Are Our Winters Getting Warmer?

By Paul Homewood

 

Now where have we heard that before??

 

 

Snowy winters could become a thing of the past as climate change affects the UK, Met Office analysis suggests.

It is one of a series of projections about how UK’s climate could change, shared with BBC Panorama.

It suggests by the 2040s most of southern England could no longer see sub-zero days. By the 2060s only high ground and northern Scotland are still likely to experience such cold days.

The projections are based on global emissions accelerating.

It could mean the end of sledging, snowmen and snowball fights, says Dr Lizzie Kendon, a senior Met Office scientist who worked on the climate projections.

"We’re saying by the end of the century much of the lying snow will have disappeared entirely except over the highest ground," she told Panorama.

If the world reduces emissions significantly the changes will be less dramatic, the Met Office says.

"The overarching picture is warmer, wetter winters; hotter, drier summers," Dr Kendon says.

The Met Office says we are already seeing dramatic changes in the UK climate.

The rate and nature of the climate change that we’re seeing is unprecedented," says Dr Mark McCarthy of the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre.

Most of the country has already seen average temperatures rise by 1C since the Industrial Revolution and we should expect more of the same, he warns.

That may not sound like much, but even these small changes in our climate can have a huge impact on the weather and on many plants and animals.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-55179603

 

McCarthy talks of climate having a huge effect on weather. However, the data shows he has it the wrong way round.

Some years we get mild winters, and some are very cold. This has nothing to do with global warming, it is simply down to the vagaries of weather. When the weather is dominated by Atlantic airflow, it tends to be wet and mild. When it is anti-cyclonic, it is usually cold.

As an example, this winter just ended was milder than average, but six winter prior to 1900 were actually warmer, with the warmest on record in 1868/69. In other words, we have simply experiencing the same weather seen in the past.

 

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/ssn_HadCET_mean.txt

 

We can see the effect more clearly by looking at just the warmest winters:

 

It certainly appears that milder winters are more common now, which naturally pushes the average up. But the weather is no different to those earlier mild winters, just more frequent.

What is also apparent that extremely cold winters are now effectively a thing of the past. The most recent Top 50 entry was 1978/79.

 

Quite what explains these shifting weather patterns, I have no clue. But there is no evidence whatsoever that it has anything at all to do with emissions, or that winters will carry on getting warmer.

Indeed quite the opposite. Winter temperatures have been very stable since 1990.

A comparison with the winter of 1898/99, which was just 0.1C colder than this winter, illustrates my argument better than any graph. Indeed that winter closely mirrors what we have just experienced:

 

 

 

Just as this winter, December was dry and settled, followed by unsettled, mild and wet weather during January and February. Gales were frequent, arriving from a southwesterly direction.

In other words, a carbon copy of this winter’s weather, with almost exactly the same temperature.

It was weather back in 1899. And it is still weather now, not climate change.