Tears on TV: the living hell and horror of delivering a 40C forecast

By Jo Nova

Modern science is just a competition to see who can cry the most. It’s national policy by agony aunt analysis. The terror and tears are right there in the national policy news at The Guardian. Six months after the UK experienced a hypothetical 40 degree minute the media are still dining out on the psychoanalysis of it.

Outlook? Terrifying: TV weather presenters on the hell and horror of the climate crisis

Guardian

What is it like to have a front row seat for the worst show in the world? Four meteorologists describe how they are explaining the reality to viewers – and coping with it themselves

Long gone is the British stiff upper lip as the Luftwaffe bomb London, now beach weather brings tears:

Switching channels, the ITV meteorologist Laura Tobin, who does the weather bulletins on Good Morning Britain, was also on duty that day. Like Rich, she had been watching the models with a mixture of incredulity and dread. “I remember when I did my first bulletin on that Tuesday morning I forecast that we would break 40C. Then when I sat down and chatted to my producer, I […]

How do we panic about warming during a maunder-type freeze?

Is this the way the Great Global Warming Scare fades out?

The UK newspapers are full of “Maunder Freeze Coming” as forecast by Ineson et al.[1] Rest assured, the solar-driven-cold is only a local effect, only 0.1C, and only a vague short 20 to 40 winters to come. The Sun, which has been ruled out as a major cause of global warming, is still not a cause of global warming — it’s just a minor technical issue called UV from a local star, which will be affecting an ocean current. Then the Big 6.6 degrees of heatstroke will land upon us.

Britain could be on the verge of a mini Ice Age as the Sun enters a cooler phase, the Met Office warned yesterday.

The last big chill was felt hundreds of years ago when Frost Fairs were held on the frozen River Thames.

However the Met Office said the new freeze will not be enough to cancel out the effects of global warming.

We’ve seen this all before, but not on this scale. If there was a volatility index — like a VIX for climate-PR — it would be setting records. The contradictions […]

UK Met Office uses graphical tricks to hide the pause

The UK Met Office went to some effort to graph the last 160 years, from hottest calendar year to coldest.

Name the scientific reason:

1. Because the order of the calendar years is important.

The graph reveals mysterious patterns — Years ending in 3, 4, or 5 are more likely to be hotter. Years containing a six are statistically more likely to be green.

OR

2. Because climate models show a linear rise in temperatures, and no “pause”, and this graph does too. Glance at it sideways and be afraid!

The Met Office used to say one year doesn’t mean anything, only long term trends matter.

Now they graph the noise.

Thanks to Barry Woods for pointing me at this, and carefully putting the years back in their chronological order in the graph below.

See the pause? See the noise?

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Sceptics ask: Is the UK government’s climate propaganda machine finally falling apart?

Just when you think things are as inanely silly as they can be, they raise the stakes. It’s a game of double or nothing in the race to the bottom. The close common interests of three big government agencies is fragmenting and instead of skeptics launching the FOI’s, this time, the BBC is.

Just in case there is anyone who doesn’t know, the UK Met predicted a winter a couple of degrees above the usual. Then supertankers of snow turned up and dumped on the nation, surprising people, and making life difficult for everyone who hadn’t made arrangements for the return of the British Blizzard and the coldest December on record. The UK Met, having got it completely wrong, decided the best course of action was to announce post hoc that actually they did get it right, really, they predicted cold weather, but they didn’t tell the public, they just told the politicians. The politicians apparently asked them not to let on to the public, or so the story goes, and the plot thickens.

One way or another someone is using tactics with all the forward thinking you’d expect from a five year old. If the Met office is not […]

2000 Forecast: Snowfall to disappear from the UK

Photo: London Evening Standard 24 Nov 2010

Monday, 20 March 2000. Look out! Back when every witchdoctor had a PR agent and newspapers dutifully repeated their latest crystal ball incantation, it was reported (without so much as a caveat) that there would soon be no more white Christmases in London, and worse, soon “kids will not know snow”. Gone too would be the scenes that inspired glorious impressionist images, and lyrical poetry. Are you in tears yet? The travesty!

Pity the poor shop owners who were trying to order stock based on met office “forecasts”. Back in 2000, shop owners were not bothering to stock sledges.

No more snowmen in England!

h/t to Bernadette and Trevor who spotted this gem.

Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past

By Charles Onians, 20th March 2000

Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives.

Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not […]