Archive
Harrabin/BBC’s Warm-or-Cold Reticence (The Met Office’s Hidden Third Winter Forecast)
Evidently (and evidently again) the Met Office did tell some people that the winter was going to be mild (pettifogging protestations notwithstanding). And likely (and likely again) it did tell some other people that the winter was going to be harsh.
This might mean they have told some other people yet, that the winter was going to be average. Could those people please step forward. You know, that’s the best way for the Met Office to try to pull off a “Derren Brown” and tell the world how good their work really is.
But that’s not the only strange thing about this ongoing story.
The news about the “exceptionally cold winter” forecast was broken by the BBC’s Roger Harrabin (of Jo Abbess fame), apparently from the pages of the Radio Times. I cannot be 100% sure because I do not read the Radio Times, there is no mention of Harrabin on the RT website and the closest online trace to Harrabin’s words is an article from the Daily Telegraph. Obviously there is no reason to believe the Telegraph has made up Harrabin’s quotes, and given that there’s been no protestation by Harrabin himself the Telegraph story is very very likely to be true.
- Why then, has Harrabin said not a thing about this all in the BBC News website?
- How can the Met Office secretly telling something very important to somebody somewhere in the UK Government at local or national level NOT be an important news item to tell the world about in first person, given it also is has appeared in almost 30 mainstream media articles in the UK?
- Why has nobody at the BBC written anything on the BBC News website, so that the only references you find are in readers’ comments?
Finally…as absence of news is as usual both news of absence, and an open door for speculation….
Volcanic Debacle, Failed Models, And Mean “Greens”
Sounds like anthropogenic global warming, doesn’t it? The danger exists, but it is being senselessly exaggerated.
What if behind the decision to stop flights on a continental scale were the failure of a whole way of thinking public policy in Europe, with an asinine fixation on using computer models?
What if the aftermath of weeks of anthropogenic fear about millions dying of swine flu or maybe not, and the aftermath of weeks of anthropogenic fear about volcanic cloud making airplanes drop from the sky like flies or maybe not…what if people finally opened their eyes about the extreme limitations of computer modeling?
Who knows. Meanwhile, let me state clearly that I am fully aware of the potential risks for an airplane flying in the wrong conditions and at the wrong time through a cloud of volcanic origin. But there are enough indications to doubt the necessity of a reaction even remotely like the irrational panic that is causing the closure of European air spaces.
For example, the famous BA9 flight that almost crashed in 1982, was not the only flight to pass through that area. Wikipedia reports that the airspace around the Galunggung volcano was temporarily closed after the accident, reopened days later and permanently shut only after a similar incident to a Singapore Airlines flight around 19 days later, on July 13, 1982.
Indeed, there are indications that the first “encounter” with the ashes from Galunggung had occurred on April 5. That is, in three months and with little precaution taken, only twice the conditions were bad enough for flights to experience severe problems. And even if we consider the famous eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, despite the resulting cloud being able to travel 8,000 kilometers to the East Coast of Africa, the total tally was of 20 “damaged” planes, none of them as badly as BA9.
Think about it…billions and billions of flight hours since the Wright brothers, thousands and thousands of flight accidents of all sort and a grand total of 22 issues with volcanic ash, none of it deadly.
Sounds like anthropogenic global warming, doesn’t it? The danger exists, but it is being senselessly exaggerated. Even a recent NASA study, stating that virtually invisible and imperceptible volcanic clouds can still cause serious damage to an aircraft, can’t dispel the doubts since, were that to be true, the effect of ash would have been long noticed in the maintenance of thousands of airplanes.
Anyway…where reason fails, money can still rule the day, hence the airlines’ discontent about the decision to keep everybody grounded. Lufthansa and Air Berlin protested first to the newspapers, and even Niki Lauda moved swiftly from caution to crying foul after finding out that the cloud of Eyjafjallajökull is not everywhere and anywhere in Europe.
Besides, once the Met Office has been found out as the main reason for the air space closure, and one of its computer models, memories of recent colossal gaffes and prediction errors just make it humanly impossible to avoid a good deal of skepticism…
There is also a clear problem with procedures. What has happened in 2010 that is so fundamentalle different from 2004 for example, when the Icelandic volcano Grímsvötn caused disruption of flights but in a limited area, and only resulted in precaution about flying some parts of the North Sea?
On Sunday, trade associations of European airports and airlines have issued a statement asking why a definitely not uncommon event (Iceland is full of volcanoes and eruptions follow one another) provoked different reactions in Europe than anywhere else in the world.
How difficult could it be to close part of the Icelandic and Atlantic airspace, fly some planes and launch some balloons to measure the situation, double-check aircrafts after they land in surrounding areas? And in fact that is what is probably going to happen anyway, and measurements have already started in earnest on Monday 19 (details in German: here, here and here).
Meanwhile, reknown experts are starting to speak up against the madness. Here’s an interview (in Italian) with Prof Guido Visconti of the University of L’Aquila, Italy. Prof Visconti teaches Atmospheric Physics, is Director of the local Extreme Phenomena Center, and has worked in the past with NASA and Harvard University. His opinion? “Much precaution about nothing…we have started taking measurements today in Italy and what we see is small and unimportant“.
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Concluding with a note of regret, one has to report (but not necessarily link) various sites who take actual pleasure in what has happened, because for a few days you there is a little less emissions of CO2, and also humanity gets to suffer instead of being happy and flying. Too bad for the people of Kenya, right?
Ash Cloud – Expect Major Measurement News On Tuesday
Can’t reveal much now but well-respected international air measurement organizations have been busy measuring up the volcanic material above the European skies, on Monday (finally). This means that we can expect for early Tuesday major news about where there are actual problems for flying.
This may or may not have anything to do with the newly-found courage by UE Transport Ministers, finally seeing the light in managing the volcanic ash risk, instead of cowering in panic.
Met Office Atmospheric Models Cause International Chaos – Why Am I Not Surprised?
The old computational forecasting wizards at the Met Office are behind the decision of closing so much of Europe’s airspace.
Of course they are.
(yes, it’s “well-proven” models, no direct measurement, the works!)
From the Herald Sun:
German airlines Lufthansa and Air Berlin said the decision to close much of Europe’s airspace was not based on proper testing. They said that their aircraft showed no signs of damage after flying without passengers.
“The decision to close the airspace was made exclusively as a result of data from a computer simulation at the Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in London,” Air Berlin chief executive Joachim Hunold said.
The “Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre in London”? Here it is, at the Met Office:
When a volcano in its area of responsibility erupts, the London Volcanic Ash Advisory Centre (VAAC), based at the Met Office, runs the NAME atmospheric dispersion model. This, and similar models, are well proven and we can use them to predict the spread of pollutants following a chemical or nuclear leak or even the spread of airborne diseases. In this case we use the dispersion model to forecast the spread of volcanic ash plumes.
The London VAAC forecaster provides the location, start time, release height and the top and bottom of the plume (if known) and the model is run. It takes about 15 minutes to complete.
Output from this model is in a map-based graphical format, and can detail expected ash concentrations over a large region. The forecaster uses this detail to prepare the volcanic ash advisory message with the expected positions of the ash plume for up to 24 hours ahead.
The Advisory message is then used by aviation authorities to decide whether airspace needs to be closed to prevent aircraft encountering volcanic ash.
Note how the Met Office washes its hands from any decision, and yet in all those years with NAME, it has apparently decided not to complement the model results with in-situ measurements. A “revolutionary” idea brought forward at present by Lufthansa itself…
“Not one single weather balloon has been sent up to measure how much volcanic ash is in the air.” Lufthansa spokesman Klaus Walter added. “The flight ban, made on the basis just of computer calculations, is resulting in billion-high losses for the economy […] In future we demand that reliable measurements are presented before a flying ban is imposed.”
UK Government: Met Office Source Code ‘Available For External Use’
As one of the signatories of the epetition on “CRU Source codes” I just received the following message:
—– Forwarded Message —-
From: 10 Downing Street
To: e-petition signatories
Sent: Tue, November 10, 2009 4:18:55 PM
Subject: Government response to petition ‘CRUSourceCodes’You signed a petition asking the Prime Minister to “Force the Climate Research Unit, or other publicly funded organisations to release the source codes used in their computer models.”
The Prime Minister’s Office has responded to that petition and you can view it here:
http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page21266
Prime Minister’s Office
Petition information – http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/CRUSourceCodes/
And this is the text from that page 21266 (my emphasis):
The Government is strongly committed to the principles of freedom of information, and the Environmental Information Regulations 2004 specifically implement our international obligations over access to environmental information. The Met Office’s commitment to openness and transparency in the conduct of their operations and to the sharing of information is set out clearly on their website (http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/legal/foi.html).
Simple and transparent licences are in place to facilitate the re-use of the Met Office’s meteorological and climate data, and large quantities are freely available for academic and personal use, for example through the UK Climate Impacts Programme and the British Atmospheric Data Centre.
The Met Office’s climate models are configurations based on the Unified Model (UM), the numerical modelling system developed and used by the Met Office to produce all their weather forecasts and climate predictions.
You may be interested to know that the UM, including source code, is available for external use under licence. For general research, the licence is free; the Met Office just asks individuals to submit an abstract describing the research to be undertaken, and to provide an annual report describing the work undertaken, the results achieved and future work plans.
To improve access to their climate models, the Met Office has worked with Reading and Bristol Universities and NERC to develop a low-resolution version which can be run on a PC and is available to all UM licence holders.
Further Information on how to apply for a research licence can be found on the Met Office website.
(http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/science/creating/working_together/um_collaboration.html)
Climate Is Weather When It Is Not Climate, Weather Is Climate When It Is Not Weather. Or Not?
or…”Climate Belief In Disarray”
Front-page article today by Andrew C Revkin on the International Herald Tribune about the problem of “selling” any urgency for warming-stopping CO2 emission cuts to the public in a non-warming planet (now that that concept has been accepted even by the hardest climate integralist).
Parts of what is reported by Revkin is interesting as it appears there is no shortage of scientists providing all sorts of opinions on why the world has not been warming as expected. Trouble is, if the recent 10-year-long set of observations showing “non-warming” cannot be used to falsify AGW, then no 10-year-long set of any observation showing anything can be used to demonstrate AGW either.
Therefore there is no meaning in the just-released climate forecasts by the Met Office talking about “the odds of a 15-year pause” after analysing “how often decades with a neutral trend in global mean temperature occurred in computer modelled climate change simulations” (my emphasis).
In fact, some are fond to say that climate is a 30-year-long average of weather. Well, if that is true, all we should be scientifically able to talk about with any amount of knowledge, is the climate trends for… 1979.
Everything else is (interesting, but just) speculation.
ps Dr Mojib Latif says he “gives about 200 talks to the public, business leaders and officials each year“. There are 365 days, in most years. At what times during the year is then “climate science” studied at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Kiel, Germany? And shall we worry about the absence of private life for AGW scientist-advocates?
pps Shame to Revkin for publishing this absurdist remark by Joe Romm: “We need all the unmuffled warnings we can get“. Why? Because Romm is a known “muffler” himself.
BBC Wakes Up To Benefits Of Warming (And To AGW Skepticism)
It’s an early Christmas for AGW skeptics in the UK with the BBC all of a sudden abandoning it’s monolithic “the world will turn into cinder” orthodoxy.
Step forward Stephen Sackur, broadcasting a series of programmes about Greenland (with one article saying that “scientific studies of the Greenland Ice Sheet” may not necessarily “indicate that catastrophe is around the corner“; and a video with a very optimistic Greenlander (at around 1m30s) who should be made to tour all Greenpeace and WWF meetings).
And step forward…Roger Harrabin (!!!), finally fed up alongside millions of fellow citizens with the baseless climatic forecasts by the MetOffice, demonstrably wrong for three years in a row. So fed up, Mr Harrabin, that he’s given some BBC space to Piers Corbyn (!!!!!).
UK Met Office (and the BBC): A Warm Summer Is A Good Summer
Now it’s the UK Met Office and the BBC delivering us the “good news” that a warmer-than-average summer is indeed a “much better” summer. Who would have guessed, when in the past they have been warning us no end about the risks, dangers, threats caused by…warmer-than average temperatures?
The story starts with dear old Roger Harrabin near the end of the BBC Radio4 Six O’Clock News for April 30, 2009 (click here to listen to the programme in full). Harrabin interviews Pat Boyle from the Met Office about their just-published seasonal forecast for Summer 2009 (“Summer temperatures across the UK are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or below average for the three months of summer“).
Imagine the happy surprise upon hearing Harrabin describe Ms Boyle as “delighted” about the “good news“; Ms Boyle herself talking of “good news” for the “UK tourism industry“, for “people staying at home” and for “farmers“.
That’s right: “farmers“, as in “people able to produce more stuff from the cultivation of the soil and the husbandry of animal because the summer is going to be warmer than average”. And so it is official: a warmer summer is a better summer indeed.
Note also the phraseology used by Chief Meteorologist Ewen McCallum (full transcript) in a YouTube-available interview:
I think last year and the year before were absolute miserable summers. […] This summer will be back to much better summers […] So, much better – get the BBQ out. […] So, a pretty good summer.
Even when avoiding any positive tone in the related web article about a possible “sizzling summer”, Harrabin can’t help mentioning “cheery optimism” near the end in the sense of “being optimist it is going to be a good summer”.
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So is the idea of “warming” finally presented on the BBC in a positive light? How can this be for real? Remember back in 2005, when “millions” were expected to be “hit by global warming”, and “animals” too, and the English country garden was “unlikely to survive in the South East in its present form” because of 1.5-3C of warming?
But don’t you worry. With Copenhagen’s huge Climate Change Extravaganza coming up in December 2009, expect plenty of warming stories in the BBC, and elsewhere in the media, as soon as the thermometer will hit the 30C/86F mark.
Warm Weather Does Not Concern The UK Met Office
An entire article about the unfavourable effects of the weather on people’s health, and not a single mention of anything relating to warmer conditions…
Does anybody know why the BBC and the UK Met Office are unable to logically follow the above, and proclaim a very, very good side of the expected warming in the next years?
Any Way It Goes, It’s Still “Global Warming”
The British Met Office forecast a cooler year but no matter…even that, is not enough to contradict global warming caused by anthropogenic emissions…
There HAS to be a point where all this shameful rhetoric will HAVE to STOP.
Does anybody know of any testable condition that would refute AGW? Unless there is a 10C drop in world temperature in a year, that is.
The Unbearable Nakedness of CLIMATE CHANGE 