Tuesday
Feb252014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill GWPF TV on the floods
Feb 25, 2014 Climate: WG2 GWPF GWPF have put out an excellent short film about the floods and the alleged link to climate change.
Feb 25, 2014 Climate: WG2 GWPF
Reader Comments (36)
Personal copies of this video should be posted to: David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband and, of course Ed Davey. In fact perhaps all MPs should be forced to watch it. No good sending it to the BBC.
What an excellent, informative film. It should be shown in all schools, particularly if they show Al Gore's propaganda movie.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc is a logical fallacy.
The video shows, at about 1:10, a document that was issued on 21.11.13, by the Met Office. The document is available at
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/m/8/A3_plots-precip-DJF-2.pdf
I found the document by googling this:
"21.11.13" site:metoffice.gov.uk
The google results list the title of the document as “below-average precipitation”. That must have been the title at the time that Google indexed the document. On the Met Office website, the title is now changed to “A3 plots-precip-DJF-2”.
Excellent film. The first I've seen of Benny Peiser on film, who comes across very well. Very measured and non-hysterical.
Invite George Monbiot for comment. He's recently been very interested in the causes of flooding, and even made his own video on it. He rightly attributes much of the problem to poor land management - but just can't move away from throwing in a little CC hysteria (I'm optimistic he will eventually change his view).
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2014/feb/17/george-monbiot-canoes-uk-floods-video
True, dat.
Slightly off track, but the MET Office rainfall anomaly maps show the Somerset levels had normal rainfall in November and December, and only slightly (100-150 %) elevated rainfall in January. And that's all it took to cause a disaster.
Nothing to do with river dredging, of course, they just need a few more trees in the surrounding hills - that'll fix it.
Douglas J. Keenan
Thanks, very interesting on many counts, including the search technique!
The Met Office make it up as they go along.
They have over-sold the idea that they actually know what they are talking about when it comes to climate and predicting the weather more than five days in advance.
Changing the story line so that it tracks how the weather actually turned out simply confirms they are a bunch of spivs who have so far got away with selling a dodgy product to some gullible politicians and who are determined to continue the scam.
Great video. So a few years ago drought was down to AGW and now its flooding. It's really hilarious. And Dame Julia doesn't seem to count snow as precipitation. I've sent the link to my press lists.
Re: Feb 25, 2014 at 12:21 PM | Martin A
Totally agree - the Met Office, particularly Slingo, simply make it up as they go along!!!
Unfortunately the Met Office don't seem to do 'reality' they prefer their virtual world of climate models.
Back in the winter of 2010 for example when Julia Slingo Chief Scientist of the Met Office tried to tell us that the bitterly cold spell we were experiencing was a 'local' event (the third cold winter in a row that the Met Office had predicted would be 'mild' which wasn't!!)
"This is not a global event; it is very much confined to the UK and Western Europe and if you look over at Greenland, for example, you see that it's exceptionally warm there."
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-uk-may-be-cold-but-its-still-a-warm-world-says-met-office-chief-2165492.html
Except we didn't just "look over to Greenland"
we looked at the rest of the world, and what did we find -
unusually, snow at Christmas in Australia
http://phys.org/news/2010-12-australia-swaps-summer-christmas.html
Atlanta, with its first white Christmas since 1882
http://theglobalherald.com/usa-weather-atlanta-georgia-experiences-first-white-christmas-since-1882/8510/
people in Northern India 'reeling under intense cold conditions'
http://www.deccanherald.com/content/123129/cold-conditions-continue-northern-india.html
the authorities struggling to cope as huge snowdrifts made the streets impassible in St.Petersburg
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-world/st-petersburg-icicle-patrol-fights-winter-hazards-20101224-1977d.html
4000 vehicles stranded on a freeway blocked by ice as severe cold swept southern China
http://www.beijingnews.net/story/720966
... so the cold we had in the UK wasn't quite so localised after all despite what our Met.Office told us!!!
The UK Met Off hasn't yet sent one of the minions alonfg to the blogs to defend their crap. I supposed it's difficult to defend any as wrong as this forecast without looking incredibly stupid. Mind you, that hasn't stop them in the past.
Mr Betts ? R U there ?
Brilliant video. As posted above, ALL MPs (and media anchors) should be forced to view it....!
In the light of events, Her Dameship makes herself look incredibly stupid...
Douglas J. Keenan: "That must have been the title at the time that Google indexed the document."
Possibly not. If you click the "repeat the search with the omitted results included" link, Google presents two versions of each file (A3_plots-temp-DJF.pdf as well as A3_plots-temp-DJF-2.pdf). For the "DJF" file, one is listed by its file name, the other listed as "Here". This suggests that "Here" and "below-average precipitation." were text fields in an original document which linked to the .pdf files, and from which Google first located those files. (Rather than your suggestion that these are former document titles.) E.g., Google located these files by running across a reference which went something like "[start of tag to DJF file]Here[end tag] is the three-month forecast, indicating [start of tag to DJF-2 file]below-average precipitation.[end tag]"
That said, I don't really know how Google gets the "title" line of its hits for items like .pdf files. Above is just speculation, based on the uninformative "Here" of one file, and the full-stop in the title of the other.
@ Peter Stroud - I just mailed the link to the whole House of Commons
BBC Reporter on the recent droughts: "Where I'm standing now should be under water."
I couldn't agree more.
It's good to see Peiser mentioning the IPCC SREX. I've written more on this and on what the IPCC AR5 says about floods.
Despite the Met Office’s tax funded £35 million super-computer I get the impression that all met office forecasts, apart from short range forecasts where weather is being physically tracked, are made on the basis of recent history and climate change confirmation bias.
@Feb 25, 2014 at 11:35 AM | oakwood
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Richard North at EU Referendum has skewered the details of Moonbat's assertions re the Levels comprehensively. That despite the fact that Moonbat knows more about everything than anybody else. Or would have us believe so.
What does Benny Peiser know about climate change? He's a sports psychologist!
Monty - wrong. Do some research. He's a social anthropologist.
Well, his Wikipedia entry is a bit ambiguous. However, even if you are right, it still doesn't mean he knows anything about climate change.....
Seems he knows more about the climate than all the collective big brains in the Met a Office...by several orders of magnitude!
Mailman
@ Monty. What does Professor Slingo know about climate change?
Really, what does anyone know about climate change?
I think I am more of a reader of the printed page than a viewer of videos, but this one was well-worth watching. It is timely, and contains many sharp points while somehow, in these trying times, remaining very civil and straightforward.
The pushers of climate alarm are in their own view saving the planet, but in my view they are actually helping weaken three things: the morale of the young, the industry of their parents, and our ability to cope with climate variation. The recent floods could well be used as an illustration of all of this. The weakening of respect for scientists, politicians journalists, financiers, and other professions prominently positioned on the alarm bandwagon will follow in due course. For some of us, it has happened already.
Nassim Taleb probably knows more than 97% of climate scientivists. But then, what has probability got to do with anything? Is that a black swan I see majestically navigating the Somerset Levels? Quick, better protect it from fear, uncertainty and doubt. Surely there's a quick buck left in there somewhere, they can't have all drowned. Anyone care to flip a coin? Swans I win; linear regressive rabbits in the headlights, you lose. Never mind, put your straight edges down and pack the balls back into Bayes’ little black nonsense bag, anyone know any good scrumpy drinking games? Confirmation bias is worse than the common cold; better order up the chasers. It’ll be chaos again tomorrow just the same. Arrr, well and truly squared my ‘ansomes, d'ya see what it did to my eye teeth? Purest battery acid, nothing finer.
God help us- I've seen better student presentations than Slingo's bumbling, hesitant delivery.
What on Earth is she is she paid for?
How did she get there in the first place- positive discrimination?
As a relative latecomer to formal education, when I eventually entered the halls of academe and worked my way through to a qualification I was singularly unimpressed by some of the very senior staffers I met along that journey who saw themselves as figures of considerable authority in every sense of the word. To many outside those halls, said senior staffers were held in rather less than stellar regard.
As one of my lecturers advised me when we filed into the graduation ceremony 'You must remember that any profession is like a septic tank - the big chunks always float to the top'.
Why are Slingo's public performances so unimpressive? Bolstered and buttressed by an immense edifice of public money and government certainty, she comes across as someone who, clearly over-promoted, can do little more than parrot the party line, contradicting herself at every turn, apparently unable to make any coherent statement.
We are invited to believe that this bumbling figure is the chief scientist of the Met. Office. She may, it's true, be more impressive away from the public gaze, though this seems unlikely.
In the meantime, apparently seduced by the dazzle of the office she occupies, in reality pulled hither and yon by her puppet masters, she presides over a once admirable organisation reduced to the production of patent propaganda.
Sad.
Incredibly well done video I thought.
The floods man made Climate Change or man made Incompetance .
Cant blame Climate Change on bad planning.
When water falls out the sky and lands on the ground it has to go somewhere.
The floods do make great TV pictures but apparently its less than a thousand homes that have been affected by localised riverside looding in a nation of 20 million households.
I love the comment by Dame Julia at about 2:20. 'snow has a much less water content than rain'.
So which part of snow is not made of water?
I can appreciate the confusion. Its a bit like the question: what's heavier, a pound of lead or a pound of feathers?
Does any know whether the Met Office had large reduction in funds at the end of the Cold War in early 90s and has since then been looking for a cause. The Met Office was set up to provide information for mariners and then became heavily involved for provide information for the RAF and RN. Is it know looking to justify it's large income ?
Slingo did indeed not impress much in that clip. But where and when do the pushers of alarm over our CO2 ever look impressive to informed observers?
Gore can still do orchestrated rallies for his cause such as this one, and that is impressive albeit not in a good way.
Where can you find a single one of them of whom you could readily say, 'there's an impressive man/woman' other than in some kind of Machiavellian or cynical sense? I have not managed to track one down yet. Which is odd given that these people are intent on saving the planet, and at least some of their leaders ought to be a bit more admirable you might suppose for such a noble cause.