Bishop Hill Guardian in sensible comment shocker
Feb 12, 2014 Climate: WG2 Take a look at Nicola Davies' article about the floods and the recent Met Office/CEH report. This is rather level-headed stuff, with none of the wailing and gnashing of teeth that usually accompany the paper's utterances on the subject. Here's the conclusion:
Is climate change ultimately the cause?
It is not possible to link the current floods definitively to climate change. "In terms of the number of storms there is scant evidence that has been increasing due to climate change so far," said Scaife. "[But] we do expect that winter rainfall is likely to increase in the future." This is in part down to a warming planet. "As the air warms it can hold more water."
That seems to me a scientifically supportable case. I wonder how much more water the air can hold if it's, say, 2 degrees warmer?
Reader Comments (138)
Feb 12, 2014 at 1:24 PM | Unregistered CommenterKeith Macdonald
Don't be silly, Scotland always has lots of bad weather, there are no "Sound Bites" or MSM Headlines in that, only "UNPRECEDENTED", "APOCALYPTIC" weather gets a mention.
I wonder how many of us know enough of British History to recall that the Roman era was one of much terraforming, to drain the Somerset Levels, to make it look as "natural" as it does now.
If the EA had its way, perhaps the Somerset Levels could be returned to its pre-Roman condition.
Here's a good map of what it looked like before then: http://www.palden.co.uk/leymap/sitesplaces.html
Here's my shortlist of what would become prime locations for expensive waterfront homes, holiday islands and new marinas.
Brean Down Island
Brent Knoll Island
Cheddar
Glastonbury Lake Village (reconstructed on the site of the original from 2K years ago)
Middlezoy Island
Othery Island
Mulchenley Island
Langport (an inland port once more)
Weasel words. can''t be definitively".
In simplistic terms I understood that change in heat is a product of mass,specific heat and change in temperature ( neglecting internal heat issues, change of phase and radiation) Air temperature on its own is not a measure of heat change. As a minimum the humidity is an essential parameter. Are not the various measurements of temperature anomalies meaningless unless humidity is measured at the same time or is it assumed that any variation in humidity at each measurement point follows an invariate time profile. If this is not correct please will someone tell me.
Keith Macdonald - come now, your nice Mr Salmond would have us believe that the UK stops at Hadrian's Wall, as he's all for pulling up the drawbridge and sailing off towards the North Pole..
So - surely you'll have to get used to 'even' more snow..?
The flood dilemma:
The government is in a curious position, because if they concede that humans are responsible for climate-change and this flooding is the evidence, then Britain is liable to pay climate ‘loss and damage’ to the developing world should they experience similar events.
The the vapour pressure of the "condensing green house gas" (as water will doubtless be officially renamed), rises exponentially with temperature. 'Averaging' of humidity is an even worse offence against science than taking an average of global temperatures.
Crikey, you've got a good memory lad.
Lots of volcanic activity in Iceland circa 1340-60, but it could be most anywhere on the globe, the likelihood is though that, the famine was triggered by a major event and extrusive volcanic atmospheric particulates and aerosols. Shame of it is, in those distant times humankind couldn't record such events with any exactitude or recognizable timeline. I wonder if now, the USGS or the BGS actually catalogue and annotate such events and globally?
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On the Nicola Davis article.
Conjures a few thoughts.
We've stopped reading history and learning the lessons of the past but also that, you can't fool all of the people all of the time.
The climate changes, get over it.
Whether mankind is anything to do with it and relating to his paltry CO2 emissions: is abstract supposition but also unprovable claptrap.
Blaming winter storm events on man made warming is divination or, idiocy bordering on insanity.
Politicians have a tenuous grasp of science but a innate and canny ability to promising all things to all men - and thus credulous or in most cases not - to draw the wrong conclusions.
There are lots of liars, some of them are paid to lie and do so and make a living out of it, some work in the Met Office, the EA, Greenpeace, WWF, FoE and it is an unfathomable but unfortunate truth, that many of these dissimulators have the ear of Governmental ministers. Livelihoods dependent on promulgating and perpetuating the green myth [CAGW], make it thus.
Are we doomed?
Probably but not because of the weather, more likely we are doomed because we started to worship ignorance.
As in most things climatic, that is a well played oversimplification. There is much, much more precipitation in the Patagonian Ice Field (up to 16 meters per year in places) than in Britain, yet the average temperature of the Patagonian Ice Field is much colder than that of Britain.
We need to check the whole precipitation process to be able to relate climate and precipitation, not only to the saturation water vapour pressure.
The increase in saturation vapour pressure from 10°C to 11°C is about 7%. It is an exponential curve, so it depends on the initial temperature.
But that does not mean precipitation. It might be highly correlated to precipitation if all precipitation is convective (like in summer storms), but that is not the case for the UK.
Air is almost never saturated with humidity, so we need to look at the mechanisms for water transport. The main one is evaporation from the ocean by winds, but in a differentialy warming world (polar amplification) winds may get weaker, so there will be less water transport from the ocean.
etc. etc. ...
If it's warmer then there can be more evaporation and hence more rain but it's not because the air can hold more water
it is about what happens at equilibrium ie what goes up must come down.
Some informative posts on the climate issue. Nothing conclusive but it does seem consistent that the determinant is the jet stream and why it wanders from north to south and generates these repetitive depressions we are now experiencing.
I like Schrodinger's Cat's idea that cooling at the pole is causing bigger pressure differentials. Re the floods, none of the media/politico commentators are addressing the fact that the water must get to the sea. We know that in Somerset the channels and sluices were neglected, but what about the Thames. Above Richmond there are forty-eight locks and or weirs - managed by the EA. Can we believe that all these are being co-ordinated for maximum run-off of the higher reaches to the tidal Thames?
Feb 12, 2014 at 1:30 PM | TerryS
You beat me to it, just a Red Herring from the MO, especially as the flooding of the Somerset Levels had been well underway in January. After an unexceptional amount of rain in November.
Isn't the MO data difficult to work with it takes a bit of effort to sort into month/year sequence? Or do you have a better source than MO Datasets?
A major problem with this "increased CO2 = increased temperature = increased evaporation = increased water vapour = increased temperature = scary positive feedback" paradigm is that atmospheric water vapur is not increasing!
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/statement-on-using-existing-nasa-water-vapor-nvap-dataset-1988-–-2001-for-trends/
Vernon
Someone once said that the jet stream determines our climate and the gulf stream moderates it.
We still know very little about the jet stream and few studies seem to acknowledge its impact in these islands and why it wanders around so much
tonyb
Greater evaporation of water would lead to lower sea levels, since there would be a net transfer of water to the atmosphere. However, there is no guarantee that higher global average temperatures will result in more evaporation, just because it has the capacity to hold more vapour.
Increasing the water content of the atmosphere requires that more evaporates relative to the amount of rain. That can be achieved by having less (even zero) rain and the same rate of evaporation, or by having a large increase in both rain and evaporation, with the latter increasing by more than the former, or any combination in between where evaporation exceeds rainfall.
Frankly I cannot see how heat that is hiding in the deep ocean can have such an enormous affect on the UK's weather. I wonder if Chazza can help?
There is an article in the Guardian today by John Abraham which really is worthy of a read.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2014/feb/12/discussing-global-warming-hard?commentpage=1
I personally see this as one of the most accurate and reasonable statements I have yet seen. I recommend all to visit and comment.
"As I understand it a warming planet results in smaller latitudinal temperature gradients with very little increase in the temperature of the tropics. Hence, one might expect to find lower precipitation associated with a warming climate and somewhat more precipitation with a cooling climate.
Feb 12, 2014 at 11:25 AM | Unregistered CommenterPaul Dennis"
Quite.
So what the heck is going on in the media with professional climate scientists right now? At a time when the evidence for CAGW has never been worse , they are in an apocalyptic frenzy.
Where are the scientists standing up and calling BULLSHIT?
@Schrodinger's Cat
Not really. It's just that the cycle time for the latitudinal meandering of the jetstreams is about 60 years. The UK is suffering the same type of weather as in 1947, which is an interesting coincidence. Try this excellent paper by Lambeck et al, written when climate science was still unsullied by activists and politics:-
http://gji.oxfordjournals.org/content/46/3/555.full.pdf
And yet, it seems to rain more in the winter. How large an effect are we talking about here?
Bottom line, juxtapose two statements:
Nicola Davies: "[But] we do expect that winter rainfall is likely to increase in the future."
Bishop Hill: "That seems to me a scientifically supportable case."
It is NOT a scientifically supportable case, because the expectation of increased winter rainfall follows only from slavish adherence to the climate models, which everyone over the age of 5 should know by now are utter failures. How any "skeptic" could call that scientifically supportable, then, is to this hard scientist an obscene avoidance of common sense, much less sound logic. When are you lukewarmers going to stop playing footsie with the consensus (and political correctness, as if the system is working), instead of denying all of it, unconditionally, as GOOD science demands?
The fairly sensible Guardian article mentioned by John Carter at 3.56pm has also got Dana Nuccittelli on the byline. Did he really agree to this......?
.
"We can discuss climate change without immediately falling back to debasing comments; when we inject more civility into the conversation, maybe it will be possible to find a new path."
Goodness gracious me, I am amazed, remembering what has gone before.
"[But] we do expect that winter rainfall is likely to increase in the future."
This is the whole point of the skeptical position that the "global warming" problem is theoretical and in the future, NOT in the present.
The CAGWers keep bouncing between saying it is happening now and saying, well, maybe it is not happening now but it will in the future - BUT fail to add the caveat, "if the story from the IPCC is right".
let s say it will rain more...but where and when?
who knows if it will rain more in Europe? and how much? will we able to measure it?
they just don't know but use whatever bad weather to scare people.
John Carter,
People like John Abraham are part of the reason why any debate on Mann Made Global Warming (tm) has become so toxic especially with those so called climate scientists who see any questioning as a direct challenge to their authority.
Mailman
Feb 12, 2014 at 4:18 PM | dha
You can judge yourself from the Met Office data, winter data up to 2013:
http://imageshack.com/a/img30/9527/von7.png
The black line is a linear trend lm(uk$WIN~uk$Year), slope = 0.03813. The grey line is flat for comparison.
So practically zero ± whatever the error. Today's most expensive rain gauges claim an error of 0.1% , but the errors due to wind, settings, etc. are much larger. I do not know the accuracy of rain gauges in the 1920's.
"I wonder how much more water the air can hold if it's, say, 2 degrees warmer?"
Quite a lot more. I was surprised. At ISA temperatures you are looking at a rise of the order 15% with an increase.
http://www.atmo.arizona.edu/students/courselinks/fall12/atmo336/lectures/sec1/Saturation_Mixing_Ratio_Tables.htm
Note I am assuming that the tables are at 1013 hPa, as they match this tables (which also doesn't have a pressure given, but it would be a coincidence if they were both the same pressure and not ISA sea level) and they hit 3% around 30 degrees C, which is about right. Saturation mixing ratio does decrease slightly with increased pressure.
Mailman @ 4:49
Yes, I am aware of the history and particularly the spat with Monkton where Abraham appeared a right royal twat.
However, I have to take his Guardian piece at face value because he now apparently takes a very different position.
It would be wonderful if everybody could just grow up and deal in facts rather than conjecture, but then again, pigs might fly!
Warmer planet, more evaporation, more atmospheric water vapour, more absorption of outgoing IR.are the main elements of CAGW.
Common sense tells the politicos that BUT as Einstein said " Science is not common sense" and if you studied his theories on relativity you would understand why he said it. :)
"The Met Office has already revealed that England and Wales has seen ‘one of, if not the most, exceptional periods for winter rainfall’ in 248 years." http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2557440/UK-weather-Shocking-map-shows-flooding-threat-thousands-homes-near-Thames.html
In 1766, Europe was still in the grip of the Little Ice Age, yet Juliar Slingo tells us that climate change is the cause. She'd really love to say it's global warming, but the Met Office 248 years statement gives the lie to the "We have seen exceptional weather," Slingo quote. However, the .CO2 level in 1766 was down around 280 parts per million & the rainfall then was not surpassed until now, so how did that happen? Personally, I don't believe her, nor should anyone else.
Is John Clees stalking the corridors of the Met Office and the BBC muttering "don't mention 1953"?
For reference:-
The 1953 flood is the most recent large coastal flood in Europe. The storm surge hit The Netherlands, the east coast of England, Belgium and Germany. Over 2.100 people died, of which more than 1.800 in The Netherlands.
The 1953 storm surge.
The 1953 storm surge.
Source: Environment Agency
It happened in the night or early morning, February 1st, 1953. A northwestern storm was blowing and it was to be spring tide. At low tide the water level at sea was as high as it is normally when it is high tide. Then the wind pushed the water up to rise even higher and the sea reached a record height of 4,5 meter above mean sea level. In The Netherlands the dikes were breached at many places in the provinces along the southwestern coast. Sea water covered large areas. Near the breaches houses were destroyed by the force of the water rushing in. Many people were caught unawares, there was no warning system and people were sleeping. In the end there were 1.800 victims. About 72.000 people had to be evacuated. Roads were destroyed and telephone lines were down. In large areas relief could only be brought by boat. Many cattle died, crops failed, buildings were ruined.
The east coast of England was also hit by this flood. According to the British Environment Agency 300 people died, about 24.000 houses were destroyed and 40.000 people evacuated. The map by the Environment Agency shows the water level in the 1953 storm surge compared to what the tide would have been without the storm.
In Belgium several dikes breached too. The Ostend and Antwerp area flooded. Nearly 40 people died.
Protective measures were started after this flood. In Britain for instance the Thames barrier was built and in The Netherlands the Delta Works were developed: a system of dikes and storm surge barriers to protect low lying areas against flooding.
John Carter,
Absolutely agree with you that people need to show some maturity. Sadly the only way that will happen is if the likes of Abraham and co are dragged kicking and screaming in to reality by an unmodelled prolonged severe cold period.
Regards
Mailman
Remember the BBQ summer a few years ago? The one promised by the Met Office but it rained non-stop. If I remember correctly, the continuous rain was due to the jet stream which had moved south. That was in summer time so the winds were not as high. (The temperature gradient was less.) I think it probably caused flooding then.
The current storms have nothing to do with climate change. At a time when temperatures have been static for 17+ years the alarmists are claiming that climate change is responsible for West Country floods, North American cold weather, Australian hot weather and Sochi lack of snow. Presumably it is not responsible for global temperature because that is just sitting still and doing nothing.
It was clever of them to ditch global warming when Mother Nature stopped cooperating and switch to climate change which is a catch-all infallible threat. However, they couldn't resist using it to explain every problem on the planet and now the public see it for what it is. Climate change is now a phrase that rings the BS bell and makes the eyes glaze over. The alarmists will have to think of something else.
It would be fun to speculate what the next alarmist strategy might be, but I will leave that to others. I can't be bothered.
From The BBC
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-26153889
"The Met Office said a wind gust of 108mph was recorded at Aberdaron, North Wales - the strongest wind gust on land of the recent storms. Gusts of 110mph were recorded at sea off the coast of the southern Irish Republic while at Mumbles Head, South Wales, 92mph was recorded."........
"The Met Office said: "Winds of this strength can cause widespread structural damage, bringing down trees and also leading to loss of power supplies."
So what Basic Wind Speed be used by a structural engineer to design a structure in the UK for Mumbles and Aberdaron it would be 103 mph. So if major structural damage is being caused then the building or structure is under designed, because engineers are oblidged to adopt factors of safety. Against overturning this woould be at least two.
The Basic Wind Speed is defined as the max gust at ten metres above ground in open level country which has a return period of 1 in 50 years. The above is a simplification but it should be noted that these wind speeds have been adopted for over sixty years.
Peter C wrote:
I am reminded of the Great Famine of 1315–1317 that marked the end of the Medieval Warm period when it was reported that torrential rain and violent storms frequently affected the whole of the NH for two years causing crop failures from the Nordic countries down to Italy. It is estimated that the European population fell by 50% (between 40% and 70% in local areas) and only returned to the previous levels in the 19th century.
...
The site, http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/histclimat.htm, has some interesting reports that put 'weather' into perspective.
Ah, but they didn't have computer models in those days! Historical records are only anecdotal evidence and therefore they can be ignored by modern scientists.
"Who said more extreme weather events occurred during the Little Ice Age?"
Terrible weather and flooding in England began in the time of Edward III, heralding the start of the Little Ice Age - some 400 years of erratic weather.
Here is some 'anecdotal' material:
The August storms of 1588 which destroyed the remnants of the Armada. "God blew and they were scattered"
“Our years are turned upside down; our summers are no summers; our harvests are no harvests!” John King, an Elizabethan preacher, 1595
“It is strange what weather we have had all this winter; no cold at all but the ways are dusty and the flyes fly up and down and the rose bushes are full of leaves; such a time of the year as never was known in this world before.”
Samuel Pepys’ Diary, 21st January 1661
“Ordered by Parliament to pray for more seasonable weather; that it is, both as to warmth and every other thing, just as if it were the middle of May or June, which doth threaten a plague to follow.” (he was right there!)
Samuel Pepys’ Diary, 15th January 1662
“Wind the last night (such as hath not been in memory before, unless at the death of the late protector [Oliver Cromwell]), that it was dangerous to go out of doors; and hearing how several persons have been killed today by the fall of things in the street and that the pageant in Fleet street is most of it blown down and hath broke down part of several houses.” Samuel Pepys’ Diary, 18th February 1662
Careful analysis of the ships’ logs of the British Navy based in the Caribbean between 1701 and 1750 (during the latter part of the Little Ice Age) have shown there were three times as many major hurricanes per year than between 1950 and 1998.
The great storm of Dec 1703; Swift’s account in 'The Storm'.
By an odd coincidence, in Jan 1777 in the USA (to be) a polar vortex, such as recently experienced there, enabled Washington’s Continental Army to escape a British pursuit, regroup and defeat Cornwallis.
“Is it not strange weather? Winter absorbed the Spring, and now Autumn is come before we have had summer: But let not our kindness for each other imitate the inconsistency of the seasons.” Dr Samuel Johnson, 11th September 1784
[extracted from my book, "While the Earth Endures"]
Feb 12, 2014 at 6:38 PM Stacey
You are right, but most structures are built in the traditional manner whilst observing building regulations which are pretty undemanding, especially for domestic buildings. Take your roof tiles, for example, with some of them nailed down and others slotted in or your garage roof which may be felt covered fibre board.
The basic practice is good enough most of the time. If that is found to be inadequate over time, then upgraded specifications become the norm. It is always possible to make everything as disaster proof as possible, but the risk may be very low and the cost may be very high.
The BBC ONE show are currently interviewing Eric (I thought we were dealing with experts) Pickles. Alex Jones asked him: "We don't want to scare people but, do you think this is the beginning of the end....?"
And they've managed to get Tom Heap from Green Peter to come along and scare the hell out of people. But the question that needs to be asked: 'Did the UKMO forecast this, bearing in mind they present forecasts to the government 'for contingency planning purposes'?
philip Foster
Don't forget the Culbin Sands.
Wiki
What a stupid bloody challenge. However, I'd take a bit of that action as long as I could use the same sort of caveats that the UKMO use. I just couldn't lose.
Schrodinger’s Cat (6:19 PM):
Which is what I have been saying: climate change is as much a myth as AGW, but, by dint of it being such an amorphous idea, it IS a very useful thing to use to explain any particularly unusual weather event. “Glo-bull warming” has seriously let the scaremongers down, simply by… er… not warming any more, so something else must be found to keep the fear levels raised. As many of the locals already interviewed have stated, the way out of the situation is simple: ditch the barmy ideas of the over-vocal Greens, and return to the old ways of river management.Schrödinger's cat
I've said it before; global warming is the cause, climate change is the effect.
The "pause" is rapidly becoming a dead letter.
I offer six lines of evidence.
1) The imbalance of insolation over outward radiation continues.
2) Other indicators of accumulating energy continue; declining Arctic sea ice, loss of mass from Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, glacier retreat, increasing ocean heat content, decreased Northern Hemisphere snow cover.
3) Sea level rise continues.
4) When you properly include Arctic temperatures, the pause disappears. Even without Kriging, temperature records including partial Arctic data show warming, while the one record without Arctic data stayed flat.
5) The pause only exists if you start from the 1997/1998 El Nino. Start with any other year and you see an upward trend.
6) Plot the long term trend from the 1970s and the last 17 years show as a rapid increase above the trend followed by a reversion to the mean trend.
lemiere
And not for the first time someone comes wandering into the room (welcome!) and hits the nail on the head.'They' want certain things to happen — keep the grant money flowing, take control of our lives by various devious ways and for various devious reasons, stop us using fossil fuels, etc. — so they say whatever they hope will frighten us into giving them more of whatever it is they want.
In this post alone we have seen evidence of enough contradictory statements from the same people at different times about winds and rain and snow and heat to last most of us a couple of dozen lifetimes.
It's all rubbish! And they think they can get away with it. And all too often they do.
EM (Emily's Mum) says: "I've said it before; global warming is the cause, climate change is the effect.
The "pause" is rapidly becoming a dead letter.
[...]
4) When you properly include Arctic temperatures, the pause disappears. "
EM: If it's 'GLOBAL' why are you only wanting to include the Arctic? In fact, you're not actually attempting to 'measure' the pause with the same metrics that were used to measure the warming...
EM - please can you give references for the data sets, the error bounds and the duration of your six lines of evidence?
Btw - I think I've seen you referring "thirty indicators" in the past - please can you start a discussion thread listing them with references so we can see the evidence for ourselves?
Entropic Man
You don't get some of your information from the Tamino blog by any chance? Not an entirely reliable source!
Harry Passfield
The Arctic stations and buoys show a faster rate of temperature rise than any other region on the planet. They are also thinly spread, so this warming is underrepresented in the temperature records and rates of warming are underestimated.
The first metric for global warming was the station and ship temperature records because that was all that was available. That gave 130 years of data on land and sea surface temperatures in occupied areas. With satellites, ARGO buoys, infra red monitors, etc available many other metrics can be monitored. It is also possible to monitor unoccupied areas without having to send people there.
The result is that understanding of the system behaviour has improved and attention in the trade now focuses much more on energy contents and energy flows than on the raw temperatures. Since the public and the media do not think in energy terms, most of what reaches the public through the media is still presented in terms of temperature.
If the air holds more water, that water is not flooding the ground.
EM: So you like the idea of using ship temp records to support your argument. So, any problems when other people use the CET record - which is longer?
Who said more extreme weather events occurred during the Little Ice Age? I remember - Paul Homewood
Feb 12, 2014 at 10:01 AM | Phillip Bratby
=====================================
Brian Fagan's "The Little Ice Age" (excellent, by the way) confirms that. More storms, more rain. Current conditions would seem to be consistent with the NH cooling of recent years. CET temps dropping like a stone.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
And I gather the same is the case in the US. I had a graph for this somewhere but am damned if I know where I put it! NH snow coverage has been increasing for some time.