A Cold Start To The New Year????
December 30, 2023
By Paul Homewood
Some cold weather heading our way next weekend, according to Willie and the ECMWF models!
https://twitter.com/williemossop/status/1741049276522803407
The Met Office are hedging their bets:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/forecast/gcqzwtdw7#?date=2023-12-30
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
The Norwegian Meteorological Institute is forecasting very low temperatures where I live, starting on Saturday 6th January.
Wunderground for my corner of the South East shows a steady decline from Tuesday onwards but doesn’t go below freezing. Pressure steadily rises which may be bad news for windmills.
Just what the fragile power system of the UK needs?
I hope you have plenty of wood (or oil?) to get you through the cold, but tragically many people may be at risk, and a number will die. Will that change the minds of those set on lunactic policies?
I’ve got plenty of wood and oil and a generator and camping stoves. Minds won’t be changed – it will be an example of extreme weather brought about by climate change.
Global Warming causes Muslim terrorists to kill Christians
https://europeanconservative.com/articles/news/media-blames-christmas-massacre-of-160-nigerian-christians-on-climate-crisis/
First context is that anti-Muslims are going over the top and using OLD photos and videos of the June 2022 church attack to illustrate the story
Last week’s attack on Christian villagers was mainly at the their homes or in fields
Here’s Reuters strange spin
“… is often characterised as ethno-religious – chiefly Muslim Fulani herdsmen clashing with mainly Christian farmers
But experts and politicians say climate change and expanding agriculture are creating competition for land, pushing farmers and herders into conflict.
Nomadic cattle herders are from northern Nigeria, which is getting drier and becoming more prone to drought and floods. That is forcing them to trek further south, where farmers are increasing production as the population rapidly expands.
That means less land for nomads and their cattle, supporting the view among local people that the conflict is based on the availability of resources rather than ethnic or religious differences.
(BTW BBC completely suppressed the story in English web.. covered it in Pidgen)
So it’s getting greener but somehow worse for herders? And that would mean the marginal land is no good for farming now, so what’s the conflict? My bet is its the opposite. Populations are expanding and the area suitable for farming is expanding northwards into glazing lands.
We forecasters have known for a week now that the UK will be hit with a change to northerly air flows from Sunday 7 jan (transition will start on sat). These flows will last for at least a week and probably longer as no major flow change in sight yet. So yes its going to be cold. sub-zero temps most nights for all UK, and some days, and probably see snow covering all UK by the 14th. I’m out chopping more firewood tomorrow. Stock up with supplies and prepare to hunker down. Keep some candles to hand as well as your woodburners.
What about wind? Will it sustain UK energy needs?
If a high pressure settles over us and the North Sea there will be a lot of demand for French energy and gas. Luckily the Germans are keeping their coal power stations running for longer having been stupid in shutting their perfectly good nuclear plants.
Well, what a surprise….it’s winter. We in NZ have had snow in the south every spring month and still not summery
My MP, Flick Drummond , has issued some COP28 boilerplate lauding the tripling of windmills. That’s another fifty gigawatts for the UK. She is ignorant about the grid. I’ve asked her what the Tories will do when the wind doesn’t blow but no answer.
Ahh..it seems quite a few of our imbecillic politicians actually believe that “tripling windmills” will actually secure our electricity security. I think we’re going to have to suffer some electricity blackouts, and probably a few unfortunate people dying from cold, before reality will slowly start to seep into the addled brains of both Govt and Opposition politicians
SUDDEN STRATOSPHERIC WARMING: During the week before Christmas, a near-record cold wave hit the Arctic stratosphere. Temperatures as low as -75C created aurora-like polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) seen as far south as Italy. Now the opposite is happening. Suddenly, the Arctic stratosphere is warming.
. . .
When the stratosphere warms in this way, it’s a sign that the polar vortex is weakening, and might even change directions. Cold air bottled up in the Arctic can suddenly break free and spill down to lower latitudes.
https://spaceweather.com/archive.php?
view=1&day=31&month=12&year=2023
It increasingly seems to me, a very careful scientist by culture and profession that all this weather and climate forecasting is largely just a guessing game. More, it seems to be a guessing game practised by people who seem to want things to get worse, much worse.
They seem to be University people who have got stuck in the academy because they never had any ambition to practice a proper vocation to achieve anything except become a professor. Why are they “doom” motivated? Is that they are vegetarians even vegans? Are they anti-factory because they read too much Marx derived utopian dreams which dominated their libraries?
I just don’t understand why they simply cannot take the facts and then address the only absolutely certain that I can see which is that there are too many of us. Billions too many. They have all sprung up in my lifetime from the just about two billion when I was born.
That is the only problem we have. No amount of windmills will cure that – not even wooden ones. Why is this not understood: because our education system has crashed and is burning fiercely?
As someone with a science degree and 30 years analysing data, I’m pretty sure it’s all fraud now. Its completely impossible that every study discovers its worse than we thought. And if its worse than modelled, the models are wrong and thus the hypothesis is wrong. But what people have to understand is that it doesn’t matter. We know that minimum wages are wrong, that rent caps cause huge damage, that monopolies, whether private or public, produce higher costs and worse service. But it doesn’t matter, we still do all of those things. People won Nobel prizes for demonstrating that things like Industrial Strategies cannot work. But still we do them. Then there’s the anti-rational social sciences foisting racist and anti-woman policies on us. We can no longer claim to be rational and sensible people.
It seems, Phoenix, Man is unchanged over the centuries. The stage changes, but Man doesn’t.
‘I just don’t understand why they simply cannot take the facts and then address the only absolutely certain that I can see which is that there are too many of us.’
A queer thought. Too many of one’s own species.
“Billions too many [of us]. That is the only [sic] problem we have.”
I would not go quite so far. But I would agree that it is a problem and almost pathologically repressed from the consciousness of almost all ‘thinking people.’ Perhaps that is because the issue can not be neatly tied to – and blamed on – either ‘libertarian capitalism’ or ‘tyrannical socialism;’ and so there is not even a theoretical solution in the mental tool-kit; and the standard, knee-jerk, hate-patterns of modern politics, with the accompanying vicious Manichaean wet dreams, can not operate to give their usual warm fuzzy feelings.
It amazes me that literally 98% of the present world population tumbled in here to join me – without so much as a by-your-leave, or excuse me or, here’s some flowers!
It is probably not the absolute number of people that is the problem. It is the rapidity of the growth. I do not claim to have the foggiest idea how any of this can be changed without monstrous means, which any normal person must shrink from.
Some muttered darkly during Covid-19 that it was part of a plan to reduce the population of the world in a massive cull. If there was such a plan it was ridiculous. It is hard do anything about demographic trends. During all the fuss and artificial hysteria of the last four years, the stork was hard at work and brought some four hundred million new babies.
I am sure each new baby is lovely. That is the conundrum which Nature has contrived for our consciences. Each individual is a miracle – and a burden.
” I can see which is that there are too many of us. Billions too many. ”
With competent governments, the world is capable of supporting billions more humans. It’s the competence of governments that’s the primary issue.
You are too forgiving. Man is the only species that has members who loathe their species. They have been talked into it. Quill and Dave have been duped.
Every now and then they give the game away! As in temperatures “around normal for early January” which means precisely what in MetOfficeSpeak?
Roughly the same as the past 40 years? CET average? Latest projection from their computer jockeys in the basement?
“…around normal…”
Bad writing. They should simply use the one word, “typical.”
Sudden (polar) stratospheric warmings – and a cold wave for us – occur in about six out of ten northern winters. In a winter such as the present one, when the (equatorial) stratospheric winds are in the easterly phase of the quasi-biennial oscillation and additionally there is an El Nino in the Pacific, the chances are more like eight out of ten.
If there should be a cold wave in January, it will most certainly not be ‘Unprecedented!’ or even ‘Worrying!’
You realise, Dave, don’t you, that most of your second paragraph is a foreign language to climatologists. Real meteorologists will understand it but this stuff about equatorial stratospheric winds and quasi-biennial oscillation is surely intended to fudge the whole issue.
We need simple explanations that convince us that its our sinful emissions that are causing weather, not this sciencey-sounding stuff about winds and La Niñas and stratospheric warmings making us cold.
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“…around normal…”
In the UK, the weather is generally changeable, therefore “normal” = changeable.
I keep asking for the thoughts of others, and expert onservers and data collectors, but I think the world is becoming increasingly restless. I think the core may ( note “may”) be warming, heating the sea from the bottom up and increasing the number of volcanoes and earth quakes.
The consequences of all of which is significant weather changes.
Nothing the religious greens can blame is for!
Programmes covering the winter of 1963 occasionally feature on some obscure television channels, that was a tough winter. Useful comparisons could be made by the forecasters between current winter weather and the 1963 winter weather.