Wednesday
Jan092013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Rumbling on
Jan 9, 2013 Climate: MetOffice Climate: Models The rumpus over the Met Office's downgrading of its climate predictions rumbles on (much like my lurgy!). The Mail covered the story yesterday evening (H/T Jonathan Jones), and included a couple of interesting quotes.
Graham Stringer:
Labour MP Graham Stringer said the Met Office’s short-term forecasts had improved, but their climate change analysis was ‘poor’.
He said: ‘By putting out the information on Christmas Eve they were just burying bad news – that they have got their climate change forecast wrong.
‘For a science-based organisation, they should be more up front, both about their successes and failures.’
Reader Comments (121)
Professor Myles Allen stated "What has happened since then has demonstrated that it is foolish to extrapolate short-term climate trends"
Such as the one from 1976-1998?
I think it was Donna who pointed out that Environment Canada does publish full retrospectives of their weather predictions, all credit to them for that, but that the results only made them look rather stupid.
I doubt that the Met Office is in the market for making itself look truly incompetent.
Allen should remember why 'if its not statistical significant its not significant at all' , is taught to undergraduates. So yes it really really does matter that there has been no 'statistical significant' temperature increase , Unless of course he allows he own students to total ignore that idea which I very much doubt , you have to ask why the standard he demand of his students is not the standard he demands of his fellow professionals.
I love Graham Stringer's qualifier 'for a science based organization'. Obviously, usual rules should no longer apply.
For a science based guy, he deserves a large silver cup for immersing himself daily in the muck 'not up front'. There's the legendary pluck of Albion.
=============
Seconded kim.
An MP had the guts to say it. I may only take one. It's that obvious.
The only proper response for a sceptic is to say 'I didn't believe the models when they said something I didn't like. I still don't believe them when they say what I think is right.' Warmists would have to say the opposite, wouldn't they? Or will they start finding fault with the models which they had faith in up to now?
Professor Myles Allen: ‘While every new year brings in welcome new data to help us rule out the more extreme scenarios for the future, it would be equally silly to interpret what has happened since the early 2000s as evidence that the warming has stopped.’
Yes, yes, yes, but .... is it still 'catastrophic'? That is what we HAVE to know !!!
Prof Myles Allen: "‘While every new year brings in welcome new data to help us rule out the more extreme scenarios for the future, it would be equally silly to interpret what has happened since the early 2000s as evidence that the warming has stopped.’"
Prof Allen doesn't seem up to speed with the latest scaremongering, we have had it drilled into us for two years now, despite the science saying otherwise, that we are experiencing and will experience more weather extemes because of clobal warming, glimate change etc. We won't, of course, because just like the bird flu pandemic it is a figment of the febrile imaginations of the alarmists and their puppy dog MSM.
Do I detect a whiff of "pea/thimble" in the final sentence Prof Allen? Just like "hide the decline" we were directed to the fact that the temperatures had indeed risen to distract us from the fact that if the proxies were unreliable to the extent they were in the 20th century then they could not be used with any scientific justification in previous centuries. Now Prof Allen tells us the hiatus in warming doesn't mean warming has stopped (which nobody claims), when the question he, and other scientists supporting massive transfers of wealth from the west to the developed world, should be asking is what precisely is the natural phenomenon that caused the hiatus, and why couldn't the opposite of this phenomenon, or indeed another phenomenon, unknown unknown, have caused the warmng we have seen from the middle of the nineteenth century?
BBC still misleads/incompetence/ambiguous/sloppy?: Shukman
BBC:
"The Met Office says its long-term projections forecast significant warming
The UK Met Office has revised one of its forecasts for how much the world may warm in the next few years. It says that the average temperature is likely to rise by 0.43 C by 2017 - as opposed to an earlier forecast that suggested a warming of 0.54C."
The BBC clearly implies/states EXTRA 0.43C from now by 2017.. (it later goes on to make it a bit clearer, but too late, 2nd sentence has done its job)
When in fact, the 0.43C is referenced from the baseline temps, and in fact temps in 2017 are projected to be about the same... If the Daily Mail can get the science right, why not the BBC
Daily Mail (correctly) reporting the Met Office Press Release:
"Now a press release, published yesterday, has confirmed that over the next five years temperatures will be 0.43 degrees above the 1971-2000 average,"
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2259012/Global-warming-Met-Office-releases-revised-global-temperature-predictions-showing-planet-NOT-rapidly-heating-up.html
Now I have tweeted the BBC's Harrabin/Shukman asking for a correction.....
How else do you get a story corrected.
I think the Met Office hung on as long as they can, I, like Rhoda, don't believe they have a clue what the weather, or climate, will do in the future, except from their models, which for weather seem to have gotten the forecasts 180 degrees out of phase for the last five years.
They've simply taken the political action of giving themselves more time. When politicians see UKIP with it's anti-green policies scooping up large numbers of voters at the next election, they won't blame themselves, they'll blame their advisers. And rightly so, the Met Office has, presumably for the best of reasons, like larger grants, have become the semi-scientific arm of the Green movement, and it will pay the price if/once it becomes obvious that nothing unusual is occurring, and that the information they have been providing to the public has been little more than opinions cloaked with the pseudo-scientific outputs of models.
Finally, why haven't they told the Government what the IPCC said, that's their job isn't it? It said:
1. ” … In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing
with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the
long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
From the 3rd IPCC report, Section 14.2 “The Climate System”, page 774.
Hasn't Professor Slingo jus made a prediction about the future climate state?
The Sun's environment editors thoughts are quite amusing...
Ben Jackson @BenJacksonSun
The story the Met Office tried to bury on Christmas Eve. #notsurprised
Ben Jackson @BenJacksonSun
To describe the Met Office as in utter shambles on the issue of decadal forecasts, is to sugar the pill considerably..
Ben Jackson @BenJacksonSun
I can say one thing for absolute certain. If the Met Office admits a slowdown in global temperatures they are going to go up #gangbusters.
- The rest of his tweets are worth a look at aswell...
"While every new year brings in welcome new data to help us rule out the more extreme scenarios for the future"
Uh? I'd love to see where the CAGW crowd have been contacting the media to alert them to new data that is ruling out extreme scenarios.
Maybe it was this Myles Allen: http://climateprediction.net/science/pubs/climateprediction_press_release.pdf
(11 degrees of warming)
1. Skeptics don't like the models.
2. The models haven't agreed with the data
3. The 'consensus' scientists have tweaked the models to fit the new data.
4. Next year, return to Stage 2.
Skeptics still don't like the models, they prefer the data.
This may be a dodge, to lower the prediction so that 2017 will bring us "worse than we thought."
Doesn't it seem that "worse than we thought" flows more gravy, much more? Are there contracts up for renewal in 2018?
Has anybody got a list (or even a single example) of the successes of the Met Office in terms of climate change predictions?
Barry
I know how you feel. Great use is made of the general public's ignorance of the issues and jargon used in climate discussions.
I had thought that the much produced graphs should have been labelled "Global Annual Temperature Anomalies" but, having thought further, came to the conclusion that most people wouldn't realise what that meant anyway. The BBC also reckoning on that general ignorance chose to present the item in the most alarmist way both on the website but more importantly on the telly with big up arrows and everything.
If a warm story like Australia can be slipped in (drop the dead Russians, Asians, Indians due to cold) all the better ! Pad out with Bowie and bob's your uncle ! - and now the weather........................
Myles Allen,
"it would be equally silly to interpret what has happened since the early 2000s as evidence that the warming has stopped.’ "
When is a trend not a trend Myles, can we go back to 1998? Phil said since 1995.....we say mild warming since the LIA........or cooling since the MWP......or the Roman Warming maybe.
The Met Office are civil servants - wot else are they going to say or do?
And Graham Stringer....."a good day to bury bad news" - wasn't that one of New Labour's big ideas?
tallbloke said (January 6, 2013 at 11:03 pm) on his site:
Meanwhile, over at Roy Spenser’s blog, David Appell said (January 3, 2013 at 1:53 PM)
(my bold).
So the goal posts are moving faster than the temp trends can keep up. This means that by 2017, you'll probably have needed 25 years of flat temps for a trend. What a surprise.
I managed to extricate myself from the Rat Race a few years ago for a quiet life. But am I the only one when reading this stuff wishes they were still involved to try and sort it out.
"Slingo, in my office now. What the hell is going on here? Have you any explanation for your department's shocking performance? "
"Blah, blah....bigger computer needed.....in the hottest 10 years on record...20% chance of everything....blah, blah"
"That'll be a no then. Shut the door on your way out and don't come back."
"Betts, come in here please. Right, you seem a decent chap. You've got 2 weeks to report to me on the state of the MO's forecasting and modelling; short, medium and long term. How good is it? Are we wasting our time here? Warts and all please, no holds barred with figures to back it up so we can see which bits if any are useful and take it from there."
To be continued...
Just where is the accountability with all this.
Myles Allen: "...it would be equally silly to interpret what has happened since the early 2000s as evidence that the warming has stopped."
Translation: It would be silly to interpret the fact that the temperature is not rising as evidence that it is not getting warmer.
Guardian has a live rolling blog:
Guardian: Global warming: has the rise in temperatures 'paused'?
The first 20 comments are principally name calling against "deniers"... this one I liked, shows how difficult it is to spin this...
SimonW
I've been playing out the scenario you outlined in my mind..................lovely.
Anyway, in the real world our 'government' do not want AGW to go away, they need it to be a problem
in order to justify the direct and indirect taxes and to maintain investment and investment income for them and their friends.
As a result Slingo has a pretty safe job for to sack her would cause the MO to implode............sorry,
playing that scenario out now too..........need a lie down.
Jiminy, there some real bloopers on the Guardian blog you referenced, such as this:
But more seriously, it appears that everyone is reading the Met Office as saying there will be a 0.43C temperature rise between now and 2017.
So apart from the obvious point, that these folk can't read a Met Office statement correctly, it shows that they really have no idea about the true scale of warming if they think that is even vaguely possible!
And why hasn't Leo Hickman corrected this silly misreading of the numbers?
The UK has not been well-served by the Met Office's climate adventurism. It suited John Houghton and his heroic evangelical vision, and it suited a great many more with more worldly motivations.
But we have seen losses due to councils and airports planning for mild winters, airports shut down until an infuriated airline boss sent up a plane to disprove the fantasies of a Met Office computer model whose output had been treated as gospel by a government with no adequate defences against such faith. I daresay we have also had losses from planning for droughts and getting floods.
But I suspect the biggest loss of all for the Met Office itself is the loss of integrity in an institution reduced to spinning and press releases and petitions and the pushing of a speculative point of view rather than merely getting on with what it was origninally set up to do.
Beyond that, and this is not only to be blamed on the Met Office, what about the loss of confidence in the future by young people exposed all their lives to doomsday talk on their tvs, in their classrooms, and in any way in which eco-groups could find to reach them with their scaremongering?
We have also had the lunacy of the Climate Change Act, that 'madness of the parliamentary crowd' that might have been tempered by a differently driven Met Office.
It has been a period of gross irresponsibility. Wiser adults should be able to absorb speculations about impending doom, and subject them to detailed review and very high standards of evidence before ringing alarm bells that have all but deafened us. The schemers of the IPCC had already made up their minds, and so failed to provide that review. They squeezed what they could out of the modest evidence for alarm, re-wrote their SPMs, and stood by while other players acted as if their sequence of voluminous reports contained adequate justification for astonishing levels of alarmism. This was a betrayal of many scientists and their honest contributions to the IPCC.
I've been trying to get the BBC to correct that misleading statement all morning, and now the Guardian is repeating it..
BBC:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20947224
"The UK Met Office has revised one of its forecasts for how much the world may warm in the next few years.
It says that the average temperature is likely to rise by 0.43 C by 2017 - as opposed to an earlier forecast that suggested a warming of 0.54C."
what Met Office ACTUALLY said:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/seasonal-to-decadal/long-range/decadal-fc
"Global average temperature is expected to remain between 0.28 °C and 0.59 °C (90% confidence range) above the long-term (1971-2000) average during the period 2013-2017, with values most likely to be about 0.43 °C higher than average (see blue curves in the Figure 1 below)."
ie 2017 is expected to be abou tthe same temp as now. NOT 0.43c higher as the BBC reported....
and the Guardian are now quoting the same BBC article..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/jan/09/global-warming-met-office-paused?commentpage=1
can nobody read/understand press releases at the BBC/Guardian !!
Barry Woods there is old saying the BBC and the Guardian are two cheeks of the same arse , so its hardly a surprise to find the Guardian repeating the BBC without questions . Its a reality that the majority of BBC job appointments are advertised in 'the Guardian' which makes quite a difference to their problematic income stream .
I was under the impression that they couldnt find the heat thats supposedly going in to the sea? Dr Richard Allen refers to it and is backed up by Bob Ward...so, has Trenbeths missing heat been found?
Regards
Mailman
I doubt that the Met Office is in the market for making itself look truly incompetent.
Jan 9, 2013 at 9:58 AM | Rick Bradford
I thought that it was doing that now.
My cross-posting from WUWT:
The quote from the report “It says that the average temperature is likely to rise by 0.43 C by 2017 – as opposed to an earlier forecast that suggested a warming of 0.54C.” is a classic piece of misreporting by the BBC and designed to fool casual listeners. It was also used on the brief segment on this on the BBC 10 O’Clock news last night. It is intended to give the impression that the temperature will rise by 0.43 C by 2017 and I believe is intentionally misleading. In the report above, you have to read a long way down before they start to mention that it is the anomaly they are talking about and that a figure of 0.43 C essentially means flatlining temperature for about 20 years.
In the BBC 10 O’Clock news they showed graphics with a huge up arrow with 0.54 C then a second graphic with a huge up arrow of 0.43 C and then claimed that the the update was therefore small. This is grossly irresponsible reporting designed to give the casual viewer the impression that temperature will rise by 0.43 C by 2017. I do not recall any mention in the broadcast item last night that this was an anomaly and therefore temperatures are flatlining. Also, they did not show the flattening temperature graphs, just the big up arrow graphics. BBC bias at its best.
I believe that it was just a few years ago that Trenberth?Jones? were stating that 17 years without statistically significant warming were sufficient to falisfy AGW…
And now they have to admit that they have not accounted for all natural processes in their models. As other commentators have noted, that equally means there could be a natural process acting that has given us the slight warming since 1970, nothing to do with CO2. That’s called a null hypothesis.
Barry Woods -
If you can get Shukman's ear to correct the "rise by 0.43 C", ask him also to change the "about one-fifth lower" which is equally misleading. Over the five-year period, the new (mean) projection increases about two-thirds less than the prior one. It's not appropriate to take the ratios of two anomalies in this context. [As ThinkingScientist's post above indicates.]
The framing of the soundbite is deliberate mischief and deserves a formal complaint.
As Don Keiller neatly points out, don't extrapolate short term trends such as 1976 - 1998 (14 years).
During the "ice age is coming"** hysteria of the 1970's, the cooling trend (as noted by the Australian Acadamy of Science in its 1976 report forthe Australian Government) was from 1940 to 1975, a period of 35 years:
“This report was prepared at the request of the Minister for Science for advice on statements by some climatologists that the earth was undergoing a continuing cooling trend. Examination of recorded temperatures in the northern hemisphere suggest that, after nearly 100 years of slowly rising temperatures, there has been fall since 1940, most pronounced at high latitudes and averaging -0.3 degrees Celsius. Combined with extreme climatic events elsewhere during the early 1970’s, notably droughts in the Sahel and the Ukraine and failures of the monsoon in India, this fall in temperature has led some climatologists to suggest that the world’s climate is progressing rather rapidly towards another glacial phase, or at least another ‘Little Ice Age’”
Try that quote again but substitute cooling words for warming words and it would be a good template for todays "extreme weather" climate alarmism
**The Clash, London Calling
ThinkingScientist -
Is that report online somewhere? A quick google didn't locate it, and at the Australian Academy of Science website I couldn't find anything earlier than 1995 (in a very quick search).
Looking at the forecast in graph in question with its upper and lower bounds and précising in MOspeak:
There is a 33% chance during the next 5 years of global temperatures becoming warmer, a 34% chance of no change and a 33% chance that they will decline.
Which, if it tells us anything at all, is that they no longer believe themselves that CO2 is 'the main driver of climate'. Having come to that conclusion some time in 2012, I can only assume that they will convey that information upward via the government chief scientific adviser* who, on the 'Buggins turn next' system of appointment that applies to this post, is there for no other reason than to take the flak over flawed policy decisions of this nature.
* "Another crucial part of my role is to work with Ministers, the scientific community and the media to ensure that the scientific method, risk and uncertainty are understood by the public. This is especially important at present given the misunderstandings around climate change."
Pity about the knighthood Bedders.
HaroldW: I have tried to get the full report for some years without success. There are some online obtuse references to the report where people try and rewrite history by pretending it did not say what it did. I forgot the links, they are not especially helpful (somewhere on one of the official Austrailian webites ie governement or Academy of Science).
I got the quotation referenced from a text book:
McTainsh, G.H. and Boughton, W.C., 1993, Land degradation processes in Australia, published by Longman Cheshire
In the above book the climate change chapter is pp118 - 145 and the quotation above is in a callout box on page 142 discussing how one should take cooling/warming predictions with a pinch of salt. I would be happy to email a scan of the page to our host the Bish to allow users to link to it - its a great page.
Nothing from the BBC yet..
The Guardian HAVE made a clarification..
I'd been ignored all morning.. so thanks to Richard Betts, for a comment (and direct tweets) that the Guardian could not ignore (saying the same thing, I'd asked if he could help out)
Richard Betts (1:49pm main article update)
"Please note that, as @bbcbias correctly states, the 0.43C warming is relative to 1971-2000, *not* this year. Also, the 0.43C is the average over 2013-2017."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/jan/09/global-warming-met-office-paused?commentpage=1
Paul Hudson BBC also said it was wrong (will the BBC change the article?)
Paul Hudson @Hudsonweather
Yes agree with that @BarryJWoods @RHarrabin @davidshukmanbbc should read 'rise TO 0.43C above 1971-2000 by 2017' , not BY 0.43C by 2017
How do you report a problem with a BBC article...
We all know that the science is settled, don't we? Furthermore, since the science really is settled, it follows that we understand all the natural variations in the climate, don't we? And since we understand all the natural variations in the climate and we understand the effects of the greenhouse gases we are putting into the atmosphere we know that the predictions of the Met Office's computer models are accurate, don't we?
If it still appears that those predictions are inaccurate then we know that the temperature record needs adjusting, don't we?
ThinkingScientist (2:02 PM) -
Thanks for the information. Yes, it would be nice to see a scan of the relevant material, in the absence of the full report.
@ barry Woods 2:23
BBC Feedback :-
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newswatch/ukfs/hi/feedback/default.stm
ThinkingScientist said: "ice age is coming"** -- **The Clash, London Calling
Hey, thanks for that, I'd never made that connection to the 70's cooling scare.
;-)
http://www.realclimategate.org/2011/06/the-ice-age-really-was-coming/
@Jiminy Cricket
Spitting feathers here - I had my post censored on Damien Carrington's doom-laden article about the Australian BOM needing a NEW COLOUR to show how hot it was forecast to be (and which hasn't happened) because I dared to suggest that the ongoing hiatus in global warming had resulted in a change in the MetOffice's projections.
Al Gore, once a hero of the left (in for example, the UK Labour Party which distributed his wisdom to all schools within its control when in government), has really blotted his copybook with some of them with the recent sale of his tv-station: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/current_situation_XLE3W50v6I9Gbyqe6Z4pFP.
Is it too much to hope that this is a further sign, along with the Met Office being caught with its PR-machine set on spin, of the disastrous edifice of CO2-alarmism crumbling?
The rumbling of that crumbling would end much grumbling. Roll on the day!
Mailman
"I was under the impression that they couldnt find the heat thats supposedly going in to the sea? Dr Richard Allen refers to it and is backed up by Bob Ward...so, has Trenbeths missing heat been found?"
Possibly. This gives a summary of a recent paper on the subject.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-chameides/has-the-earths-missing-he_b_1268673.html
The full paper is quite a mouthful and covers a lot more ground.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/11/13421/2011/acp-11-13421-2011.pdf
John Shade made me think of this:
And the muttering grew to a grumbling;
And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling;
And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.
Whenever I hear the term climate model I reach for my Browning.
And a nitpick to comments from both viewpoints: percentage changes in temperature unless measured in degrees kelvin are meaningless, because the percentage change depends on the units of measurement. The same increase in temperature will be a different percentage increase if measured in Fahrenheit than if it's measured in Celsius.
Off topic but brilliant.Sometimes there is a God
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4733630/Vegetarian-KFC-protester-punched-by-diners-and-pelted-with-chicken.html
The BBC & Guardian have probably got it deliberately wrong. The Met office are accepting the inevitable - temperatures are just as liable to go down a bit over the next 5 years as they are to go up a bit. There is a natural 65 year oscillation in global temperatures and the last decline happened from 1940 - 1970. Since 2000 we have started a similar decline which will last till 2030. Including an underlying logarithmic dependence on increasing CO2 levels then predicts the following trends (description here):
2000 - 2030 No change in temperatures
2030 - 2060 0.5 C rise in global temperatures
2060 - 2100 No change in temperatures
Nicolas Scaffetti explains the 60 year oscillation as a tidal effect in the orbit of Jupiter on the Sun . I am not convinced and agree others who think that it is more likely to be the oscillations in the Oceans.
Either way we can look forward to a great deal of squirming and large amounts of egg being wiped of faces of leading politicians, their “scientific advisors”, and anti-growth carbon extremists. That is if we still have any economic activity left functioning by 2030 !
more about the Met Office forecast here
mikep, 4:26 PM
I see no such use of percentages on this thread. Have you been misdirected?
We are discussing, amongst other things, the repoorting of temperature anomalies.
Here are some examples of the same change in a temperature anomaly in Klevin, centigrade, and Fahrenheit:
K: 0.7 dropping to 0.43 a drop of 38%
C: 0.7 dropping to 0.43 a drop of 38%
F: 1.26 dropping to 0.774 a drop of 38%
You'll find such use of percentages here for example: http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/uk-met-office-cuts-projected-2017.html
Is that what you are concerned about?
My kingdom for a spellchecker on this blog's commenting panel!