Storm Desmond brought out the scaremongers and ‘storm chasers’ who want to blame it on man-made causes….the rainfall was said to be the heaviest ever recorded…and of course temperatures generally said to be record breaking.
However things ain’t what they seem, it depends on which statistic you look at.
The highest temperature in the UK was in 2003 and if you look at record temperatures by month they are spread right throughout the last century and the highest wind speeds were in the 1980’s to 1990’s.
And what of that record rainfall?
Highest 24-hour rainfall totals for a rainfall day (0900-0900 GMT)
Country Rainfall (mm) Date Location England 279 18 July 1955 Martinstown (Dorset) Scotland 238 17 January 1974 Sloy Main Adit (Argyll & Bute) Wales 211 11 November 1929 Lluest Wen Reservoir (Mid Glamorgan) Northern Ireland 159 31 October 1968 Tollymore Forest (County Down) The highest 24-hour total for any 24-hour period is 341.4 mm from 1800 GMT on 4th to 1800 GMT on 5th December 2015 at Honister Pass (Cumbria).
That record rainfall of 341.4mm (on a gauge only active since 1970) was not in the offical 24 hour period of 0900 to 0900….just how do they measure it? Surely they must make a continuous measurement of rainfall every hour, record it and then they are able to assess any 24 hour period. How long have they been able to do that work which seems very labour intensive if done manually?…which suggests it is a modern innovation and such records don’t exist for earlier periods….maybe even as late as the 50’s.
If such records could not be kept in previous eras how can the Met. Office claim such a record when it is just as likely that any random 24 hour period in a previous era, if recorded, could have shown similar rain levels?
The Met. Office itself says a record is only a record if standardised…
Weather extremes
The tables show the national weather records. To ensure consistency, these weather records are only given for stations with standard instruments and exposure. Although some records have been broken by non-standard stations, these are not accepted as official records for this reason.
You have to suspect similar rainfall in previous periods especially as the 1800’s had periods of very heavy rain….one random 10 year period being the wettest on record to coin a phrase.
The wettest year on record…1872….2012 two places behind.
The driest year on record….1788…2003 is ranked only 25th driest.
Record Breakers
I used to implicitly trust Roy Castle and the McWhirter twins when they were at the BBC
When I’m told that Usain Bolt has run 100 metres in under 9.6 seconds, and that’s the fastest a man has ever run, I tend to accept it as fact. We can’t know – there may have been some unrecorded pre-Columbian Inca chap who was pretty nifty. They never invented the wheel so there was an incentive to run fast – plus he would have had the advantage of altitude. However, given his physique and modern advances in sports science (hopefully within the rules) Bolt, I think, can reasonably call himself the fastest man ever.
But, oh deary me, when Carol Kirkwood on behalf of the Met Office and the BBC this morning tells me that some barely pronouncable Scottish location of which only Robbie Burns will ever have heard has just witnessed the warmest over-night temperature in December (or some such) I’m frankly not much impressed. In fact I’m inclined to suggest they give their thermomer argood shake and re-check their record books.
It’s all too off pat. Too agenda-driven. Their credibility is blown.
I have already stated on this forum that the suggested record rainfall at Honiston might not have been a record at all. The vehicle used to collect the rainfall was not an official Met Office gauge but one bought by the Environment Agency and from the photo’s taken of the recording station, looks like a 10″ Tipping Bucket type. It is known that the tipping bucket type has issues with collecting correct rainfall amounts, both under recording and over recording. NASA have stated that this type of collecting device, tipping bucket, has to have extreme quality controls to record correct data, so much so, that even a wind screen should be used as gusts of wind can cause premature tipping of the buckets which would indicate more collection of water that what had actually happened. The siting of these tipping bucket gauges is paramount for accurate data recording. The photo I have seen of the one in Honiston did not meet any of the Met Offices own standards. Unfortunately, once the rain fall tips the bucket the rain water is tipped out of the container back onto the ground, so no record of double checking on amounts collected can be made, unlike all other Met Office recording devices. If the tipping bucket gauge was faulty, no-one would know for quite simply, a strong gust of wind down the collecting funnel can tip a bucket and thus record an overvalued rainfall amount. It has been stated in scientific papers that a 15% over or under recording can take place. Is it no wonder a record was made in the teeth of 60/70 mph winds coupled with rain. Interesting to note that these “records” of rainfall are being made not with the Standard Met Office equipment (recognised by the World Met Organisation) but with the unrecognised Environment Agency tipping bucket gauges. The work force who place these gauges out into the environment, despite I’m sure of “best practice” are not meteorologists and it is not in their remit to be so.
TOB,
You seem to know your stuff! Unlike some ‘scientists’, enviro’mentalists’ & politicians.
You would think that as AGW and its effect on weather and, thus, our lives was so important – as these ‘scientists’ & campaigners claimed – to have the UK (and EU) Tax System fundamentally changed for it, that they would want to use the best possible measuring devices and measure consistently from a base point. That, after all, is good science – real science.
Brilliant OB. So all the billions spent on so called climate change research and our advanced consensus of scientists and this device is what they use to measure rainfall. Don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
And concerning the “record” over night temperatures or for that matter any other record of temperature be it a high record or a low record, today, as I have already said on this forum, every man and his dog now have weather reporting station in their garden and many of these are now sending electronic reports through their computer to data collecting agencies such as the Met Office. The Met Office run their own collecting but also link into private reporting through their WOW scheme. Schools, colleges, work place and private stations send data on a regular basis (every 15 minutes) to the Met Office computer which then collates the data. With so many more reporting stations is it no wonder that more “records” are being broken? Before all these home made station reports we had to rely upon the Ministry of Defence to supply us with their data, most coming from military airports. It is a no brainer to realise that there are going to be more records made when you have 1,500 more recording stations across the U.K. than you did 10 years ago. The same applies across the Globe.
http://www.wunderground.com/
http://wow.metoffice.gov.uk/
Not only that, but as the number of weather reports rises by orders of magnitude, it is inevitable that quality controls at source (station siting issues, recording anomalies, basic equipment quality, calibration practices) will fail to keep pace. The direct and specific consequence of this is that it is the variability of data that will rise. Records will appear to be broken with a relentless rise which is directly caused by crowd-sourcing. Even using Environment Agency recordings is, as you have noted further above, fatally compromised by the methodology, equipment, training, and frankly the purposes of those recordings.
I suspect that the art of science ‘popularisation’ has had a part to play in this descent into imitation science. It is a little like saying ‘anyone can write poetry’, or ‘anyone can create art’ [out of a dirty old unmade bed, perhaps], without having any grasp of the basic rigors involved – in observation, measurement, calculation, hypothesising, and the application of common-sense. The recent programmes celebrating the centenary of the General theory of relativity, for example.. (I knew there was something in all this rambling about the BBC!)
Anyone with even a smattering of history (which, apparently, excludes most so-called ‘climate experts’) would know that this island has experienced some pretty impressive weather over the centuries, not least the Great Storm of 1703.
No doubt caused by ‘global warming’, this November storm saw thousands of acres of the West Country under water, with hundreds of people drowned and incalculable numbers of livestock destroyed. In London, thousands of chimney stacks were demolished, an admiral in the Royal Navy suffered the humiliation of having his ship blown, uncontrollably, from Harwich to Gothenburg, thousands of trees were uprooted in the New Forest and well over 1,000 seamen were lost in one night as hundreds of ships were destroyed. It was one of the Royal Navy’s greatest ever single losses. In all (estimates vary) from a tiny population by today’s standards, the Storm claimed as many as 15,000 lives.
In earlier centuries, many other violent storms have been recorded, in one of which, an entire river was diverted in its course in the space of a single night. There are many other examples or such ‘extremes’
What we didn’t have was a hysterical media class occupied by ignorant media studies types. waiting to flap their hands on TV the following morning while reciting the modern day equivalent off ‘it was God’s way of punishing us for our sins’, though the pamphlet writers of the time had a good try.
There’s no wonder that the most sceptical of all the scientists I have run into are geologists, whose discipline treats centuries as seconds and who have a greater knowledge than any of what ‘climate change’ has meant in the distant past! Historians are also quite high on the list of eyebrow raisers as they, too, have a perspective that stretches further back than 1970.
Indeed, GC, did not a spot of, no doubt AGW induced, bad weather help to save us – after the main battle itself – from The Armada?
Rainfall? Usain Bolt?
What do we know?
We know that some “athletics” world records, especially women’s records, are thiry ish years old.
We know that all of these records were set by “women” from the former Warsaw Pact.
We know that some of these “women” were men or at least men-ish.
We know that many of these record setting organisms fell on hypodermic needles with some regularity.
(Remember the Saudi who “fell” on a young girl recently?).
We know that the Marxists falsified every statistic they created.
We know, in fact we, that is the public, have known for decades that major sporting bodies have been as bent as Julian Clary.
We know that this information was available to our “leaders”, the “elite” or whatever name you give to that bunch of treasonous fertiliser, not yet in the ground (where decomposition could do some good), even earlier.
We know that, the proverbial blind eye was turned, the same blind eye which overlooked millions of paedophile
Muslim rapes, to this corruption, by the brown envelope takers.
We know that this corruption extends to the EU, the UN and every other “international” organisation.
We know that this so-called “elite” are not going to change.
We know that the so-called laws created by this “elite” have no moral or legal force.
We know that we need to create our own, retroactive laws, now.
We know that the “elite” need to be the first group to feel the force of our new laws.
We know that the surface of Downing Street needs to be thoroughly cleansed, in the HaemoAugean manner.
How temperatures are measured and how the data is then “adjusted” is highly problematic. According to a new report (published yesterday), “The majority of weather stations used by NOAA to detect climate change temperature signal have been compromised by encroachment of artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts”.
The vast majority of thermometers are in towns and cities often very close to roads, buildings, airports, traffic etc. All this artificially skews the measurements and makes global temperatures appear up to 30% hotter than they really are.
And it’s not just in the US. There are many examples here in UK of poorly sited weather stations like this one at the
Radcliffe Observatory in Oxford which is 20 feet from a generator and near a wall.
More detail here; http://goo.gl/dMGNBX
Earlier this year they proclaimed ” the warmest ever temperature recorded ” .This was found to be for 4 minutes by a weather station near a runway at heathrow just after 2 jumbo jets had taken off .
But nearly all of the weather hype is done for political reasons .
This year , just like last year , NASA /NOAA said that it is going to be the warmest year on record .
Although the 2 other main records UAH & RSS , [ which use actual data ] , said neither was the warmest . Each year just before the climate conference the NASA produced their figures claiming ” warmest ever”.
Then last year , after the climate conference NASA admitted it was very unlikely that 2014 was the warmest .
So bearing in mind that NASA/ NOAA are under investigation by the American Senate for falsifying their weather records , how long before they admit that this year was not the warmest again .
Not that that will stop the AGW nutters , as some of them are still saying that 2014 was the warmest on record .
That’s not a generator, it’s a paraffin space heater! Something like this monster !
http://www.hireheating.co.uk/products/indirect-gas-paraffin-diesel-heater-hire/h15-indirect-diesel-heater.html
Almost certainly outputs more heat than a generator would too !
Studying statistics over such a short period of time is almost useless. 15 years? 50 years? 200 years? For any meaningful numbers we need to look back over a period of 10,000 years, at least. The climate is always changing one way or the other – warming and cooling.
The reason scientists are interested in stats dating back only 2 or 3 hundred years is to see if climate change has accelerated since the beginning of the industrial revolution, for obvious reasons.
I’m quite sure some people are using some statistics to further their argument that climate change is down to human causes, but also that some people are interpreting some statistics as evidence that the climate isn’t changing at all. In that respect both parties are using statistics in misleading ways irrespective of whether they are right or wrong.
Making assumptions by looking at year-by-year record-breaking rainfall, wind speeds, temperatures, and so forth, is a complete red herring because these figures do not equate to the overall average. You will notice that the Met Office statistics are split by country – England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland. Notice the years in the ‘Rainfall’ table between countries;
England 279 18 July 1955
Scotland 238 17 January 1974
Wales 211 11 November 1929
Northern Ireland 159 31 October 1968
By looking at the years, you’d think these countries were all thousands of miles apart! But they’re not. They are all next door to each other, so the stats are meaningless when it come to recording and forecasting changes in climate. For that we need to look at historical average yearly rainfall. But that still wouldn’t give us any real clues.
It would be more helpful to look at average temperatures, which, according to the Met Office, have increased since 1961 – http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/climate
Of course, this is still not conclusive evidence, but only paying attention to the statistics that agree with our assumptions or opinions, and ignoring all the facts and figures that put our beliefs into doubt, is self-delusional.
The Today Programme
It’s so warm, there’s only one thing for it. Christmas, Aussie style. Here’s how you BBQ your bird.
More on the weather here: http://bbc.in/1Obyvcm
What next, ISIS style?
Scorchio.
And so it continues…
BBC News
Vladimir Putin had described Donald J. Trump as the “absolute leader in the presidential race”.
Donald Trump ‘honoured’ by Vladimir Putin’s compliments
BBC.IN
Looking at the comments, this so far has worked out really well for:
a) Putin
b) Trump
Not sure this is as intended.
Maybe the BBC should set up a Clarke County office too?
ps: Not being an IT whiz, most posts on FB seem to be signed off BBC.IN. What does that mean? They can’t be outsourcing to India, surely?
Putin’s endorsement of Trump is a tricky one for the BBC to spin. My guess is that they will just ignore it .
What relevance is “The highest temperature in the UK was in 2003” ?
The highest December temperature was 18.3C, set on December 2 in 1948 in Highland, Scotland, decades before ‘global warming’ was even thought about !
It is the fourth mildest start to December, but the figures only go back to 1960! 1979, 2000 and 2006 were marginally milder.
Why did they call this destructive weather event Desmond? Everybody knows that the name Desmond is very popular with black people. I can think of several black Desmonds (Tutu, Dekker, and one table tennis player from the 70s, forgot his second name). The only white person called Desmond is Desmond Lynam. Are they saying that black people are more destructive than white people? Why don’t they name nice weather events after black people as well?
It’s a disgrace!
Yesterday the weather was quite nice, for a mid December day. I vote we call it Nice Day Mandela.
It was more likely a sideswipe at the owner of the Daily Express.