The accuracy of warmist climate predictions

The UK Met Office's three month weather outlook issued on 23 March ran thus (my emphasis):

'The forecast presented here is for April and the average of the April-May-June
period for the United Kingdom as a whole.

This forecast is based on information from observations, several numerical models and expert judgement.

SUMMARY - PRECIPITATION:
The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier than average conditions for April-May-June as a whole, and also slightly favours April being the driest of the 3 months.

With this forecast, the water resources situation in southern, eastern and central England is likely to deteriorate further during the April-May-June period.

The probability that UK precipitation for April-May-June will fall into the driest of our five categories is 20-25% whilst the probability that it will fall into the wettest of our five categories is 10-15% (the 1971-2000 climatological probability for each of these categories is 20%).'

So the experts at the Met Office predict a drier than normal April and we get the wettest April in a century? This is not a one-off, as I have reported before, the Met Office regularly mess-up their weather predictions. The odd thing is that the errors always seem to be towards backing up the warmist agenda, now why would that be?

Actually maybe the oddest thing is why anyone believes the met Office's predictions of impending Climate Change when they get so much else wrong.

The effects of Global Warming

Twice over the Christmas period I have heard expressed the view that Global Warming means weather extremes such as the severe cold snaps experienced in the UK over the last few years. It is incredible how the true believers will believe whatever the 'warmists' tell them is the truth. I however have a memory and the ability to research. I have posted before that:

'The Independent told us all in 2000, in an article by Charles Onians that ''snow is starting to disappear from our lives' and that 'Children just aren't going to know what snow is'. Really? How many days have been lost to 'unprecedented' smow-fall over the last three winters? Any children who don't know what snow is? Of course not, The Independent's article in 2000 just repeated the claims of the 'warmists' for whom a day is not complete if they cannot scare people about the results of global warming.'

But here is a link to a 1999 Science Daily article which explains that:

'The research, which appears in the June 3 issue of the British journal Nature, offers no predictions on what temperatures future winters will bring, but suggests a continuation of the current trend for three to four more decades.

If warming trends continue, said Drew Shindell, associate research scientist at Columbia's Center for Climate Systems Research and lead author of the report, northern regions of Europe and Asia and, to a lesser extent, North America, can expect winters that are both warmer and wetter, with increased rain and snow.'

'Winters that are both warmer and better' - really? I believe that this December will be the coldest for over a hundred years and the whole winter period my well follow suit. What will it tale for the 'warmists' to admit that they were wrong about Global Warming/Man Made Climate Change?

'So when is a forecast not a forecast? When the Met Office gets it wrong, it seems. '

Autonomous Mind has caught the Met Office out:

'Dave Britton, the Met Office’s Chief Press Officer, e-mailed the following statement to the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF):

'Following the entry on your blog regarding the Met Office please find the Met Office response below:

The Met Office has not issued a seasonal forecast to the public and categorically denies forecasting a ‘mild winter’ as suggested by Boris Johnson in his column in the Daily Telegraph.

Following public research, the Met Office no longer issues long-range forecasts for the general public; instead we provide a monthly outlook on our website, which have consistent and clearly sign-posted the very cold conditions.
(Continues on the GWPF website).'

This is all very interesting. Either the Met Office’s left hand doesn’t know what it’s right hand is doing, the Met Office has no idea what is being said by its employees, or the Met Office is playing semantics in a very disingenuous manner. Why? This bit of information issued by the Met Office in October…

'The latest data comes in the form of a December to February temperature map on the Met Office’s website.

The eastern half of England, Cornwall, Scotland and Northern Ireland is in for temperatures above the 3.7C (38.6F) average, more than 2C warmer than last winter.

The map also shows a 40 per cent to 60 per cent probability that western England and Wales will be warmer than 3.7C (38.6F), with a much smaller chance of average or below-average temperatures.'

'

Read the rest of the Autonomous Mind article and see if you agree that:

'So when is a forecast not a forecast? When the Met Office gets it wrong, it seems. Let’s see how they spin this. But for now the words ‘bang to rights’ spring to mind.'

What has more effect on the Earth's temperature: Man or the Sun? Something to get your teeth into on Christmas Day

The 'warmists' would have us believe that it is man who is to blame but somehow I think that 870,000 mile diameter luminous ball of plasma at the centre just 93 million miles away may just have a larger influence. It seems that I am not alone...

NASA write:

'What are the primary forcings of the Earth system?

The Sun is the primary forcing of Earth’s climate system. Sunlight warms our world. Sunlight drives atmospheric and oceanic circulation patterns. Sunlight powers the process of photosynthesis that plants need to grow. Sunlight causes convection which carries warmth and water vapor up into the sky where clouds form and bring rain. In short, the Sun drives almost every aspect of our world’s climate system and makes possible life as we know it.

Earth’s orbit around and orientation toward the Sun change over spans of many thousands of years. In turn, these changing “orbital mechanics” force climate to change because they change where and how much sunlight reaches Earth. Thus, changing Earth’s exposure to sunlight forces climate to change. According to scientists’ models of Earth’s orbit and orientation toward the Sun indicate that our world should be just beginning to enter a new period of cooling — perhaps the next ice age.

However, a new force for change has arisen: humans. After the industrial revolution, humans introduced increasing amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and changed the surface of the landscape to an extent great enough to influence climate on local and global scales. By driving up carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere (by about 30 percent), humans have increased its capacity to trap warmth near the surface.

Other important forcings of Earth’s climate system include such “variables” as clouds, airborne particulate matter, and surface brightness. Each of these varying features of Earth’s environment has the capacity to exceed the warming influence of greenhouse gases and cause our world to cool. For example, increased cloudiness would give more shade to the surface while reflecting more sunlight back to space. Increased airborne particles (or “aerosols”) would scatter and reflect more sunlight back to space, thereby cooling the surface. Major volcanic eruptions (such as that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1992) can inject so much aerosol into the atmosphere that, as it spreads around the globe, it reduces sunlight and cause Earth to cool. Likewise, increasing the surface area of highly reflective surface types, such as ice sheets, reflects greater amounts of sunlight back to space and causes Earth to cool.

Scientists are using NASA satellites to monitor all of the aforementioned forcings of Earth’s climate system to better understand how they are changing over time, and how any changes in them affect climate.'

Meanwhile Boris Johnson in The Telegraph sings the praises of a climatologist who has managed to predict the UK's weather rather more accurately than the Met Office and on a much smaller budget. His secret?

'He studies the Sun.

He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy. '

Piers Corbyn, for that is the scientist's name also

'believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.'

Boris is still a believer in the 'warmist' agenda but he does allow himself to wonder:

'The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun. Is it possible that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world? The Sun is incomparably vaster and more powerful than any work of man. We are forged from a few clods of solar dust. The Sun powers every plant and form of life, and one day the Sun will turn into a red giant and engulf us all. Then it will burn out. Then it will get very nippy indeed.'

Finally Climate Realists report some interesting and frankly scary analysis:

'“The big freeze of 2010 is part of a much broader climate change phenomenon,” he (author and climatologist Gavin Cooke) explains. Most alarmingly it appears to be following a similar pattern to the most recent seriously cold spell when the River Thames froze over in the 1700s.

The so-called Little Ice Age, which lasted about 70 years and was the coldest period in 1,500 years, was significant because it enabled astronomers to discover an unexpected connection between Earth’s climate and the action of the sun. “We get all our energy from the sun and it dictates our climate but the role of the sun is traditionally overlooked by meteorologists. The scary thing is that sunspot activity has a direct correlation to climate. When the sun is producing a lot of sunspots [cooler patches] – normally in a year there are 30,000 to 40,000 of these – the temperature on Earth is traditionally warmer.”

In 1645 there were no sunspots whatsoever, five years or so later the Little Ice Age began and lasted for seven decades.

“The scary thing is that NASA scientists discovered there were no sunspots in 2008,” says Cooke. “Now, as predicted, Northern Europe is once again entering a period of exceptionally cold winters.”

And 2010 is apparently just the beginning. According to Mike Lockwood, professor of space environment physics at the University of Reading, we can expect the cold weather to peak between 2025 to 2040. The problem for us is the impact that low solar activity has on the jet stream, the current of air that blasts across the Atlantic carrying all our warm weather with it.

“Britain lies just outside the Arctic Circle and on the same latitude as Labrador. If it wasn’t for the jet stream and to a lesser extent the gulf stream – the warming of ocean water – our winter weather would be similar to that the Eskimos experience every year,” says Cooke.

In simple terms sunspot activity keeps the jet stream going. Take them away and the warm air won’t reach us during the winter months. Instead freezing air from Siberia in the North rushes in to fill the vacuum. '

So there's a huge nuclear fusion reactor at the centre of our solar system that represents 99% of the mass in the solar system. It's gravity is so strong that we all revolve about it and it heats the solar system and beyond. How anyone could believe it has an influence on our climate is a mystery ...

Is this the pretext?

A while back I, and others, used to speculate that Gordon Brown would not hold a general election, 'postponing' because of some 'national emergency'. Am I alone in getting a tad suspicious that the seeming overreaction of completely closing UK airspace not because any volcanic ash has been observed above the UK but on the say so of Met Office who are relying on their always reliable computer simulations of weather systems. These are the same computer simulations that seem incapable of producing accurate three-day weather forecasts.

Are we being set-up for a postponed election? Before you scoff, remember that Tony Blair dry-ran this technique with the postponed council elections at the height of the foot-and-mouth epidemic, another disaster that was massively exaggerated and overreacted to by this Labour government.

The Met Office's new long range forecast

Deniersaurus claims to have had sight of the Met Office's newest long range forecast, here's a snippet:

"Long Range Forecast for the UK - Summer 2010

And it shall come to pass that in the land of the northern tribes the great warming will devastate all mankind and the beasts of the field alike.

Verily, as the satanic dioxide increases so shall increase the viscosity of the very water until it turns deepest blood red and all the fishes in the water shall perish and the creatures of the air and land that eat of them.

There shall follow a great storm the like of which has ne'er been seen upon the face of the earth and the young of the amphibians shall be lifted aloft in great winds and shall fall as a hellish rain upon thy lands.

Truly, as the lands become hotter the dominion of the insects shall increase until they become a great multitude and the torment of the lice shall be visited upon the people of the land and all shall suffer the unscratchable itch."

Do read the whole article; it's probably no less accurate than the real long range forecast.

Three reasons used to stop Freedom of Information requests of the Met Office, I wonder why?

The Mail reports how the Met Office have tried to avoid providing information resulting from a Freedom of Information request from David Holland, an electrical engineer familiar with advanced statistics who has written several papers questioning orthodox thinking on global warming.

"The Met Office’s first response to Mr Holland was a claim that Prof Mitchell’s records had been ‘deleted’ from its computers.

Later, officials admitted they did exist after all, but could not be disclosed because they were ‘personal’, and had nothing to do with the professor’s Met Office job.

Finally, they conceded that this too was misleading because Prof Mitchell had been paid by the Met Office for his IPCC work and had received Government expenses to travel to IPCC meetings.

The Met Office had even boasted of his role in a Press release when the report first came out.

But disclosure, they added, was still rejected on the grounds it would ‘inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank provision of views’.

It would also ‘prejudice Britain’s relationship with an international organisation’ and thus be contrary to UK interests.

In a written response justifying the refusal dated August 20, 2008, Mr Ainsworth – then MoD Minister of State – used exactly the same language."

If the first two reasons were not true then surely a penalty should be imposed.

Read the rest of The Mail article and ask yourself why the Met Office and the MOD are so keen to keep experts from looking over their data? I think we all know why, don't we?

Now the Met Office have been comprehensively discredited is it time to listen to Punxsutawney Phil?

The Pittsburgh Post reports that:

"Punxsutawney Phil, the internationally known weather prognosticating groundhog, saw his shadow this morning and predicted six more weeks of winter.

Thousands gathered on Gobbler's Knob in Jefferson County to await the groundhog's annual prediction. The Punxsutawney Groundhog Club said Phil has seen his shadow 98 times since 1887, hasn't seen it 15 times, and there are no records for nine years."

If it's good enough for Bill Murray in Groundhog Day then its good enough for me...

The Met Office's chief given a well-deserved grilling by Andrew Neil

This is one of the people who ask us to believe that they know that world temperatures are going to rise but can't make accurate long range forecasts. Do you find his performance convincing?

Those 'experts' at the Met Office

I note that in February those climate change experts at the Met Office reported that despite the 2008/09 winter being "expected to be the coldest UK winter since 1995/96, according to provisional Met Office figures... the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue, with snow and frost becoming less of a feature in the future." Apparently the "Natural variability of climate means that the UK will continue to see spells of colder weather at times. Although, if it had not been for the general warming already observed in global temperatures, this winter may well have been even colder."

This is the same Met Office who confidently predicted a "barbecue summer" for a summer that saw heavy rainfall and the wettest July for almost 100 years.

This is the same Met Office whose October long range forecast was for a mild winter.
Oddly Met Office figures to be released on Monday are expected to show that the UK is experiencing the coldest winter for up to 25 years.

This is the same Met Office that is proud to inform the world of the following "credentials":

"* World-class knowledge and experience to guide you through all the science.
* Practical experience of helping our customers manage the impacts of the weather and climate change.
* Significant contributor to the global understanding of climate change, from one day to 100 years ahead.
* Key science contributor to the UKCP09.
* We make substantial contributions to the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
* We help inform government policy."

Isn't it odd how the Met Office are so certain of what the world's future climate will be like but can't even predict the weather two months ahead of time...

Not learning by experience

The Telegraph reports that:

"The Met Office has quietly defended itself against its derided prediction of a "barbecue summer" by claiming its forecasters got the temperature right - just not the amount of rain."

Apparently:

"Its forecasters have now admitted that they are not very good at predicting the amount of rain that will fall in summer."

Just to show that people don't always learn by experience , the report ends:

"In a departure from the wet and warm summer, the Met Office has predicted a dry and cold September. "

Will they ever learn?

Why so secretive?

Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit has been having problems getting data out of the met Office. The Met Office seem to think that weather records are in some way sensitive. Oddly it now seems that the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at The University of East Anglia (UEA) has just started deleting data. Steve McIntyre points out, quite correctly:

"Under U.K. Freedom of Information Act, once FOI requests have been made for information, public authorities are not permitted to "alter, deface, block, erase, destroy or conceal any record held by the public authority, with the intention of preventing the disclosure by that authority of all, or any part, of the information to the communication of which the applicant would have been entitled." As fordprefect observed the other day, the Computer Misuse Act also prescribes various offences, one of which is the unauthorized modification of the contents of a computer with the intent "to prevent or hinder access to any program or data held in any computer"."

Anyone might think they had something to hide...

Forecasting

The Met Office's excuses that its forecasting of a "barbecue summer" was only to give journalists an easy headline does raise questions over the purpose of the Met Office. However their failure to forecast weather trends for a summer season did not start this summer.

In 2007 the Met Office forecast:

"The summer is yet again likely to be warmer than normal. There are no indications of a particularly wet summer."

In fact it was the wettest summer for England and Wales for 95 years and temperatures were below average.

In 2008 the Met Office forecast:

"Summer temperatures are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or above average."

In fact 2008 was one of the wettest summers on record in the UK with high winds and low sunshine.

This year the Met Office forecast:

"Warmer than usual with rainfall average or below average".

So far we have had a few hot weeks and then a lot of rainfall, so much rainfall that reservoirs are once again full in the middle of summer.

The Met Office try to explain that that seasonal forecasting is in its infancy and is a cross between climate change prediction and forecasting tomorrow's weather forecast; apparently the Met Office is really good at those two predictions...


If the Met Office has now failed on three consecutive summer forecasts to get close to reality, then why should we place any credence on their climate change predictions?


The Guardian reported in 2006 as fact that:

"Scientists know a lot about how events will unfold...which means that whatever we do, our climate destiny is fixed for the next few decades... Rainfall will decline in the summer and the increased deluges in winter will struggle to replenish thirsty reservoirs because much of the water will run off the baked ground."

"Scientists know... climate destiny is fixed... Rainfall will decline in the summer..." It's all rubbish folks; most of these scientists are not predicting based on science, they are designing science to fit the desired predictions.

Look at some facts and figures, read around the subject and learn that Climate Change is a conspiracy not a science.

Met Office propaganda

The Met Office's UK Climate Projections include a "big picture set of "facts", shall we take a look at these "facts"?

1. Climate change is happening and humans are contributing to it.

2. Temperatures are continuing to rise.

3. The current climate change is not just part of a natural cycle.

4. Recent warming cannot be explained by the Sun or natural factors alone.

5. If we continue emitting greenhouse gases this warming will continue and delaying action will make the problem more difficult to fix.

6. Climate models predict the main features of future climate.


Wow, that's an impressive list of facts. Let's look at the proof shall we.

The proof of the first fact that "Climate change is happening and humans are contributing to it" is a pair of graphs that conveniently end in the year 2000. Is there no more current data than that? What has happened since 2000?

The proof of the second fact that "Temperatures are continuing to rise" is a graph showing ever more rapidly increasing temperatures. This is an interesting graph as it shows a drop in temperatures between 1940 and 1950 and slow increases up until 1980. Interesting as that was the period when the increase in CO2 production was at its largest; the world fought a war with massively increased industrialisation and followed the war with a huge further spurt in industrialisation. All that extra CO2 and the temperature dropped and then rose slowly, isn't that odd?


I could debunk the rest of the "facts" but I have work to do. What I will do is point you to four websites that may prove of interest as an antidote to the Met Office's propaganda:

1. Greenie Watch - pay particular attention to the piece headed "Latest British climate predictions are a joke"


2. Climate Feedback - You may be interested to read that:

"But while the projections were originally slated for release last November, an independent committee was convened at the eleventh hour to check out the methodology.

Oxford climatologist Myles Allen was on the committee, and he’s concerned that the results stretch the science beyond its current capabilities. His main worry is that as recently as 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn’t think that climate variables could be reliably resolved at spatial scales beyond a couple of 1000kms. And no research published since has challenged that view. "

3. Climate Audit - This is Steve McIntyre's fascinating site and has plenty of graphs (and accurate ones at that) to pore over. Be warned the science is always there so you will need to concentrate, but the truth is not always as easy to understand as the spin.


4. Suface Stations is a site that covers many matters related to the subject of the questionable reliability of the data on which the "science" of climate change is based. maybge a good place to start would be with their page devoted to badly sited measuring equipment. If the equipment is sited badly (and by badly I mean near air-conditioning equipment, barbecues, asphalt surfaces, carparks etc.) then how can the data be relied upon?


Take a look at these sites, read around the subject and discover that the science is not as cut and dried as we are being told it is. Then you can start to wonder why governments, government agencies and super-governmental bodies are so keen to convince us that Climate Change is real, urgent and at least partly preventable.

Deliberately inaccurate charts? Why would the Met Office mislead the public?

The Met Office have produced an easy to use front end to their UK Climate Projections 2009 report. Included is a "How the climate might change in your region" piece of flash programming. This purports to give you graphical data to show how temperature and rainfall may change. I have looked at the London graphs and they are woefully inaccurate:

Average Annual Rainfall is predicted to fall from 640mm to 639mm, a minuscule change but the graph seems to show around a 5% fall.

Average Winter Rainfall is predicted to rise from 157mm to 180mm, a 12.8% increase but the graph seems to show a near doubling of rainfall.

Average Wettest Winter Day is predicted to increase from 14mm to 16mm, a 14.3% increase but the graph seems to show around a 25% increase.

Average Annual Temperature is predicted to rise from 11° to 13°, an increase of 18% and this graph seems to show around that degree of increase.

Average Warmest Summers day is predicted to rise from 31° to 33°, an increase of 6.5% but the graph seems to show around a 25% increase.


So on the five graphs I examined for one region only one was broadly correct, one shows around twice the rate of change, one around four times the rate of change, one around eight times the rate of change and one around 500 times the rate of change.

Why the discrepancy between figures and graphs? Do the Met Office not understand how to accurately present graphical data? Have they deliberately missed out the Y-axis figures so as to exaggerate the changes predicted? If they cannot present results accurately then why should I trust their figures?