Bishop Hill Julia Slingo on the storms
Feb 9, 2014 Climate: MetOffice Climate: WG2 The Met Office and the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) - a government research centre - have issued a joint report into the storms in south-west England. To mark the occasion Julia Slingo has taken to the airwaves, trying desperately to insinuate that there is a link to climate change:
Dame Julia said while none of the individual storms had been exceptional, the "clustering and persistence" were extremely unusual.
"We have seen exceptional weather," she said.
"We cannot say it's unprecedented, but it is certainly exceptional.
"Is it consistent with what we might expect from climate change?
"Of course.
"As yet there can be no definitive answer on the particular events that we have seen this winter, but if we look at the broader base of evidence then we see things that support the premise that climate change has been making a contribution."
Of course, the storms are also consistent with business as usual, but such nuance is prominent by its absence from Dame Julia's public utterances. For a more balanced summary of the report, take a look at the blog post by CEH's Barnaby Smith. It's really necessary to read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts that Dame Julia felt it necessary to brush over entirely:
- A preliminary analysis suggest that outflows aggregated over six weeks were the greatest since the 1947 floods – the most extensive in England & Wales during the 20th century.
- In December and January, a few rivers (including the Mole, Wey and Medway, which, on the basis of preliminary data, recorded their highest flows since the extreme floods of September 1968) registered outstanding maximum flows.
- Generally, however, the peak flows registered during the recent flooding were not extreme. On the Thames the highest flow in 2014 has been exceeded during 14 earlier floods (most prior to 1950).
The impression you get is that the rainfall is high, but not unprecedented. A similarly nuanced view of the link to climate change is given. But all we get from the Met Office are weasel words like "consistent with" - the scientist's counterpart of the environmentalist's "linked to". Coming so soon after Dame Julia's self-serving briefing for central government it does look as if the Met Office is reverting to type.
Reader Comments (203)
Don't be too keen to call for the banning of home building on floodplains. The buyer should beware but be free to take the chance. Furthermore, some wealthy landowners will be most happy if building land is put off-limits because the per acre price for their own non-floodplain land will rise, and rents also. What's more, those nice people already living on - though not working on - the choicer parts of the flood-prone land don't want the grubby polloi arriving at their rural retreat and may also call for intervention to prevent the crime of making a home.
Sky News balanced? I just saw Slingo and the Natalie Bennet Green Party leader leader give a CAGW masterclass in propaganda. No one to give any facts at all, just newspeak from two fanatical common purpose harpies.
Stephen Richards
Would you have a link to Lamb's piece on the jet stream position? I'd be interested in reading it.
Feb 9, 2014 at 9:25 AM | Unregistered CommenterLord Beaverbrook
Buy his book !!
So I don't think there's a discrepancy here.
Feb 9, 2014 at 11:03 AM | Registered CommenterRichard Betts
Cloud coo coo land as usual.
Buy his book !!
Feb 9, 2014 at 12:34 PM | Unregistered CommenterStephen Richards
Amazon now.
Met off 3 month forecast Dec 13 Feb 14 ............. Crap
NOAA NASA 3 month forecast Dec 13 Feb 14 ..... Crap
All climate models Crap. And yet people from the Met off come here to defend their destruction of the UK and World economy along with the Elderly and poor. Very soon the middle class of europe and america will start to feel the impact of these left wing, progressive communist, science activist policies.
I actually think that Dame Julia may be right in the statements highlighted above by BH. It could very well be that this extreme weather is linked to the apparent climate shift around 2006 when global surface temperatures began to move ever so slightly downwards. Such a shift is "climate change" and could bring on more severe weather as it has done before when temperatures declined. Maybe that is not what she meant, but certainly what she said. Climate change is simply that, up or down.
The key issue is when did Slingo cease to be an objective scientist?
From page 1 there is reference to "climate change" rather than "man-made climate change" and then on page 2 there is this:
"There is an increasing body of evidence that extreme daily rainfall rates are becoming more intense, and that the rate of increase is consistent with what is expected from fundamental physics.
There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly heavy rain events"
Forgive me for being a lowly physicist and engineer but fundamental physics would mean that any heating effects of greenhouse gases, in particular CO2, would have been isolated and characterised. Tyndall's experiments and the oft repeated putting gas in a box and seeing it heat up, is not the whole story unless the box can be successfully removed to reveal the gas only effect. Otherwise you risk mistaking restriction of convection for radiative heating. Hertz and Angtrom showed this approach back around 1910 with their NaCl glass experiment.
Now that is just off the top of my head after doing some reading up on it over a few nights and even just listening to some people on here, as well as using my own experience. It would be nice if our lofty institutions stopped making stuff up to fit their own agenda and actually did "science".
Or to be frank: that they stopped lying about what they know, or think they know. It demeans them.
@Micky: basic statistical thermodynamics precludes any thermalisation of GHG-absorbed IR energy in the gas phase. The relevant Law is Equipartition of Energy meaning the proportion of activated molecules is defined by Local Thermodynamic Equilibrium. The excess energy pseudo-diffuses to thermalise at condensed matter. The experimental proof is the CO2 laser which is cooled at the walls.
So she chose the weekend when she knew that the flooding was going to dominate media coverage, to get her PR people to work Saturday & Sunday, arranging media headlines & appearances for her - all resulting in headlines like
"Climate change is to blame, says Met Office scientist, Flooding like that in Somerset may become more frequent" - Telegraph.
"Climate change ‘almost certainly to blame for floods" - Times
But - "she wasn't talking about flooding".
Hmmmm …….. I used to think you were the honest voice there Richard, but I suspect now you're just the stooge being brought in to supply "plausible deniability".
Feb 9, 2014 at 12:59 PM | John Peter
============================
In which case, everything is down to climate change, so why even bother to mention it. What we do know is that stormy weather and extreme rainfall has in the past happened more during cooling periods than warming periods. Oh shit. I forgot. When it gets warmer, it gets colder. Silly me.
To recap: it's climate (Slingo) but it's weather (Betts). Therefore it can't be debunked as "weather not climate" and it can't be debunked as "disagrees with climate science".
It's a miracle! Allelujah!
Ps in yet another miracle the Dame has confirmed exactly what Dave the Number 10 Scientist had said all long. Who needs scientists when the PM is such a bright man?
It's just nonsense, isn't it, Bishop? I've just watched even Sky's so called 'science reporter' spouting the same nonsense! This is an attempt to exploit the misery of the people in the south west for political purposes. It is only 'science' in the sense in which 'political science' is 'science'! And there was Charles riding in for the rescue (his idiot son of boar hunting) when the Environment Agency was exactly following his own misanthropic philosophy. Return the world to Nature, that precious non-entity, and damn the people! Ironically, it the 'people' who, sick to death of Metro-wierdos, are doing it for themselves. The 'people' know their land. On another thread some where wondering what would happen when 'the lights go out'. Absolute fury! We shall see. Blow the whole carapace off! (God, I'm furious! :))
Worldwide, government science advisors are trying to maintain the illusion of honest government science in the face of overwhelming evidence that public scientific and educational institutions are accepting public funds to deceive the public.
The integrity of constitutional government and scientific research were sacrificed to save the world from possible nuclear annihilation in 1945 when it was agreed to Unite Nations, to rule people with hysterical rhetoric, and to hide the abundant source of energy that powers our beautiful, bountiful, benevolent universe from the cores of:
Heavy atoms like Uranium
Some planets like Jupiter
Ordinary stars like the Sun
Galaxies like the Milky Way
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Chapter_2.pdf
The corruption of science was first exposed when Climategate emails revealed manipulation of data to fit a political agenda in Nov2009, . . .
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2014/02/04/a-historical-perspective-on-hysterical-rhetoric/
. . . Yet most critics (except Donna Lafamboise) could not then, and will not now, believe that NASA, DOE, EPA, and other federal research agencies were already manipulating observations and data to fit the UN's agenda when the US President Eisenhower specifically warned of this threat to our form of government in Jan 1961:
Http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOLld5PR4ts
With deep regrets,
- Oliver K. Manuel</I>
Former NASA Principal
Investigator for Apollo
PS - If you doubt my conclusions, try for yourself to get any member of the UN's IPCC, the UK's Royal Society, the US or any other National Academy of Sciences, or the Swedish or Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee to publicly address three figures of precise experimental data (Figures 1-3, pages 19-27, my autobiography) that falsify standard post-1945 models of stars and nuclei.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Chapter_2.pdf
What is actually meant by “Climate Change”? The climate of the British Isles has long been one of changeable weather, making predictions of conditions more than a few days hence very difficult. There is a history of prolonged periods of severe weather, often resulting in catastrophe (sometime beneficial to the British, if you look at what happened to the Spanish Armada). So, dreadful as it is for those suffering the effects, the events of this winter are fully consistent with the British climate in all recorded history.
As such, then, “Climate Change” is a myth. It probably is so, on a global scale, too; are the climates of others regions changing, beyond the normal vagaries of weather? I suspect not; “climate change” is another phrase to keep us scared, now that “global warming” is proving to be not so dreadful as
hoped forpredicted. As it is becoming more obvious that there is no climate change, the new phrase being bandied about is “Climate disruption”, a phrase that has an even more tenuous grip on reality, as climate disruption is, in reality, merely a display of the vagaries of weather. I will accept the concept of “climate change” when it becomes a British custom to cook the Christmas turkey on the barbie on the beach, and June becomes the time to ski in the Cairngorms.Seems to be a lot of muddling of different datasets. The impression is created that the rainfall is a record high for the last 248 years. That's certainly how the BBC are spinning it. However, the dataset that goes back that far is all Englad+Wales precipitation (EWP).
Looking at that data Dec 2013 doesn't seem to extraordinary; ranks 32nd out of 248. It's not even in the top 10%. The Jan 2014 data hasn't been added yet. However a hunt around their website gives separate Jan 2014 figures for England & Wales. Combining them (taking into account the relative sizes of England and Wales) I get a figure of 174mm for EWP Jan 2014. That's very close to the previous wettest January; 1948 at 176.8mm.
Looked at over all of England & Wales and all of the last 248 years December was wet but not particularly remarkable. January was as wet as the previous record set in 1948. But it might be worth noting that January isn't a particularly wet month. There have been wetter Mar, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov and Dec figures.
Note:- I am not saying it hasn't been very wet in southern england - but you can't make claims going back 248 years for just that area.
"The BBC are pushing, whenever the opportunity arises, the connection between the current weather and climate change."
Slingo, in her most recent interview with the BBC (Radio 4, around 1.10 pm today), was given free rein by a deferential host - who spoke of "deniers" - to push her propaganda, more particularly in the direction of extreme events.
Each fawning interview like that takes Slingo closer to the peerage that she surely craves - to sit in the House of Lords alongside such pillars of good climate sense as Lords Deben, Oxburgh, Rees and May ...
Someone should ask Slingo if she would be happy to have her pension index-linked to the temperature
Cassio: Yes, I listened to the World This Weekend on R4 just now. Shaun Ley tried to get Sling to use the 'D' word by calling us so (the BBC now has no qualms on that then), but to her credit she did not rise and continued to call us 'sceptics'. (Ley came over as a slimy little sh*t). But the BBC offered no opposing POV so left Slingo to push on by saying she would be very happy to listen to sceptics if only they had something of 'science' to contribute. But as she's been a climate scientist all her life, she said, she would rather take the science (the models I guess) over what the sceptics could possibly say.
And when Slingo said it was all down to 'Climate Change' I so much wanted Ley to ask her: 'Is that a cooling change or a warming change?' - but fat chance of that.
Yet, in all of the interview, there were so many 'coulds', 'possiblys' and 'mights' that it was quite obvious that it had little to do with science.
Dr Betts,
I think I heard Dame Julia say 'because it's wamer there's more humidity in the air' -- something like that.
Could you point me to a graph of what she is thinking of? I've found some images which indicate that we're talking about a tenth or two tenths of a gram per kilogram of air and I'm wondering it that would actually do the trick.
Also, how is the rest of the world doing in terms of precipitation? Is this year, globally, remarkable in any way?
JF
May I offer this quote from Eric Pickles as the best thing that could be said about the EA and MO - it should be engraved on all Government letterheads:
@Julian Flood: atmospheric humidity has been falling, on average.
Slingo is talking a load of unscientific tosh because the assumptions in the GCMs about heat generation are entirely false, exaggerating net surface IR by 6.85x. In reality, the World is now cooling fast. Our storms are caused by the warm N Atlantic mixing that heat into the Arctic whence it goes to Space. This is because the Polar Vortex has split in two. The overall event is determined by the irreversible thermodynamics of the OLR.
Sadly it's logically impossible to get a meaningful answer from Richard Betts on this topic.
He can only defend the latest slimgy Met Office statements no matter what (hence meaninglessly) or resign.
Having no wish to see Richard unemployed we'll have to make do with the meaning-free.
I was watching Sky news when it was announced that a top climate scientist has said that all the available evidence points to climate change being the cause. When we got to Slingos interview she didn't say that at all. She said that some evidence suggests it was a contributory factor. Of course she didn't mention what evidence and nobody bothered to ask. But all the same, quite a difference from the headline. It turns out the first quote came entirely from some dumb journalist who was interviewed later. If either one would bother to read the IPCC report they'd easily find out that there is no evidence of any link, anywhere with global warming affecting the jetstream. So this comes down to mere headline grabbing and base stupidity.
Ironic that Eric Pickles later said, in relation to the Somerset levels and the EA, that we were caught out because we listened to those we thought were experts. Yes, quite! A lesson perhaps to notice the weasel words, to ask what this 'evidence' actually consists of and to try to recall the predictions 2 years ago of more droughts due to the selfsame climate change.
Why doesn't Slingo kick off and say everything can be blamed on man made warming................and have done with the scientific proof of equivocation and lies.
Her words, have gone all around the British media 'airwaves' - it is evident, that, this was a purposeful and deliberately fashioned outpouring, done with guileful intent and on a slow news day - therefore it achieved maximum effect - that comes from the MO playing politics and ignoring objectivity of pure science.
Musing on and concerning the egregious Mann uptick hockey stick fraud - he and his fiddled computer algorithms gave the alamist loons a propaganda victory which nearly swayed this mythical palaver. I posit, what Slingo has recently averred - is no less of a deliberate falsification.
What does Britain do for dissimulators, a couple spring to mind, first dear Bryony and also it elevates another to a Dame - and is it not a metaphor for our national decline, a demise in intellectual scientific standards and has the truth been booted out of the front door?
I too note that RB comes here to defend his boss but never seems to get involved in matters of actual climate or physics. What he posts here is up to him, but where in the past he put up some useful comments nowadays it is mere PR, and no use to me.
Julia was talking about the weather, not flooding
Inevitable...., even if the rivers were dredged? Seems an endorsement perhaps too far for a scientific body like UKMO
Is this saying that if the rivers had been dredged regularly then the effects of the storm would not have been so severe?
Oh really - http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/tag/winter-forecast/
"We thought we were dealing with experts."
Blame it on the experts then and the lazy bastards who knew otherwise but didn't have the bottle to rock the boat eh Richard.
At least Eric Pickles doesn't blame the floods on climate change: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luaDqygMQPI
Re
"Hose pipe ban by the summer I guess.
Feb 9, 2014 at 11:06 AM | Unregistered CommenterMartyn"
I was going to ask (tongue firmly in cheek) "Hows the reservoirs?"
MDGNN/Alec
Okay I see what you mean. What I was talking about was when such experients with gas on a box are done it would be nice if the effects you are talking about where then demonstrated so that any supposed greenhouse effect was properly understood.
Currently all we get is the gas temperature goes up so it must be radiative. Rather than wait theory precludes this, laser experiments don't show this so let's figure out what's going on with the equipment we have.
I have been curious as to how much of the Somerset floods were due to the recent rainfall and how much poor flood management / drainage. I found the T-junction where the car is stuck in this - http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/10614806/UK-flooding-special-drone-captures-360-image-of-Somerset-under-water.html - on an OS map using http://www.geograph.org.uk/gridref/ST3434 (it is just east of Muchelney, grid ref. ST 45160 23340) and fortunately the T-junction has a spot height of 8m above sea level. I would have thought that was plenty enough of a drop (if the rivers had been dredged) to avoid such a large area of inundation?
@Martyn: the politics of this are astounding. Slingo represents the alarmist group promoted by Houghton which for a generation controlled climate alchemy based on Sagan's false science. This was promoted by Houghton and Hansen for different reasons. Houghton is arguably a religious fanatic similar to Joseph Priestley who used Phlogiston for similar reasons. Hansen is a Marxist. Slingo was badly deceived because Sagan, Houghton and Hansen made basic Physics' mistakes.
@Micky: standard physics shows that the thermalisation in Tyndall's experiment can only be at the inside wall of the tube. Nahle sort of proved this in his mylar balloon experiment - reduce the PET container wall thickness by a factor of 12 and there was no warming. Unfortunately this is just one of many mistakes in Climate Alchemy, driven by politics not objective science.
Ah yes, Houghton, the weapon of mass destruction.
Julia Slingo talking to Shaun Ley on BBC Radio 4's World this Weekend - the transcript:
https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20140209_ww
MDGNN/Alec
That's interesting about the mylar baloon experiment. Considering the amount of money sloshing around for AGW you would think it wouldn't be that much trouble to repeat such experiments. I mean how much would we be talking about? A few thousand maybe 10s - certainly not in the millions.
Reading the transcript of BBC Radio 4's World this Weekend - sorry, but I think J Slingo may be quite ill.
The 'Chief Scientist of the Met Office' keeps banging on about 'global warming' and 'evidence' and how 'ongoing sea level rise is 'a manifestation, of course, of global warming', yet:
Satellite data - the very instruments created to end our uncertainty - says:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1996.65/plot/rss/from:1996.65/trend
Zero warming for over 17 years.
Hmmm, that's strange. I see Julia Slingo is still talking about "Global Warming".
She obviously didn't get the memo.......
Global Warming out - Climate Change in.
To the extent that the prevailing weather has been experienced many
times before, a better description might be "Climate Variability"
The term "Climate Change" suggests that climate variability is changing.
In my opinion, it is not.
So; I believe or accept climate variability but do not accept that the variable
climate is more variable now; than was in the past.
Eric Pickles says he is sorry that the Government took advice from people they thought were experts.
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
Yes, just more boring predictable drivel, so perhaps it would be more fun to look at it in its context.
1. When the Berlin wall came down and Gorbachov (Spelling?) visited the flat next door it was widely realized that socialism was actually the means by which professionals in government sought to protect themselves from the consequences of mistakes rather than as the means by which well educated professionals used their expertise with the objective of improving the lot of a grateful plebs (the nanny state), and so no longer occupied the moral high ground. A new noble objective was required to enable governments to think they acted for the best. At about the same time, scientists on the make rather stridently promoted the idea that the world was being harmed as a result of human activities and in the vacuum that then existed readily convinced governments that preventing such activities was the noble cause they sought. Everybody knew that socialism had not actually influenced what dictatorial governments did, and nobody thought that preventing the unwanted activities would actually lead to governments being required actually to do anything other than talk, and so governments were undeterred by threats of adverse consequences. In the UK all main political parties embraced the idea and it moved out of the hurly-burly of day-to-day politics.
2. Since then successive governments have occupied themselves in managing the work and should, I think, be judged to have been both proactive and successful. They have funded numerous universities under contracts that require that a proper basis for the claims that human activities are harmful be found, that appropriate government responses be identified, and that the means of moulding public opinion to the view that the threat they pose is real be developed, and have made it clear to the contractors that success will be evaluated by advances made towards these requirements while avoiding public condemnation for wasting public funds. They have played a large part in the establishment of the IPCC and in its continuing efforts to establish mankind's responsibility for harming the world, and have convinced many that the body is trustworthy on climate. They have closed reliable sources of energy that are said to be harmful and funded subsidies for establishing and running uneconomic renewable energy sources that are said to be harmless without provoking taxpayer revolt, and have turned a blind eye when politicians and business people have cooperated to capture large parts of these subsidies in a way that would be judged contrary to the public interest in any other field. They have increased the cost of energy without provoking rebellion by bill payers. And like any good manager, they have appointed the right people. Thus Slingo and Richard B at the Met Office, Gummer and Kennedy at the Climate Change Committee, Yeo at his select committee and so on. It matters not whether these people actually believe that humankind endangers the planet or whether they are in it for the money - and while matters stay as they are we will probably never know for certain who belongs to which camp.
3. But the idea that humankind was endangering the planet was oversold and many of the government's activities described above were a great deal more than the mere lip service originally envisaged. Government now finds that pursuit of many of the measures to prevent the dangers said to be posed by human activities is contrary to the immediate interests of the population. and so we see parts of government trying to ensure those interests are not prejudiced. But it is not a concerted effort because government, having for years responded to cries of 'Its not right - do something', how has to think about far too much with the result that nothing, including what to do about humankind harming the world, gets the attention it deserves. Thus we have Cameron with the greenest government ever encouraging fracking and Slingo's present pleadings.
Context!
4. Yes, history is easy. But what of the future? What strategems will a government made up from the present three parliamentary political parties adopt to conceal the U-turn that the threat of power cuts seem likely to force? More politicians saying opposite things out of different corners of their mouths? More frantic attempts to avoid saying anything that might offend someone - anyone? What about UKIP? They alone will not have to do a U-turn. And then, what will happen to the universities involved in the government contracts if present assumptions about the evils of human activities are abandoned? Funds could be cut off quickly. And lastly, what about government staff? It is unlikely they would be made redundant and most would stay until retirement, but doing what? I dunno.
But of on thing I am sure - it will all be painfully slow.
Dame Julia said while none of the individual storms had been exceptional, the "clustering and persistence" were extremely unusual.
Clustering and persistence in climate and hydrologic data is a well known phenomenon dating back to H.E Hurst's work on 1000 years of data on the River Nile. As some here have pointed out, clustering occurs even in purely random data. Although extreme events are normally characterized by their probability of occurrence (return period), extreme events do not occur randomly and are more often clustered because of the persistence of various phenomena like the jet stream.
Meltemian
Global warming is the process. Climate change is the consequences.
A question for Richard Betts.
When Julia Slingo was talking in the interview about climate change and global warming, was she specifically talking about anthropogenic climate change and anthropogenic global warming, or about natural climate change and natural global warming?
It seems to me this is very poor and unscientific use of language and should not be expected of such a senior scientific officer of the Met Office. Not being concise and specific can lead to the two different causes being conflated, thereby misleading the listener.
Look forward to your response.
warmer, more energetic climate.
Win, win.
Feb 9, 2014 at 10:12 AM | Unregistered CommenterEntropic man
Your usual rubbish. When the planet warms the differential temp between pole and equator is reduced and therefore the climate energy is reduced.
It seems to me this is very poor and unscientific use of language and should not be expected of such a senior scientific officer of the Met Office. Not being concise and specific can lead to the two different causes being conflated, thereby misleading the listener.
Look forward to your response.
Feb 9, 2014 at 5:34 PM | Registered Commenterthinkingscientist
Got it one. That's is exactly what the Met Off want to say ....... NOTHING.
Even Pickles needs some lessons,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/10626939/Eric-Pickles-Spend-aid-abroad-to-stop-flooding-in-the-UK.html
Britain’s international aid budget will help reduce flooding in the UK by addressing the causes of climate change abroad, Eric Pickles has said.
Mr Pickles rejected "populist" calls from Ukip and some Tory MPs that money should be diverted from foreign aid budgets to support British people suffering from the effects of flooding suggesting instead that money spent in a "sustainable" way will help alleviate extreme weather in the UK.
Given that I view the lot of them as nothing more than a bunch of integrity-estranged pseudoscience curb crawlers, it's no surprise to me at all.