Sunday
Feb162014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Deliberately or otherwise, Slingo has misled the public
Feb 16, 2014 Climate: MetOffice Climate: WG2 Climate: other Almost every scientist who has said anything about the floods has said that there is no way to link them to global warming - Brian Hoskins was fairly clear about this on the Today programme. The latest is Matt Collins from the University of Exeter, quoted in the Mail on Sunday:
Professor Collins told The Mail on Sunday: ‘There is no evidence that global warming can cause the jet stream to get stuck in the way it has this winter. If this is due to climate change, it is outside our knowledge.’
Only Julia Slingo has tried the opposite tack. When asked about a possible link she said
...all the evidence suggests that climate change has a role to play’
Reader Comments (87)
Don't underestimate the ability of the dumbed down public to believe the BBC and CP Slingo.
Millipeed is using it as smoke screen to hide his own failings during his ministerial role in the worst government the UK ever had.
Who are now leading the poles.
What short memories people have.
They think Liebour are going to set off another non job free for all, there's no money left, remember.
No, they are going to inherit their own mess, at last.
A few recent key stats for the Environment Agency:
£395 million on wages (£592 million incl pensions) vs £219 million on capital projects + £20 million on maintaining rivers
£5 million spent on redundancies but permanent workforce increased from 10,701 to 11,177 in the past year
The real employment levels at Environment Agency actually stood at 12,252 people (temps and contractor personnel)
Budget and staffing levels that rival French, Danish, German, Swedish, Austrian and Canadian Environment Agencies COMBINED
Directors at the agency declined bonuses but 38 managers shared a pool of £334,000
Past two years, 14 employees left with six-figure cheques, some in excess of £150,000
Spending on maintaining culverts and channels to help the flow of watercourses dipped by £1.3 million last year
£3.6 million was trimmed off the budget to build or improve embankments that protect communities from floods
Environment Agency spent hundreds on 'equali-tea' gay awareness mugs... and £30,000 on gay pride marches
Spent over £250k from 2011 to mid-2012 on meetings at private venues, despite having over two dozen offices around the country
Nearly 7,000 vehicles (plus trucks) - more than one official vehicle for every two employees
Environment Agency bosses spent £2.4 million on PR alone (excluding staff wages) but refused £1.7million dredging in Somerset
Single water abstraction licence for Avoncliff costing £152 cost the taxpayer ~£611,000-£1.5 million
A £2 million Environment Agency case ended with a fine of just £1,000
20-25% of business travel costs lost to fraudulent cases costing an estimated £1.8-£4.5 million
Significant number of man-hours lost in abuse of flexi time, home working and annual leave
As she obviously has all this evidence then she should produce it and let it speak for itself in order to prove she was not deliberately misleading the Public and the Government.
Collins tweets "I don't disagree with Julia".
Presumably another way to put this would be that his views are "consistent with" hers.
Driveby: he is clearly backtracking to keep out of trouble. He has just rephrased his remark enough to stop it being a direct contradiction of his boss, which is a sensible career move given what happens to people who step out of line in the NHS, the police, and it appears almost every other area of the public seector.
The antipodean green parrot was held in check until the end of the Marr Show reading of the papers this am, whilst elsewhere Ed Miliband, Philip Hammond and Ed Davey publicly and emphatically renewed their vows to AGW/ CC in an attempt to breath life back into the Norwegian Blue.
A cynic might describe this as an attempt to displace blame for their own fluvial failures over the past twenty years whilst putting the gravy train back on it's track.
Vote UKIP in May 2014 - they won't like it up them!
"Is there anything not caused by climate change?"
A higher IQ.
Don"t worry, the government will soon make her a life peer, for her services to climate science.
Roy
The problem is that you don't know the future real world forcing when you run the models. The randomised effects include natural and industrial aerosols, volcanoes, rate of human CO2 production and other unpredictable variables.
One big volcano can have a big cooling effect, an active solar cycle can boost UV insolation. Neither are predictable five years ahead.
You can look back at model runs from five years ago and pick out those whose forcing best matched the real world data. You cannot look five years ahead and say which will fit best looking back from 2019.
Unfortunately a run which was a good fit to reality in 2014 may not fit as well after another 5 years.
Do I agree? if you could predict future forcings exactly it would make life easier, but it is, alas, not practical. I would have to say no.
Latest tweet from Mat Collins
Could one of you warm-mongers out there actually define what these people mean by "climate change"?
Jonathan Jones
Surprise, surprise, as predictable as the sun rising in the morning!
Wagons, circle, Yo!
Jimmy haigh
I am assuming your question is not rhetorical.
The climate system is accumulating energy. The amount of energy entering the atmosphere from the sun is greater than the amount of energy leaving. This is global warming.
The extra energy is melting ice, raising sea levels, shifting rainfall patterns, changing the behaviour of jetstreams, thawing tundra and having many other effects. Collectively, these are climate change.
What is driving the rising cost of natural disasters?
Prof. John McAneney
Managing Director
Dr. Ryan Crompton
Chief Research Officer
Risk Frontiers
Macquarie University
Australia
It is a widely held view that climate change arising from human activity is increasing the cost of natural disasters. This perception is false. While it is undeniable that the economic cost of natural disasters is rising rapidly, it is doing so because of growing concentrations of population and wealth in disaster-prone regions. So far studies of long-term insurance or economic disaster loss histories caused by extreme weather -tropical cyclones, floods, bushfires (wildfires) and storms- have been unable to identify a contribution from human-induced climate change. This is true for many different natural perils and across jurisdictions.
Given the inter-annual variance of natural disaster losses, identifying a climate change contribution with statistical confidence faces a formidable signal-to-noise problem. At least in respect to US tropical cyclone losses and based on current climate change projections, the emergence timescale has been shown to be of the order of many decades to centuries.
(The emergence timescale is the time taken for a climate change contribution to the losses to emerge with high statistical confidence). This being the case and in the absence of scientific clarity, decisions relating to climate change will have to be made in a climate of uncertainty and ignorance.
The uncertainty about actual outcomes of a warmer climate in terms of extreme weather and property damage strengthens the case for increased investment in disaster risk reduction for its own right, and as part of climate change adaptation policies. Risk-informed land use planning practices, hazard resilient building codes and defence measures such as flood levees hold the key but their implementation will require unpopular political decisions. Without such efforts the cost of natural disasters will continue to rise. Insurers have the benefit of being able to update their views of risk every 1-2 years, and so climate change should not be a main concern for the industry as long as underwriters understand company exposures, and price risks accordingly. Over time, good underwriting practice can send a strong message to government and homeowners to encourage risk-reducing behaviours.
I expect Collins and Slingo will produce a joint statement that reinforces the alarmist view without actually providing a shred of evidence to support it.
I find climate science so frustrating. No other branch of science would tolerate models that that regularly get their forecasts completely wrong, year after year after year, then continue to use them to make alarmist claims about future warming, sea levels rising, polar ice melting, and so on. Every time they publish the alarmist claims, the BBC, press, politicians and warmists generally, all wail that we are doomed, wring their hands and call for power stations to close, higher fuel costs and the erection of more useless windmills.
Then the observations fail to match reality, the models have failed again, but wait, here is the next round of alarmist papers and exaggerated forecasts. Here we go again. It goes on and on, each time diverging further from reality.
We really do live in a fantasy world where reality takes second place to political dogma, fanatical beliefs and greedy people who exploit ignorance and manipulate public opinion for their own gain.
It is depressing to witness group think at its extreme.
She has to say it, otherwise the Green Party sacks her for not believing in climate change...
Jonathon Jones
I stand corrected.
Slingo's a political animal in its purest sense
Mat Collins, he has had his string pulled and told just who is in charge and which side this bread if buttered on.
Expect humble contrition for his 'sins ' no matter what the facts .
Bish, you obviously didn't see Question Time then.
Prof mark Winston said that the Flooding was caused by Climate Change.
Even the CEO of SEPA is alleged to have said publically that
'...there was actually no natural weather left, the incremental difference caused by humans can be blamed for extreme weather events.'
To be fair that was last year and not said in relation to the flooding in Somerset.
see:http://www.2020climategroup.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/2020_Lecture_Sept_2013_Report.pdf
The most sensible utterance to date on this media outbreak of climate hysteria was when Lord Lawson told BBC Radio 4's Today programme he didn't blame the climate scientists for not knowing whether there was a link between flooding and climate change. "Climate and weather is quite extraordinarily complex and this is a new form of science. All I blame them for is pretending they know when they don't."
So, ostensibly, it implies +1 for Matt Collins's frankness (or rather David Rose for extracting the admission) and -1 for Julia Slingo's opportunist pretense.
That is like maxing your credit card and leaving your children to pay the bill.
Feb 16, 2014 at 1:04 PM | Unregistered Commenter Entropic man
[Manners] Bust the credit card now and both us and our grand children will be living in poverty. Your a clown !! Brain of rocking horse.
Verney is spot on. Adaption for humans is what we are good at and so is nature as she has proven for the past 4.5 billions years.
Just how much rubbish will the Brits put up with before they get rid of this dishonest lot and in this case the dissembling Met Office? Did the Brits not fight, along with the colonials on two occasions and win the right for Britain to remain free of particular European domination, and in this instance the domination of greenie ideas which appear to have originated in Europe and now come from the EU and have infested the Met Office? Despite the aforesaid hard fought victories the nation appears to have no remedy for this nonsense and is waffling on and being their polite selves and allowing the ruin of its finances, its countryside with windmills and lately with this flooding, and risking its future and it seems there is no remedy. Britain's national preoccupation with the weather has been subverted by ideologues and charlatans and is ruining the "mother" country.
Why is the language of climate science so obscure and why does the media perpetuate its use? Supposedly carbon dioxide is the cause of global warming. "Climate change" is a competely meaningless concept. How on earth can a "believer in climate change" make any rational sense? Climate change seems to now be accepted as an obscure way of referring to global warming. Now the debate is about whether the current UK flooding is caused by climate change, so presumably this is a way to obscure the question whether the UK flooding is caused by global warming. But if it is accepted that carbon dioxide is the cause of global warming, then the real plain language question must be whether UK flooding is caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Is the Met Office really saying that CO2 as 0.04% of the atmosphere is responsible for current flooding localized to the south of England? Does the UK public really believe this? Just so irrational!
I fear that if all these climate disasters happen more frequently than they did in the past due to climate change, there won't be enough time in the year to pack them all in.
/sarc
Watch this space - have sent an official request to Tim Yeo, Chair of the E&CC committee, to ensure myself and DR Gadian present our concerns about the current climate calamities to senior personnel at the Met Office. Although I have more faith in the sceptic community than the other bunch, they do have access to all the knobs and buttons that are needed to scrutinise this whole AGW fiasco.
Alan Davidson: I totally agree.
They adopted climate change as a label when global warming lost credibility due to the fact it wasn't happening.
So what does climate change actually mean? Why, anything they choose it to mean. So if it is warming, cooling, snowing, drought, floods, windy, heat wave, then it is climate change and climate change is scary.
Climate change is garbage, more like. At least we know what it is not. It is not temperature change, because that has been constant for 17+ years. So when they talk of climate change, ask them to be more specific.
This is the sort of thing I've been dreading for years.
This IS, of course, climate change. The Gulf stream has shifted and that has changed the climate. On the other hand, it's probably not Climate Change, since we don't know what's caused it, it doesn't agree with anybody's predictions about Global Warming, and it could change back at any minute for all we know.
So the world, or at least the Northern Hemisphere, is going to hell, and the people we look to for leadership in this crisis are the same turkeys who have been trying to "hide the decline" and deal with every argument by showing us pictures of polar bears on ice floes.
It's worth remembering that this exact thing happened a few years ago in Eastern Europe. Widespread flooding, not in accordance with any accepted Climate Change scenario. At that time nobody was saying "this is proof", they were saying "what is wrong with our climate models?" But then Eastern Europe just doesn't have the same newsworthyness as the Somerset Levels.
UNCLE GUS
Concerns about the Gulf Stream were brought to the attention of DECC four years ago. The undersecretary to the minster threatened to throw his superior down the lift shaft - the refusal to deal with Gulf Stream was high on the 'brush-under-the-carpet' agenda. Said hero for the cause got a sideways promotion then left with a serious debilitating stress related condition. Nuf said.
A main reason why disasters are happening is that people are living in more fragile areas.
1. Very few structures dating before 1800 AD flood because they were built outside of areas which flood. Churches in Romney Marsh very rarely are flooded.Tewkesbury Abbey was surrounded by water in 2007 but it was not flooded because it is located on a small knoll.
2. Homes destroyed by forest fires because people live in areas which when, dry the vegetation catches fire. More people, the greater chance of someone causing a spark.
3. Mudslides occur because development cuts into slopes and removes trees so that when they become saturated they fail . A major problem where development encroaches on steep slopes comprising unstable soil/rock in areas subject to heavy rain.
4. Modern concrete and steel structures are built in earthquake zones but often they contain in-sufficient steel. Consequently, buildings collapse killing people.
5. Earthquakes cause fires because gas mains are ruptured and fallen electrical cables cause sparks.
6. Tsunamis kill more people if they hit areas densely populated.
If one looks at homes from the Stone Age many were built on piles platforms above water for protection from humans. These homes were often accessed by piled raised causeways.
Houses built before 1800 along coasts where storms are common are rarely damaged because the fisher folk built them in safe places.
Population growth combined with poor engineering is a problem.
Charlie: "Population growth combined with poor engineering is a problem."
Yup. In California they haven't built a big dam since 1979 despite a 16 million population increase.
When the current drought cycle occurs on schedule, idiots freak out. You can't live in a desert without water storage.
One of the many, many untrue claims AGW fanatics depend on is the assertion that "the climate system is accumulating energy".
Where is it "accumulating energy"?
Weather events discharge and dissipate energy. They don't accumulate it.
And weather events are not increasing in frequency or severity.
Is there a climate battery? The oceans, the fanatics and hypesters claim. Except for the lack of evidence, it is very credible.
As to the Gulf stream changing- please show us the evidence.
'nuf said.
I have a hunch that when our times are reviewed by later historians not yet born, the date of great storm of 15/16 October 1987 will be given much prominence.
Was this the day when the UK Met Office threw-in the towel? The day when they realised that how ever well they did their job, they could still be on the receiving end of unjustified vilification for not predicting the unpredictable?
-Thus it would not matter wtf they said in public...Why do a good, but limited, job if you never get kudos for it?
Or was 15 Oct 1987 the date when senior personnel concluded that the government, the civil service, the UK public, and the world at large, were gullible enough to believe that the Met Office could and should predict such things?
-Thus it would not matter wtf they said in public...Why do a good, but limited, job, when you can get kudos for doing a much worse one, secure in the knowledge of not getting rumbled? When alarming people about weather events that don't happen pays better than making worthy but dull predictions about weather that does happen, why should anybody be surprised? You get what you select for.
Oh.... I just remembered.... there was also the Burns' Day storm of 1990. Wikipedia, cough, states the Met Office reported 97 related deaths due to that event. Julia Slingo is older than me. As far as I can see, she has no excuse for not remembering these events. I mean, jssfckngchrstnbk, if 97 deaths occurred today due to a weather event, can you imagine what the BBC et. al. would be claiming about global warming?
How have we fallen so far, so quickly?
Hunter
Two main energy sinks at present. Ice is melting off the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets at about 500 cubic kilometres a year. The latent heat of fusion needed to turn ice at 0C into water at 0C shows in the energy budget, but not as a temperature change.
The other battery is ocean heat content. It soaks up most if the excess incoming energySince there are 1.3 billion cubic kilometres of ocean and they have a high specific heat capacity a lot of heat can be absorbed for a small temperature rise.
Entropic man (4:29 PM) -
If I've done the math right, the energy required to melt 500 km^3 of ice per year, comes to 0.01 W/m^2 when averaged over the surface of the earth. Not quite negligible, but not a large fraction of the energy imbalance; if I remember correctly (an unreliable method, but references aren't at hand), OHC rate (0-2000m depth) is around 0.6 W/m^2.
Harold W
I've done the same sum and got the same result. Ice melt is contributing about 40% to the sea level rise, but on!y a couple of % to the energy absorbtion. OHC is where pretty well all the excess energy is going.
I got the same answer for energy uptake both ways. Back calculate from thermal expansion or from the temperature change and you get an answer similar to the imbalance.
The agreement between the three metrics is why I am pretty sure that we' re looking at a real effect.