The alternative climate reality that the U.K. Met Office seeks to occupy has moved a step nearer with news that a group of its top scientists has proposed adopting a radical new method of calculating climate change. The scientific method of calculating temperature trends over at least 30 years should be ditched, and replaced with 10 years of actual data merged with model projections for the next decade. The Met Office undoubtedly hopes that it can point to the passing of the 1.5°C ‘guard-rail’ in short order. This is junk science-on-stilts, and is undoubtedly driven by the desire to push the Net Zero collectivist agenda.
In a paper led by Professor Richard Betts, the Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office, it is noted that the target of 1.5°C warming from pre-industrial levels is written into the 2016 Paris climate agreement and breaching it “will trigger questions on what needs to be done to meet the agreement’s goal”. Under current science-based understandings, the breaching of 1.5°C during anomalous warm spells of a month or two, as happened in 2016, 2017, 2019, 2020 and 2023, does not count. Even going above 1.5°C for a year in the next five years would not count. A new trend indicator is obviously needed. The Met Office proposes adding just 10 years’ past data to forecasts from a climate model programmed to produce temperature rises of up to 3.2°C during the next 80 years. By declaring an average 20-year temperature based around the current year, this ‘blend’ will provide ”an instantaneous indicator of current warming”.
It will do no such thing. In the supplementary notes to the paper, the authors disclose that they have used a computer model ‘pathway’, RCP4.5, that allows for a possible rise in temperatures of up to 3.2°C within 80 years. Given that global warming has barely risen by much more than 0.2°C over the last 25 years, this is a ludicrous stretch of the imagination. Declaring the threshold of 1.5°C, a political target set for politicians, has been passed based on these figures and using this highly politicised method would indicate that reality is rapidly departing from the Met Office station.
Using anomalous spikes in global temperature, invariably caused in the short-term by natural variations such as El Niño, is endemic throughout mainstream climate activism. ‘Joining the dots’ of individual bad weather events is now the go-to method to provoke alarm. So easily promoted and popular is the scare that an entire pseudoscience field has grown up using computer models to claim that individual weather events can be attributed to the actions of humans. ‘Weather’ and ‘climate’ have been deliberately confused. Climate trends have been shortened, and the weather somehow extended to suggest a group of individual events indicates a much longer term pattern. Meanwhile, the use of a 30-year trend dates back to the start of reliable temperature records from 1900, and was set almost 100 years ago by the International Meteorological Organisation. It is an arbitrary set period, but gives an accurate temperature trend record, smoothing out the inevitable, but distorting, anomalies.
By its latest actions, the Met Office demonstrates that the old-fashioned scientific way lacks suitability when Net Zero political work needs to be done. Trends can only be detected over time, leading to unwelcome delays in being able to point to an exact period when any threshold has been passed. Whilst accepting that an individual year of 1.5°C will not breach the Paris agreement so-called guard-rail, the Met Office claims that its instant indicator will “provide clarity” and will “reduce delays that would result from waiting until the end of the 20-year period”. The Met Office looks forward to the day when its new climate trend indicator comes with an IPCC ‘confidence’ or ‘high likelihood’ statement such as, “it is likely that the current global warming level has now reached (or exceeded) 1.5°C”. In subsequent years, this might become, “it is very likely that the current global warming level exceeded 1.5°C in year X”.
Why is this latest proposal from the state-funded Met Office junk science-on-stilts? A variety of reasons include that climate models have barely an accurate temperature forecast between them, despite 40 years of trying. Inputting opinions that the temperature of the Earth might rise by over 3°C in less than 80 years is hardly likely to improve their accuracy. There are also legitimate questions to be asked about the global temperature datasets that record past temperatures. Well-documented poor placing of measuring devices, unadjusted urban heat effects and frequent retrospective warming uplifts to the overall records do not inspire the greatest of confidence. At its HadCRUT5 global database, the Met Office has added around 30% extra warming over the last few years.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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The adjustments of historic temperature data is clearly an admission that they got it wrong previously, on numerous occasions. Is this expected to give anyone except the feeblest-minded any confidence that they have it right now?
Follow the money to find the $cience….U$ 1 Trillion p.a. market, for ‘climate’, adding in all projects, grants, funds, financing etc. What can you buy with that money?
Climate is now bigger than the criminal industry of Pharma (a measley $100-150 billion in p.a. revenue but enough to buy institutions in every country). I bet not 1 in 10 sheeple understand that money and power is behind the climate crap. 0 to do with science.
Good science is when the data doesn’t fit the theory, the theory is changed.
Bad science is when the data doesn’t fit the theory, the data is changed.
or the just invent the data, as has been done for many measurement stations for years.
I adjusted the football results and West Ham are now World Club Champions. —-And all you “deniers” can shut it.
Raw unadjusted data shows no warmtarding trend, and in many locations that have temp stations, a cooling trend. Most of the planet is bereft of temp reading stations and those that do often put them in urban heat sinks. Rural and satellite data don’t support the warmtards (remember the ‘pause’ 1995-2015?).
ClimateGate – hide the decline. Met just continuing the fraud with their fake models. They will do a NASA and GISS and bake in higher temps.
IPCC, COP et al feed off of the fake models,which I assume the Met will be handsomely compensated for by TPTB. All against a fake target of 1.5 C (thermodynamically you can double plant food and nothing happens to the temps, see Milankovitch cycles for more info).
In Guardtard in 1989 a headline was published screaming that nations must give up national sovereignty to save us from the fraudulent greenhouse effect (pro tip, Co2 is exothermic and endothermic and the earth is an open system).
If you want to control society – control health and energy and control energy by committing fraud and graft about ‘climate’. And what % of the sheeple believe any of this crap? Too many.
It was in the late 50s that the Rockefellers decided that they could drastically expand business by grabbing control of two things: health and climate/environment. They were joined by Maurice Strong, Henry Kissinger, Klaus Schwab. We see it all coming together: WEF, WHO.
Anthony Watts surfacestations.org …
Why are they even bothering with this latest bit of climate fraud? They’re going to forcibly implement all the Net Zero b*llox no matter what the weather is doing or whatever made up figures these bought-and-paid-for climate shills produce.
In other news, the excess death statistics, now based on the Imperial College modelling of 2020, show that we exceeded the half million deaths projected by the model over two years ago, and over twenty percent of the country is now dead, though it should be stressed that many of these deaths are asymptomatic..
If for political, (or any other purposes), you set off with a known conclusion you intend to reach you will strive to shoehorn any old crap into the garbage equation you may be compelled to use as a vector for your views. Just don’t expect us to believe it.
Perhaps we should redefine Political Parties, so that the Met Office becomes one of them.
This will sit very nicely with the WHO’s global power grab. If countries sign up to the updates to the International Health Regulations and the Pandemic Treaty, one man – the WHO’s director Tedros – will be able to declare a PHEIC (Public Health Emergency of International Concern). This can be an expected – not actual global climate Emergency. It is not restricted to pandemics. The MET will be fabricating junk science to backup the legal enforcement of lockdowns, quarantined, surveillance, medical interventions etc.
I remind everyone that both government and opposition are intending to sign away our sovereignty to a bunch of criminals by making IHR legally-binding.
Now the MET Office is being mobilised to help facilitate the global power grab, things are coming together quite nicely for the would-be tyrants.
Is there any part of science that is not being affected by nonsense like this?
Not if it is politicised. ——-Maybe if it is about black holes or something where the government has no stake in it, we might expect honest science, but for everything else we get “official science” rather than “science”
So nothing with real funding behind it then!
Yes. Science is fine. This isn’t science.
“Computer says hot!”
A Climate Scientist is someone that uses global average temperatures to forecast, using computer models, where global average temperatures will be in 30 years or even in 100 years time. This isn’t really a science is it?
It is obvious that the Met Office are just useful idiots and working for someone else other than providing a weather service for the population at large. They are fully in step with the following:
“The data don’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We’re basing them upon the climate models”
UN Commission on Global Biodiversity
“Rather than seeing models as describing literal truth, we ought to see them as convenient fictions which try to provide something useful”
Monika Kopacz
“No matter if the science is all phoney, there are collateral environmental benefits…. climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world”
Jill Singer
“We’ve got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” Maurice Strong
“A global climate treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect.”
Maurice Strong
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
David Suzuki
“Human society cannot basically stop the destruction of the environment under capitalism. Socialism is the only structure that makes it possible”
David Suzuki
And this from a 2006 Senate Hearing…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1rj00BoItw
We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period!
Yep I am familiar with all of those quotes. Thanks for refreshing my memory. The whole thing STINKS. ———I also like an old one from Mark Twain way back when he said “Ah yes Science ,one gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact”—-If Mr Twain was around today he would surely be getting stacks of book material out of the phony climate crisis.
Thanks varmint. I know it’s repetition, but that is what the ‘enemy’ is doing and with fanatical intent, and I know you know this also, but…The following is from the opening of the Russian film of Tolystoy’s War and Peace
“It is always the simplest ideas that lead to the greatest consequences. My idea, in it’s entirety is that if vile people unite and constitute a force then decent people are obliged to do the same; just that.”
Apologies as my list appears to have been corrupted (probably by me) as the names are not correct. But what was said was said. The two below make more sense within the context of this article.
“The data don’t matter. We’re not basing our recommendations [for reductions in carbon dioxide emissions] upon the data. We’re basing them upon the climate models.”
Chris Folland UK Met Office
“Rather than seeing models as describing literal truth, we ought to see them as convenient fictions which try to provide something useful.”
David Frame Climate Modeller Oxford University
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Maurice Strong
This in reality has been the case for a long time. I think it was Stephen Schneider who said ages ago that we don’t base it on the data, we base it on the models. ——-We saw from the Climategate emails the brazen attempt to distort science and keep the true story of temperatures away from public view. This cadre of activist government funded data adjusters were deleting emails all over the place when they realised freedom of Information requests might reveal their deceptions. —“We cannot account for the lack of warming and it’s a travesty we can’t” etc etc. —-They knew there was no dangerous warming and were determined we would not know that so government policies regarding energy and climate would not be undermined.—— Remember the Hockey Stick shenanigans where the authors of that graph refused to release their data, code and methodology so others could check their work, and it took a dogged Steve McIntyre about 5 years graft without the required information to expose it as a sham and it was quietly dropped from IPCC reports. ———Pocket calculators are very useful tools. They save us time, but they are not much good if the numbers we punch into them are wrong. It is the same with climate models. Putting wrong numbers into models will give you the wrong answer, and the problem is that many of the climate parameters going into those models are either poorly understood or unknown. ECS (Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity) eg. This number determines how sensitive the earths atmosphere is to increasing amounts of CO2. If the number is low then there will not be much in the way of temperature increase. But the true value for ECS is not known. ——-So far is it any wonder then that all of the models have been WRONG?
When thermometers don’t do the job, even those by runways, wheel out a good ol’ model.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/the-climate-scaremongers-mosquito-fever/
Paul Holmewood’s take down of this week’s eco nonsense.
It’s a cracker!
I’d rather the Met Office focussed on trying to get tomorrow’s forecast right! They are useless these days; their one-day forward modelling is often way off. I use Weather Underground now – much more reliable than the Met Office.
The bloody Met cannot manage a forecast one hour in advance. Absolutely useless.
Where’s Michael Fish when we need him?
…
The Emperor really doesn’t have any clothes. And neither does any of his staff.
Any “$cience emanating from models is worthless junk as far as I am concerned. Knowing that Pantsdown is modeller-in-chief tells us all we need to know about modelling.
A 30-year period?! That’s just 1 solitary climate trend data point! This confirms only one thing, what jokers the Met Office now are.
Why not just ditch it all and get the King, The Pope and Di Caprio to make energy policy?
This is similar to the Michael Mann tree ring data stunt. He used tree ring data to calculate past temperatures and then stitched actual temperature on the end to produce the hockey stick. Actual temperatures is also a nonsense because it is impossible to represent the complex climate by a single number. An average temperature is just a calculated statistic and it has no physical meaning. There is no experiment that can be done to derive an average temperature because an average requires a total and there is no total temperature, unlike mass, for example.
Some great comments. but I’d just like to say … thanks for the article Chris. On this particular issue, we need, apart from all the scientists gearing up to kick back, to add some big secular hitters to our battalion … Douglas Murray, Bjorn Lomberg … Jordan Petersen …
I forgot to mention ————–Models do not “predict”. —–They “project”——There is a subtle but important difference.