Annual rainfall (mm) England and Wales 1766-2012
The BBC has a reputation for being fairly untrustworthy in its climate reporting, guided as it is by the clever Roger Harrabin who admitted that he had been campaigning for climate change for over twenty years on the BBC…
‘I have spent much of the last two decades of my journalistic life warning about the potential dangers of climate change.’
It does its reputation no good with yet more dubious reporting such as this……
‘More hot summers’ for parts of UK
Scorching summers such as the one in 2003 look set to become more common in England and Wales, a study suggests.
And devastating rains such as in Britain’s worst winter in 2013-14 may be less likely in the decades ahead.
Work by the Met Office has calculated the odds of particular weather scenarios striking in future years.
The computer simulations-based study, in journal Nature Climate Change, finds that milder winters and drier summers will also become more likely.
Of course the Met. Office and Co famously predicted we would never see snow again and were not so long ago proposing that we were to be victims of extreme rainfall...apparently not anymore…but here’s the future we seem to have dodged…..
Extreme rainfall in UK ‘increasing’
The frequency of extreme rainfall in the UK may be increasing, according to analysis by the Met Office.
Risk from extreme weather set to rise
Climate change and population growth will hugely increase the risk to people from extreme weather, a report says.
The Royal Society warns that the risk of heatwaves to an ageing population will rise about ten-fold by 2090 if greenhouse gases continue to rise.
They estimate the risk to individuals from floods will rise more than four-fold and the drought risk will treble.
Why, oh why, does it keep raining?
Dr Peter Stott, a leading climate scientist at the UK Met Office, says that since the 1970s the amount of moisture in the atmosphere over the oceans has risen by 4%, a potentially important factor.
That does not sound like much but it does mean that extreme rain storms may bring more rain than before – with more moisture in the air, what goes up must come down, and the odds are worse.
Whatever happened to all that promised rain which we are now not going to be getting?
Then we have the BBC trying to defend the Met Office’s reputaion…..
‘Apparent contradiction’
A parallel goal is to make clear that a trend to warmer temperatures does not mean that extremes of cold or rainfall are made impossible – instead, weather that seems to buck the prevailing remains on the cards, if less likely as the century progresses.
The 2009 study had suggested that the country faced a future of milder, wetter winters and hotter, drier summers – and the Met Office faced fierce criticism when shortly afterwards Britain was suddenly plunged into the bitterly cold winter of 2009-10.
Met Office scientists acknowledge that there was confusion in the public mind about the “apparent contradiction” of hearing a 30-year projection for milder winters only to endure the reality of ice and snow.
A co-author of the report, David Sexton, said that basing the projections on 30-year averages, as in the UKCP09 study, risked giving the impression to people that those weather conditions would apply to every single year.
“When I talk to people, they remember the hot summer of 2003 or the wet winter of 2013-14 and they know they were extreme seasons – people can make tangible links to those impacts, they mean something to them personally, and the 30-year averages don’t make sense to people in the same way.”
Blogger ‘Autonomous Mind’ thinks there is no defence for the Met. Office in regard to the accuracy of its forecasts….
BBC spins that Met Office got winter right, just kept it secret from public
This is a potentially huge story with a nasty smell of conspiracy about it. There appears to be a concerted effort to whitewash serious failings at the Met Office, with the assistance of a senior climate change propagandist at the BBC who is fully bought in to the Met Office’s warmist agenda.
The Telegraph reports today that: ‘The Met Office knew that Britain was facing an early and exceptionally cold winter but failed to warn the public, hampering preparations for some of the coldest weather on record.’ The article goes on to say:
In October the forecaster privately warned the Government – with whom it has a contract – that Britain was likely to face an extremely cold winter.
It kept the prediction secret, however, after facing severe criticism over the accuracy of its long-term forecasts.
October? That is the same month that this temperature probability map was published – for public consumption:
There is absolutely no logical or rational basis for the Met Office publishing the probability map above, yet ‘secretly’ telling the government a completely different story. The Met Office not only published the map, it had meterologists speaking publicly about the map and setting an expectation of a very high probability of warmer than average winter.
The BBC itself noted way back in 2010 the Met. Office’s two-fold approach…and that it thinks the Press, Politicians and the Public are too unintelligent to understand their forecasts…
The Met Office and its seasonal problems
An internal executive paper noted the impact as follows:
“Unfortunately, less ‘intelligent’ (and potentially hostile) sections of the press, competitors and politicos have been able to maintain a sustained attack on the Met Office … The opprobrium is leaking across to areas where we have much higher skill such as in short range forecasting and climate change – our brand is coming under pressure and there is some evidence we are losing the respect of the public.”
This report argued that one downside of the seasonal forecasts was that they remained on the website and could easily be later compared to reality. It said:
“One of the weaknesses of the presentation of seasonal forecasts is that they were issued with much media involvement and then remain, unchanged, on our website for extended lengths of time – making us a hostage to fortune if the public perception is that the forecast is wrong for a long time before it is updated.”
In contrast it noted that the “medium range forecast (out to 15 days ahead) is updated daily on the website which means that no single forecast is ever seen as ‘wrong’ because long before the weather happens, the forecast has been updated many times.”
As another document put it, “‘Intelligent’ customers (such as the Cabinet Office) find probabilistic forecasts helpful in planning their resource deployment.”
A communications plan in February 2010 instructed staff that “interested customers” should be told the three-month outlook will be available on the research pages of the website but that “this message should not be used with our mainstream audiences”.
Met Office staff clearly feel the general British public find it difficult to cope with probabilistic statements.
“It is considered that the task of educating the UK public in interpreting probabilistic information will be neither a short-term, nor simple task.” It compares this unfavourably with the apparently greater ability of the US public to grasp such material.
Fascinatingly Kafkaesque….keep updating your forecast right up until the weather happens, whilst removing all previous forecasts, and you will never be wrong! They really do think people are stupid. The Met. Office doesn’t know whether to nobble the forecast by fixing what the Public can see or cobble together something that can be interpreted several different ways if necessary to cover their blushes when it all goes pear shaped later on.
Or perhaps a combination of the two as it tells government one thing and the Public another…..
Helen Chivers, Met Office forecaster, insisted the temperature map takes into account the influence of climate factors such as El Nino and La Nina – five-yearly climatic patterns that affect the weather – but admits this is only a “start point” for a seasonal forecast. She said: “The map shows probabilities of temperatures in months ahead compared to average temperatures over a 30-year period.
You kind of suspect the Met Office couldn’t predict last week’s weather never mind that over 30 years….or that in 100 years time as it supplies for the climate alarmist industry….speaking of which…from Christopher Booker…
How Arctic ice has made fools of all those poor warmists
Two events last week brought yet further twists to one of the longest-running farces of our modern world. One was the revelation by the European Space Agency that in 2013 and 2014, after years when the volume of Arctic ice had been diminishing, it increased again by as much as 33 per cent. The other was that Canadian scientists studying the effect of climate change on Arctic ice from an icebreaker had to suspend their research, when their vessel was called to the aid of other ships trapped in the thickest summer ice seen in Hudson Bay for 20 years.
In 2007, with the aid of scientists such as Wieslaw Maslowski and Peter Wadhams, the BBC and others were telling us that the Arctic would be totally “ice free by 2013” (the Independent even cleared its front page to announce that the ice could all have disappeared within weeks).
By 2011, the BBC’s science editor Richard Black was telling us that the ice would “probably be gone within this decade”. In 2012, his colleague Roger Harrabin was reporting that the sea ice was now melting so fast that more had vanished that summer than “at any time since satellite records began”.
The greatest scare story of all simply isn’t turning out as their computer models predicted. And no one has been more dangerously taken in by this silly scare story than the warmists themselves.
How we miss the Black propaganda, still we’ve always got the persistent Roger Harrabin…let’s hope he spent that £15,000 from the climate change propagandists at the Tyndall Centre wisely.
Just why did the pro climate change Tyndall Centre fund Harrabin et al?…..
Mike Hulme: Did anyone hear Stott vs. Houghton on Today, radio 4 this morning? Woeful stuff really. This is one reason why Tyndall is sponsoring the Cambridge Media/Environment Programme to starve this type of reporting at source
The CMEP being Harrabin’s pet project.
In my experience, Climate Change supporters tend to be Left or very Left of centre.
Those who oppose Climate Change, tend to be Right of centre.
Is my view shared?
If so, we have a very complex and politically loaded belief system to overcome.
Facts won’t matter.
Ever tried to debate with a religious zealot?
..
‘Climate change’ supporters are very left of centre because that’s what it is – an extreme eco-socialist agenda pushing for ‘social justice’ aka re-distributing the ‘wealth’ (debt doesn’t seem to count) from Western industrialised nations, and ‘sustainability’ aka anti-capitalism i.e. ban fossil fuels in the West (it never seems to apply to China and India) thus rendering capitalist economies useless.
There are a few useful quotes here:
http://www.c3headlines.com/global-warming-quotes-climate-change-quotes.html
e.g.
Quote by Al Gore, former U.S. vice president, and large CO2 producer: “Humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with our planet. Unless we quickly and profoundly change the course of our civilization, we face an immediate and grave danger of destroying the worldwide ecological system that sustains life as we know it.”
Quote from the UN’s Own “Agenda 21”: “Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level.”
Quote by Ottmar Edenhoffer, high level UN-IPCC official: “We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy…Basically it’s a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization…One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore.”
Quote by Naomi Klein, anti-capitalism, pro-hysteria advocate of global warming: “So the need for another economic model is urgent, and if the climate justice movement can show that responding to climate change is the best chance for a more just economic system…”
Quote by Club of Rome: “In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill….All these dangers are caused by human intervention….and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself….believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this common enemy is “a real one or….one invented for the purpose.”
The best account of how this far left global agenda came about, and who is behind it, is James Delingpole’s book ‘Watermelons’ (green on the outside, red on the inside).
“‘Climate change’ supporters are very left of centre because that’s what it is – an extreme eco-socialist agenda pushing for ‘social justice’ aka re-distributing the ‘wealth’ ”
Problem is, johnny, that the redistribution under Major/Lamont/Clarke and Blair/Brown has been from the UK low-paid & poor to the UK’s high earners & wealthy. As for redistribution from First or Developed World to Third or Undeveloped World, well that has not really happened at all. Indeed, it could be argued that Global Warming (a scientific & measurable thing) has been and is being used to reinforce Developed World hegemony.
Assuming global warming is harmful and that it is primarily or only caused by carbon emissions (several big doubts there!), the logical thing to do was to create tradeable individual carbon allowances that would have transfered income & wealth from high earner & wealthy to the poor and low earner.
Had the Lefties been really concerned about 1. the planet, and 2. the poor, that should, I would have thought, have been an overwhelming priority for our Government that often says that it “is leading the world”.
But no.
Rather gave the game away, didn’t it. ‘By their deeds shall you know them’.
‘…..it could be argued that Global Warming (a scientific & measurable thing) has been and is being used to reinforce Developed World hegemony.’
We now have en energy supply margin of less than 2%, down from around 15% not very long ago. The government is paying private companies to provide back-up from diesel (yes, diesel) -powered generators at something like 6 times the standard unit cost of electricity produced from coal. In the next couple of years we will face domestic power cuts or businesses will be forced to go on short time.
The environmentalists have a grip of this country now. If Friends of the Earth and their ilk had been around at the time of the Industrial Revolution it would never have happened. Our only real hope for energy security over the next few decades is fracking, yet it is four years since the first exploratory well was drilled and there is no sign of it developing into a viable and thriving industry in the UK. All because of the myth of global warming.
It sounds like you haven’t woken up yet to the impact these eco-communist loons are having on your life, and all in the name of ‘climate change’.
Meanwhile the BBC continues to irresponsibly portray ‘renewables’ as a viable alternative, never challenging the claimed output of wind farms and the number of homes they will provide energy to, let alone ask the simple question ‘what happens when the wind isn’t blowing’.
Surreal times we live in.
“It sounds like you haven’t woken up yet to the impact these eco-communist loons are having on your life, and all in the name of ‘climate change’.”
Oh yes I have, johnny, because the alarm bells started ringing as soon as Tony Blair said in public ‘Climate Change’ instead of Global Warming for the first time. They damaged my life considerably, including my working life where clients some way away would say “We’d like to use you but the budget cannot handle your travel expenses. Would you be able to reduce them considerably?”
When you are being asked to work nearly for free, then you cannot escape the fact that things have gone badly wrong. To finish, I request you read the first paragraph of my post above a couple more times. The economic reality – ‘the impact these eco-communist loons are having’ – is all there. 😉
Is my view shared?
Yes. That is the consencus of a majority of peer reviewed right thinking individuals.
They feed all this data into a huge computer , that crunches the numbers. It will give out about 4 or 5 scenario`s , maybe more . The ones they don`t like ,because it does not fit their narrative ,are hidden, & only the answer`s they want to hear are revealed . That`s why, anything about Global Warming ,the BBC tells you ,we all know is complete bollox ,
They can’t even get tomorrow’s forecast right!
I live in West Wales and today’s forecast was for rain, from torrential to heavy showers, all day. We had some rain this morning (not much) and the river levels haven’t moved.
This is the current level for Capel Dewi (on the Tywi (Towy)) a few miles upstream of Carmarthen:-
http://apps.environment-agency.gov.uk/river-and-sea-levels/120758.aspx?stationId=4193
As you can see it is at it’s lowest.
Despite having (to my knowledge) one of the only three Kray Computers in the country (the other two are at HMRC and GCHQ) they still cannot forecast tomorrow’s weather. In computer speak this is known as G.I.G.O. (Garbage In Garbage Out) or the more commonly used C.I.C.O.
To use an oft reprised refrain “If they can’t get it right for 24hrs how can they forecast for 100yrs”. I won’t even mention the next 10-20 as we have had 18 years to prove them wrong.
Cannot speak for your part of the world (and weather can be amazingly local) but in my experience, in a corner of the south east, the forecasting accuracy by the Met direct has improved immensely over recent years.
I use this w/s: http://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/2653877 and have found that it is very accurate, to about 95% – 97% at a guess. It is often updated – can be hourly – during the day to adjust for changes as winds rise & fall, change direction, clouds run out of rain, etc..
Are you relying on broadcast reports, especially via Radio 4?
These are notoriously poor and Gwyneth Williams’ promised reforms have apparently been abandoned long ago. They do not cover many areas and are more like weather performances by the Met Office personnel rather than Continuity’s “news of the weather”. [For some strange reason, they usually also spend most of the time talking of areas of the UK with the lowest population density and, therefore, the least number affected by the forecast. BBC Pravda at work, perhaps?]
If you are at or near a coast, I’d also recommend the Shipping Forecast and, more importantly, the Inshore Forecast as a way of getting accurate weather information.
If you work for the Met Office (or the UEA) you have to behave as though you believe the lies or you’re out of a job. Every fact has to be twisted to fit the agreed script. At the same time they have to maintain a sense of self-worth by believing that they are honest scientists, with the result that they suffer from cognitive dissonance. They know that they are lying but have to keep telling themselves that they are not. They square the circle by persuading themselves that they are acting “for the greater good” as western society has to be saved from its own excesses. For the zealots it is about protecting GAIA from humanity.
As Dover Sentry has pointed out it’s a belief system and reason doesn’t come into it.
Yes Essexman it is a political thing. Those who browbeat us about Global Warming are on the left because of course the reason for it is the fault of capitalism & the greedy West. No wonder the BBC sign up to this, it is their world-view in a single issue.
The reason why Leftists appear to be the main supporters of the global warming fantasy is because, if it were true, dealing with it would mean the forced adoption of so many of the things the Left has always advocated. This is the genius of it and why it is so hard to overcome, even when its predictions have failed time and time again, thus failing the basic test of a scientific theory.
Vegetarianism, ‘organic’ farming, international and national redistribution of wealth, deindustrialisation and a return to a pastoral lifestyle, world government – there aren’t many of the Left’s sacred cows that AGW doesn’t facilitate.
We are always advised to ‘follow the money’ when we suspect a fraud. In this case, the biggest clue to the fraudulent nature of this artificial panic lies in the astonishing number of Left wing ideas it supports.
Of course, it is very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that today’s singular weather is a result of “Climate Change” or as some still put it, “Global Warming”. You only have to witness the salivating Left Wing media which includes the far left BBC, when, a thermometer somewhere records a record high temperature, even when a plethora of thermometers just a few hundred yards down the road records bog standard temperatures. It would never occur to them that maybe, just maybe, something was amiss, but no. Such is their undenying love affair with “Climate Change/Global Warming” even the blindingly obvious is somehow not blindingly obvious. But, with most of the July data in and using the Met Office’s own data and despite a finger of warmth from Africa at the beginning of July, as with June, July almost certainly will be a “cold” month, indeed approx’ 4 degrees cooler than average. 4 degrees is a lot in anyone’s “Global Warming” money and according to the “warmists” predictions, shouldn’t be happening. Oh dear. Well, bad news, it is and it is called “Global Cooling”. A change in the climate is taking place because of the reduced or non existent sun spot/radiation activity thus affecting our upper atmosphere and henceforth cloud distribution and cloud type. Historically during such periods of sunspot inactivity, a cold, dry summer is what we get. Guess what? And as far as the winter is concerned? Well, when was the last time the Thames froze? “Climate Change” but not as we know it Jim.
Length of Solar Cycle gives us the an even better correlation with Climate Change, than sun spot number. Between 1913 and 1996, only one of eight Solar Cycles was longer than the mean Solar Cycle length of 11.04 years, the last of these was the shortest Solar Cycle for more than 200 years. That’s what caused the Global Warming scare.
Back in the seventies the same ‘consensus’ of scientists was telling us we were heading for another ice age because all that nasty man-made CO2 was blocking out the sun. The theory coincided with a post-war cooling that had lasted approx 30 years.
Then when they realised global temperatures had started to rise again they did a very rapid u-turn and straight-facedly informed us CO2 was actually causing the earth to warm and we were all going to fry in hell. Like the gullible majority I believed it – that is, until I read Lord Lawson’s superb ‘An Appeal to Reason’ which summarised the findings of a forensic analysis of the main body of the IPCC report. Most of the claims made by the IPCC at the time were shown to be made with such low levels of confidence they were almost worthless. In contrast, however, the ‘Summary for Policymakers’ i.e. the political part of the report and the one that is presented to journalists, went for the full gung-ho warmist alarmism with all the uncertainties removed.
As more people cottoned on to this discrepancy and sceptics’ websites began to flourish the IPCC responded by upping its levels of confidence in the main body of the report, despite more and more real-world evidence showing the warming predicted by all their climate models to be wrong.
As soon as the alarmists realised that the lack of warming might go on indefinitely they slyly re-branded ‘global warming’ as ‘climate change’, and thenceforth any weather event could be laid at the door of those nasty man-made CO2 emissions. Crafty, eh? Here’s arch-warmist Kevin Trenberth from 2009 (11 years without warming at that point):
‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.’
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/22/kevin-trenberth-struggles-mightily-to-explain-the-lack-of-global-warming/
But we all know now that they can, don’t we? It’s all gone into the sea, or is it the fault of volcanoes, or maybe the sun might have something to do with it, or…….(make up your own and….take your time – after all, it only took ‘the world’s top climate scientists’ 11 years to come up with an answer!).
So we’re left with yet another of those inconvenient questions you will never hear asked by the BBC: ‘But you told us the science was settled!?’
Coal, carbon from “Tropical Rain Forests”. Great Britain stands on a sea of coal. Tropical Britain ? Climate change any one ?
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/ancient_earth/Coal_forest
I would love to know what the BBC’s carbon footprint is, in fact the whole T.V. and Film industry, populated as it is by so many left leaning types, I wonder how they can justify the carbon emissions generated by their industry. The hot air from the BAFTA’s alone could probably keep a small village going for Months.
My wife reminds me about the old chestnut from way back when, before you could routinely find out the sex of your baby before it was born:
There was an obstetrician who could predict the sex of his patients’ unborn babies with 100% accuracy. When the baby was born, if the mother said to him ‘You know, you were absolutely right – it is a boy – how on earth did you know?’, he would say, well, I can just tell, it must be all my years of experience.
If the mother said, ‘You were wrong you know – it’s a girl’, he would look in his notes and pull out the slip of paper on which he had written ‘girl’.
He was, of course, always right one way or another. Perhaps the Met Office saw the virtue of always being right, too.
‘Wet and warm? No, we said it would be cold and horrid – we did..’
The reason that the Met Office are guaranteed to always produce garbage is that the core formula in all Met Office computer models is in error. This is shown by the scientific paper “Falsification Of The Atmospheric CO2 Greenhouse Effects Within The Frame Of Physics, Gerhard Gerlich, 2009”
In Astronomy, retrospective computer runs are essential to prove any predictions based on Kepler’s Laws, which now include the predictions for a mini-ice-age. But as for the Met Office, Peter Lilly did bringing up this issue with some bemused idiot, but the Met Office only has certainty about the future, but do not seem to know how to check these ideas with the past.
Also, Moisture would always be expected to rise in a Global warming trend, as well as fall during a Global Cooling trend. And the Met Office only knew that Britain was facing an early and exceptionally cold winter because they must have bought a 40 day weather forcast from the brother of a Labour Party leadership contender.
Its quite obvious that the Met Office forecast is at least 100 miles and three hours out after 48 hours, 50 percent of the time. As well as totally unreliable after 7 days. Therefore, Intelligent members of the public would get their 40 day weather forecast from Weatheraction. Its also apparent that the Arctic is the most unreliable area of the world to judge current trends, in fact it can contradict a cooling trend for up to ten years due to increasing cloud cover trapping heat input. Heat input from somewhere else is more important for the Arctic, than anywhere else.
If only someone had chopped down The Magic Tree of Yamal before Michael Mann found it.