Bishop Hill King says Met Office has it all wrong
Jan 6, 2014 Bureaucrats Climate: MetOffice Climate models provide a broad range of projections about changes in storm track and frequency of storms. While there’s currently no evidence to suggest that the UK is increasing in storminess, this is an active area of research under the national climate capability.
The Met Office, a couple of days ago.
"The important thing to get across is the simple notion that storms and severe weather conditions that we might have expected to occur once in 100 years, say, in the past may now be happening more frequently," he told BBC Radio 5 Live.
Sir David King, yesterday
OK, so he didn't say so in as many words, but he clearly thinks that there is evidence of an increase in storminess in the UK. The Met Office is unequivocal that there is none.
Who is right?
Reader Comments (79)
They're both right and this is always true. Stop asking awkward questions.
Since I'm sceptical of almost everything the Met Office says, I guess I'll have to assume Sir David is correct, eh?
Follow the money.
You are misleading your readership again. He clearly states "The important thing to get across is the simple notion ...". and as you know a notion is a: "a conception of or belief about something". So what he is really saying is that it is important to get everybody to believe severe weather is more frequent and not that severe weather is actually more frequent.
Clearly you owe him an apology.
ChandraTerryS
The ability of supposedly clever and informed people like Sir David King to discount natural variability never ceases to amaze. If only climate scientists and Government advisers would research some climate context and history, e.g. British Isles, 1750 - 1799
they would realise than nothing we have seen in the last 30 years is unusual or unprecedented.
Excellent Terry.
With the Barristers going on strike, can't we find a friendly one with time on their hands to logically tear the warmist position apart.
There are so many holes and contradictions in it (like this), it would be like shelling peas for a trained legal mind.
The key word is 'may'. He could say 'may not' with equal validity.
It is fairly obvious that the weather is worse now,
than it was, before it was as bad as it is now.
That should clear this matter up.
As TerryS says, it doesn't matter if either is right, as long as the key message gets across to the people. The message of increased storms and severe weather being brought about by global warming/climate change is being repeated so many times in the media that people will soon accept it as the truth. People won't remember the "no evidence" and the fact that the original messages were peppered with "might", "may", "could".
Neither, just two organisations trying to justify funding. They don't have any answers, they don't see any need for proof. But they do expect to be believed?
"The important thing to get across": i.e. nothing to do with reality and science, and everything to do with continued funding and policy objectives
I'm sure that if the Met were asked, they could say: 'King is not wrong because he may be right. While there is no evidence, 'an absence of evidence does not mean an absence of fact'.
This new mantra, which is appearing more and more often, allows AGW-faithful to speculate in any way they wish, and to anyone who disagrees, to challenge them to prove their speculation wrong.
King has jumped the gun I think. Once the Met Office has conjured up some evidence, or tweaked their model to produce the desired answer, they should again be singing from the same hymn sheet...
The difference may be in the posture.
Sir David King is speaking personally in an interview, describing a trend in the frequency of extreme weather visible on inspection of the data.
The Met Office is speaking with its official scientific hat on. It would be more cautious, reluctant to make a firm statement that extreme weather is increasing until the trend is statistically significant.
I'll have to go with the Met Office on this. The storms of the past few days have not in my lifetime of experiencing storms been exceptional. What has dramatically changed though is the technology to report possible problems, especially plotting them using Google earth.. So one West coast Spring tide with a following wind has now resulted in hundreds of flood warnings (not actual floods) where before only one warning would have been given.
The advent and appetite of rolling TV News has also increased the frequency and severity of storms.
Quote (above): "Sir David King is speaking personally in an interview..."
No, he is not. He is not being interviewed as some guy called David King, because who would be interested in just anybody's opinion? He is being interviewed, as the Guardian said, as "The former chief scientific adviser spoke out..." That is the context of what he says. And he knows that.
This is the same David King who said that Climategate had the hallmarks of a goverment involvement (Russian Intelligence Agency)???????
"Sir David said, however, that it was not possible to dismiss the possibility of Russia's involvement. "If it was a job done on behalf of a government, then I suppose there is the possibility that it could be the Russian intelligence agency," he said."
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-emails-hacked-by-spies-1885147.html
Is it surprising he believes in non-existent evidence for increasing severe weather? He most likely believes in ono-existent things such as unicorns, etc. as well.
Time for the Funny Farm
PS: Sir David King was also being interviewed as "the government's special envoy on climate change..."
Entropic
"reluctant to make a firm statement that extreme weather is increasing unless or until the trend is statistically significant."
There you go, fixed it for ya.
There is a host of scientific literature on this, and results are a mixed bag, to say the least. Lots of decadal variability, lots of different regional variations. Furthermore, there are debates about data quality and suitability. For example, increases in European storminess have been reported for reanalysis data [Donat et al., 2011; GRL], but subsequently the reanalysis data has has been declared unsuitable [Krueger et al., 2013; J. Climate]. And so on.
If you want to have a look at probably the currently best available data yourself here: http://eca.knmi.nl/indicesextremes/index.php (select "trend maps").
Just as an example, the journal Natural Hazards and Earth System Science has a special issue on European Storminess.
http://www.nat-hazards-earth-syst-sci.net/special_issue135.html
Find more by Googling "European storminess trends" (preferably via Google Scholar).
The Met Office has been caught out in various ways in recent years so they are much more careful not to claim things that are not supported by the evidence. This is especially true at a time when their climate models, the centre of their universe, are beginning to look decidedly questionable.
We have had a whole string of so called scientific advisors who interpret their role as being cheer leader for the alarmist cause.
The Guardian would not have interviewed him if they had expected anything else.
Like many climate change issues, we'll all have a better idea in a couple of decades.
Until than everyone is arguing ahead of the data.
I find myself more interested in the way the polar jetstream is thrashing about. Anyone like to join a book betting on how long the 3-cell Hadley circulation lasts? ;-)
Models predict that with increasing temperatures there will be an increase in extreme weather events. If history is consulted the reverse is true. The LIA period had some of the worst storms, 1703 being one such, for centuries. Flooding was worse then as well, and in all the familiar areas we now see covered in water.
The models fail to to get near reality let alone correct enough to make a forecast, and it is these abortions that they trot out as proof of CO2 driven climate change.
Both King and UKMO are wrong.
HOW MANY TIMES DOES IT HAVE TO BE SAID?
How long will it be before the EA and the Met office are once again informing the British public that the South East is a region with rainfall amounts almost equal to the desert regions of the Eastern Mediterranean?
If one views historical average rainfall amounts, the British climate gets wet, then it gets a bit dry for a bit, then it gets wet again - this is no mystery, oh and it does get a bit blowy too - just like it is now - BUT IT AIN'T UNUSUAL NOR IS IT UNPRECEDENTED.
Give us a break, with the Arctic Oscillation index passing into negative, it might get a bit colder soon.
The whole trough is surrounded by whoreson caterpillars and bacon-fed knaves.
What a decadent country we have where there is greater profit in spinning scare stories and developing an 'app' for it than in doing something useful such as producing something tangible.
[Snip - manners]
In the UK (10 locations geographically spread) since 1993;
There has been a downward trend of average monthly temperatures.
There has been an upward trend in average monthly maximum wind speeds of 1mph.
There has bee a downward trend in average monthly rainfall volume.
There has been a downward trend in average monthly rainfall duration
With a correlation of 0.91 between rainfall volume and duration it would indicate rainfall is not heavier.
Exactly where is this increase in extreme weather these non-meteorologists keep spouting about?
The South African, Sir David King is a chemist. Nothing in his wiki entry resembles any other than layman;s knowledge of physics or the atmospheric circulation. Amazingly he held directorships and a lamentable government advisory role on the environment. I will take the Met Office slant on this one, I am tired of listening to self appointed experts in the media these days.
I keep hearing stories of the River Nith flooding the Whitesands in Dumfries.
I went to school in Dumfries and it was a rare winter when the Nith didn't flood the Whitesands at least once.
Since we moved to France four years ago the local river has twice invaded the commune and, as I write, is about 150 metres wide at a point where it is normally about 30 metres wide.
Nobody really cares all that much mainly because nobody has been stupid enough to put houses anywhere in that 120-metre wide strip of land, or indeed anywhere else up and down the river where it is prone to "extend its reach".
Since this a very soggy part of France (though it drains exceptionally quickly) most of the local roads are at least a couple of metres above the surrounding countryside. If you misjudge a bend you end up in a ditch — literally!
The ditches are cleaned out on some sort of schedule (roughly once every two years, it would appear) by the commune. There doesn't appear to be any question of "what if...?"; they just are; it's something that has to be done so it gets done.
But then, there is a mayor with an office not 200 metres from where I am sitting who I can talk to if it doesn't get done, not some faceless agency in Lyon or Dijon that is more concerned with the standard of its carpets and curtains than with doing the job it's paid to do.
And I am not pestered on a daily basis by pontificators like King or the BBC (or the Met Office) trying either to cover the backs or position themselves closer to the trough. Those who have lived here longer than me will be better placed to comment but from where I'm sitting the obsession with using any and every weather event to push the global warming religion seems to be a very Anglophone pastime.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/mar/14/met-office-arctic-sea-ice-loss-winter
"Decreasing amounts of ice in the far north is contributing to colder winters and drought, chief scientist Julia Slingo tells MPs"
But of course that was just before the 2010-12 drought broke.
"Let's have a Slingo - King head to head on this. I don't know which one to believe." My synethesia keeps giving me images of boxes of frogs.
The trouble is that all these mays, could be's and mights get dropped in later derivative reports so wild speculations are called obvious, irrefutable facts and the rational skeptic is then called a conspiracy theorist, denier, flat-earther, oil-industry shill, etc, merely for trying to point out the reality. It's like trying to debate with children. If scientists could bring themselves to stick to the actual known facts and drop all these unfounded speculations then we might be able to have a grown-up discussion. It would be nice too if they'd stop inventing 'increasing evidence' where none exists.
In fact, as Lindzen states, it used to be textbook meteorology that a warming world would bring less extreme events. During the ice age scare of the 70's the doom-mongers promoted these same extreme weather scares for exactly the opposite situation. And still let's remind ourselves that all this speculation is based on a piddling 0.6K/century, none of which was in the last 15+ years. The real scary part for me is finding out just how dumb that apparently intelligent people can be!
I am fed up with people attributing all sorts of things to climate change. I ask them, "What climate change was that?".
When they look blank, I point out that if they are referring to temperature change, there hasn't been any for nearly two decades. That usually shuts them up.
It's standard climate-speak. Full of coulds, mights, and possibles, and plenty of focus on a doom-filled tomorrow which never seems to arrive.
in order to research my articles on historical climate in the UK back to 1000AD I am a frequent visitor to the Met office and make use of their excellent archives.
In consequence I have read literally thousands of weather accounts. There is not the slightest doubt that weather events prior to say 1850 were much more extreme than today.
Whilst snow and ice featured, the most notable events concern drought, heatwaves, great storms of astonishing intensity and most notable of all biblical amounts of rain which lasted months.
This frequently inundated the fields, swept away mills and destroyed bridges. There was a great flood in July/August 1342 which was especially bad in Central Europe.
We have a noted diary available from that exact time whereby we can trace the events in England that led up to it. This consisted of many weeks of hot dry weather with wind that dried and compacted the fields. Here is the relevant extract;
"It is to be noted that not much rain fell between the 9th of April and loth of May, but there was dryness with considerable heat.
June. 1st, rain, with rather strong W. wind. 2nd, light rain. 3rd, fog. 5th and 6th,
considerable heat. loth and 11th, rather strong N. W. wind. 7th, 8th, 9th, and loth, rain.
12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th, rain. 16th, very heavy rain, which, by its own power, together
with that of the preceding rains, penetrated considerably. 17th and 18th, light rain. 19th,
moderate rain at Oxford ; but there was extremely heavy rain in certain parts at a distance
of seven English leagues°' from Oxford. loth, heavy rain with severe hail and thunder at
Oxford, but in certain parts, at six leagues distance, there was not much rain. 21st,
much rain. 22nd, rain, with light wind. 23rd, light rain, with rather strong wind. 24th,
heavy rain, with much thunder and lightning. 25th, rain. Last day, light rain.
July. ist and 3rd, light rain. 2nd, lightning at night until almost midnight. 4th,
light wind, with rain. 5th, much rain. 6th, heavy rain. 8th, wind, with very light rain.
loth, 11th, 1 nth and 13th, very strong W. wind. loth, extremely light rain. 12th, light
rain. 14th, light rain in certain parts of Lyndesay, and in certain parts heavy rain.
15th, rain. 16th, light rain. i-th, heavy rain, with strong S. «'. wind. 18th, rain.
19th, rain, with thunder three or four times. loth, light rain. 27th, light rain. 24th and
30th, extremely light rain, as light as possible. 31st, rain."
The above is relatively modest compared to some of the descriptions I come across of rain, but it does enable us to follow events sequentially and raises it above the 'anecdotal' by which most historic weather are routinely dismissed by alarmists. .
tonyb
EM
It's good to see something you and I can agree about but we are still in the realms of the unknowns.
While the alarmists want the drunken jet stream to be caused by global warming (or are at the very least quite happy to imply that it is) what happens (to quote Tommy Wills in the Climategate emails) “...if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably …”
It's just as likely (I would surmise) that the current behaviour of the jet stream is linked to one or other of the oscillations that seem to have a considerable influence on the planetary weather systems.
I don't know; I'm pretty sure you don't know; I doubt that the majority of "climate scientists" know either. But are they being allowed to research that or are their camp followers like King and Beddington so busy pushing the received political wisdom that considering any possibility that they might have got it wrong all these years is simply tabu?
And if that's the case, where does that leave us when the cold comes, please?
Another vote for Terry S here.
King is simply regurgitating the mantra that weather is somehow more 'extreme' than some previously unidentified point in the past. He's trying to shape and control he debate on his terms and he' doing this to distract attention from the Pause, which no matter how hard warmists try to pretend otherwise, is killing agw theory.
File under yet more dissembling and deception.
They have to say something when the green journalists call. As long as it does not obviously damage 'the narrative' as believed in by said journalists, they have a lot of freedom to be bland, provocative, ambiguous, banal, absurd, contradictory, wrong, misleading, scary, pompous, portentous, safe, cautious, anodyne, and so on and on and on. If it sounds comforting for, or at least non-threatening to, the cause, then no need to analyse meanings or dig more deeply into what they have been up to. That sort of digging is real old-fashioned journalism, of the kind that may have taken place before the great green enlightenment which saw established interests of many kinds enshrined in bubbles that no green journo wants to prick.
An imagined gem of this genre of statement from an establishment stronghold is on the wall before me as I type:
The Schmearcast by Cost-A-Fortune Teller (now Dame) Julia Slingo. As, presumably, revealed in a dream to Josh.
[Ref Josh (2014), January, Calendar 2014, Cartoonsbyjosh.com]
This collector's item is on the wall by my desk, and I have high hopes of more timely blasts from the past from it as the year proceeds.
So what if the more frequent/more severe storms are caused by 'climate change'? But, what if that climate change was where it switched from warming mode to cooling mode? Which, from what I read, is a great possibility (climate cooling, that is).
The thing is, I believe we have far more to fear from cooling than warming, yet the warmists would have us take all sorts of daft precautions and mitigations for a warming world. Well, if their ideas bore fruit (as if 'man' should be so arrogant as to believe he can affect the weather!), they would be pushing us further into the dangerous embrace of a cold, cold world when we should be looking for ways to keep warm.
I would like to pose the following simple question to all these doommongers:
'Please advise me as to when the weather was perfect..'
The Met Office are right. Meteorology is primarily a physics problem.
Sir David King is a chemist.
A few months back, when I spent some time reading through the 17th century diaries of Pepys and Evelyn, I was struck by how many frreakish "extreme weather events" they both recorded (at the hieight of the Little Ice Age). Shortly aftewards the Spectator sent me for review a most impressive book by the historian Geoffrey Parker, for the first time chronicling the remmarkably significant role played by climatic extremes in all the plethora of wars and political upheavals of that turbulent century, Here are the opening paragraphs of my review (with a link to read the rest on the Spectator website) - a book which as can be seen I highly recommended.
Just before I was sent this huge tour de force of a book to review, I happened to be reading those 17th-century diary accounts by Pepys and John Evelyn which record a remarkable number of what would today be called ‘extreme weather events’. Repeatedly we see them referring to prolonged droughts, horrendous floods, summers and winters so abnormally hot or cold that their like was ‘never known in the world before’.
These were the days of those London Frost Fairs, when the Thames froze so thickly that it could bear horses, coaches and streets of shops. This was the time of the Maunder Minimum, when for decades after 1645 sunspot activity was almost non-existent. It marked the depths of that ‘Little Ice Age’ which saw global temperatures lower than at any time since the end of the last glaciation 13,000 years ago
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/8919751/global-crisis-by-geoffrey-parker-review/
Christopher Booker
I quoted just above an excerpt from the Merle Weather diary of 1342 concerning periods of rain. I have accumulated a great deal of material for the second in my series of articles' The long slow thaw' in which I reconstructed CET from its instrumental date of 1659 back to 1538. I quote Pepys on occasion
ttp://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
In the next article I hope to reach back to around 1350.
We can observe a slow rise in temperature throughout the instrumental record from 1659 which makes Hadley (1850) and Giss (1880) merely staging posts and not the starting posts of a warming trend.
It is not surprising that the weather events were worse back in the periods we know as the LIA. There is a greater temperature differential between the arctic and tropics when the former is colder. This creates the energy for storms greater than when the temperatures are more equalised. The smaller the temperature differential the less energy there is which thereby creates more settled weather, as happened in the MWP and the modern warm period.
That used to be well known but rarely seems to be acknowledged these days.
tonyb
Jan 6, 2014 at 12:02 PM | JamesG :
"The trouble is that all these mays, could be's and mights get dropped in later derivative reports so wild speculations are called obvious, irrefutable facts and the rational skeptic is then called a conspiracy theorist, denier, flat-earther, oil-industry shill, etc, merely for trying to point out the reality."
Yes. The social phenomenon of CAGW is the result of a narrative war. The ability of narratives to prosper is rewarded more than their verifiability. In the long-term this results in factual content being skewed or completely drowned out.
http://wearenarrative.wordpress.com/2013/10/27/the-cagw-memeplex-a-cultural-creature/
Sir David King is not looking at the weather statistics based on actual weather events, apparently.
But it seems vital to him and his pals that we not pay attention to actual weather events, but rather only listen to the stories about weather he approves of.
Mike Jackson
There's a lot of research interest in the Arctic amplification idea. Watch for more papers coming out of the pipeline about jetstream behaviour.
The recent weather in the US and UK started as high pressure in Northern Asia pushing warm air into the Asian Arctic. This displaced cold air a lot farther South into the US than normal.
Coming further South, the temperature gradiant across the jetstream is greater than usual and its velocity correspondingly greater. This is generating the stream of deep depressions we've experienced.
Rossby waves tend to drift Eastwards eventually. Cold weather in the UK next week?
Over recent years the amplitude of these Rossby waves, in terms of latitude variation has shown signs of increasing, bringing large temperature variations with it. The Chinese cold spell and Russian heat wave come to mind, along with the 2010 freeze here. The record 1 day thawing in Greenland last Summer was another extreme Rossby wave variation bringing warm air North.
Why? Not yet clear.
Is warming in the Arctic destabilising the jet stream? Is the extreme variations in mid-latitude weather in recent years a consequence? Links with the AO and NAO have been mentioned. Come back in a couple of decades.
Pepys' diaries chronicles the onset of the Little Ice Age, a period of transition from one climate state to another. He describes considerable instability
The climate is generally recognised as a chaotic system. In chaotic systems the transition from one stable state to another tends to be a period of instability.
Consider the possibility that we are entering a similar transition period and the instability we see is a symptom. The interesting question then becomes:- What will the new climate state be like?
EM
Well, I doubt I'll be around in a couple of decades but I take your point. And as far as I am concerned what you are describing is weather, pure and simple.
There is a fair amount of discussion going on about extreme weather today with a lot of it being compared to events from previous centuries which lead to the conclusion that anyone trying to link these events to global warming is barking up the wrong tree. Comparing them to global cooling on the other hand and in line with the established theory that severity is directly related to the temperature gradient would seem more plausible.
In any event the answer is still "we don't know!"
Incidentally we have had a run of warm days here in central France with our local forecast for a peak of 14C tomorrow falling steadily to min 0C / max 5C by next Wednesday so your forecast is looking good.
Tonyb
I suspect that there is a heat engine that utilises 'tipping points' in the climate system that act, unlike the prophets of doom would have us believe, as natural thermostats on the ocean heat circulation.
As an indication of such 1976 saw the thermostat open and heat being pulsed, Enso, more efficiently to the poles causing them, with an ~8 year lag to warm at a faster rate than the equatorial regions. At the other end 1998 saw the thermostat close and I suspect in the next couple of years the rate of cooling for the polar regions will be noticeable.
At such times I am reminded of the Watergate wall at Worcester Cathedral
http://www.flickr.com/photos/knowlesteve/8125394789/in/photostream/
Apologies. The link I posted goes to to another view of the Severn at Worcester - just click the < arrow for the Watergate wall