Mar 25, 2012 at 10:23 AM | Richard Betts

and it's true that you can take the numbers and put them in a ranked order, even if that doesn't particularly mean very much.

However, on 3 April 2012, Bob Ward tweeted:

Met Office: last month was third warmest in UK since records began in 1910: [url]

What the gentleman forgot to mention in his tweet is that, from that dataset, January 2012 was 10th warmest since 1910, February 2012 was 17th warmest since 1910 and the "winter" was 16th warmest since 1910. I am sure a gentleman as clever as Bob could have given the full story within 140 characters, but that would not have excited his followers, would it?

As we can see from Bob's pathetic tweet, ranking of the numbers can lead not only to "not meaning very much" but also to encourage cherry-picking to generate alarmist tweeting.

If as you say, ranking the numbers "doesn't particularly mean very much" why does the Met Office bother to produce and publish that data set?

Unless of course, it is part of Met Office policy to give warmists some stuff (albeit meaningless) that they can use to back up their alarmist agenda?

Moreover, as far as I can see, there is no caveat on that Met Office page about the "uncertainties" or even a warning that "these rankings do not particularly mean very much".

If you have the time, perhaps you could could have a word with the author of the data set and ask him to, er, mention, in big letters, that there are many uncertainties and that the rankings do not mean very much.

Thank you.

The Verified Emissions Data (CED) released by European authorities showed a 2.4 per cent drop in emissions in 2011, nearly twice the fall expected by analysts. A variety of explanations was given, including unusually warm weather and the economic downturn, but what surprised some analysts was the 3.1 per cent fall in emissions from the power sector when a 1.6 per cent increase had been anticipated, particularly after the closure of nuclear power stations in Germany.

In fact, German emissions fell 1 per cent overall, and emissions from its power sector were down 1.9 per cent. Fossil fuel generation in France slumped 11 per cent. Analysts said because France had completed only 25 per cent of its data, the fall could be greater.

Quite a good answer to your question Greensand! Perhaps the only one we will obtain.

Apr 20, 2012 at 1:05 AM | Green Sand
Apr 20, 2012 at 1:23 AM | Lord Beaverbrook

Thank you for your interest.

Having created the post, I began to wonder about the word "plonker".

Having seen some of the definitions after Googling, I decided that it could be seen as a very naughty word indeed and I requested that the comment be removed.

However, I just wish that people who do not have the first idea about thermal power stations would just mind their own business.

I read somewhere that there was a questionaire in the USA about household electricity supply and where it came from, and a large majority expressed the view that it came out of the wall.

It seems to me that this is a widely held view.

The trouble is that when you get to a "forecast" which is updated 4 times a day, the amount of actual fore in the cast is minimal.

A surprising amount of so called weather forecasts are in fact "nowcasts", which information is not actually useful in most cases.

This leads on to the issue of the forecasts being the test for the climate model which supposedly verifies them - but which forecast? 24 hr, 48 hr, further out? As they rarely agree to any realistic degree, it can't be all of them.

I regularly listen to the inshore waters forecast in the summer and it is practically useless for planning in western Scottish waters - the 48 hr forecast almost never matches the 24 hr one 24 hours later. The actual predictions are so vague anyway that it's remarkable that they can still be wrong. "Winds force 4 - 7" isn't any use, and as they claim accuracy if the outcome is within +/- 1 BF, it could be anything from 3 (virtually nothing) to 8 (severe storm) and UKMO would claim "Accurate forecast".

Just for reference if anybody needs them.

GS

Like it, just remember I may add fresh posts to the page but you will only need to scroll through to find what you need.

Richard

Is this why there was obvious discrepencies between modeled and observable temperatures?

The global-mean cooling in the middle stratosphere, around 25–45 km in altitude, is nearly twice as large in the NOAA data set as it is in the Met Office data set (see the figure) The differences between the NOAA and Met Office global-mean time series do not occur in a single discrete period of time, but begin around 1985 to increase until the end of the record. According to the Nature article: “The differences between the NOAA and Met Office global-mean time series shown in Fig. 1 are so large they call into question our fundamental understanding of observed temperature trends in the middle and upper stratosphere.”
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