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)
Come back with some evidence that extreme weather has increased beyond the bounds of natural variability.
JamesG: " it used to be textbook meteorology that a warming world would bring less extreme events."
Yes, Science News' 1975 article "Climate Change: Chilling Possibilities" -- apologies, my link goes to a paywall now -- contains this discussion:
Toynbee/Christopher Booker
My source, which I read 30+ years ago and now reference on line, is the Anglo Saxon Chronicle. This is a centuries long annual summary of events in the Anglo Saxon world (modern day England), there are enough references in there to tell you that weather events "worse than any man can remember" have a millennia long history. It was something that struck in the 70s when I read it for the first time.
sandys
I have the Anglo Saxon Chronicles in my bookcase. When compiling my research I eventually worked out that people had short memories and that 'worse than any man can remember' was about 20 years (with some exceptions) .
Mind you nothing has changed. We seem to have complete mental block about the current storms (worst since only 1991) the last summer (the warmest only for around 20 years) and worst of all unprecedented Arctic warming when we have news reel and newspaper reports from the 1940's arctic showing it doing exactly the same thing as today-melting fast.
tonyb
@Jan 6, 2014 at 1:48 PM | Entropic man,
You give us a nice example of how AGW belief leads to a sort of pattern forcing by the believers. Winter weather shifting cold air south is not unusual. The weather dynamics that send the the cold air south from the poles is not new, unusual, dangerous or unprecedented. But the CO2 bsessed require that patterns emerge from the weather. And these patterns must support the CO2 obsessed's belief in AGW. This study is just another derivative faux study desigend to defend the CO2 obsession. However, in a sense AGW really is Anthropomorphic in its origin: AGW is a creation of and exists in the minds of CO2 obsessed.
Worth reading Paul Homewood's commentary about that Met office article
"There is no evidence that storminess is on the increase. Nor is there any agreement among climate models on the issue."
I've just finished my analysis of the December rainfall data.
It shows there is nothing out of the ordinary, with many previous Decembers being as wet and wetter.
There is also no sign that such events are becoming more common.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2014/01/06/is-englands-bad-weather-a-sign-of-climate-change/
Hey Paul, that was a quick reply, do you have an automatic detector for when people mention you ?
I'm not sure sure who the Skeptical Science sponsored troll 'Entropic Man' is hoping to influence here with his vague references to supposed extreme weather, that is obviously factual to his understanding but requires another two decades of proof. He seems quite happy to ignore the IPCC's opinion regarding the fact that there is no evidence of increased severe weather events and provides SkS propaganda, complete with yet more flaky research papers, to make the case that present extreme, but normal weather events are caused by global warming when, in fact, they are caused by the contrast between not unprecedented cold winter weather in the northern hemisphere reacting with warmer air in the tropics.
Like Chandra [AKA ZDB] the guy's an SkS troll, a waste of space!
Michael hart
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n1/full/nclimate2065.html
Try references 1 to 4 at the end of this recent paper.
Michael hart
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n1/full/nclimate2065.html
Try references 1 to 4 at the end of this recent paper.
Jan 6, 2014 at 5:19 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
More flaky research from an activist web page.
The IPCC and the Met Office say it isn't happening so stop scraping the barrel for different opinions, they are, after all, supposed to be authorities on your obsessional subject global warming [climate change].
RKS
"Skeptical Science sponsored troll 'Entropic Man' "
Chance would be a fine thing. Where do I apply? :-)
RKS
I never thought of Nature, the most respected scientific journal on the planet, as an activist web page.
RKS
I never thought of Nature, the most respected scientific journal on the planet, as an activist web page.
Jan 6, 2014 at 5:37 PM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man>>>>>>>>>>>>
The magazine that refuses to publish papers sceptical of AGW not activist? [ever heard of climategate?] Pull the other one!
The title of the web page "Climate Change" should make any reader aware of the web page's objectives.
Do you disagree with the champions for your cause, the IPCC and the Met office, when they say there is no evidence that climate change [due to, at present non existent, global warming] is causing more frequent extreme weather events.
RKS
What about the two papers discussed here?
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/the-skeptics-were-right-climate-changes.html
Sir David King seems to have crossed swords with some Russian scientists a few years ago, back in Blair's time, when he WAS the advisor. My apology for the length of this, as I only have an .rtf file of this and can't find a link.
“Andrei Illarionov, former chief science adviser to President Putin:
… in respect to the presentation made by representatives of the so-called official team of the British government and the official British climate science, or at least how they introduced themselves at the seminar. I personally was surprised by the exceptionally poor content of the papers presented…
Simultaneously, they revealed an absolute—and I stress, absolute inability to answer questions concerning the alleged professional activities of the authors of these papers. Not only the ten questions that were published nine months ago, but not a single question asked during this two-day seminar by participants in the seminar, both Russian and foreign, were answered.
When it became clear that they could not provide a substantive answer to a question, three devices were used… The British participants insisted on introducing censorship during the holding of this seminar. The chief science adviser to the British government, Mr. King, demanded in the form of an ultimatum at the beginning of yesterday that the program of the seminar be changed and he presented an ultimatum demanding that about two-third of the participants not be given the floor.The participants in the seminar who had been invited by the Russian Academy of Sciences, they have been invited by the president of the Academy of Sciences Yuri Sergeyevich Osipov. Mr. King spoke about “undesirable” scientists and undesirable participants in the seminar. He declared that if the old program is preserved, he would not take part in the seminar and walk out taking along with him all the other British participants.
He has prepared his own program which he proposed, it is available here and my colleagues can simply distribute Mr. King’s hand-written program to change the program prepared by the Russian Academy of Sciences and sent out in advance to all the participants in the seminar.
A comparison of the real program prepared by the Academy of Science and the program proposed as an ultimatum by Mr. King will give us an idea of what scientists, from the viewpoint of the chief scientific adviser to the British government, are undesirable. In the course of negotiations on this issue Mr. King said that he had contacted the British Foreign Secretary Mr. Straw who was in Moscow at the time and with the office of the British Prime Minister, Blair, so that the corresponding executives in Britain should contact the corresponding officials in Russia to bring pressure on the Russian Academy of Sciences and the President of the Russian Academy of Sciences to change the seminar’s program.When the attempt to introduce censorship at the Russian Academy of Sciences failed, other attempts were made to disrupt the seminar. At least four times during the course of the seminar ugly scenes were staged that prevented the seminar from proceeding normally. As a result we lost at least four hours of working time in order to try to solve these problems.
During these events Mr. King cited his conversations with the office of the British Prime Minister and had got clearance for such actions.
And thirdly, when the more or less normal work of the seminar was restored and when the opportunity for discussion presented itself, when questions on professional topics were asked, and being unable to answer these questions, Mr. King and other members of the delegation, turned to flight, as happened this morning when Mr. King, in an unprecedented incident, cut short his answer to a question in mid sentence realizing that he was unable to answer it and left the seminar room. It is not for us to give an assessment to what happened, but in our opinion the reputation of British science, the reputation of the British government and the reputation of the title “Sir” has sustained heavy damage.”
TonyB - 20 years seems about right for most people's memories of weather. As for last year's English summer, I was away for the month of August and so missed it - June and July were rather chilly I recall. I departed the UK on a chilly, rainy day at the start of August and returned on another chilly, rainy day at the end of Auigust....what summer?
Allan M
The link to the Russians is here.
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/climate-policy/politics/illarionov2004-5.php
Jan 6, 2014 at 6:54 PM | Paul Homewood
Thanks for the link.
When G.B. Shaw was writing music criticism, he frequently used the title 'professor' as an insult (especially towards his fellow Irishman, C.V. Stanford). Maybe we should use the title 'Sir' in a similar way.
It's good to see that "rant" by Illarionov again.
He was absolutely right; King's behaviour was appalling and not befitting the representative of a British government (even that British government) in any circumstances.
It was that episode that helped finally to confirm my belief that the entire global warming scare was a fraud and that the whole thing was politically motivated though it took some time and a bit more research to establish the "back story" that took us back to Strong and the Club of Rome.
What is on the increase is 24/7 global news coverage by young journalists trying to make any weather story sound dramatic.
I'm very happy with Entropic Man's proposal that we wait a couple of decades to see what happens. But then I'd like to defer expensive precautions until we see that there's some point to them..
Mike Jackson/Alan M: SHEESH!! I've just read that rant by Illarionov you posted. The take home phrase - of so many that stood out - for me this, which, coming from a Russian just added so much more piquancy:
[My bold]I strongly recommend everyone read the entire piece to see just what a piece of
sh*twork King was and is - most probably used well at the behest of Blair and Straw.To keep the link in context I have repeated it here:
http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/climate-policy/politics/illarionov2004-5.php
The general rule (for the UK especially) is that *cooler* conditions than average in Summer (negative NAO/AO) gives more storminess and greater precipitation, and *warmer* conditions than average in Winter (positive NAO/AO) also gives more storminess and greater precipitation. And it's not exactly the best time to be claiming that the UK is getting warmer Winters due to global warming!
I just posted response on WUWT to Paul Homewood's excellent piece presenting the facts on the recent wet weather in South of England and thought readers here might find it of some interest.
In bid to understand what is actually going on with the UK weather I’ve recently taken to charting and exploring the Met Office historical data using a web based data visualization tool called Tableau. It does a far better job than Excel and lets one share the Web link with others so they can explore and query the data for themselves – so much better than static charts. I started off looking at my local station (Leuchars http://bit.ly/1aFwMcH ) but given the fixation in the media with the rain down South I thought readers here might appreciate a data visualization of Heathrow http://bit.ly/1cX28zJ
The station data does not yet include the very wet December 2013 but given the excellent and informative post by Paul I doubt it will be anything exceptional.
Osseo
Divers have a concept which illustrates the danger of the "wait and see" attitude.
Google "incident pit".
The Radio 5 Live segment with Sir David King is now transcribed here:
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20140105_r5
EM,
No doubt there are risks in 'wait and see'. They have to be balanced against the certain losses of taking avoiding action. Only with hindsight can you tell if you were in an 'incident pit' (and then, of course, it is too late).
osseo
My brother-in-law dives and told me about anincident pit he nearly fell into.
He was diving on a wreck outside Belfast Lough, only accessible around slack water. Four of them went down. Micael leading, a moderately experienced club member and two novices, 30 minuts before slack water, expecting the tide to decrease. When it didnt decrease on schedule Michael led them straight back up.
They later found that the Coastguard had given them tide times for the wriong day, and they had already missed slack water. If they had stayed down, they would have been swept away.
The clubmate said he would have stayed down and died, rather than risk being thought chicken for coming back up. Michael had been trained to get out quick at the first sign that something was wrong. My own PPL flying training said the same. It saved my own neck at least once. That's why I dont like "wait and see" as a climate change strategy.
I'd rather react and then find I didnt need to, than not react and find myself in the pit.