Sunday
Jan052014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Fish's water
Jan 5, 2014 Climate: WG2 With UK climatologists now generally on their best behaviour on the subject of a possible link between extreme weather and global warming, Channel Four news seems to have struggled to find someone credible to push the green line. They seem eventually to have persuaded the weather forecaster Michael Fish to give the sermon and you can see the results below. The line taken by the great man was, in essence, that although all the science has been unable to identify a link (unsurprising since there appears to be no actual evidence of adverse changes in weather extremes to explain), he could feel the causation in his water.
Strewth.
Reader Comments (34)
I watched this live yesterday evening. We thought he looked like he had never got over the "great storm of 1987" and was, to put it politely, getting a bit past it. He's not a good advert for global warming alarmism that Channel 4 News likes to mention at every opportunity.
Aahhh. Bless him.
You would have thought he would have learned a lesson from his idiotic personal guarantees he has provided in the past in relation to extreme weather events.
With a name like Fish, where else would he 'feel it' apart in his water...
Sorry...
Er... Yes, what tohose two said above.
'Hurricane' Fish is an appallingly bad advert for getting predictions right. What were the spin doctors thinking?
As the good Dr Pachauri famously said of Dr V K Raina, the former director of the Geological Survey of India whose 2009 report Himalayan Glaciers, A State-of-Art Review of Glacial Studies, Glacial Retreat and Climate Change sparked "Glaciergate":
"With the greatest of respect, this guy retired years ago and I find it totally baffling that he comes out and throws out everything that has been established years ago!".
Quite right too.
Hah, he's onto the wrong kind of snow. Those lucky Americans with the right kind of snow.
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I have started a discussion thread where the new AGW extreme weather encounters can be logged and discussed.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/2267759
Lets face it, once you see the 17 year lack of increasing temps, increase in sea ice etc there is not a lot left to hang on to ;)
Curious how mere “weathermen” are dismissed when used to argue against AGW, but become oracles when pro-AGW.
I found it first......
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqs1YXfdtGE
Follow the money. What was he paid to appear?
Crikey! present me with just one 50 degree temperature in Australia this year.
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/17557773?searchTerm=states%20blanket&searchLimits=
"This map, based on the officially recorded maximum temperatures throughout New South Wales on Wednesday, can be taken as typical of any day during the last fortnight. The heavily shaded portion shows the large proportion of the State that experienced temperatures exceeding 110 degrees. The registration of 124 degrees at White Cliffs was the highest recorded in New South Wales since the record for the State, 125 degrees, was made at Bourke in 1909"
125 degrees F = 51.66 degrees C .
All those recordings seem to have been disappeared down the memory hole. Double plus good!!
‘In fact there wasn’t a phone call, it was me telling a white lie. There was a colleague with me who rang his mother in Wales on a BBC phone. ‘She was about to go to Florida on holiday and was concerned about hurricanes and we told her not to worry. I thought, “I’ll use that as an intro”.’
http://metro.co.uk/2012/10/15/weatherman-michael-fish-corrects-great-storm-blunder-in-new-youtube-advert-25-years-on-606463/
As we're always told the alarmists do, at least Fish guards his answer with all the caveats and uncertainty:
"There is no doubt we are going to have to get used to this extreme weather"...oh hang on.
As always with these soothsayers, the safest check is to see what their track record of prediction is:
See Jonesey's link above
...oh hang on again (joking, but I bet he has no long term skilful track record).
Anyway they'll have Mr Watts on next week, you'll see.
An excellent discussion of research into the connection between global warming and tropical storms may be found here. It should be noted that GW *is* expected to have some effects in this area, but that (contrary to Mr Fish) it is not expected to be detectable statistically until the latter half of this century.
Is he taking the piss ... ?
I wondered if it was worth looking up actual rainfall stats to establish whether the frequent floods that the UK are currently experiencing are actually being caused by an increase in periods of sustained heavy rain. York used to flood on a very regular basis until improved flood defences were built. Is it possible that better flood defences in one place cause a problem somewhere else?
It is also worth pointing out that floods were not on the list of CAGW disasters that, according to the alarmists, we were about to bring down upon ourselves. Only when they started happening did the alarmists find it convenient to hitch their wagon to them.
Michael Fish in this interview epitomises what soft targets meteorology and climate studies were for the determined characters who with foresight or luck turned a generally quiet, and not very scientifically appealing (because, ironically enough, it was just too difficult, just too messy with all the turbulence, interactions, and lack of decent data) into a hotbed of intrigue and political ambition, and made it awash with grants and awards beyond the wildest dreams of avarice.
Into this, in large part amateurish field (large numbers of people like to record weather, photograph clouds, study storms, and so on), came some determined folks. Determined to make the most of a great, unifying simplification that had caught their attention, namely that rising CO2 levels would drive the climate system and that mankind was to blame. Heady stuff. Early on they managed to convert the prospect of a mild warming into something to fear - quite an achievement in itself. Then of course the magic of computer models came to the rescue by allowing them to present computer print-outs as if they were scientific evidence. The success of the Club of Rome and its fatuous Limits to Growth models would not have been lost on them. If the scientific subset was a soft target for takeover, there were several political ones who welcomed the upstarts with open arms as reinforcements for their own causes, be they the ending of industrialisation, the suppression of population growth, the overthrow of 'capitalism', or merely that we should all be more economical with resources, and of course recycle anything and everything regardless of cost.
Thanks to Greenie Watch , I came across a recent article on that most inspiring example from the days when meteorology and climate were not political happy-hunting grounds for the ambitious, Richard Lindzen. For those who would understandably have been dismayed by Michael Fish's performance in that interview, here is something to restore your faith in humanity: "What Catastrophe? MIT’s Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed climate scientist"
In the water?
That's nothing. In the States, we have a "sitting" Senator who claims she feels it when she's flying - presumably through her posterior.
Admittedly, her "detector" does have a lot of surface area, so maybe she's just highly sensitive to it.
Hi HaroldW,
thanks, that's an interesting link. But it's full of the usual circular reasoning, pleased-with-themselves hindcasting and spurious precision that abounds in ClimSci. (2-11% increase in the next century FFS). It's clear these guys are in thrall to their (unvalidated) models.
The proof of the pudding of course is in their predictions which are unsurprisingly poor .
it is not expected to be detectable statistically until the latter half of this century.
Well how convenient.
In a nutshell, they're just guessing... and so is Michael Fish
(my brother actually bought me that song as a Xmas present!)
Oh Dear! The poor man. Normally I would have said he should have known he would be manipulated, but he's convinced that it's 'extreme weather' and maybe he wanted to get on TV again to say what he did.
You would have thought the old fool would have embarrassed himself enough on TV already, but apparently not. Clearly he can't even keep up with what the alarmist side are saying, who as you point out have largely given up their false claims of any link between CO2 and 'extreme weather'.
Somehow though, I don't think we should be too concerned about anything this old dinosaur says about any aspect of the weather.
In answer to Stoneyground's question, you can get the rainfall records for the UK here
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadukp/
I grabbed the records for the South East of England (where I live) and plotted the annual average from 1873-2013 (files also contain the monthly figures), nothing alarming to see at all, so I think I'll stop worrying about the breathless cries of panic from the local MSM.
@NHills
Thank you for that information. I've had a quick look but it will take a bit longer to analyse it to see if there any trends.
John Shade
Much as I decry anecdotal evidence in climate studies I have had a personal experience that supports your contention.
I knew a former head of the major national hydrology research institute in Canada who used to like to say that although projections of CAGW may not be valid, promotion of CAGW is very helpful when it comes to additional funding for the institute.
SimonW (5:25 PM) -
I will not disagree with you about the models. While I find it mildly amazing that they are able to produce wind/temperature/current patterns which resemble reality, I don't think they have shown nearly enough skill to trust their results over decadal-to-century time-scales.
Mr Fish tosses off the "no single event ..." disclaimer the way one ticks the "I have read the terms and conditions..." box -- mechanically, without meaning. Let's be clear: even if the incidence of tropical storms doubles, it will remain impossible to say "this particular storm would not have happened without AGW." So the question is whether there has been a statistically significant change, and the answer even from the "establishment" -- i.e., those who give greater credence to the models' accuracy than you or I -- is not only that such a change is not detectable now, but it won't be for several decades more.
Don't mention the 1987 storm cos it was nothing like a real hurricane.
The week-long hurricane that struck the south of England and the English Channel on November 24th, 1703, was beyond anything in living memory.
The week-long hurricane that struck the south of England and the English Channel at the end of the month was beyond anything in living memory. John Evelyn described it in his diary as ‘not to be paralleled with anything happening in our age or in any history almost ... every moment like Job’s messengers brings the sad tidings of this universal judgement.’ Winds tore across the country, sending the roofs of houses flying, levelling barns and knocking flat thousands of trees, which lay prostrate in rows like regiments fallen in battle. It was reported that 4,000 oaks perished in the New Forest and an attempt to count the toll of trees in Kent gave up at 17,000. Evelyn himself lost more than 2,000 on his Surrey estate. The chimneys of Wells Palace fell in, killing the bishop and his wife in their bed.
The storm struck on a Wednesday evening and in London Daniel Defoe had a narrow escape in the street when part of a nearby house fell down. On the Friday, the 26th, the wind began to blow even harder and when he checked his barometer, he found the mercury sunk lower than he had ever seen it. After midnight the gale swelled to such force that it was almost impossible to sleep. The noise of the chimneys of neighbouring houses coming down made the family fear that their own solid brick house might collapse on their heads. But when they opened the door to escape into the garden, they saw tiles hurtling through the air, some travelling thirty or forty yards and then driven eight inches deep into the ground. The Defoes decided to stay inside and trust in God’s providence.
The storm did not abate until December 2nd, and the next day Defoe went to the Pool of London, where he saw some 700 ships all piled up into heaps together. He advertised in the London Gazette for witnesses to send in their accounts of the gale and published The Storm the following year.
Evelyn and Defoe, like their contemporaries, believed that the storm was a visitation of the anger of God. After it had blown out, Queen Anne’s government announced that the calamity ‘loudly calls for the deepest and most solemn humil-iation of our people’ and proclaimed a national day of fasting on December 16th in recognition of the ‘crying sins of this nation’. The archbishops and bishops were to write special prayers for the occasion in the hope of averting further manifestations of the divine wrath.
Talking of the extreme weather / climate change link, here's a transcript of Sir John Beddington on the Today programme yesterday (h/t Breath of Fresh Air on a different thread, plus Chris C. on my email list):
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20140104_r4
"...the overall analysis is saying that we should have an expectation that the frequency of extreme events is going to become more regular."
So says Sir John ... in the future tense: "is going to become".
I wonder if the worriers about AGW are aware of how much they hear is in the future tense, and mostly future conditional ("may", "could", "should", "might", "can")?
The most vehement of defenders of the narrative say extreme events ARE increasing, the evidence IS in, while the scientific reports say MAY and WILL BE. The shift is not easily noticed. We are told by our stockbrokers and our parents similar things about the improvements in our coming lives, and we accept the comments as observations of future reality, not projections or hopes. Hopes most are, reflecting a desired outcome more than a reasonable extension of past and current trends.
The error is simple. The implication that arises from recognizing the error is, for many, so horrifying it is unacceptable. If the experts cannot tell with finality the outcome of such a planet-scale situation, what certainty is there to anything in this life? Chaos has no disciples other than the Devil.
I feel it in my knee.
Where do you feel it?
Papertiger
I feel in my thumbs, especially during the winter months. A bit more warmth would be a relief as would less snow to move.
John Shade did you actually read it?
What the hell is this?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/what-catastrophe_773268.html?page=3
Richard Lindzen presents a problem for those who say that the science behind climate change is “settled.” So many “alarmists” prefer to ignore him and instead highlight straw men: less credible skeptics, such as climatologist Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama (signatory to a declaration that “Earth and its ecosystems—created by God’s intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence—are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting”), the Heartland Institute (which likened climate “alarmists” to the Unabomber), and Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma (a major energy-producing state). The idea is to make it seem as though the choice is between accepting the view of, say, journalist James Delingpole (B.A., English literature), who says global warming is a hoax, and that of, say, James Hansen (Ph.D., physics, former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies), who says that we are moving toward “an ice-free Antarctica and a desolate planet without human inhabitants.”
Papertiger
It's my hands that feel the cold wintry weather most, sometimes even to the point of blistering. It's all that bloody shovelling.
papertiger: "I feel it in my knee. Where do you feel it? "
"I feel it in my fingers, I feel it in my toes." From way back...
I did indeed read the article, Poptech (11:40AM). I sense you are concerned about the extract you quote. Is it just the phrase 'less credible skeptics' which you put in bold? In my view, it is hard to find any 'skeptic' with more credibility than Lindzen, and the innuendos about three of them (2 people and 1 organisation) that follow are indeed what passes for argument amongst some 'alarmists'. The writer of the piece is drawing attention to their device, and goes on to illustrate the coarseness of it even further with the Delingpole/Hansen comparison.