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Dame Slingo at UKMO Crosses the Line on Extreme Weather Attribution
Reposted from Notes on a Scandal Excellent analysis on Julia Slingo’s reframing of the relationship between ‘climate change’ and ‘weather’ by guest blogger Jaime Jessop.
It’s happened. The battle lines have finally been re-drawn. Global surface temperature rises (which have been inconveniently static for 17+ years) have been ditched by the warmists in favour of the new CAGW meme – extreme weather. The opportunities for making unfalsifiable claims are endlessly more expansive and the sheer headline-grabbing power of ‘big weather’ far exceeds that of mere ‘global warming’.
The remarkable UK Cyclonic Winter of 2013/14 – still ongoing as we speak – has afforded the warmist politicos an eagerly awaited unique opportunity to climb firmly aboard the extreme weather bandwagon and claim that it’s all down to CAGW branded ‘climate change’ (patent pending). Hence Dame Slingo of the UK Met Office now claiming definitively that ” “all the evidence” supported the theory that climate change had played a role” in the devastating West Country floods.
I am sure that the farmers whose land has been underwater since December will be delighted to know that it is simply because they drive around all day in their gas guzzling 4x4s and their environmentally unfriendly tractors which consume umpteen gallons per mile of tax exempted red diesel, blasting out vast clouds of demonic CO2 into the atmosphere in the process. Not forgetting the unfortunate habit of their herds of cows constantly expelling the more potent greenhouse gas methane as they innocently go about their daily business of munching grass!
I am equally certain that the thousands of people whose homes, lives and livelihoods have been devastated this winter by the flooding will also be grateful that Cameron and Slingo have, between them – with a little help from Ed ‘duhhh’ Davey – pinned down the cause and, though it’s bad news for now, a few more windmills thrown up here and there, higher fuel bills and more grant funded insulation should help solve the problem.
It was inevitable of course that Dame Slingo, Chief ‘Scientist’ at the UK Met Office, would eventually jump on this irresistible opportunity to promote the flagging global warming cause – such is the depressingly predictable majority mindset of the ‘intellects’ charged with researching climate science in the UK today. Meanwhile, something even more sinister emerges in this Telegraph report by Christopher Booker and associated EUreferendum post. Flooding of designated rural areas is revealed to be part of an EU grand plan of ‘re-wilding’, basically, giving up cultivated land – often to water incursion – in order to create ‘sustainable’ wildlife habits, notably free of human beings. Agenda 21 rears its ugly head.
In her urgent quest to twist and contort “all the available” scientific evidence to claim that CO2 mediated global warming is propelling us into a new and dangerous Age of Meteorological Extremities, Slingo conveniently forgets to mention the immediate cause of our extraordinary run of bad weather – an energised and persistent Jet Stream which has funneled a ‘conveyor belt’ of one Atlantic storm after another to UK shores – preferring instead to waffle on about “persistent rainfall over Indonesia and the tropical West Pacific” triggering “a global weather system that included the severe storms that have flooded thousands of homes in Britain, as well as the exceptionally cold weather in North America” and the fact that extreme weather is “consistent with what we might expect from climate change”. Note the emergence too of that other unfalsifiable CAGW meme – ‘warming causes extreme cold’. Problem is, my dear, the IPCC benchmark of ‘climate change’ (aka man-made global warming) – global surface temperature rises – has not manifested its presence for 17 and a half years now, and counting. So, if this ‘climate change’ hasn’t been happening, what has been driving the changes which we apparently see in the Jet Stream which have given us a remarkably wet and windy winter this year and a notably very cold late winter/early spring last year, in addition to the famously wet summer of 2012?
Increasingly in the scientific literature, and encouragingly I might add, we are witnessing a growing trend to attribute natural climate variation to a combination of factors governed principally by variations in solar activity. The IPCC dismisses solar variation as insignificant compared to CO2 induced warming, but the tide is turning and amplification mechanisms which explain how relatively modest variations in solar output can drive changes in global meteorological patterns (and hence climate change) are being put forward. For instance, here and here. There are literally hundreds of papers linking climate change with solar amplification mechanisms and of course many will also invoke induced changes in the subtropical and mid-latitudinal jet streams in both hemispheres as being instrumental in the manifestation of such climate change. Of course, this leads us to a possible explanation also for the changes in weather patterns – more ‘extreme’ weather – which we are witnessing in the UK and elsewhere. I wonder if Slingo can quote hundreds of papers explaining how increasing CO2 (without subsequent increase in average global surface temperatures of course) causes extreme weather via changes in the jet streams?
Stephen Wilde seems to be on the right track with his New Climate Model and those scurrilous ‘climate sceptics’ over at the now infamously censored Pattern Recognition In Physics also contributed some very interesting theories linking Planetary and Lunar tidal forces and orientations to solar variability and hence climate change.
The ball game is changing for sure and the tactics of the AGW theorists are becoming ever more blatantly outrageous and anti-scientific. Scientific credibility and observational confirmation deserted their camp some time ago and now they are having to scrape the bottom of the global warming barrel to come up with ever more tortuous and convoluted pseudo-scientific ‘evidence’ to support their claims that the human race is the destroyer of our benign climate.
Posted by Jaime Jessop at 05:09
Source: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2014/02/09/dame-slingo-at-ukmo-crosses-the-line-on-extreme-weather-attribution/
