London summers will be as hot as Nice by 2070: Met Office
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
Why on earth do they need a Climate Modelling Team, never mind a Head of Situational Awareness?
Summer temperatures in London could be like Nice in 50 years’ time if carbon emissions continue to rise at their current rate, the Met Office has warned.
Jeff Knight, who runs the forecaster’s climate variability modelling team, said that – in a high emissions scenario – "the central estimate of temperature increase by 2070 is about 4C in southern England.
Referring to the UK’s record-breaking heatwave in 2022, he said: "Despite the events of July last year, 40C days are still considered rare, but by … 2070 then we could be thinking about those kinds of temperatures occurring every five years.
"If we think about a four-degree temperature increase, that would be like transforming the climate of London, the summer temperatures of London, into something like historically we might have seen in Nice.".
Speaking at a Met Office briefing ahead of the peak summer months, head of situational awareness Will Lang said that he could not rule out a repeat of last year’s heatwave that saw temperatures reach 40C (104F) for the first time in the UK.
As the Met Office know full well, or should do, the high emissions scenario used for this latest scare is widely accepted by scientists to be an impossible one.
But worse still, this latest piece of Met Office junk science is utterly discredited by the actual data, which shows English summers have warmed by less than a degree since the 1940s. If emissions continue to rise at the same rate as they have since then, why on earth should anybody believe temperatures will rise by 4C in the next 50 years?
And there is an even bigger problem with their modelling. Even though average summer temperatures may be rising, largely because of the reducing frequency of cold, wet summers, temperatures are not increasing at the top end. The summer of 1976 still stands as the hottest summer in England.
And there is a good reason for this. Hot summers are the result of plentiful sunshine and the dominance of southerly or easterly winds bringing hot continental air. In other words, weather.
While you cannot rule out freak weather events, such as the one last July that brought hot Saharan air to the UK, the dominant role of the sun effectively puts a ceiling on summer temperatures.
Given the UK’s latitude, we are never going to see the sort of 27C summers that are the norm in Nice.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Surely the temperatures in Nice will also have increased? So ‘as hot as Nice is now in 2023’ is the qualifier for this load of junk.
Good point, but surely we were told all this back in the 80’s when the various gardening programmes were showing us how to plant for a Mediterranean climate?
I would be interested in seeing Paul’s sunshine totals, because with less pollution I think we have seen more sun. The suns direct heat gets absorbed by buildings and tarmac so the overnight temperature doesnt drop too much, and it has a quick getaway when the sun starts shiningg the next day.
Clear skies particularly coupled with dry conditions can actually work in reverse to what you are claiming allowing radiation frosts. In the legendary hottest ever summer of 1976 I actually spun my bosses car on ICE in the early hours of the moring in the first week of August just outside Coventry.
p.s. I was stone cold sober but it was a V12 E – type!
Something strange in BBC “Logic”.
The less pollution is apparently also MORE pollution which is why the BBC is hot for introducing 15 minute ghettos to save the “Hundreds of people who die every year from air pollution” (just in Sheffield), according to the City Council as reported with delight by the BBC.
I guess they are too young to remember the steel industry….
Martin Brumby – it would be interesting to know how many people have “air pollution” on their death certificates as the cause of death.
JW:
They expect the date will be 2027. e.g.
“2007 Dr. David Viner within twenty years, the Mediterranean would become far too hot for European holiday makers, who would instead flock to Blackpool to take advantage of warmer summers in the UK.”
“In a high emissions scenario” RCP8.5 I presume which is unrealistic and largely discredited. Just scare mongering again, just why do they keep doing it?
Their jobs depend on it GeoffB
There is money in it for them. The Met Office is a bought and paid for eco-activist organisation.
It is what you get if you recruit in your own image for 30 years. Suggest you might like to do science at the Hadley and you will be looking for new employment. Hadley must be spinning in his grave.
Are you talking about the Met Office or The BBC?
Another load of utter ball cocks, they can’t even predict the weather for 2 or 3 days ahead.
Four degrees rise in average temperature is absurd, and just saying that undermines their credibility totally.
I think a factor ignored by the warmunistas, and not emphasised enough by us sceptics is that the relationship between CO2 concentration in the atmosphere and global temperature, however big or small it may be, is a logarithmic relation ship whereas a 4C rise in the next 50 years is more like an exponential relationship, hence plain wrong
Once again the magic word ‘could’ is rolled out. Dictionary says: a verb used to indicate possibility. Which means, the phrase where it is used is equally valid if the word ‘not’ follows the verb.
The Met Office and The Sun, the perfect idiotic combo!
I hope this reaches the ears of our political leaders because it is certain to cause everyone living in Nice to head for the English Channel with their small, or even very large, boats. We won’t have enough Border Force or RN vessels to escort all of them across as well as the refugees from Albania.
In 1981, NASA’s James Hansen put out a paper showing a lack of correlation between CO2 and temperature:
Click to access hansen81a.pdf
“The most sophisticated models suggest a mean warming of 2° to 3 .5°C for doubling of the C02 concentration from 300 to 600 ppm . The major difficulty in accepting the theory has been the absence of observed warming coincident with the historic C02 increase. In fact, the temperature in the Northern Hemisphere decreased by about 0.5°C between 1940 and 1970, a time of rapid C02 build up.
In addition, recent claims that climate models over-estimate the impact of radiative perturbations by an order of magnitude, have raised the issue of whether the greenhouse effect is well understood. ”
In normal science that would have been game over, but the weather changed. CO2 kept rising, but it got warmer as well, recovering from one of the coldest periods of the 20th century. Game on again. Climate models still over-estimate the impact of radiative perturbations, especially RPC8.5, but they present their output as factual and these projections will manifest as claimed.
There is NO correlation on a geological time scale. No correlation whatsoever. Even better, the combination of work of Scotese (1999) and Berner (2001)as well as the work of W Jackson Davis: “The Relationship between Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Concentration and Global Temperature for the Last 425 Million Years”. This paper can be found online as a pdf : Climate 2017, 5, 76; doi:10.3390/cli5040076
I quote from the abstract of his work “This study demonstrates that changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration did not cause temperature change in the ancient climate”. By Ancient climate he refers to the Phanerozoic which is the time period from around 540 million years ago up to and including the present day.
Thanks for the link, useful.
For me key words are: “central estimate” ….”could”…..very Fergusonian; is it just me or is “every five years” too round a number, conveniently cyclical. Have some experience in stochastic modelling and “isn’t it amazing how the output can change so dramatically with a simple innocent tweak to just one element”..IOW how do you want the output to look….which inputs need “some work”…
“London could be like Nice in 50 years’ time if carbon emissions continue to rise at their current rate, the Met Office has warned.”
And if CO2 emissions were to be reduced it would have no effect on the lowering of emissions already added. But it would devastate travel with fewer and fewer fuels for conventional vehicles and at higher costs. That should accompany the warning.
Anything that relies on RCP8.5 should be labelled
“For entertainment and Hollywood movie plots only”
To put into context just how plain daft these climate alarmists are is this “World Weather Attribution” analysis. https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/without-human-caused-climate-change-temperatures-of-40c-in-the-uk-would-have-been-extremely-unlikely/
Appararently, the chances of a repeat of the 2022 record figures at places like RAF Cranwell https://tinyurl.com/RAF-Cranwell are once on every 1,500 years.
Think about it, King Harold would have had no problem with those pesky Normans if he could have just whistled up a few Typhoon jets back in 1066
Dear Met Office,
1. It is not CARBON emissions, it is Carbon Dioxide returned to the Carbon Cycle from whence it was removed and locked away. They are DIFERENT molecules, stupid.
2. Given that you link both of these processes, please point to the statistically significant empirical datasets which support the oft repeated but never ever substantiated claim that carbon dioxide returned to the Carbon Cycle by the actions of man can in an measurable way be shown to be responsible for any part or all of the current welcome warming, the FOURTH warming in recent human history.
If you cannot point to this data then desist making this claim because it is clearly not based on any kind of science except for political science and if so I ask what use to man or beast is a politicised Met Office?
3. As a final point. isn’t it “supposed” to be Global Warming which causes Climate Change….not the other way around? Maybe you take learned your climate science from the modern history graduate the BBC employs as one of their climate experts. She also spouted twaddle that climate change causes global warming.
Just asking as your story appears a tad incoherent.
With a complete absence of regard or respect
JonnyS
Spot on! Especially the part that they keep banging on about climate causing weather.
Here we go. No longer 10 years they are projecting 50 years into the future when they cannot forecast the weather next week! These people are word weasels. It is said for effect YET they will never ever be held accountable. 50 years what a meaningless abuse of tax payers money. It would be bad enough if they just said “because of climate change”, but they reveal their true identity by pushing the left wing political message using the arts graduate term “carbon emissions” and their reduction and all that entails which is pure POLITICS.
Conservative Government! Since when was it acceptable for the Met Office to make political and specifically left wing political pronouncements?
A true scientist would never allow himself, ever, to utter the words, ‘carbon emissions’.
What a load of utter wallop, no change there then at the Hadley centre for alarmism – met office HQ Exeter.
Perhaps somebody should ask Jeff Knight to write a paper providing the evidence of the claim that increasing “carbon emissions” have any connection with rising temperatures.
I hear a lot of conjecture and hand-waving (if you can hear hand-waving!) but precious little from these people that provide anything vaguely resembling PROOF for their claims.
C’mon, Jeff. I’m sure Paul could find space for a reasoned, scientifically-backed argument for your claim!
The very first lesson I ever had stats (A level) involved the lecturer asking us to plot the increasing production of horse manure against the increasing sale of new Minis (that long ago) and come up with conclusions. Of course, what he was trying to get us to appreciate that cause and effect are not always so what you think they are.
To date, I’ve heard no serious repudiation of the long, long held belief that CO2 follows temp.
Why 2070 and not 2100? 2100 is surely much safer to forecast .. are the experts losing even the sense of self-preservation? Yes they do – now they use the word “forecast” instead of a much safer “projection”.
This afternoon I have emailed the Met Office a lengthy (4 page) email regarding the known inaccuracy of their weather stations on multiple grounds. (I could forward it to Paul if he would like to view)
It is in further response to an original query of mine a few weeks back which got a fob off response. I will advise of their response to why sites like this https://tinyurl.com/RAF-Coningsby are considered accpetable given their site requirements as detailed here https://tinyurl.com/WMO-Siting-Guide.
Well done Ray, and I will be interested in their response. The hysterics about the highest temperature ever recorded was based on one day’s measurement at Coningsby.
Mr Jeff Knight, an employee of the Met Office, publicly displays he does not know the definition of ‘heat wave’ nor ‘climate.’
Pretty damned embarrassing for a professional organization.
GC, the UK Met Office have official weather recording stations in Walled Gardens, by active Royal Air Force runways and civilian airports, alongside huge electricity sub stations, in Car Parks, and just about every inappropriate place imaginable. They used to quote a UK record at a site in Cambridge that they themselves delisted as unreliable back in 1931! A former Scotland record site was closed down a few months after opening as the recordings in their words were “DATA RUBBISH” – but the “record” still stood.
They are a disgraceful heap of sh!t that makes the BBC look almost reputable.
I believe nobody lives in Nice during July because of the high temperatures. Is this true?
Nobody lives further south than Lyon during the summer because of the high temperatures. All the British tourists heading for hotter climes are unknown to them diverted to Torquay where the locals sportingly play along by speaking French or Spanish.
As Noel Coward sang
Presumably on the Promenade des Anglais on the Nice seafront…
Give over you damned fools!!
Might explain the email I received yesterday from David Hinton CEO of South East Water blaming his failure to supply water to some areas on, amongst other things, ‘more extreme weather – in winter as well as summer’.
I’ve written (since communication by modern means is made as difficult as possible) asking for evidence and linking the 2023/06/15 post here about the latest GWPF annual review. ‘The UK climate remains absolutely benign. The changes we have seen have been small, and mostly thoroughly welcome. Who would complain that we are seeing fewer bitterly cold winters?’
I pointed out that Faversham has seen 333mm of rain so far in 2023 and 23mm so far this month. Reservoir levels are fine, as is the water level in the chalk at Little Bucket Farm.
I also suggested that he apply himself to his job rather than trying to make excuses by scaring my grandchildren.
Excellent! I agree regarding scaring children. They should be allowed to enjoy the spells of nice weather we have, as we were able to do as children.
Why on earth does the Met Office need a “Head of Situational Awareness”. What exactly does this person do and why are we taxpayers paying for it? The Met Office seems to be out of control.
Brief hot Saharan plumes to the UK like in summers 2019 and 2022 are predictably more common during low solar periods as they depend on a more southerly and wavy jet stream. Rising CO2 forcing is modeled to increase positive North Atlantic Oscillation conditions, that means a more northerly and less wavy jet stream.
Mean summer temperatures will follow the AMO when it shifts to its cold phase from the 2030’s.
Major heatwaves like in 1976, 2003, 2006, and 2018, are a cause and not a product of climate change as they are discretely solar driven.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQemMt_PNwwBKNOS7GSP7gbWDmcDBJ80UJzkqDIQ75_Sctjn89VoM5MIYHQWHkpn88cMQXkKjXznM-u/pub