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Josh Feb 16, 2014 Josh 
Inspired by Emily Shuckburgh's recent performance at the Climate Change Committee AR5 hearing and with reference to Lauren Cooper (hilarious video), one of Catherine Tate's comic characters.
Bishop Hill Feb 16, 2014 Climate: MetOffice Climate: WG2 Climate: other Almost every scientist who has said anything about the floods has said that there is no way to link them to global warming - Brian Hoskins was fairly clear about this on the Today programme. The latest is Matt Collins from the University of Exeter, quoted in the Mail on Sunday:
Professor Collins told The Mail on Sunday: ‘There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge.’
Bishop Hill Feb 16, 2014 Climate: WG2 While we have heard a great deal in recent weeks about the unprecedented nature of the floods, this article by Terry Marsh of the National Hydrological Monitoring Service should calm things down a bit:
Tidal flooding is expected to increase as thermal expansion of the oceans, supplemented by meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets, increases sea levels. The risk of flooding from groundwater may also increase if winter rainfall rises appreciably.
However, the outlook in relation to fluvial (river) flooding is much less clear cut. This can be well illustrated by flow patterns in the Thames, for where the recent flooding has been most extensive. The Thames we have one of the longest continuous flow records in the world. Systematic flow measurement began at Teddington in 1883; there is also a wealth of documentary evidence relating to historical floods.
You need to read the whole thing.
Bishop Hill Feb 16, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Climate: Surface Climate: WG3 Guardian columnist Henry Porter has written a very funny column in which he takes a bash at global warming sceptics:
Hearing Lord Lawson argue with the impeccably reasonable climate scientist Sir Brian Hoskins on the BBC Today programme last week, I finally boiled over. It is surely now time for the deniers to make their case and hold an international conference, where they set out their scientific stall, which, while stating that the climate is fundamentally chaotic, provides positive, underlying evidence that man's activity has had no impact on sea and atmosphere temperatures, diminishing icecaps and glaciers, rising sea levels and so on.
Until such a conference is held and people such as Lawson, Lord Monckton, Christopher Booker, Samuel Brittan and Viscount Ridley – names that begin to give you some idea of the demographic – are required to provide the proof of their case, rather than feeding off that of their opponents, they should be treated with mild disdain.
Bishop Hill Feb 16, 2014 Climate: WG2 Environment Agency
Updated on Feb 16, 2014 by
Bishop Hill
Updated on Feb 16, 2014 by
Bishop Hill
Updated on Feb 16, 2014 by
Bishop Hill
Commenter "Corporal Jones' Ghost' left this comment on one of the flooding threads. It looks to be quite important.
I want to tell you what really has happened on the Somerset Levels.
I am remaining anonymous for good reason, I think you'll understand why.
You have to go back to 1939, when the MOD decided that they needed a new Munitions factory for HDX explosives, HDX uses a lot of water, all munitions manufacture does, but HDX is greedy.
The levels had too much water and so we built one on the Levels, ROF37 or ROF Bridgewater or ROF Woolavington, it's all the same place.
To ensure that there was enough water even on the waterlogged Levels, we built the Huntspill River, we then connected it to the River Brue to the North and the Kings Sedgemoor Drain via a pipe to the South, we also widened the River Sowy to get water to our factory.
Bishop Hill Feb 16, 2014 This is a guest post by Nic Lewis.
The recent Met Office report 'The Recent Storms and Floods in the UK' makes the striking claim that a further 11-16 cm of sea level rise along the English channel is likely by 2030, relative to 1990 and including vertical land movements, at least 2/3 of which will be due to the effects of climate change:
"Sea level along the English Channel has already risen by about 12cm during the 20th century; this is over and above the increases associated with sinking of the southern part of the UK due to isostatic adjustment from the last Ice Age. With the warming we are already committed to over the next few decades, a further overall 11-16cm of sea level rise is likely by 2030, relative to 1990, of which at least two-thirds will be due to the effects of climate change. We are very confident that sea level will continue to rise over coming decades as the planet continues to warm, and these numbers represent our current best estimate for the UK."
Bishop Hill Feb 15, 2014 Reader Paul K (a regular writer at Lucia's) left this fascinating comment on the thread about the England trade winds paper. As BH regulars know, I don't spend a lot of time on alternative theories of climate change, but I felt this was worthy of an airing.
As Nic correctly points out, from the observed data, the total global ocean heat flux shows a peak around 2001-2005 depending on which dataset one takes. TOA radiative measurements show a peak in net radiative incoming flux somewhere around 1997-2000, driven largely by SW changes in net albedo. Modern MSL data from satellite altimetry (or indeed from tide gauge data) shows a peak in its derivative function around 2001-2003, which should also be a proxy for net heat flux going into the ocean. (Using gravimetric data from GRACE, we can rule out the possibility that the peak in MSL derivative was caused by mass addition – it is a peak clearly driven by thermosteric expansion. There is a useful presentation here by Nerem.
Josh Feb 15, 2014 Climate: MetOffice Josh 
H/t Lord May on the Daily Politics Show who thought the weather being on steroids was an apt metaphor. Thanks also to Julia Slingo for the latest suitably vague scientivist phrase "consistent with".
Bishop Hill Feb 15, 2014 Energy: gas Environmentalists have struck a major blow against iGas's attempts to drill for shale gas at the Barton Moss site, with a judge making what appears to be a quite extraordinary ruling in their favour.
Prosecutors accepted at Manchester Magistrates Court that charges of obstructing a highway against the protesters should be dropped after Judge Khalid Qureshi ruled that Barton Moss Road is a public footpath.
Here are two pictures of Barton Moss Road, taken from just outside the iGas site, looking in opposite directions. In the middle is the map.
Bishop Hill Feb 15, 2014 Blogs Climate: WG3 I'm taking flak from Richard North (doesn't everyone?) for not linking to him and Booker enough. This is slightly odd because I cited North a couple of days ago and there is a link to his EU revelations in the "Seen elsewhere" column. Still, Booker's article in the Spectator today - a roundup of the floods debacle - gives me an opportunity to air their work further.
It's interesting to compare this rather level-headed take on the floods with Damian Carrington's melodramatic offering of a couple of days ago:
The stormy assault mounted by the extreme weather since December is most relentless the nation has ever recorded, with one extreme attack has smashing in after another. The opening salvo - a huge East coast storm surge - was the most severe since at least 1953; the Christmas deluge sank Surrey and the Levels; the January monsoon was the greatest since at least 1766; ferocious, incessant winds topping 100mph are set to blow away decades-old records.
The problem is that the dull truth - bureaucracy and environmentalism - is just not as good a sales pitch as "OMG we're destroying the planet". The dull truth may well get through eventually, but it will be an uphill struggle against the massed forces of the disreputable.
Bishop Hill Feb 14, 2014 Greens The Greens have decided to enliven things by calling for a purge of heretics from within the government machine:
The Green Party of England and Wales has called for a purge of government advisors and ministers who do not share its views on climate change.
Any senior advisor refusing to accept "the scientific consensus on climate change" should be sacked, it said.
Party leader Natalie Bennett said the rule must apply to all senior advisors, including those with no responsibility for environmental issues.
It's rather like the Socialist Workers Party isn't it? Wannabe Lenins and teen revolutionaries who never quite grew up. Sad really.
Bishop Hill Feb 14, 2014 Climate: Oceans Environmentalists have been getting very excited by a paper by England et al. which claims to have unearthed the reasons for the pause. Anthony Watts covered it a few days ago.
The paper is published in Nature Climate Change:
Despite ongoing increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, the Earth’s global average surface air temperature has remained more or less steady since 2001. A variety of mechanisms have been proposed to account for this slowdown in surface warming. A key component of the global hiatus that has been identified is cool eastern Pacific sea surface temperature, but it is unclear how the ocean has remained relatively cool there in spite of ongoing increases in radiative forcing. Here we show that a pronounced strengthening in Pacific trade winds over the past two decades—unprecedented in observations/reanalysis data and not captured by climate models—is sufficient to account for the cooling of the tropical Pacific and a substantial slowdown in surface warming through increased subsurface ocean heat uptake. The extra uptake has come about through increased subduction in the Pacific shallow overturning cells, enhancing heat convergence in the equatorial thermocline. At the same time, the accelerated trade winds have increased equatorial upwelling in the central and eastern Pacific, lowering sea surface temperature there, which drives further cooling in other regions. The net effect of these anomalous winds is a cooling in the 2012 global average surface air temperature of 0.1–0.2 °C, which can account for much of the hiatus in surface warming observed since 2001. This hiatus could persist for much of the present decade if the trade wind trends continue, however rapid warming is expected to resume once the anomalous wind trends abate.
Bishop Hill Feb 14, 2014 Climate: WG2 Paul Homewood has done a fascinating review of the precipitation data. Examining both the data for the South West and for the station nearest to the Levels, he has found that while it has been very wet down there the situation is far from unprecedented.
At the local station of Yeovilton, about 20 miles south, Met Office figures show that rainfall in November was 23% lower than normal. Given this, and the dry summer, river levels should have pretty low as December started....
At Yeovilton, in December, rainfall was 43mm above normal. Although, as I say, January data is not yet available, rainfall maps don’t suggest that Somerset has been wetter than the rest of the region and indicate between 150mm and 200mm, against a normal of 67mm.
This would imply that December and January’s rainfall combined was probably about 120mm and 170mm above normal.
Bishop Hill Feb 14, 2014 Climate: WG2 EU While the Guardian is in something of an ambulance-chasing frenzy, devoting its front page to a hysterical outburst from Lord Stern, in the Telegraph Fraser Nelson has a more thoughtful take on the floods.
No one can be blamed for the rainfall, but the extent of the floods has been linked to human error – and deeply flawed ideology. Some years ago, the Environment Agency took the disastrous decision to stop the routine dredging of the main Somerset rivers, as part of an overall idea that a little more flooding might be a good thing. Now, voters may have some opinions about the agency’s decision to put wildlife before people and property – but no one can be fired. It is a massive quango, outside the direct control of the elected government.
He's right about the problem of quangos, but I think that Fraser's preferred solution - bringing the EA back within the Whitehall machine - is inadequate. Decision making by environmentalists in a Whitehall department is going to be as little responsive to the needs of the people of Somerset as decision making by environmentalists in a Whitehall quango. And at the end of the day, neither will be able to make much impact because decision making in London is actually "decision making" in London. The policies are set - or effectively set - in Brussels.
Josh Feb 13, 2014 Climate: MetOffice Environment Agency Josh 
