Is Our Cold, Wet Summer Due To Global Warming?
August 5, 2023
By Paul Homewood
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-66304220
You may recall the BBC’s recent attempt to blame the currently cold and wet summer on global warming!
Well the Met Office’s figures for July show that rainfall for the month was hardly unprecedented:
In reality, there is no such thins as “normal July weather”. It can veer from one extreme to another from one year to the next.
You don’t need to invoke the climate bogeyman to explain English weather.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
We were discussing this, at least five years ago. It is all happening as per the back-up plan. Whatever happens, it is certainly not an illustration of, “We were, and are still, uneducated, moronic, miserable, sadistic, bastards. You name it, we get it wrong.”
The plan will work for at least another decade. That is my prediction, anyway.
But Paul, whatever the weather, it’s climate change:
Indeed. Climate change as a term is tautology. And what is Earth’s climate anyway? At school 60+ years ago we learnt, in Geography, about climate zones and how the habitats and resources available to locals moulded their life styles and prosperity (or not) through the ages.
Major zones: Continental, Dry, Temperate, Tropical, Polar.
Regional zones: Rainforest, Monsoon, Savanna, Desert, Steppe, Tundra, Subtropical, Continental, Oceanic, Mediterranean, sub-Arctic.
Boundaries of these zones, and the range within them, shift over time with Earth’s planetary cycles and solar cycles, whether Man is present or not.
Quite right. O level Geography back in the 1950s at my Grammar School and compulsory Geomorphology at University 1960s
Most weather forecasters, especially Piers Morgan’s mate Alex whatshisface, like to say temperatures are above/below “where they should be”.
When I hear that phrase I can’t help thinking “naughty temperature get back to where you should be”
“There is a school of thought that a warming climate is causing this change.”
Do they mean primary school?
That’s why they renamed “Global Warming” to “Climate Change”.
Covers all possibilities!
101 marketing – when sales start to drop try rebranding the product
It’s no “Global Heating”, by the way…
Global boiling is so much more expressive…
Global boiling seems to me to come from the Bud Lite school of marketing that has become so successful that it will now be included in marketing courses. I do assume that the courses will be using it as a ‘how not to alienate your core customers so badly that it now seems certain that sales will never recover’ as the beer is being replaced on shelves with something that sells.
I’m surprised the global elites haven’t come up with “global sautéeing.”
Problem 1: whenever there is a consistent pattern of weather, of any type, the “forecasters” call upon the jet stream to explain why their predictions have been wrong, or accidentally right. But the movements over time of the jet stream seem to be totally unpredictable, reminding me when speeded up of the flickering lines on an oscilloscope, which would seem to indicate that weather is intrinsically random too, so all the weather reporters need to do is to tell us where the damn thing is.
Problem 2: does the jet stream really “carry weather systems across the Atlantic” or does it rather act as a barrier preventing the northern cold air masses from mixing with the southern warmer ones? Hence, overpoweringly, giving us our weather.
Problem 3: is the jet stream only present above about 10km and, if so, what is the significance of its influence at lower levels?
Problem 4: “shown a tendency to get stuck”: is there data to show this phenomenon? What possible connection can there be between an alleged increase in heat energy from global warming and a reduction, rather than an increase, in the volatility of a critical element of the atmosphere into which that extra heat is being input?
Problem 5: (as previously noted in an earlier response) “a school of thought that a warming climate is causing this change” (i.e. the blocked jet stream): what school, what thought, what evidence can there possibly be for such a lazy and stupid statement?
Problem 6: an apparently knowledgeable professor accepts that it will be “interesting to see if there is conclusive evidence that climate change has led to that”. My guess is that there won’t be any such evidence, and that we will hear nothing more on the subject until the next random fluctuation of the jet stream.
Problem 7: it looks like a chink of sanity appearing as the professor says “that’s going to be a pattern we see going forward in future”. What, that conclusive evidence will be required before any more statements are made on the causes of the mild warming over the last half-century? No – guessing again – I expect she means “climate change has led to so many (bad) outcomes, I wouldn’t be surprised if every minor aberration in the weather continues to be laid at the door of climate change”, caused, of course, by all of us wicked humans.
“forecasters” huh…?
– can we reward those who demonstrate practical skill in prediction and reassign those who don’t?
Re. problem 4 – see here: Blocking patterns.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/how-weather-works/high-and-low-pressure/blocks
Of course they won’t go anywhere near the fact that a meridional jet stream coincides with a solar minimum.
I can recall a whole summer of virtually every 24 hours having some rain which was explained by the jet stream being right across the UK instead of moving to the north during summers. This was with a zonal jet stream.
Typical British summer one year hot one year mediocre one year wet rinse and repeat
British is a keyword. But even a conversation about weather is no longer polite.
“that’s going to be a pattern we see going forward in future”.
I quite like that. Can you go backwards to the future? Ah – I seem to remember a film om those lines…
A sign of the poor literacy that abounds these days. I despair at a weight loss advert that has ‘more healthier’ in it. It is ‘more healthy’ or ‘healthier’ FFS.
Crowded House song: Weather With You.
Perhaps it could be the anthem for the climate change cultists.
There must be a reason why when two or more British people come together they invariably start talking about the weather.
I wonder what it could possibly be…
Has the BBC never heard of St.Swithins day (if it rains on the 15th July it will rain for 40 days)
I was always sceptical about the wisdom or otherwise of the St Swithin’s Day thing, but now I’m not so sure. I suspect that our ancestors, who were much closer to nature than we are, and for whom the weather was vitally important, observed patterns from year to year over prolonged periods. Perhaps the jet stream getting stuck around July, whether to the north (so hot and dry) or to the south (so cool and wet) of the UK is not a recent phenomenon. Perhaps it has long being a regular phenomenon, and perhaps our ancestors were very well aware of it. In which case, what’s climate change got to do with it?
You make a very interesting point Mark. Old wives’ tales, myths, fables, historical allegories etc etc often arise from a kernel of observed human experience or truth, many of their origins being long lost in the mists of time. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if a keen modern student of hydrology could immerse themselves in 3 centuries worth of CET figures and find the evidence to support the St Swithin’s theory? I’d be chuffed. The doomsters at the Met Office less so, I suspect.
Red sky at night etc
Works quite well
One local one where I grew up was if there was mist hanging on the sides of the hills/mountains like smoke from fires in the morning then it was going to rain for the rest of the day. That also had a good hit rate.
The red sky at night works with a westerly airstream as the colour comes from dust in the atmosphere showing weather system has passed.
Imagine if the Met Office in 1977 had claimed future summers would be hotter based on the one off unusually long hot summer of 1976……….. they would have looked pretty stupid.
I note no one appears to be mentioning the massive underwater volcano explosion off Tonga in 2022, the biggest on earth in 140 years, that may well be affecting weather patterns:
https://phys.org/news/2022-05-massive-eruption-tongan-volcano-explosion.html
Daily Sceptic :
Massive Water and Cloud Boost From Tonga Eruption Could Explain Recent Unusual Weather Patterns :
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/08/04/massive-water-and-cloud-boost-from-tonga-eruption-could-explain-recent-unusual-weather-patterns/
If you use the accepted climate models then yes the Tonga volcano explanation looks plausible.
The study makes a prediction and the prediction appears to be happening. The AGW doomsters don’t like this study they much prefer making predictions after the event (attribution studies).
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-022-01568-2
Roy Spencer mentioned it in his site.
It is unlikely that a 10% increase in the sparse vapour content of the stratosphere would have any effect on general temperature in the stratosphere, and even more unlikely (absurd in fact) that it would have an effect in the troposphere.
The bone-dry, bitterly cold, tenuous, body of air that is the lower stratosphere, is completely ineffective at either absorbing or emitting infra-red radiation, from the Sun or from the Troposphere- except for a slight effect from the carbon-dioxide molecules present. There are 3,000 molecules of these per million molecules of air. The recent addition of water vapour amounts to an addition of three or four water molecules per million molecules of air.
If an increase in water vapour were having any effect on the temperature in the stratosphere it would be to raise the temperature from its normal – 60 C. It is not rising. Check out the C10 layer:
https://images.remss.com/msu/msu_time_series.html
‘In recent years the jet stream has shown a tendency to get stuck’
[citation needed]
‘meaning that weather patterns can persist or become “blocked” in place for weeks. There is a school of thought that a warming climate is causing this change.’
How many fools does it take to make up a school of thought?
“I think the jury is out, but there is definitely some science showing that we are getting these much more persistent, static kind of weather patterns, similar to what we’ve got at the moment with the heatwaves,”
[citation needed]
‘said Prof Liz Bentley, from the Royal Meteorological Society.’
Cirrusly, Liz, you did all that work to become a professor and you stoop to stupid shit like this? You’d flunk any student who said such stupid things. Well, I hope you would.
“It will be interesting to see if there’s conclusive evidence that climate change has led to that.”
And WTF evidence could that possibly be? What is it you are waiting for that will tell?
“And that’s going to be a pattern that we see going forward in future.”
GROSS SPECULATION!
‘The authors of the Met Office study say that 2022’s record year for the UK was made much more likely by climate change.’
Splain that, you dicks.
‘”The heatwave that is happening now across southern Europe, the heatwave that we saw last year, all of these things are fitting into a pattern,” said Mr Kendon.’
[citation needed]
“These things emphasise that our climate is changing. And it’s changing now, and it’s changing fast.”
Data. Show us the data. All these petitio principii assertions are just juvenile.
‘Looking forward, under a medium emissions scenario, there’s a 1-in-15 chance that the UK would hit 40C in any one year by the end of the century.’
Just making it up while you go along.
‘”That trend for [extreme temperatures] is going to increase as we go through this century,” said Prof Liz Bentley.’
Just making it up . . . .
“If you look at future climate projections, we are on a path for hotter, drier summers. So 2022, for me was very much a sign of things to come in future years with our changing climate.”
Ahhh, projections. What have we here, laddie? Mysterious scribblings? A secret code? Oh, projections, no less! Projections, everybody!
‘Earlier this month, the government’s independent climate advisers warned the UK still needed to make climate change preparations a more important priority.’
My big old hairy butt! They are as independent as Trump’s prosecutor.
What we have here is junk science writ large. BBC and Bentley should be embarrassed. But they won’t be. It’s for The Cause.
‘Looking forward, under a medium emissions scenario, there’s a 1-in-15 chance that the UK would hit 40C in any one year by the end of the century.’
That’s a 14 in 15 (93.333% ) chance that it wont hit 40°C.
(apparently, when talking about temperatures, you need at least 3 decimal places to make people think you are an ex-Burt )
An Ex is a has been and a spurt is a drip under pressure
Doesn’t that depend on the deployment of Typhoon fighters?
In other words, we have clear and obvious natural causes for the weather but we’d like to blame those weather phenomena on climate change. We can’t but we really want to, so if i say it like this, it will sound as if we can. And yes, we are looking for the cause we wa tnto find, not looking for the cause.
I have to say, whomever drew that trend should be fired! There’s no trend whatsoever. The lowest reading is part of a supposed rising trend, as are the second and third lowest readings. The highest reading is part of a declining trend. It’s utter nonsense.
The BBC calls it a Heat Wave but the Met Office didn’t. Because the WMO definition of a heat wave is five days not 48 hours. It was 26degsC in Plymouth and raining, right?
The British definition of a heatwave used to be two fine days and a thunderstorm.
In my family three hots days and a thunderstorm was summer.
It took me precisely two minutes to find out the official WMO definition:
https://www.britannica.com/science/heat-wave-meteorology
Why cannot journalists who are writing articles or broadcasting do the same?
I guess they are simply not very interested in anything except doing agit-prop.
Though I do not ever listen to the BBC, I would not be surprised if it cites WMO definitions when it suits them and ignores them when it does not. The sort of people who work in the BBC (I once met some!) may not know that there is such a thing as careful definitions in science.
As for particular countries which ignore the WMO, the Meteorological Office actually requires THREE consecutive days above certain thresholds – thresholds which they raised recently in fact.* The U.S. Weather Bureau requires TWO days, but they also have to be unusually humid. That makes some sense as exemplifying the old, boring comment, “It’s not the heat, it’s the humidity!”
Since ALL the definitions are entirely relative to the localities and have no objective meaning at all** there is little sense to them except as a general warning – it may be a little more trying than you are used to.
Anyway, the shenanigans of the Met have been almost embarrassingly feeble this year and except for the already converted will have fallen on deaf ears.
As for Storm Antoni (why the silly spelling?), apparently it was a hurricane (‘Land Conditions – Devastation’ in the good old Beaufort Scale.) Not where anybody I know lives! It drizzled quite hard for a few hours and the wind may have reached a sustained level of 15 knots.
* It reflects the ‘fact’ that the climatology for 1981-2010 for the U.K. was a little higher than for the previous reference period.
** It did, once upon a time. It was coined in the U.S.A. to describe an actual mass of air that was arriving from somewhere else, where it had been created perfectly normally. This was always especially relevant in North America where masses of air regularly sweep down from the Arctic (a ‘dry, COLD-carrying WAVE of air’) and regularly push up from the Gulf of Mexico (a ‘moist, HEAT-carrying WAVE of air.’) With this sort of usage it only makes sense to announce a heat-wave in the U.K. when the hot air is actually coming from elsewhere – from Spain and North Africa, usually, with that haze of red sand.
The Elephant in the room?
“Readers may recall that we have reported on the massive amount of water vapor that has been injected into the stratosphere by the 2022 eruption of the Hunga-Tonga volcano. A recent study said a 13% increase in stratospheric water mass and a 5-fold increase of stratospheric aerosol load.
Water vapor is by far the strongest greenhouse gas according to NASA, and it stands to reason that the dramatic increase in stratospheric water vapor is having an effect on global temperature.
Water vapor is Earth’s most abundant greenhouse gas. It’s responsible for about half of Earth’s greenhouse effect — the process that occurs when gases in Earth’s atmosphere trap the Sun’s heat.
https://climate.nasa.gov/explore/ask-nasa-climate/3143/steamy-relationships-how-atmospheric-water-vapor-amplifies-earths-greenhouse-effect/“
“Elephant.”
You might be interested in my comment above, replying to W. Flood.
Quoting the article…
“…Quoting the article…”
They are shooting themselves in the foot if they are saying that a natural, temporary, situation is raising temperatures. We should ignore the next few cries of ‘hottest evah!’ (?)
The meteorological weather presenter consensus on TV and Twitter is that only AGW CO2 greenhouse gas forcings cause extreme weather or even any sort of weather.
Natural climate forcings have no effect at all, even a volcanic cataclysmic injection of water vapour into the Stratosphere has no effect on anything. Even cloud free skies won’t warm up the Mediterranean.
I am surprised that people on this site don’t understand such things.
If I had a pound for every Climate scientist who said temperature or rain fall was xx% higher or lower than it should be, I could carpet the Sahara Desert in solar panels.
Paul’s last sentence above got me thinking.
“You don’t need to invoke the climate bogeyman to explain English weather.”
In fact I got to thinking that the English Weather is ideal for the Alarmists. It is so erratic, unlike California for instance, that almost every year we can see deviations from a perceived norm or ideal. Call this erratic behaviour “extreme” and you can back up your assertions. If we had a more or less stable weather pattern each year, there would be little to shout about.
If we were a backwater somewhere on Earth little could be made of our gyrations but we are right in the middle of an area that is prosperous, populated and full of media reporting so we are wide open to the focus of the World.
Monty Don on GW Friday was blaming sharp winter cold snaps on Climate Change.
I shall ask the IPCC to add that to their list.
Monty Don knows …. how to keep his job !!
unlike the wonderful David Bellamy.