Bishop Hill Targetted rebuttal
Apr 12, 2014 Climate: MetOffice Media Here's another interesting snippet from Julia Slingo's appearance on The Life Scientific. This is where Slingo is asked about the kerfuffle over her apparent linking of this winter's storms and floods to climate change. Readers will no doubt recall that this blew up when David Rose published an article in the Mail on Sunday which noted the contradiction between Slingo's remarks, as reported by Roger Harrabin, and conventional understanding of what was behind the storms, namely a shift in the jetstream, with no known link to AGW.
According to Slingo, her remarks had been "taken out of context" and all she had been trying to say was that warmer air will hold more water thus leading to more rainfall. So if she is to be believed, when asked if there was a link to between this winter's series of storms and AGW, her remark that "all the evidence points to a link" was meant to mean that the storms had been made marginally worse by AGW.
I'm not convinced that this is the message that most people would have taken away with them.
And just as surprising is that when Rose reported Slingo's remarks as reported by Harrabin, the Met Office decided to issue a criticism of Rose.
Reader Comments (47)
The statement "warmer air will hold more water thus leading to more rainfall", would lead most people to ask "do we get a lot more rain in the summer because it is warmer than winter?" It was just another disingenuous statement by Slingo, deliberately meant to deceive the general public.
"Taken out of context".
Yet another of the favoured gambits from the Warmist Handbook for Beginners. (cf also: "consistent with"; "fossil-fuel funded"; "peer-reviewed"; "robust"; "consensus"; "settled science". And so on and so forth).
Liars all.
And just as surprising is that when Rose reported Slingo's remarks as reported by Harrabin, the Met Office decided to issue a criticism of Rose.
You mean the people whose boss was spouting BS decided to attack the person that pointed it out now there is a shock !
Slingo is first and foremost a 'political animal ' that long stop doing any science and she is more than smart enough to know how her words would be taken has that was the intention . The MET has little chance of restoring its reputation until she is gone off to happy and very well paid retirement as he head of some government qango , I pity the organisation that gets her. Becasue its her approach to 'the cause ' that has got the organisation into the state its in over AGW, more than happy to push scientific rubbish and do 'science by press release, if the cause falls one casualty will be the funding of the MET , and for that it only have itself to blame.
If I were Slingo, and wanted to push an alarmist line while not losing all scientific credibility, I'd make the pronouncements and have a little team come around to clean up afterwards, knowing that the equivocal scientific statements would not make it into the mainstream after the first extravagant statement was made. That way my organisation could push an agenda and not appear to lose its cred.
Slingo -met office- circulation- a few hundred.
David Rose -Daily Mail -circulation -1,780,565
I rest my case.
Could anyone provide a UKMO criticism of any Guardian or BBC article related to climate alarmism ?
Slingo, slingo and thrice slingo
011011000110111101101100
I don't read morse. Nor ASCII. What does that say?
_______________________
The whole story needs putting together with detailed timeline. From Memory...
- Cameron said 'climate change has caused this rain'
- Met office spokesperson said 'that's bollocks; there is no evidence that climate change caused the rain'
- Senior Met Office Person + ?Peter Stott? said "no it's not bollocks at all the rain is due to climate change" (Presumably the spokesperson was given 'advice')
[obviously those were not the precise words used]
Harrabin was at it again last night, caught him saying on the news whilst reporting from Germany that the biogas structures use farm waste. This is not fully true, farm manures are part of the mix but a major contribution to the blend is maize harvested specifically for the job.
From the Department of Unfalsifiable Grand Hypotheses (DOUGH)
Global warming causes heatwaves
Global warming causes big freezes (US Polar Vortex)
Global warming causes drought
Global warming causes flooding
etc...
> I don't read morse. Nor ASCII. What does that say?
011011000110111101101100 = 6C6F6C = lol
Martin A asks: "I don't read morse. Nor ASCII. What does that say?"
Finally, a question I can answer :)
1. Split 011011000110111101101100 into 3 groups of 8 = 01101100 01101111 01101100
2. Convert each group from binary to decimal = 108 111 108
3. Look up each decimal number in ASCII code tabe = l o l
On a serious note, I am honestly confused about the "global warming is causing extreme weather events" meme.
If there has been a statistically significant increase in extreme weather events - personally I'm not convinced that there has been anything of the sort, but that is beside the point - then that would be an important piece of data which requires scientific explanation.
It seems to me that the one potential cause which we could rule out immediately would be global warming, anthropogenic or otherwise. Why? Er, because the globe isn't warming. Been flatlining since 1997. Everyone knows that. So whatever causes extreme weather to happen, it can't be GW.
Or am I missing something here?
Julia Slingo outside the Met Office
Contributed to the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change and to the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC.
Served as a member of several national and international committees, including the Met Office and ECMWF Scientific Advisory Committees.
In 2007 was appointed to the Joint Scientific Committee of the World Climate Research Programme.
Regularly involved in Royal Society activities, and in 2008 became the first woman President of the Royal Meteorological Society.
In her old age she seems to have fallen into a political groupie rut.
I suppose she thinks its worth it to become a Dame of the British Empire. Unfortunately apart from the acquisition in 1955 of an uninhabited lump of rock out in the Atlantic the Empire is finished and her questionable awarded title means as little as Rockall to the man in the street.
How does psychopaths behave?
This is a good illustration of why the Met Office has lost credibility as a scientific organisation.
There is no evidence to support the alarmist claim that the floods were related to climate change. There is no evidence that the climate is changing any more or less than normal. In fact, if temperature is a good indicator of climate change, then our climate is not changing at all.
It is true that warmer air holds more water than colder air. This is why the tropics are humid and the poles are dry. However there are other factors that prevent the positive feedbacks that are at the heart of the alarmist belief. We do not see the promised hot spot over the tropics or the increased humidity in the mid or higher troposphere. We see the opposite.
Bu then, the Met Office scientists are so sure that their models are correct that they ignore the observations and fail to investigate the thermostatic mechanisms that give us a remarkably stable climate.
Harrabin's reporting should be viewed in the perspective of his £15,000 supposedly given to him by CRU/UEA, to push the GHE/Global Warming ''problems''. He is actually not qualified in anything. According to Wikipedia he attended Cambridge to read English but there is no mention of him actually finishing the course. So here we have a man pontificating on climate change with no qualifications to actually understand the science. Good old BBC, wrong man in the wrong job. W1A in all its glory.
Oh! for the good old days when the met office was the Man on the Air Ministry Roof and the herald of the Shipping Forecast
I had to listen to this latest from Slingo twice as I could not believe the babbling of inanity that she came out with. Apparently she said that the heat of the atmosphere was taken up by cold water of the Pacific (I paraphrase as her ramblings were so incoherent it was really hard to tell!) Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) seemed to be beyond her to explain coherently. (Was she sober? Probably.)
So all the atmospheric heat magically vanish to the deep of the Pacific Ocean but then it somehow this cooled hot global atmosphere still causes more rain in the UK. (Was it the good old Beeb standby - much cold remedy? Maybe!)
Later she explains that weather is far too random to be predictable - Met Office's main job is what? But then somehow climate is not so unpredictable, and therefore computers can accurately model the climate - honest that is what she said!
There were some sycophantic thank-yous given for allowing computer time to other Universities, and of course a plea for a bigger and better computer system so she can play more climate fantasy changing games even faster.
Life Scientific - hardly!
Slingo has become a serial deceiver. Her position as a credible scientist has long been eroded to the point where she should be dismissed from her post.
My bad, it was Shukman who was reporting from Germany. The point remains the same though, BBC man misleads about biogas feedstocks. Sorry for the mistake.
John Lyon
Perhaps she has been on the gin and lemon eponymous drink?
George Orwell's 1984 could have been written as a comment on CAGW and CAGW believers.
Julia Slingo's statement is very much doublespeak on par with doublethink. The Met Office could easily be the Ministry of Truth. The Ministry of Love organises the multiitude of CAGW trolls who try to torture all those evil dissenters.
If the 1984 analogy holds, Big CAGW is running the GWPF too.
The South west, the South of Britain thanks to a kink in the jet stream which normally flows to the north of our Island during the winter but this year it didn't. So, it was quite wet at the beginning of the year in the South - the shock of it all - I know. Mainly thanks to environmental quangos - particularly the EU believing water voles and bivalves are far more important than people, rivers are not properly managed, dredged or anything else - it's a 'back to nature policy' and mainly directed by Greenpeace under the auspices of the Brussels Empire.
Thus, the Thames flooded, the Somerset levels reverted to pre Roman times and the politicians along with the loony left wing press had some sort of field day - headless chickens ran around in the Westminster bubble and proclaimed loudly,
"man made warming is nigh! Gadzooks and alack for we are all doomed to damnation!"
- you know the usual IPCC stuff really.
Julia Slingo, a MO bod of not much repute but with shedloads of front, her being a political animal if you know what I mean [eh Richard?] and civil servant defending her cushy sinecure. With a God given ability to espy a golden opportunity - immediately Mz Slingo joined up with the newly 'out of the closet' man made global warming bandwagon - all this wet stuff - it's proof she shouted! Lets face it, the chance was too good to miss.
Now it seems, it was all a dream.
Ah but Slingo and her minions unfortunately are still our [taxpayers and consumers] nightmare - we have to pay for their mistakes and their ongoing belief in the chimera of CAGW.
Phil W,
Or you can simply C&P the binary string and get it converted to text automatically here:
http://www.roubaixinteractive.com/PlayGround/Binary_Conversion/Binary_To_Text.asp
Presumably a reasonable conclusion from this is that droughts have been made marginally less intense by AGW
Lord Beaverbrook
Could you have a look at the following article - Modelling UK weather patterns - especially the section headed "Long-term forecasting" it makes the following statement:-
That does not square with my recollection of the Dec 12 release, wasn't it was the one that caused the storm by forecasting no increase in global temperatures over the next 5 years? Or am I mistaken?
warmer air holds more water
so?
this does not explain why it rains more
as
warmer air HOLDS more water
Green Sand -
The Met Office's Dec 12 "decadal" forecast is here. It shows a rise for ~ 3 years, then a fall. At the peak, the mid-range value is about 0.5 K above the 1971-2000 baseline, which would make a new record high. The UKMO page does not mention that feature, but it may be read from the figure.
[One should also note that the mid-range of the annual forecast for 2013 also would have been a new record high. Again, not mentioned on the UKMO webpage. This feature is also present in the 2014 annual forecast.]
Interestingly, the Met Office's explanation Why Does It Rain" at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/learning/rain/why-does-it-rain does not match Slingo's explanation.
@Ed B - to answer your question
- the argument is that instead of warming the air, the extra co2 heat has gone into the weather system, so increasing intensity, so more extreme weather events, however that is just speculation. I would guess it is not true as they have published no valid evidence .. And they'd love to have some.
Slingo seems to be more of a climate astrologist , as she makes up explanation after things.
have happened.
if her explanations came before and accompanied with predictions which always came true, then that would be science...
..but as ever from true believers .. It's about dirty PR , not proper science.
Jeremy Shiers
You are of course correct but a more accurate statement might be that warmer air CAN hold more water but does not necessarily do so.
If you were to come here, near Narbonne, in mid July you would not find much water in the air.
I believe that is even more true in the Sahara!
My bad, it was Shukman who was reporting from Germany. The point remains the same though, BBC man misleads about biogas feedstocks. Sorry for the mistake.
John Lyon
Apr 12, 2014 at 11:55 AM | Unregistered Commenterjohn Lyon
Did you read the comments. They were 97% against shukman.
Green Sand. HaroldW
Your memory serves you well. This was the one mis-released over Christmas that seemed to cause some controversy in the fact that it wasn't ten years but five and it predicted a continuation of the 'pause' for the first time which the UKMO seemed to be on the back foot about. Richard Betts provided a good PR coverage allowing us insight into the 'new experimental model' that wasn't really official in a smiley academic sense but provided a more realistic forecast than the previous one. The modelled forecast has, since release, been felt as a bit of an embarrassment by the way that scientists have delt with questions about it and has obviously been replaced with something that doesn't actually provide a mean.
The statement about the prediction of Atlantic hurricanes is a little loose with the truth from memory as I recall that their figures were over ambitious to the actual.
gordon walker
of course you are correct, CAN does not mean DOES
Stern was over tv like a rash in new year talking about warmer seas in caribbean, suggesting this was the reason for the record rainfall in uk (record in this context means not actually a record in any sense other than for pr to cause alarm)
but how much warmer?
1c?
some people might have thought the air got colder as it moved across the atlantic from caribbean to uk
others might have wondered if this had anything to do with redistributing heat
Green Sand
I particularly like this bit:
Do you recall any previous discussions in this area?
Still, glad that the science is improving that's the most important thing.
Lord Beaverbrook: "The statement about the prediction of Atlantic hurricanes is a little loose with the truth from memory as I recall that their figures were over ambitious to the actual."
The UKMO published an analysis of their predictive performance for the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season here, see Table 2. They gave themselves a fairly good score, but not full marks. They marked themselves down for their May forecast that there would be 4-14 hurricanes in June-November, when there were actually only 2. On the other hand, they were proud to give themselves a pass on the April forecast (May-October) of 2-12, as the 2 observed managed to squeak into their range; similarly with the 2-14 predicted in June (actual 2) and 2-12 predicted in July (actual 2).
Their summary: "Forecasts of the number of hurricanes provided good guidance for all forecasts issued apart from May. However, observed values were at the lower end of the range predicted."
This is an interesting interpretation of the word "good".
HaroldW
Seems to fall into a pass with their own metrics the same as the temperature predictions do :-)
Lol
Me myself i would have had the audacity to call that LESS than
Good
wammish slime
/Lol
As a 'forecast', 2-12 hurricanes looks a pretty wide range. So wide, in fact, to be of no practical use. How does it stand up against the historical record?
> How does it stand up against the historical record?
Going back in time it would be wrong in the following years:
2005 - 15 Hurricanes.
1914 - 0 Hurricanes.
Now we are starting to get the picture!
Slingo - Yes, warmer air has the potential to hold more water. Throwing little factoids into a conversation has the potential to distract the un-attentive.
Along those lines a commenter at JoNova's website has developed an app that will dynamically generate Peer-Review worthy "Climate Psychology Papers" http://eric.worrall.name/kant.cgi - They are quite mind numbing and ripe for posting.
Most amusing!!!
Apr 13, 2014 at 2:14 PM | TerryS
Is there really a 'good' published forecast for a specific year that covers virtually every year in the historical record?? 0-16 looks a pretty good forecast then.