winters and wetter summers for the future".
That appears to be the new official line from the MO as others have made the same forecast in the past 24 hours.
Alex Cull has a new transcript up at
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20120314_AJ
from last spring about dealing with climate change, in which Climate Modeller Andrew Jarvis says:
Deary me, poor Liam of the Met Office, he explained "what£ happened but not "why" it happened, other than to claim it was global warming. This is the disreputable heavily taxpayer funded organisation that didn't give an inkling as to what was about to "actually" happen next back in the Spring! This is outrageous in the extreme. The extent if the BS amounts to "Some areas will have more drought, some areas will have less drought. Some areas will have warmer temperatures, some areas will have cooler temperatures!"
Laughable, simply laughable"
That's interesting Roger, but the underlying trends in the CET (when I last looked a year or two ago) was that the increasing average temperature arose from less cold winters, and similar (but possibly damper) summers, not the colder winters mentioned now.
At least we can guarantee that this outpouring of Met Office inspired nonsense will come back to bite them in a Dr David Viner sort of way.
I found it extraordinary to hear on the R4 PM programme yesterday that 2012 had the second highest rainfall total ever. Why does the BBC translate 'in a series beginning in 1910' as 'ever'? I would complain but it's like water off a ducks back.
I have not heard a single commenter relate the UK rainfall totals in 2012 to what is happening in the Atlantic (low hurricane activity) or the Pacific (ENSO neutral conditions). Do we live in isolation from the rest of the planet?
Very depressing viewing it was. I've long since given up on the BBC for TV news, and generally champion Channel 4 News because it simply works harder at the difficult task of reporting, even whilst wearing their generally leftish sensibilities fairly openly. But last night's report was a gag-inducing collapse of standards not just of their reporting, but of their collective intelligence. One expects nothing better from the Met Office, obviously, but it was gobsmacking to watch them dancing around, trying oh-so-hard to avoid the words 'autoregression to the trend'. Terrible.
Maybe Cathy Newman will "FactCheck" their own report:
http://blogs.channel4.com/factcheck/
;-)
Cumbrian Lad
Exactly so!
However another change of platform is required as their current weather beaten train approaches terminus.
The new train of thought has no warming, cold winter running and weird summer downpours, similar to the year just past.
All aboard the Bisto Express!!
The media gets its lead from the Met Office.
It is significant that Richard betts has not commented on this crude propaganda.
Unfortunately he increasingly reminds me of the Trojan Horse. Beware those bearing gifts.
Don Keiller
On Richard Betts; those are my thoughts as well. He has been noticeably absent during all the recent MO cock ups.