Spot the difference

I'm still suffering. Even whisky isn't working. It must be serious.

In the meantime, Paul Homewood has found something interesting about the Met Office's forecasts.

Rumbling on

The rumpus over the Met Office's downgrading of its climate predictions rumbles on (much like my lurgy!). The Mail covered the story yesterday evening (H/T Jonathan Jones), and included a couple of interesting quotes.

Graham Stringer:

Labour MP Graham Stringer said the Met Office’s short-term forecasts had improved, but their climate change analysis was ‘poor’.

He said: ‘By putting out the information on Christmas Eve they were just burying bad news – that they have got their climate change forecast wrong.

‘For a science-based organisation, they should be more up front, both about their successes and failures.’

and Myles Allen

Professor Myles Allen of the University of Oxford said: ‘A lot of people  were claiming, in the run-up to the Copenhagen 2009 conference, that warming was accelerating and it is all worse than we thought.

‘What has happened since then has demonstrated that it is foolish to extrapolate short-term climate trends.

‘While every new year brings in welcome new data to help us rule out the more extreme scenarios for the future, it would be equally silly to interpret what has happened since the early 2000s as evidence that the warming has stopped.’

Must-reads

A couple of posts that I simply must point out to readers. Firstly, Steve M is back in the saddle at Climate Audit, reviewing his recent visit to the AGU and making some disturbing revelations about the AGU's welcoming back of Peter Gleick into the fold.

Gleick’s welcome back to AGU prominence – without serving even the equivalent of a game’s suspension – was pretty startling, given his admitted identity fraud and distribution (and probable fabrication) of a forged document. Last year, then AGU President Mike McPhadren, a colleague of Eric Steig’s at the University of Washington, had stated on behalf of AGU that Gleick had “compromised AGU’s credibility as a scientific society” and that his “transgression cannot be condoned”. McPhadren stated that AGU‘s “guiding core value” was “excellence and integrity in everything we do” – values that would seem to be inconsistent with identity fraud and distribution and/or fabrication of forged documents, even by the relaxed standards of academic institutions.

Meanwhile, Tallbloke and his readers have uncovered a downwards revision in the Met Office's temperature projections. It's interesting to wonder why a statistically insignificant rainfall trend was worthy of a Met Office press release while a major reining back on the projections wasn't.

England and Wales rainfall trends

In the wake of the "more rain and more intense rain" story, Doug Keenan sends this graph of England & Wales rainfall records for 1766-2012 (click for larger; data here).

Let's just say the trend towards more rainfall is not obvious. (As indeed is any trend towards less rainfall, which is said to be more likely by the UK Climate Impacts Programme).

[Updated to show England and Wales, rather than UK]

Update on Jan 7, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Doug writes:

The plot shows the total precipitation for England and Wales in 2012 as 1070 mm. That was the amount in the file for seasonal precipitation that the Met Office had on its web site when I downloaded the file on January 4^th (at 20:31). The amount, however, is incorrect. The Met Office has since changed the file to specify the amount as 1245 mm. The other data points in the plot seem to be correct. An amended plot is included in the e-mail that I sent to Julia Slingo on January 7^th. As shown and discussed there, the obvious problems remain.

Quote of the week

By Today's Moderator.

I rather liked this comment on WUWT about the spat between David Rose and the Met Office and whether global warming has recently stopped or not .

the duke October 13, 7.14pm.

So, should we all conclude that temperatures are relatively normal, or temporarily normal, or abnormally normal, or apparently normal on a continuing but wholly unpredictable basis? Or are there other possibilities?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/13/report-global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago/

Click to read more ...

Lovelock on the Met Office and Richard

Leo Hickman has interviewed James Lovelock again, the result being this article. There is also a set of transcripts, which contains this interesting statement.

I keep contact with the Hadley Centre. They are one of the best climate centres in the world. Something to be proud of. They should be given credit. They are under enormous pressure from government and are not allowed to say what they really think. But there's some really good scientists there. I like Richard Betts very much and respect him. He couldn't be a scientist and not discuss the uncertainties [in climate science]. Three cheers for him.

I wonder whether central government is asking the Met Office not to express their concerns in full or whether they are asking them not to go into too much detail on the uncertainties. The quote suggests the latter, but the former seems more likely given what we know about central government.

Reactions to Leo

A couple of Richard Betts' Twitter exchanges in response to Leo Hickman's article on climatologists talking to sceptics are interesting. Firstly this one with paleoclimatologist Kevin Anchukaitis, who tweets as ThirstyGecko.

Anchukaitis: Hopefully the Met Office had actual paleoclimatologists on hand for their 'conversation' with these folks?

Click to read more ...

Me and Richard B in the Guardian

Leo Hickman has written an article about the Met Office's outreach to sceptics, covering my visit to Exeter in some detail.

Last June, I wrote a blog post in which I proposed that a "meeting of moderate minds" within the climate debate might be a productive way forward, even if it's just to see if any common ground could be identified. The idea wasn't exactly warmly received - not least by Montford's readers! - but I still hold firm that there is some sense to this idea. It is, therefore, refreshing to hear that the Met Office is now holding such "conversations" with its critics. The testimony of both Montford and Betts show that such efforts can produce positive, if tentative, steps forward.

Behind the lines

Just a short note written from the Met Office library, where I'm going to spend an hour before heading back home. The day has gone extremely well, with some really interesting exchanges of views, some of which were quite unexpected.

My talk was probably pitched at a level that was a bit too general and not science-y enough, but as ever with these things it was the Q&A that was the most interesting anyway. Richard Betts had invited Martin Juckes to attend and Juckes was the source of several probing questions. (Long-term readers at Climate Audit may remember him as having a long exchange with McIntyre back in 2007 or thereabouts). This led onto an interesting discussion of uncertainty bands and inverse regression. Peter Stott also wanted to take me to task over some of the things I said, and there was a frank, but not unfriendly exchange there too.

It was great to meet Richard and (briefly) Tamsin. Although unfortunately we had less time for informal chats than I would have liked.

Thanks are certainly due to Vicky Pope and Richard for their hospitality. It was a productive and, I think, a very useful day.

Travels

I'm going to be mainly offline for a couple of days. I'm off to Exeter, where I have been invited to speak to an audience at the Met Office. I'm sure there will be some tough questioning, but I think this is probably more stimulating than preaching to the choir.

Richard Betts has promised me lunch and I understand that Tamsin Edwards is going to make the trek down from Bristol too.

The Met Office are paying my expenses for which I'm grateful. However, if readers want to help out with a speaking fee, the tip box is your friend. Thanks as ever to those who subscribe to the site to help cover the costs of these efforts.

A Rose on winter

Over the weekend there was quite a lot of interest in David Rose's article in the Mail, which addressed new figures from the Met Office which appeared to confirm a lack of any warming in the last 15 years.

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Rose was also warning of further cold on the way, based on an assessment of Solar Cycle 24 and 25.

The Met Office have now responded, with a blog post that has a whiff of Bob Ward about it: "includes numerous errors in the reporting of published peer reviewed science". The argument seems to be that if you take decadal averages it is still possible to obscure the plateau in the temperatures.

Or words to that effect.

Conveying truth 3

With nothing of any great import on the newswires today, I'm going to return to the subject of the Met Office's 2010 briefing to central government. The next statement I want address is this one:

Over the last 100 years the Earth has warmed by about 0.75 degrees Celsius and that warming is accelerating.

Click to read more ...

Futurist - Josh 137

Reading this thread may be required.

Thorne responds

Peter Thorne's comments about politicisation of science have been among the most prominent of Climategate2. Now Thorne has apparently responded in a comments thread at RealClimate, making some extraordinary claims about Phil Jones.

I do not know of a single person who has done more to try to advance data sharing of meteorological data for the last 15 years than Phil Jones (if you doubt me you could mine something useful instead of personal emails … the GCOS report series to see how hard this really is to get to happen and how involved Phil Jones has been).

Public investigations

After the charade of the House of Commons investigation into Climategate, one has little confidence that anything coming out of the Palace of Westminster is worth the time of day. However, two new inquiries have been announced that may be of interest to readers here.

Several readers noted yesterday that the House of Commons SciTech Committee are going to investigate Science in the Met Office.

More intriguingly, the House of Lord SciTech Committee is going to investigate the role of Chief Scientific Advisers:

“The Committee is keen to gain a clearer understanding of the ability of departmental Chief Scientific Advisers to provide independent advice to ministers and policy makers within their departments and find out more about their influence across government. We would encourage anyone with any interest in this issue to contact us with their views and experiences on the role that they play.”

Some of the questions to be addressed are:

• How do CSAs ensure that departmental policies are evidence-based?
• What is the range of expertise provided by the network of CSAs across government departments?
• What influence do CSAs have over research spend?