Annual rainfall (mm) England and Wales 1766-2012
‘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……
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…..
The frequency of extreme rainfall in the UK may be increasing, according to analysis by the Met Office.
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.
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….
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…
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…
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.
