An Extreme(ly Nice) Summer
By Paul Homewood
I see the BBC/Met Office are up to their extreme weather scam again! (Timed to coincide with COP27 of course):
Extreme weather events have affected most of the UK this year.
In February, there was a succession of storms, in the space of a week, with storms Dudley, Eunice and Franklin bringing widespread damage and disruption.
The summer saw people flocking to beaches, with the UK experiencing its highest ever temperature on record at 40.3C (104F) in Lincolnshire.
Now that’s been followed by an unseasonably mild autumn with temperatures in Porthmadog in Gwynedd reaching 21.2C (70F) on 13 November.
BBC Wales weather presenter Sabrina Lee heads to the Met Office to find out what is going on with our unpredictable weather.
Their main ploy is to present a few days of hot weather as “extreme”. The same weather that brought millions out to enjoy the sun!
The BBC reporter takes a trip to the Met Office, where Helen Roberts, who apparently is a socio-meteorologist (no I don’t know either!), informs us that global warming will bring more heatwaves, but strangely forgets to mention that we will also get less of that really extreme cold weather.
And the other pathetic examples wheeled out?
A few winter storms, of the sort we see every year. Eunice, they say, was one of the worst storms to hit Britain with gusts of 122 mph. This of course is the usual Met Office disinformation, as that wind speed was recorded on the high, exposed cliffs of the Needles, where wind measurements only began in 1996. The Needles is a totally unrepresentative site, as it recorded wind speeds 40 mph higher than anywhere else in the country during that storm.
To pretend that winter storms are an example of Britain’s weather becoming more extreme is utterly dishonest, as the Met Office’s State of the Climate 2021 clearly showed that wind storms have grown less frequent and intense over the years since peaking in the 1990s.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/about/state-of-climate
And the “unseasonably mild autumn”? Neither September or October were anywhere near record warmth.
And Porthmadog? The highest CET temperature this month has been 15.9C, but this is 2.8C lower than the record for November, 18.7C set in 1946.
It is of course stretching credulity to call a mild day in November “extreme”.
It is deeply ironic that the video ends with footage of the Beast from the East in 2018. Have they not worked out that we see much less of this cold snowy weather nowadays?
There is actually one final section, where the Met Office’s Dr Rosie Oakes looks at a graph of temperature changes over the last 55 million years, and claims that we have never seen the pace of warming we see now.
If she really believes that she should be in another job, because you simply cannot detect changes over such a short period of time using the geological record. Averaging temperature changes over millennia cannot tell you what happens on a decadal time scale.
Maybe she needs to acquaint herself with the CET, which proves that we had an even greater and faster temperature increase in the early 18thC:
Sadly this sort of political propaganda is par for the course where the Met Office is concerned.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
All those CO2 emissions saved because we have used our heating much less so far this Autumn/Winter. Yippee!
The problem you’ve got, Paul, is that graph, which shows that the CET has been persistently below the 61-90 average for about 300 of the last 360 years and only for the last 30 has it been solidly above.
Show that graph to the average ignoramus who barely scrambled ‘O’-level physics (which includes me) and they are going to agree that something out of the ordinary is happening. Graphs (given accurate input) do not lie and the majority do not have the time or the inclination for long detailed explanations.
Temperatures up? ✔️ CO2 up? ✔️ Good enough for me, chum! If the experts (and who could be more expert than the Met Office?!) say so, who am I to disagree?!
Game over? Well, hopefully not, but you get the point!
Try extending your horizons back to the Roman warm period. Don’t cherry pick nonsense from a natural recovery from the Little Ice Age. You might also want to think about whether warm or cold weather is better for humanity and whether high or dangerously low CO2 is better for humanity? The planet dies below 150 ppm CO2.
FYI many of the Met. Office minions know that their higher pay grades are lying.
The fact its only the last 30 years is the giveaway.
Yes. It isn’t the best graph to refute the world increase of about 2 degrees C since 1920. The Central England temperature has increased by the same. But then England has increased population by record numbers and building around the Midlands. Urban effect. That’s why Met Office propagandists chose it.
Oops 1 deg C
Any time you see ‘Socio’ or for that matter “Pychco”, you know there is going to be trouble. They are obviously actually a Sociopath or a Psychopath,as in Socio-Metorologist or Psychologist.
Indeed the fall in temperatures at the start of thst graph pretty much mirrors the rise at the other end. Speed of change, not just speed of rise should be the criteria.
What I would really like is for the Met Office/BBC and the rest of the MSM, to stop explaining the weather to me. Especially explaining what I can see by going outside or just looking out the window.
Just give me the forecast of temperatures, precipitation, and wind. A mention of cloud cover/sun shine hours, ice, deep snow actual floods if they have actually happened. Otherwise shut up and don’t patronise.
Just to cheer you all up. It has been announced that a new solar energy farm will be built on the site of the former Chapelcross nuclear facility. Now children , can anyone tell me where Chapelcross is? No? Well where would be the worst place for solar energy? That is right children, in the far north in the rainy west. Chapelcross is in SW Scotland. I live 16 miles away. It has been raining for a week. I cannot remember when I last saw the sun.
But surely it will be a Mediterranean-style sun worshipper’s paradise by 2050 – or was it 2100? Too late for the first set of panels though 😎
[Any change of formatting these emails so the paragraphs wrap within the email client window, and images scale to the window width?]
This is the same Met Office who factored in global warming into their supercomputer program and consequently produced wildly inaccurate weather forecasts. The BBC did not renew their contract as a result.
You couldn’t make it up if you tried!
The mean CET for November is currently running at a record for the series, looking at the current forecast for the rest of the month it will not end up as a record, just very warm.
The yearly mean CET will be a record unless the rest of the year is 2C colder than normal – highly unlikely. So get ready for more hype.
Folk who went outside during our very good summer will have topped up their Vitamin D levels without having to resort to supplements. Health benefits all round. 😉
“Helen Roberts, who apparently is a socio-meteorologist” This is what she is/what she does according to https://www.rmets.org/metmatters/psychology-weather-forecasts
“When we produce a weather forecast, we’re not doing it just for the sake of predicting a future state of the atmosphere, we’re doing it because weather impacts us. It determines when we put our washing out, whether we wear a coat, our hobbies, our businesses and their operations, and our safety. We want to know what the weather will do, rather than what it will be. The Met Office’s purpose is ‘helping you make better decisions to stay safe and thrive’. This statement of intent puts people at the heart of our raison d’etre.”
“…whether I should wear a coat…”
The last person I remember giving me advice about this was my mother when I was seven. Oh, and my mother when I was thirty-seven.
Mission creep! All institutions go down this road, especially when obviously becoming irrelevant.
I was curious about Rosie Oakes’ extraordinary claims, standing on front of that chart. There is just enough on the video to see where the chart comes from. You can see a story with the chart on the following link, although I have not been able to get a copy of the paywalled paper:
https://news.ucsc.edu/2020/09/climate-variability.html
I have not been able to get some statement of the resolution of the reconstruction. However the information in the story reveals is comes from ocean sediment cores, and the method acknowledges the necessity of splicing together core segments. It seems pretty sure that Oakes’ claim that very recent warming is 10 times faster than we’ve seen before is a wild exaggeration.
Marcott et al (Science, 2013) gives a measure of what is achievable from these types of reconstruction. His paper created a stir which motivated him to respond on the “realclimate” website at the time. His comment is still there and in the form of a Q&A, including the following:
“Q: Is the rate of global temperature rise over the last 100 years faster than at any time during the past 11,300 years?
A: Our study did not directly address this question because the paleotemperature records used in our study have a temporal resolution of ~120 years on average, which precludes us from examining variations in rates of change occurring within a century. Other factors also contribute to smoothing the proxy temperature signals contained in many of the records we used, such as organisms burrowing through deep-sea mud, and chronological uncertainties in the proxy records that tend to smooth the signals when compositing them into a globally averaged reconstruction. We showed that no temperature variability is preserved in our reconstruction at cycles shorter than 300 years, 50% is preserved at 1000-year time scales, and nearly all is preserved at 2000-year periods and longer. Our Monte-Carlo analysis accounts for these sources of uncertainty to yield a robust (albeit smoothed) global record. Any small “upticks” or “downticks” in temperature that last less than several hundred years in our compilation of paleoclimate data are probably not robust, as stated in the paper.”
Marcott went to the effort of carrying out testing of what his reconstruction could and could not resolve. The assessment suggested his methods detect ZERO variability at cycles shorter than 300 years, but he seemed confident that all variability was preserved for 2000 year cycles and longer. Which, in reality, is not very much information in his reconstruction when you consider it spans only 11,300 years (six fully detected cycles at best). Climate science striding forward at the familiar snail’s pace.
So there is something not right about what Oakes is claiming. To be able to suggest the last c.100 yers is ten times faster than the record is to claim she has paleo data capable of detecting cycles of 10 years. Not credible IMO. BS detector flashing.
Paul ,the early 18th century warming pulse in the CET series only amounts to 0.4 – 0.5C C and the chart indicates the 1980s warming was marginally faster if one examines the respective inclines . However , you can inform Dr Rosie Oakes of the Ministry of Met Office Truth that approximately 14700 years ago Greenland ice core stratigraphy reveals temperatures spiked rapidly by 10 celsius in just 3-4 years and 11700 years before present – coinciding with one of the glacial meltwater pulse horizons – the warming increase was another 10 C over 60 years . A 1 degree celsius temperature rise over 170 years [ absent huge portions of the worlds oceans and land surfaces that had no station data until the 1950’s ] in the age of thermometer readings and satellite sensor technology is not the fastest pace of warming ever experienced . Dr Oakes scanning the geological record tens of millions of years back in time , must be aware of this I wonder why her focus is on that section of the timescale ? . The temperature swings of the Pleistocene epoch are
visible for anyone to see for themselves and carbon dioxide had nothing to do with them as the glaciological analyses have shown the temperature rises preceded CO2 increases by decades to centuries…. It is difficult to imagine the rapid warming pulses of 14700 and 11700 years ago were confined to the western Arctic and not other parts of the northern hemisphere albeit of lower yet still significant magnitude .
Now recently I attempted to access the relevant environmentcounts.org link only to be met with ” this site cannot be reached ” So allow me to type the URL in manually and I hope you have better luck putting this temperature reconstruction up . I am encountering this annoying problem a lot more these days environmentcounts.org/greenland-ice-cores-reveal-warming-10-c-three-years/
environmentcounts.org/greenland-ice-cores-reveal-warming-10-c-three-years/
Have you examined this Paul ? https://environmentcounts.org/greenland-ice-cores-reveal-warming-10-c-three-years/
Have another look CET 1695-1735ish. 3C swing in extremes, best part of 2C in the running average.
The ‘early 18th century CET warming blip Paul referred to [ circa 1725 – 32 ] is only a 0.4 C increase from the baseline and the incline is no more abrupt than the 1980’s uptick from the 0 baseline . Thats the issue and Pauls point is valid as I can see the temperature upswing you are referring to MrGrimN starting from the 1690’s ..However critics might then say the Central England Temperature series is confined to the British Isles whereas the Greenland ice cores are a recognized northern hemisphere temperature proxy reconstruction and the 10C paleo-temperature increases 14700 and 11700 years ago are far more prolific and not all that distant in time .
For some reason the environment counts .org link I provided has not loaded
No, it’s the rate and degree of warming that is important, that shows such bursts of warming have occurred in the recent past.
The baseline is whatever you choose it to be, the fact that perhaps it was 0.5C, now 1C, above an arbitrary baseline is not the point.
No MrGrimN , the location is also important …..The Central England Temperature series is just that – a central England dataset . Pauls critics may argue , not without merit I might add , there is a discernable temperature stalling or hiatus from 1705 – 1715 /20 that essentially cancels any perception of a warming escalation Did you notice this ?
[ Another reason I chose the 0 baseline for comparison ] . Furthermore thermometers until the 1840’s are not widely acknowledged as reliable ..What I do find interesting however is the CET temperature pulse occurred towards the closure of the Maunder solar minimum so the event may be a rebound warming selection effect analogous to the Industrial Revolution coinciding with the dissipation of the Dalton Minimum circa 1830 , the fall in cosmic dust influx around 1800 and the 1809 – 1825 cluster [ centred on Tambora 1815 ] of volcanic eruptions There is one point of mine you are evading for some reason : the Greenland ice core temperature swings of 10C 14700BP and 11700 years ago in just 3-4 and 60 years We’re not talking 2-3 C within a decade but rather 10C in a region recognized as a northern hemisphere paleo- temperature proxy site …..This is why I was astonished Paul had not cited the Greenland time series in his rebuttal You insisted yourself the rate and degree of warming is important ..Can you find the link MrGrimN ?
Pauls observation still has some validity as the temperature rises sharply from say 1695 – 1708-ish but the quality of thermometers back then is questionable and unless the central England time series is replicated to some degree in European records climate alarmists will remain
dismissive ..The 14700 BP and 11700 BP Greenland ice core 10C temperature spikes worry them a lot more
If the ‘rate and degree of warming is important ” why are you reluctant to discuss the prodigious temperature swings 14700 and 11700 years ago MrGN ?
“These are the reasons why Porthmadog is always the hottest place in Wales”
June 2018 https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/reasons-porthmadog-always-hottest-place-14846827
“The Met Office said the mercury in Porthmadog reached 32.6°C on Thursday making it the hottest place in Britain.
Porthmadog was also the hottest recorded place on Tuesday and Wednesday and is regularly Wales’ warmest spot. Met Office meteorologist Mark Wilson said: “With the wind coming from the north east Porthmadog is getting a lot of shelter.
“Although it’s by the coast it’s not really getting a lot of breeze off the sea meaning the temperatures keep rising and rising. “If the breeze does pick up you can expect to see the temperatures fall.”
BBC Wales weatherman Derek Brockway tweeted: “The weather station in Morfa Bychan is on sandy soil which heats up rapidly. Wind direction is east-northeast. Air flows over the mountains sinks & warms boosting the temperature in Porthmadog.”
Slightly off topic but I was looking at the wikipedia entry for London. There is a climate table – but it is for Heathrow – shows max ever temperature of 40.2 but you can click below and get the chart for Greenwich – which has a max of 37.5 – I think that is quite a difference.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London
Of course the Middle Ages, Roman, and Minoan warm period peaks all arose and declined within similarly short timescales as the modern warm period – so maybe the decline will be just as sudden – who knows!
Warmists don’t like GISP2 and claim it’s not a global reflection. But anyway.
https://co2coalition.org/facts/temperatures-have-changed-for-800000-years-it-wasnt-us/
“…warming ten times faster…”
In the Saturday Times (I succumbed to boredom and glanced at the headlines of one lying around) there is the headline:
“Cliffs could crumble ten times faster as erosion takes its toll” [because of climate change].
Obviously, “ten times” – as the prescribed, getting worse all the time, number – is now in play in the ‘nudge’ language of the climate hysterics. After a while, they will have to change the setting on the fright-knob to “a hundred times.”
Portmadog 8 degrees at present, pretty chiily!