Brrrrr! It's the Warmest Year Ever!

[Teddy Bear]

Consider this passage from an article by Susan Watts at the BBC titled Yes it's cold... and it's still getting warmer from an exchange she had with Dr Adam Scaife at the Met Office who is head of Seasonal to Decadal Prediction, which includes seasonal forecasting, decadal forecasting and modelling of climate variability.

After the barbecue summer fall out, the Met Office has of course stopped giving out seasonal forecasts - at least to the general public. But here's what he had to say about this week's record-breaking weather.

Why is it so cold in northern Europe so early?

"What's happened so far is consistent with El Nino/La Nina signals." Briefly put, in an El Nino year, like that of last winter, the Pacific is warm, and Europe's winters are cold and dry. In a La Nina year, which is where we are now, European winters are warmer and wetter.

But all of that is for LATE winter. In EARLY winter the situation is flipped, so cold and dry in a La Nina year - ie now. But later on this winter, possibly in January (though no one knows for sure), it should start to get warmer than it was last winter. Dr Scaife stressed that it's all very variable, so don't hold him (or me) to that.

The reason it is hard to be sure is that the El Nino/La Nina signal is strong enough only to be seen over a number of years, and not strong enough to use to determine an outcome. "In any individual year, there are lots of other fluctuations that can hide it," Dr Scaife said. Examples would be volcanic activity (strong enough for ash to reach the stratosphere), and what's going on over the Atlantic Ocean.

Is it just me, or does anybody else think this Met Office 'explanation' is just begging for sarcasm? Or maybe it wouldn't be begging for sarcasm if you had a particularly hard day where sarcasm was the last thing you wanted to consider.

Sorry I couldn't help it I must have been infected by what I was reading.

Put this above article into context, and bear in mind the annual Climate Change Conference is going on, this time in Cancun, Mexico where at least they can count on being globally warmer than Copenhagen, where it was held last year, and the AGW lobby needs to cling to something.

Naturally the BBC is all to willing to help them in their cause.

Fortunately James Delingpole at The Telegraph, among others, sees the humour in all of this and shares it with us.

Brrrrr! It's the Warmest Year Ever!

By James Delingpole Politics Last updated: December 6th, 2010

One of the things that makes hectoring, joke-free comedian Marcus Brigstocke weally, WEALLY cwoss are people who go: “If global warming is happening how come it’s so cold outside?” As he explains here (about 20 mins in) in his latest veritable Stalin show trial of a mirth routine: “The weather where you live is not the global climate. The temperature is not the same the world over.” Indeed, Marcus. Thanks for that. It’s ‘funny because it’s true’, right?

What Brigstocke would like to us to believe, channeling the Met Office and apologists for the global warming industry generally, is that the world continues to get hotter and hotter, whatever the evil climate change deniers to say. So here are some facts to put the Met Office’s claims into perspective, courtesy of Dr David Whitehouse for the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

If the media headlines are to be believed 2010 is heading to be either the warmest or in the top three warmest years since the instrumental global temperature records began 150 years ago, and proof that the world is getting ever warmer. But looking more closely at the data reveals a different picture.

2010 will be remembered for just two warm months, attributable to the El Nino effect, with the rest of the year being nothing but average, or less than average temperature.

With November and Decembers data still to come in (that will account for 16% of the year’s data) the UK Met Office estimates the temperature anomaly (with respect to the end of the 19th century) for 2010 so far as 0.756 deg C. As it has been cooling for the past 4 months we can expect that figure to decline below the 2005 0.747 deg C level and the El Nino influenced 1998 of 0.820 deg C.

2010 will therefore be no higher than the third warmest year, possibly lower.

Warm Spring

What has made 2010 warm is March and June due to El Nino, a short-term natural effect and nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming.

January was cooler than January in 2007, 2005, 2004, 2003, 2002 and 1998.

February was cooler than February in 2007, 2004, 2002, and 1998.

March was exceptionally warm at a temperature anomaly of 0.971. However it was, given the errors, statistically comparable with March 2008 (0.907) and March 1990 (0.910).

April was cooler than April 2007, 2005, and 1998.

May was cooler than May 2003 and 1998.

June was exceptionally warm at 0.827 deg C though statistically identical to June 2005 (0.825) and 1998.

July, when things started to cool, was cooler than July 2006, 2005 and 1998.

August was cooler than August 2009, about the same as 2005, and cooler than 2001 and 1998.

September was cooler than September 2009, 2007, 2005, 2001 and 1998.

October the last month for which there are records ­ was cooler than October 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005, 2004, 2003 and 1998.

The pattern is therefore of an unexceptional year except for a Spring/early summer El Nino that elevated temperatures.

There is no evidence whatsoever that the lack of warming seen in the global average annual temperatures seen in the last decade has changed.

Check the figures for yourself here.

Definitely also worth a look if you haven’t seen it already is this piece in the Mail On Sunday by David Rose titled: What happened to the ‘warmest year on record’? The truth is global warming has halted.’

Last week at Cancun, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give £20billion immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5 degrees higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production.

The maths isn’t complicated. If the planet were going to be six degrees hotter by the century’s end, it should be getting warmer by 0.6 degrees each decade; if two degrees, then by 0.2 degrees every ten years. Fortunately, it isn’t.

Actually, with the exception of 1998 – a ‘blip’ year when temperatures spiked because of a strong ‘El Nino’ effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) – the data on the Met Office’s and CRU’s own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.

They go up a bit, then down a bit, but those small rises and falls amount to less than their measuring system’s acknowledged margin of error. They have no statistical significance and reveal no evidence of any trend at all.

Meanwhile the great Booker weighed in with this trenchant piece, subtitled “The global warming scare was fun while it lasted, but the joke’s over“:

If, last week, frozen behind a snowdrift, you heard a faint hysterical squeaking, it might well have been the sound of those 20,000 delegates holed up behind a wall of armed security guards in the sun-drenched Mexican holiday resort of Cancun, telling each other that the world is more threatened by runaway global warming than ever. Between their tequilas and lavish meals paid for by the world’s taxpayers, they heard how, by 2060, global temperatures will have risen by 4 degrees Celsius; how the Maldives and Tuvalu are sinking below the waves faster than ever; how the survival of salmon is threatened by CO2-induced acidification of the oceans; how the UN must ban incandescent light bulbs throughout the world.

Meanwhile, Dr Rajendra Pachauri was telling us that we must spend hundreds of billions on covering the world’s oceans with iron filings, on building giant mirrors out in space and on painting all the world’s roofs white to keep out the heat from the sun.

“Scientists”, we were told, are calling for everyone to be issued with a “carbon ration card”, to halt all Western economic growth for 20 years.

And the Sunday Express was reminding us that by early next year around 5.5 million British households will be living in “fuel poverty” thanks to the soaring energy bills artificially – and entirely unnecessarily – inflated by David Cameron’s and Chris Huhne’s insane plan to destroy the British countryside with Hoo Sticks (aka wind turbines over half the size of Canary Wharf tower) and solar panels.