Wednesday
Jun192013
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill That Met Office meeting
Jun 19, 2013 Climate: MetOffice The Met Office's meeting to discuss the run of poor weather we have endured in recent years has been the subject of considerable interest on the blogs and Twitter, although to tell the truth I can't get that excited about it. I find it a bit odd that the Met Office would want to publicise the fact of holding a meeting anyway. Having done so it's a bit rum to then complain that the media have done what the media do, blowing it up out of all proportion and saying that it's a crisis meeting.
The upshot of all those brains being put together seems to be that it might be something to do with the North Atlantic Oscillation and it might be something to do with Greenland ice melt, as Louise Gray reports in a somewhat strange article here.
Reader Comments (80)
noTrohpywins 12:48 pm
+1
seconded
South Eastern France (around Lourdes) should be SW france and we have been on RED alert for 36 hrs. It is a classic example of the late breakdown of the winter to spring pattern. Depressions from the atlantic are forced south with the jetstream by a cold arctic and then come to a stop across western europe while trying to break down the high pressure block over eastern europe.
Humid air is drawn up from the Med continuously creating rainfall in a line sw to ne france and southern england. In the past it has flooded some villages several times in a 2 month period.
Signs of a sea change, or of a false dawn? Are the deep convictions of doom of previous Met Office leaders Houghton and Napier being displaced by a proper scientific humility in the face of great complexity? Will CO2 be once again be classed as a trace gas of great importance to plants and of minor importance to atmospheric dynamics? Time will tell.
I think this is relevant. Over in the States, Judith Curry has published a fine Fisking of a review article in a leftwing outlet. The article quotes scientists toeing the IPCC party line on climate, and JC provides considerable illumination of the merits or otherwise of them, and of the signs of changed attitudes that some represent.
The author of the article himself makes this observation, which is of a kind that would get him banned on CiF for example:
More here.
"The MET has a fundamental problem.
Their credibility is about as high as Bernie Madoff's."
Isn't that a rather optimistic asessment? I mean Bernie Madoff was a very good con-man, the MET isn't.
'Louise Gray reports in a somewhat strange article'
She 'reports'? I did not know that.
The don't have a clue. Anyone who discusses climate sensitivity is mad.
Jun 19, 2013 at 2:37 PM | eSmiff
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Mad, may be a little strong, but disengenuous I would accept.
As I often comment, until one fully knows and understands everything there is to know and understand about natural variability, what it comprises of, each and every one of its constituent forcings, the upper and lower bounds of each and every constituent forcing, it is impossible to assess climate sensitivity from observational evidence, because until one possesses that degree of knowledge and understanding, one cannot begin to separate the CO2 climate sensitivity signal (if any) from the noise of natural variation.
I consider it disengenuous to claim that figures for climate sensitivity are anything other than a guess.
The only thing we know is that natural variation can over power climate sensitivity to CO2, witness the 1940 to 1970s cooling (when natural variation exceeded any upward forcing from CO2) and the past 17 years (or so) temperature hiatus (when natural variation has equalled and therefore nullified any upward forcing from CO2). In the paleo record, there are many instances when high levels of CO2 and/or rising levels of CO2 were overcome, and temperatures either did not rise, or fell soemtimes in an extreme manner with the Earth going into ice ages.
@richard verney.I believe you have the wrong end of the stick. The feedback system keeps OLR = thermalised SW IN. The variation is because natural processes store and release energy at different time constants so there are local surface temperature variations.
Think about it - an instantaneous radiative feedback control using CO2 as the working fluid, latent heat energy ebbing and flowing in the atmosphere and oceans with hot and cold zones swapping around.
There can be no CO2-AGW or 'back radiation'; simple physics but you have to go way beyond where the propaganda tries to get the punters to focus, e.g. Tyndall's experiment does not prove where thermalisation occurs.....
I suspect that the Met Office for a long time has benefited from being the "option which won't get you fired". If you are in a business where knowing what the weather is going to be is critical and you are the person in charge of sourcing forecasts or of making decisions based on forecasts then the Met Office has been the safe bet.
The forecasts might have often been wrong but you could always claim that they were the best available, whereas if you were using anyone else with less of an establishment reputation you'd look like an idiot when they were wrong, even if they were less often wrong.
The Met Office has been so publicly, so completely, wrong recently that they might be losing the "safe bet" status with even the most conservative organizations.
If so they must be terrified.
Even the denser people in government must be wondering what on earth is the point of spending millions on an organization which is a mostly-wrong laughing stock.
Questions which spring to mind would be:
If you are saying it is too early to tell, you presumably think that you will in due course know the answer to whether climate change could be intensifying the natural cycle?
Is there a possibility that climate change could be ameliorating the natural cycle instead?
How would you be able to tell whether climate change is ameliorating the natural cycle or intensifying it when you have nothing to gauge how intense the natural cycle would be in the absence of climate change?
Don't tell me you are proposing to answer your question by use of climate modelling?
How do you expect us to trust the output of your model, when you have only just begun to recognise the existence of natural cycles?
Artwest says: "I suspect that the Met Office for a long time has benefited from being the "option which won't get you fired". "
Rather like buying IBM PC's in the 1970's....nobody would get fired for buying IBM.
Now, of course, they are mostly Dells, HP's and not IBM PC's.
Weather forcast met office style.
http://s446.photobucket.com/user/bobclive/media/Spike2.mp4.html
Er, thinkingscientist, it was buying an IBM mainframe that would not get anyone fired. The IBM PC only appeared around 1982 (ironically, IBM no longer make PC's - too bad, because their keyboards lasted forever - I'm using one now).
But then things changed, and Akers was put out to grass as the bottom fell out of the mainframe market.
After that, buying an IBM mainframe could get you fired (if the CEO had been sold on the idea of open systems).
Jun 19, 2013 at 4:44 PM | AlecM
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Alec
I am sceptical as to whether the measured DWLWIR is anything more than a signal, I am sceptical as to whether it is energy capable of performing real work in Earth's environ.
If DWLWIR is capable of performing real work it is surprising that we are concentrating on solar arrays rather than DWLWIR arrays since solar is not really effective in mid northern latitudes where most people reside, and particularly inefficient in winter (when days are short and incident of sunlight low), whereas according to K&T there is more average DWLWIR than average Solar. So if DWLWIR is capable of performing real work, it surprises me that no one is seeking to extract this energy in the form of PVR panels (or something similar) tuned to the wavelength of DWLWIR rather than wavelength of solar EMR. Constant energy extracted from DWLWIR would solve the planet's energy needs, so if it exists why are we not exploiting it/
It is because I have my doubts as to the effectiveness of measured DWLWIR to perform work that I stated: "one cannot begin to separate the CO2 climate sensitivity signal (if any)..." I do not necessarily accept that there is any climate sensitivity to CO2. That is not to say that CO2 does nothing, but merely that it may not act to warm as claimed.
So Professor Burper thinks that "climate change" might have something to do with "weather"?!
Give the man a coconut!
Martin A, I stand corrected. I hope the meaning of my comment still stands, and who buys mainframes now anyway? Mainly climate scientists as far as I can see. The last one i used was a MicroVax 2, back in 1990. Could even be misconstrued as an alternative to a Miele vacuum cleaner now....
Some responses to the Met Office concern about the weather:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/letters/
See above.
...MicroVax 2, back in 1990.
Jun 19, 2013 at 8:30 PM ThinkingScientist
You made the point very well.
A MicroVax a mainframe? This is what a mainframe looked like.
o/t for the enthusiasts :-)
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/index.html
Like others, being called a 'Flat Earther' by Gordon Brown really p***ed me off and I laughed heartily when Jeremy Clarkson called Brown a 'one-eyed effing Scots idiot' during a visit to Australia.
I too suffer one failed eye, but have have never regarded the epithet 'one eyed' as having anything to do with one's eyesight.
IMHO, if any politician, anywhere and in any era, suffered from a total failure of intellect and trumpeted that failure to the world, it was the same Gordon Brown.
Did you perhaps mean the DEC mini kind of microVAXes, not IBM mainframes? I worked for a company that for decades used dozens of the little marvels, if not hundreds.
IBM mainframes and other sizes are still pretty popular in the business world, which is one reason for IBMs continuing health. Now I'm in an enterprise that uses dozens of those. You know, non-stop operation, scalability, and legacy compatibility, with lots of hand-holding. Just buy what you need when you need it, and sleep soundly. All for a price, of course.
But for modelling, I suspect something else would be the ticket. Massively parallel, for instance.
OK, now my imaginary IBM stock is safe.
Martin A: We had two VAX 11/780's and a VAC 11/750 (for the research bods) and I guess they would qualify by your definition. For remote offices overseas we moved to MicroVax 2's. To me, if the computer had dumb terminals and multiple users logged on to the same machine it was effectively a "mainframe", even if its not in the same (now rather mediocre) IBM mainframe league. We still had the Telex tape drives (later Kennedy tape drives, which were ok until they failed to autoload - no hand feeding the tape on them like the Telexes.
My father was repsonsible for purchasing mainframe computing at BAC in the 1960's/1970's. I still have the proposal from IBM that he kept in his personal papers, including pricing, HUGE disk drive (as in physically large, not capacity!). The cost was astonomical. My mobile phone is probably more capable now!
It all changed in the oil industry when Sun SPARC machines came out...
thinkingscientist/martinA: I remember servicing mainframes similar to the one shown - I actually cut my teeth on the 360 series which followed the 7000. And I have memories(!!) of middle-of-the-night calls to tape units like those in the pic!!
But is you think the VAX might be mistaken for a vacuum cleaner, you must know that the Univac computer came from the company that gave us whole-house integrated vacuum cleaning with vacuum pipes built into the walls - hence, univac.
BTW: when the EA instituted their flood defence on the river I back onto they gave me a certificate saying it was good for 100 year floods, BUT, because of the Climate Change risk they had upgraded it to 150 years! Didn't mean a thing to my insurers: they just ignored it and loaded my excess for flood!
Jun 19, 2013 at 3:25 PM | John Shade
I have also noticed the word “uncertainty” creeping into the "WEATHER" from our weather forecasters on BBC,ITV etc... (not sure if Richard has an input into this, but BH & other inputs seem to be having a effect).
but again tonight's BBC weather person pans out the map to show the hot spots in Europe ?
did they do the same when Europe is freezing ? I think not (wonder why)
ps. anybody know how many weather persons on UK media/tv/radio/etc... & who pays (average salery) for them ?
dfhunter
BBC weather presenters are actually employed by the Met Office - so no conflict of interest there!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Weather
To be fair, the weather forecast used by ITN (for ITV and Channel 4) are supplied by the Met Office so not much difference in content.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITV_Weather
The Met Office ought to be concerned that they might lose at least the ITN contract. Even if they didn't lose the BBC platform in the short term, if the opposition were showing significantly more accurate forecasts it would be terrible PR at least.
Rhoda: "Let me make a prediction. Even when they have turned the container ship and finally caught up with what the weather is doing, they will still be, in their minds, right, and WE will still be WRONG. "
As someone who did a joint science and engineering degree - and philosophy, I had the strange experience of going from a physics degree into an engineering company. My wife on the other hand only did science. I keep trying to explain to her that science doesn't always work in practice. She believes it does.
I try to explain how when you try to apply scientific theories in real world situations (i.e. engineering or GP practice) , more often than not science doesn't work as expected (often because of the human element). She continues to believe it does.
And I quite understand her because that is precisely what I thought when I went into engineering. The science was right ... it was just something odd about the situation in which it was being used ... if only I knew what it was ...
This is precisely what we have from the climate science ... their science works, if only they knew what was causing it not to work ...
But eventually, engineers learn that almost all situations are the odd exception and that there are very few real-world situations where you can unquestionably just fling a scientific theory at it and expect it to work.
I would guess it takes dozens of engineering projects to change the way most scientists view things after they go into engineering. But unfortunately, there is only one climate. It takes about 10 years to "get a result". So the number of real-world applications or "projects" any climate scientist is ever going to undertake in their lifetime will never be enough for most of them to cross that threshold of understanding between science and engineering to learn by experience that science cannot be flung at the climate and expect it to work.
Like the time-served engineers I met when I went into engineering ... we can only sigh ... and if we get really fed up with their arrogance ... suggest they go down to the stores for a long weight.
And I have memories(!!) of middle-of-the-night calls to tape units like those in the pic!!
Jun 20, 2013 at 3:16 PM Snotrocket
Love the old IBM or hate it, they were superb at marketing. The story is that an IBM sales director noticed that IBM tape drives like those in the picture had a panel light indicating "IDLE". He issued an order and, within weeks, every IBM tape drive in the world had that panel light replaced by one indicating "READY".
MikeHaseler
When I hear an engineer describing the superiority of engineers over scientists I think of the Tacoma Narrows bridge, of the Derbyshire, of Apollo 1 and Apollo 13, of Columbia and Challenger, of Windscale, Three Mile Island and Fukishima.
Most of all I think of Chernobyl, where the engineers turned off all the safety systems and melted their own reactor!
Surprise that I can think of engineers and of Apollo 1 and 13 and Chernobyl too.
Not sure what your point is EM other than displaying your ignorance again.
Engineering as a profession has an approach based on learning from failure and analysing mistakes honestly to improve the breed. I also think that this is true of the majority of scientific endeavour. Climate science (tm) however does not appear to share this desire for truth or improvement.
Anyway here's something for your reading list - I'm sure the HSE will issue a revision upon receiving your considered comments:
http://www.hse.gov.uk/nuclear/fukushima/final-report.pdf