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)
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 .
#'Jan 9, 2013 at 12:08 PM | KnR
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BBC - AND Public Sector jobs. All paid for by the taxpayer. Indeed, it may well be the taxpayer who is keeping the Guardian afloat. And another matter .... how come that the more the Guardian loses, the higher Rusbridger's salary goes. How does that work?
I particularly liked our favourite churnalist Louise Gray's tweet on the subject. Unsurprisingly, she has followed the Grauniad and Beeb's line, but this time adding the revised anomaly figure to the warming since 1850. No wonder she fell for the Hockey Stick, adding apples to oranges to get testicular objects :
"Louise Gray @loubgray
Global temps already 0.8C up since 1850 New @metoffice figures forecast by 2017 it'll be up 1.2C rather than 1.3C predicted before Big Deal?"
I think, the response below is quite funny:
Fred Pearce trying to prove the sceptics wrong, ie sceptics say scientists ignore natural variability, ends up makeing the sceptics case... big fail
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23060-has-global-warming-ground-to-a-halt.html?cmpid=RSS%7CNSNS%7C2012-GLOBAL%7Cenvironment
Are these cycles just something scientists have invented to explain away the lack of recent warming?
No. The Met Office admits that we still know far too little about how these natural cycles work, and how big they are. And climate scientists are open to the charge that they ignored the potential impact of natural variability when it was accelerating global warming. According to Brian Hoskins of Imperial College London, it now looks like natural cycles played a big role in the unexpectedly fast warming of the 1990s.
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ie on the record. scientists say we know FAR TOO LITTLE about natural cycles, and HOW BIG they are..
and Sir Brian Hoskins saying, looks like natural cycles played a BIG ROLE in the 90's warming...
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maybe they need to reflect on that a bit...
David whitehouse has a good review of the press coverage at GWPF, noting the incompetence of the beeb. (Dunno how to do links from my phone).
John Shade if you register you can go back and edit typos!
Thanks, Paul M - I did register a while back, but some time ago when I tried to post after logging in, I got a message saying the comment could not be posted (can't recall exact words). I'll take it up with the Bish when he's better!
I strongly agree about the David WGhitelhosue review.
I'd also commend the discussion at Tallbloke's original post: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/major-change-in-uk-met-office-global-warming-forecast/
'Whitehouse' that is.
Phillip Bratby asked:
Well, it wasn't a Met Office prediction, but one's mind always turns to this gem:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html
and Sir Brian Hoskins saying, looks like natural cycles played a BIG ROLE in the 90's warming...
maybe they need to reflect on that a bit...
Jan 9, 2013 at 6:15 PM | Barry Woods
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Was it Lindzen, during Anthony's WUWT TV day who stated that in the USA there is NO money going towards the research of natural variability? Ergo that it ALL goes to AGW? I can believe that.
Fred Pearce ( in the New Scientist piece ) has got the brief wrong and is describing Anthropomorphic Climate Change.
In his scary world there is one single climate and it behaves like the villain in a Bond movie. You can fool the villain for a while by hiding the heat in the ocean or moving the earth around the sun a bit - but you can't fool it forever and when it bites back it will be very very angry.
Yes the atmosphere will be very angry by 2020.
I also like the new tense - the double-subjunctive...
This is climate science in a nutshell - a confused tense where you can't be sure if the climateer is describing a real observation from the past, or a current event, or a projection, or a prediction, or the result of a calculation, or an omen, or something else.
Leo Hickman in the Guardian has concluded that:
"The "global warming has stopped" line from climate sceptics has always hung its hat heavily (and conveniently) on the freakishly anomalous warm year of 1998 as its starting point or baseline. As has been pointed out repeatedly by the Met Office and many climate scientists, this is tantamount to picking the sweetest of cherries."
They were happy to pick the sweetest of cherries back in the early 2000s for example:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/1212-03.htm
Among other gems from 2002: "Richard B. Alley, an expert on abrupt climate change at Penn State University, said a new analysis of how the planet's climate has responded to sharp changes in the past suggests that either the models are accurate or they underestimate the changes we will see in the future.
Groups that are concerned about climate change point out that the rate of warming is steeply increasing. The excess heat could unleash deadly heat waves, raise the sea level as more ice caps melt, and cripple agriculture, warned Brown of the Earth Policy Institute."
Perhaps global warming will resume when all the hot air currently in Australia spreads to the rest of the world.
I've felt for a long time, and have tried to warn Richard Betts and Tamsin on past threads, that to put all their eggs in one basket by expressing confidence that the future can only be destined to warm, they are setting themselves as hostages to fortune. Now of course they may be right, but equally well so could Abdussamatov and others who anticipate a 21st century Little Ice Age. Which is why, simply as insurance and covering all eventualities, I think it the prudent thing for anyone working on potential impacts from climate change should surely work up the impacts for the cooling case. I certainly wouldn't want to get caught short like that if I were doing that job. But it seems to fall on deaf ears.
One of the first things a geologist learns is that natural cycles are ubiquitous in the history of the Earth, everything from the diurnal scale up to the erathemic. What goes up must come down. Take the sealevel record, its up and down just like a fiddlers elbow, and just about anything else you look at is cyclical also.
The second thing you learn, particularly when a well is drilling up your prospect, is humility. Never think you are smarter than nature.
Rick Bradford Jan 9, 2013 at 9:58 AM
Tim Ball actually,
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/08/wrong-prediction-wrong-science-unless-its-government-climate-science/
Hmm, OK how about this?
1) The wettest year was 1872, when there was 1284mm, compared to 1244mm in 2012. It was also wetter in 1768. Clearly the impression given by the Met Office, that the rainfall last year, and in 2000, is somehow “unprecedented” is not true. One is entitled to wonder why they made it.
Is there an honest bone in the body of the Met Office, or is it all about propounding MMGW aka - climate change?
Pharos says: "The second thing you learn, particularly when a well is drilling up your prospect, is humility. Never think you are smarter than nature."
I have said almost the same here before, but that's the problem with climate scientists and their models: they never have to test their predictions except by..........................waiting.
I too have been humbled many times by a well drilling a prospect, enough times to know that no matter how good my models they are still just models.
From Climate Realists.
Another nail in the coffin.
The astonishing NASA announcement comes in the wake of a compelling new study just published titled, “The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth’s Climate.” One of the participants, Greg Kopp of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado, overturned mainstream climate science thinking by declaring even slight changes in solar output have a considerable impact on climate. Kopp conceded, "Even typical short term variations of 0.1% in incident irradiance exceed all other energy sources (such as natural radioactivity in Earth's core) combined."
and this:
Ball believes this latest NASA publication marks the breaking of the control Hansen had over climate research at the U.S. space agency. “The comments of Hansen’s boss indicate the degree of political power Hansen had as a bureaucrat,” adds Ball. As he has written before, Ball has shown that the evidence is stacking up proving that Hansen was "out of control" and what he has been doing publicly and politically probably should have been censured, even prosecuted under the Hatch Act.
Ball notes, “I understand that upper management were advised by much higher authority not to touch Hansen. When you look at the manipulations used by Senator Wirth for his appearance before Al Gore’s committee it is not surprising.” This is a reference to Wirth's own admission that theatricality was used to unduly influence a key U.S. committee investigating global warming in the 1980's.
How about that - Hansen is a nutter - who da thunk it - where does that place Julia and Napier?
The link embedded in Athelstan's WUWT hotlink to lithographs of the Victorian floods around Windsor is particularly good
http://www.thamesweb.co.uk/windsor/windsorhistory/floods1875.html
David Shukman has now corrected his article after twitterbombing from me , Barry &Paul Hudson.
Paul Matthews (9:52 PM) -
The revised article has corrected the "rise by 0.43 C by 2017" to the accurate "the average temperature is likely to be 0.43 C above the long-term average by 2017." However, Shukman didn't fix the sentence "the new model, known as HadGEM3, gives a rise about one-fifth lower than that of 0.43C." In fact, the *rise* (over the interval 2013-2017) is about two-thirds less than the HadGEM2 model projected -- 0.05C vs. 0.15C. Taking the ratio of two anomaly figures is inappropriate (unless one were comparing the rise since the base period). Numbers here.
I am a litle annoyed that the BBC has not mentioned in the article that a correction has been made.
Is that not normal and best journalistic practice to do this.
Very well done all concerned. And as far as BBC bias is concerned, worthy of record, including the absence of a comment highlighting the correction. What a shabby outfit they really are. And all they get for their efforts is another few thousand sceptic recruits fed up with their deceit.
Is that not normal and best journalistic practice to do this.
Not if you are the BBC who is never, ever wrong about anything
Channel E4 was screening The Day After Tomorrow this evening. Always like a good comedy so I turned it on. Whilst watching it I was struck by the lines such as "give the computer and I'll prove it with a model". Was surpised to see the bus driver being bribed was Michael Mann in a cameo :-).
However, the thought that came to me whilst watching it is maybe the BBC and The Grauniad reporters think its not a film but a documentary.
Interesting article by Paul Homewood on WUWT
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/09/uk-rainfall-2012-the-report-the-met-office-should-have-produced/ about their claim the 2012 was second wettest year on record.
The MO have a "Met Office in the news" page which somehow seems to have missed all the press items regarding their latest "5 year long Decadal Forecast" maybe they would appreciate a gentle nudge?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/news/newsfeed.html
Ben Santer has a comment to Andy Revkin (also see Richard Betts in main article at link):
Revkin quotes email from Ben Santer
oh and there is a more general comment from Santer added as an "Update" to the original post by Revkin:
from Ben Santer to Revkin -- see 'Update' at bottom of Revkin's original post
"The global effects are there for all to say." --Guardian commenter.
Nice Freudian slip. All "saying" and a little hand-waving; no seeing.
"This is what the discussion should focus on – the signal rather than the noise." I think I understand this from his previous words, but would it would help if someone could correct my understanding. Is he saying that they knew all along that there were natural causes of warming and cooling, but these are noise and the only important signal is that human induced heating, and that can't be detected because the noise is too great? However, in this case, both the signal and the noise cause warming and the noise can also cause cooling, but the "noise" isn't important in the study of the climate because it gets in the way of proving AGW? Is that it?
Myles Allen is beginning to sound like he could really use some help.
So maybe it's just the water-vapour feedback that's gone missing.
lol
Well, if Santer ever tires of science, at least he could pursue a career in poetry.
A signal met Santer in a dark alleyway and made a loud noise.
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The words "natural variability" are now being bandied about everywhere, even by the Met Office and the BBC. And now its "decadal" time scales to detect AGW.
Whatever happened to the claims of "all natural effects are accounted for in the models" and "the science is settled"?
What happened to "17 years without a statistically significant trend would falsify AGW"?
The data are shouting loud and clear that the climate is poorly understood, in spite of all the efforts to "recast" the past temperature record d add systematic warming corrections to them. The days of torturing models until they confess to AGW may be discredited.
As Churchill famously said "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
James Delingpole in the DM
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2259942/The-crazy-climate-change-obsession-thats-Met-Office-menace.html
The crazy climate change obsession that's made the Met Office a menace
The £200 million-a-year official weather forecaster often gets it wrong
This week it has admitted there is no evidence that ‘global warming’ is happening
The Met Office quietly readjusted its temperature projections on its website on Christmas Eve
By JAMES DELINGPOLE
I find the quote from Ben Santer quite revealing:
"...there are a number of possible explanations for differences between observed temperature trends and model trends in simulations of historical climate change."
Ok, so the models may be wrong.
"Dr. John Christy and Dr. Patrick Michaels claim that such differences are entirely due to model response errors. Such claims are scientifically incorrect."
Really? How do you know this? What if they are right and you are wrong?
"Errors in the imposed forcings - particular the anthropogenic aerosol, stratospheric ozone, solar, and volcanic forcings - remain a serious concern."
Ah - an admission that the models may be wrong. And note the appearance of natural factors - the sun, volcanos, ozone, whereas previously these were all dismissed as accounted for.
"And as the history of the MSU debate has taught us, we certainly cannot rule out residual errors in the observations."
So now the data could be wrong too?
It never seems to cross his mind that maybe the models and the hypothesis of AGW could be wrong, does it?
Now, what will the MO do when they realise there was and never could be any CO2-AGW or positive feedback because of fundamental radiative equilibrium physics?
I read on this blog that David Whitehouse's dogged work on the reality of the global temperature standstill led to a suggestion he be journalist of the year, given that his work has now been accepted as being correct. He was years ahead of others.
Well what about nominating him for the John Maddox Prize.
It says The John Maddox Prize for standing up for science rewards an individual who has promoted sound science and evidence on a matter of public interest. Its emphasis is on those who have faced difficulty or hostility in doing so.
http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/john-maddox-prize.html
David sounds like a good choice BUT oh ho t's run by Nature, so....no chance.
Indeed, along with an essay by David Archibald (and an appearance on Newsnight by a sceptic Liverpool Uni professor around the same time - must have been Peiser?) it was probably this article in the New Statesman by Whitehouse back in 2007 which triggered my interest and subsequent scepticism of the CO2 mantra.
Has global warming stopped?.
I am not sure if the Archibald essay is still online, and I have never found any trace of the Newsnight interview on you-tube.
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?
Jan 9, 2013 at 11:24 AM | jferguson
Just a POI, I sing with a Met Office man. Back in 2011 with the Iceland glacier irruption, the Met Office were forecasting all sorts of doom & gloom along with their colleagues in the EU initiating the Precautionary Principle, i.e. do absolutely everything to be seen to be doing something, regardless of the pointlessness of it, causing the whole of EU airspace to be shut down for no reason whatsoever. The Met Office were busy "modelling" the so called ash cloud which proved to be all but worthless & in any case irrelevant, he told me that the Guvment has renewed their contract as if this was some major surprise due to the ridiculous media speculation in previous weeks, probably instigated by the Met Office themselves as a straw man argument. There is NO NATIONAL GUVMENT IN THE WORLD THAT WOULD DUMP ON A NATIONAL WEATHER BUREAU!, regardless of how inept & incompetent they were, the plummeting confidence would result in massive job losses, pension collapses, & some knight/damehoods for services to science etc being the only positive outcome of such an event. The latter will occur in any case to the upper echelons of the system! The MO & the BBC are so intertwined they are almost inseparable!
The Michael Crichton explanation of CAGW, wearing his anthropologist's hat, was that environmentalism in general - and climate nuttiness within that - are best understood as religious phenomena, having as they do all the same features.
In effect, this anthropological hypothesis itself enables a scientific prediction: that alarmists' predictions of ever-rising temperature will be found to be inaccurate, because they're religious prophecies, not science.
I'd say this sceptic prediction is being resoundingly borne out.
The BBC / MO are desperately trying to stop themselves from being split up into news / science and propaganda sections, with the latter being privatised.
This is apparently why some are plugging extreme weather to claim they have been right yet the realists are paddling away because they realise they were misled by the second raters in charge of this updated Lysenkoist creed.
The Delingpole tour de force linked to by Breath of Fresh Air (Jan 10, 2013 at 8:19 AM) makes many good points with that lightness of touch we fans of his have come to love and expect!
There is also an editorial here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2259934/DAILY-MAIL-COMMENT-Global-warming-inconvenient-truth.html , and it begins:
To which the answer can only be "Yes, it sure is."
I hope someone in the National Audit Office is busy taking notes just in case they get the call.
"Why, then, did the Met Office choose to sneak out this intriguing information on Christmas Eve, knowing there would be no newspapers the next day?"
Could it be that someone within the Met Office took the opportunity to release this data in Christmas Eve when most of the big-wigs were already on vacation, so there was nobody available to say no?
ThinkingScientist,
You're not seeing what is happening here. Every climate scientist is now laying a documented trail they can point back to in 5 or 10 years to say that they always knew the effects might be exaggerated. They don't do it all at once... a sentence here.. a figure there. Then when they are being asked why they didn't speak up.. they can gather together and aggregate all these little nuggets.. and voila.....they always know it was bollox.
Watch out for it. Small but steady little admissions of error. But over the years, with compound interets, they add up to an indictment defence.
Yes, in a post dated 10 January 2013 on the UK Met Office web site, they give the oceans a starring role in climate over decadal time scales - with forecasts for them grandly titled 'decadal forecasts'. See: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/decadal-forecasting .
We might yet see 'decadal climate science' developing as a new field of study. The newness will reduce the taint of earlier 'climate science' which often looked 'several to many decades' into the future to find alarming projections with which to entertain their political masters, and appall anyone who knew anything about the competence of the models. Well blow me down with a zephyr, that's progress.
Is 'decadal forecasting' the escape pod to allow some to detach from the doomed mother ship of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming with its monotically increasing temperature projections harvested from the versatile morass of diverse model outputs?
'monotonically' that is
This is getting to be a habit. A bad habit. Clutters up the comments. Sorry.
John Shade
“they give the oceans a starring role in climate over decadal time scales”
If I am reading the following correctly:-
“There has been a debate about why the decadal forecasts from 2012 are indicating a slower rate of warming in the next 5 years than the forecasts made in 2011. Such a change in the forecast is entirely possible from the natural variability in ocean 'weather' and the impact that has on global mean temperature.”
The implication is that a change in “ocean weather" over a 12 month period can produce the following changes in their model output:-
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-0e9S3JvjWrg/UOmGJq06wYI/AAAAAAAABDY/3UHjSSHTfKo/s670/metOffice20112012DecadalForecast.gif
Very powerful things our oceans
In the Andy Revkin article referred to by Skiphill above our good friend Richard Betts is quoted as follows:
"There’s lots going on here, and the first thing to note is that decadal forecasts are still regarded as experimental, which is why this has first appeared on our research pages and not as a paper or a press release with a big fanfare – it’s not a “ta-daaaa” moment, more a “OK here’s what the latest setup tells up, feel free to take a look while we continue developing the techniques”."
Is it just me or does this all have a sightly disingenuous ring to it?
Richard if you are reading this, the Met office is making a fool of itself. If you can't see that you need glasses!
Delingpole Daily Mail article gets a kicking from the MO !
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=10921
RE: John Shade "Is 'decadal forecasting' the escape pod to allow some to detach from the doomed mother ship of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming "
Hopefully to find themselves in the same company as the survivors of the Golgafrincham 'B' ark!