Articles Tagged "Met Office Decadal Forecast"
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Saturday, March 9th 2013, 4:50 PM EST
Met Office data show only a tiny change in world temperatures
Readers of this column do not need to be reminded why it is so important for us to know whether the world is truly in the grip of runaway global warming, or whether this belief has all been based on a colossal misreading of the scientific evidence. One reason why it is so vital for us to understand this, of course, has been all those devastating political responses to this fear, which promise to change our way of life out of recognition.
Just in Britain alone, paying for our Climate Change Act is officially due to cost us up to £18 billion a year. It is now driving our entire national energy policy, threatening us with ever more crippling bills, power blackouts, and the sight of our countryside being covered in ever more giant wind factories. In convincing the world that we must make such a dramatic response to man-made climate change, nothing has been more persuasive than those graphs that purport to show global temperature soaring to dangerous levels.
That iconic “hockey stick” graph, showing temperatures recently shooting up into the stratosphere, may now have been discredited. But just as important have been all those graphs showing how temperatures have changed in recent decades. These have the effect of greatly exaggerating those changes, by narrowly focusing just on what are called temperature “anomalies”, showing how they have risen and fallen round their average level in the past 30-odd years.
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Friday, March 8th 2013, 10:15 AM EST
In response to our complaint to an article by James Delingpole in the Daily Mail on 10 January 2013 the Daily Mail has now published a response from the Met Office Chairman on its letters page.
Met Office mettle
James Delingpole’s views misrepresent the Met Office’s reputation for world-class weather and climate forecasting and research (Mail). The UK can be rightly proud that the Met Office is among the world’s top two national weather forecasting services.
We’re proud that, in independent surveys, more than 90 per cent of the public regard our warnings as useful and more than 80 per cent of the UK public trust our forecasts and warnings. This respect for our professionalism and impartiality has been built over 150 years of forecasting for the nation.
We aim to use our world leading scientific expertise to protect life and property and increase prosperity and wellbeing right across the UK. We provide impartial services ranging from forecasts and warnings to the public, services to transport operators, so we can fly, drive or sail safely, and advice to the energy, retail and health sectors so we can all go about our daily lives safely and efficiently.
views 56,387
Tuesday, January 29th 2013, 12:34 AM EST
The Met Office says temperatures will remain flat until 2017
A newly released study from the Research Council of Norway has climate change alarmists abuzz. One of the things the alarmists have been pushing for is to halt warming at a 2°C increase at any cost (and they mean that literally). In the Norwegian study, much to the alarmists' dismay, researchers have arrived at an estimate of 1.9°C as the most likely level of future warming. The report also recognizes that temperatures have stabilized at 2000 levels for the past decade even though CO2 levels have continued to rise. Meanwhile, a reconstruction of the Eemian interglacial from the new NEEM ice core, published in the journal Nature, shows that in spite of a climate 8°C warmer than that of the past millennium, the ice in Northern Greenland was only a few hundred meters lower than its present level. This finding casts doubt on the projected melting of ice sheets and resulting sea-level rise.
After rising sharply through the 1990s, Earth’s mean surface temperature has leveled off nearly completely at its 2000 level. Ocean warming also appears to have stabilized, despite the fact that CO2 emissions and other anthropogenic factors claimed to contribute to global warming are still on the rise. Clearly, a number of factors affect climate development, not just the usual suspects cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
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Sunday, January 20th 2013, 5:09 PM EST
How dramatically is global warming really? NASA researchers have shown that the temperature rise has taken a break for 15 years. There are plenty of plausible explanations for why global warming has stalled. However, the number of guesses also shows how little the climate is understood.
Flowers are blooming earlier, sea level is rising – no doubt the climate is changing. The last year, as reported by NASA, was the ninth warmest since measurements began 132 years ago. The past decade was the warmest in this period.
But it has become common knowledge for some time that the climate has recently developed differently than predicted. The warming has stalled for 15 years; the upward trend in the average global temperature has not continued since 1998 (sic). “The standstill has led to the suggestion that global warming has stopped,” NASA admit.
views 30,278
Sunday, January 20th 2013, 4:40 PM EST
The Science and Public Policy Institute has been asked to comment on the apparent inconsistency between the news that July 2012 was the warmest July since 1895 in the contiguous United States and the news that the Meteorological Office in the UK has cut its global warming forecast for the coming years. The present paper is a response to that interesting question.
Early in August 2012, the NOAA issued a statement to the effect that July 2012 had been the hottest month in the contiguous U.S. since records began in 1895. NOAA said the July 2012 temperature had been 77.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 0.2 F° warmer than the previous July record, set in 1936.
However, NOAA’s statement was based on incomplete information that has since been revised. Updated data available at the NCDC website (NCDC is the division of NOAA that maintains national climatic data for the United States) show that July 2012’s temperature was not 77.6 °F, as NOAA had previously claimed, but 76.9 °F, half a degree Fahrenheit below the record 77.4 °F set in July 1936
Even this revised value may be a considerable exaggeration. In response to criticisms of the siting of U.S. temperature monitoring stations, in 2008 NOAA introduced a new network of carefully sited stations with up-to-date, standardized, properly monitored equipment. The Climate Reference Network, as it is called, shows that the July temperature for the continental U.S. was 75.6 °F, lower by 1.3 °F than stated by the NOAA in August 2012 based on incomplete data from its older, poorly-sited stations influenced by urban heat-island effects, and lower by 2 full Fahrenheit degrees than the 77.6 °F that NOAA had published in August 2012.
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Friday, January 18th 2013, 4:02 PM EST
Australia burns; the US rebuilds from Sandy and counts the cost of record heat; and the UK ponders its weirdest year of weather.
The UK Chief Scientist tells me weather extremes now worry scientists as much or more than overall global warming. "If this gets worse, how are farmers going to operate?" he asks.
Yet at the same time there's a relentless spread of climate confusion in parts of the media. The Met Office, a world-leading purveyor of climate information, recently suffered reputational damage that will increase public confusion over whether climate change is important at all.
It happened after bloggers seized on a Met Office paper revising downward its decadal global temperature projection for 2017.
Scientists have been puzzling for some time over exactly what combination of factors is preventing the earth getting even warmer - maybe changes in solar activity, ocean currents or emissions of aerosol pollution.
views 49,235
Monday, January 14th 2013, 11:58 AM EST
The reporting of the Met Office’s new half-decadal prediction of global temperatures, which now forecasts no rise in warming over the next five years (in sharp contrast to previous record warm forecasts) – has highlighted two lessons in reporting climate change. One is the violation of the old maxim that people are entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts – in climate change reporting it seems that facts can be flexible. The other is that it seems you can’t please anyone, anytime. Here is the BBC’s original broadcast of the recent Met Office forecast put out at 7.00 am Tuesday 8th January, BBC Radio 4.
Newsreader: The Met Office has revised downwards its projection for climate change through to 2017. The new figure suggests that although global temperatures will be forced above their long-term average because of greenhouse gases, the recent slowdown in warming will continue. More details from our environment analyst Roger Harrabin.
Roger Harrabin: Last year the Met Office projected that as greenhouse gases increase, the world’s temperature would be 0.54 degrees warmer than the long-term average by 2016. The new experimental Met Office computer model, looking a year further ahead, projects that the Earth will continue to warm, but the increase will be about 20% less than the previous calculation. If the new number proves accurate, there will have been little additional warming for two decades. The Met Office says natural cycles have caused the recent slowdown in warming, including maybe changes in the sun and ocean currents. Mainstream climate scientists say that when the natural cooling factors change again, temperatures will be driven up further by greenhouse gases.
I have said before that I did not think Roger’s script was very good, the use of figures was confusing in my view, but I think he did get the story basically right; that the Met Office has a new projection to 2017, based on a new computer model, and that will mean little additional warming for two decades (although I would have said none). He said the temperature slowdown was due to natural influences and that temperatures would eventually go up again.
Source Link:
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views 62,583
Sunday, January 13th 2013, 4:02 AM EST
They share a name – David – and a passion for nature. For a while they also shared a place in the vanguard of nature documentary-making, broadcasting from every corner of the globe to the homes of millions. But while one, Attenborough, basks in the glow of national treasure status, the other claims he is now a pariah.
"You're early," David Bellamy roars, dropping the wheelbarrow he is pushing around his four-acre garden in Co Durham. He strides towards me, all rolling gait, unruly white hair and beard. "Go inside while I just finish off."
Though he turns 80 next Friday, Bellamy has a remarkable physique for a man his age, over 6ft tall and slender, muscular even, despite a little trouble when he walks. The voice and appearance have stayed in pretty good nick since his heyday as a scientist, conservationist and TV personality. He was a household name, inspiring Lenny Henry's "grapple me grapenuts" catchphrase and even a Ribena commercial.
views 41,584
Sunday, January 13th 2013, 3:33 AM EST
Last year The Mail on Sunday reported a stunning fact: that global warming had ‘paused’ for 16 years. The Met Office’s own monthly figures showed there had been no statistically significant increase in the world’s temperature since 1997.
We were vilified. One Green website in the US said our report was ‘utter bilge’ that had to be ‘exposed and attacked’.
The Met Office issued a press release claiming it was misleading, before quietly admitting a few days later that it was true that the world had not got significantly warmer since 1997 after all. A Guardian columnist wondered how we could be ‘punished’.
But then last week, the rest of the media caught up with our report. On Tuesday, news finally broke of a revised Met Office ‘decadal forecast’, which not only acknowledges the pause, but predicts it will continue at least until 2017. It says world temperatures are likely to stay around 0.43 degrees above the long-term average – as by then they will have done for 20 years.
views 57,105
Saturday, January 12th 2013, 5:22 PM EST
Inevitably last week it didn’t take long for the bush fires set off by Australia’s “hottest summer ever” to be blamed on runaway global warming. Rather less attention was given to the heavy snow in Jerusalem (worst for 20 years) or the abnormal cold bringing death and destruction to China (worst for 30 years), northern India (coldest for 77 years) and Alaska, with average temperatures down in the past decade by more than a degree. But another story, which did attract coverage across the world, was the latest in a seemingly endless series of embarrassments for the UK Met Office.
Some of this story may be familiar – how on Christmas Eve the Met Office sneaked on to its website a revised version of the graph it had posted a year earlier showing its prediction of global temperatures for the next five years. Not until January 5 did sharp-eyed climate bloggers notice how different this was from the graph it replaced. When the two graphs were posted together on Tallbloke’s Talkshop, this was soon picked up by the Global Warming Policy Foundation which whizzed it around the media.
views 39,842
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