Warm, Cold, Dry,Wet? It’s All your Fault Anyway!
By Paul Homewood
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/25/climate-change-uk-weather-wet-dry-met-office
As Tallbloke has pointed out, this report seems to have been leaked to the Met Office’s friends, the BBC & Guardian, even though there is nothing on their own website. (UPDATE – see Met link below)
There is, in fact, nothing new in the report, which has no doubt been wheeled out to frighten us all. It simply repeats previous forecasts, such as the UK Climate Projections Report and DEFRA’s Climate Change Risk Assessment.
Meanwhile, despite the last few months, UK winters have been growing steadily colder since 2007, and the long term trend is lower than in the 1920’s.
While summer temperatures remain stable.
As for rainfall, the long term trend has been towards drier winters, even despite the recent wet spell. The wettest decade remains the 1910’s.
And summer? It probably won’t surprise you by now to find that summers have been getting noticeably wetter, since the dry interlude in the 1960’s and 70’s. Again, we see that conditions have returned to those seen in the 1920’s.
Finally, I notice that the Guardian has wheeled out the “Extreme Rainfall” graph, although it is not clear if this is part of the new report.
As I have shown before, for instance here and here, the 1960’s and 70’s were an unusually dry interlude, and any conclusions drawn about extreme rainfall trends, using these years as a starting point, are misleading and meaningless.
Analysis of data from earlier decades suggests that there is no long term increase in extreme rainfall. The Met Office have all this data, and more, available, so why do they persist in making misleading claims, based on such a short and unrepresentative dataset?
References
1) All data from Met Office
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/summaries/datasets
2) The Met Office report is now available here.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/2014/uk-drivers-and-impacts
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Paul, it is on the MO website
Can be found here:-
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news
“Too hot, too cold, too
wet, too dry: ”
Click to access Drivers_and_impacts_of_seasonal_weather_in_the_UK.pdf
Thanks.
I like the bit about
seasons that are too hot, too cold, too wet and too dry!
I thought it was called weather!
As a life long UK resident I would say the title “Too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry ” is a remarkably accurate description of normal UK weather.
Move on nothing to see
Sorry Green Sand.
I could have sworn that your post wasn’t there when I posted mine.
I’ve been having problems with my EE connection which probably accounts for it.
No worries QV, the more the merrier!
Green Sand posted this link to the report yesterday;
Click to access Drivers_and_impacts_of_seasonal_weather_in_the_UK.pdf
The Rainy Days graph is in it, but as you say, the start date has been cherry picked.
The Beeb’s Shukman gets hammered in the comments of “UK’s future climate to be all sorts” for wasting space.
So far >1200 comments & highest rated is by ‘Global Yawning’
“Stephen Belcher, head of the Met Office Hadley Centre, sums it up like this: “We’ve got to continue living with the cold events and we’ve got to get used to the hot events.”
In the olden days we used to call those events Winter and Summer.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-26731790
Too “hot” & too “cold” weather.
The MO highlights that Summer 2003 & Autumn 2011 were “Too hot”; and, Winter 2010/11 & Spring 2013 were “Too cold”.
They also tabulate Key Impacts (financial repercussions) including mention that “Overall in England there were 2,091 (17%) excess deaths in the first two weeks of August 2003.”
However, weather can also be too hot (i.e. warmer than average) in Winter, and, too cold (i.e. cooler than average) in Summer. Strangely, these particular phenomena fail to get mentioned. I wonder why the MO failed to report that a comparatively ‘hot’ winter (2013/14 as the most recent example) reduces cold-related deaths, and must be deemed beneficial to us in the UK?
Just to play Devils Advocate : Are the Met being more devious that we are giving them credit for?
More heatwaves, more frequent and longer cold spells, stronger storms and more frequent droughts. There is some historical evidence that these conditions prevailed during the “Little Ice Age” associated with the Maunder Minimum.
Given that many solar scientists are predicting a prolonged period of reduced solar magnetic activity, are the Met hanging their hat on this, with the intention of blaming it on our CO2 emissions, rather than ascribing it (should it actually verify) to the Sun?
Huxley would be in awe of the absurd mental gymnastics the far-left goes to in order to hang onto their collective insanity about AGW. He would have to re-write “Brave New World”.
Interesting that the actual trend for winter rainfall is, if anything, towards slightly drier winters and in summer the actual trend is for wetter summers. This is directly the opposite of what the Met office, the Guardian, the BBC and others were saying we should experience under climate change. I can remember my own organisation was conned into commissioning a regional study about 8 years ago and the theme we were told was for drier, hotter summers and milder, wetter winters. Useless, utterly useless. These buffoons just make it up as they go along.
You are going to get hot summers and cold winters. I never knew that was particularly out of the ordinary.
Human influence is where the rubber meets the road, and it is negligible. Hubris or wishful thinking is once again driving societies to engage in attempts to use sympathetic magic to control the planet. It will have the usual effect: self-destruction.
Paul, have you ever attempted to replicate/extend retrospectively the MO “Rainy Days” graph?
I feel that would be interesting but I wouldn’t know where to start.
I wonder why the MO didn’t go back to 1931, when there statistics begin, if that’s what they used.