vforvendetta

Fascinating interview - I found out several things I didn;t know. 1) Julia Slingo got a BsC from Bristol University in Physics. She started her career at the met with only an undergraduate degree in Phyics!!! She has since been awarded a phd in 1989 for published work, and 2 honorary doctorates. Nevertheless she is not as highly qualified as some would have you believe. 2) It may be due to her lack of scientific qualifications, but Dame Slingo apparently believes that heat moves downwards in fluid. "the ocean moves heat from upper layers to deeper layers" Interesting, she didn;t quote any evidence for this assertion, and I am not aware of any reputable measurements which give evidence of this peculiar mechanism. 3) She admits that when the AGW thesis was being formulated " we knew virtually nothing" " we didn;t even know what clouds looked like from space" 4) She admits not knowing why there has been such a long pause in global warming and is not willing to say when it will likely end, beyond stating that there is a pattern of cooling in the pacific which shows heat has moved form the upper to lower levels. So a cooler ocean show that the naughty heat is hiding in deeper levels, how astonishing, And yes I know all about Kelvin waves, and the fact that there is an El Nino brewing, its natural variation linked to the PDO. 5) She maintains that the Met Office went form being the least knowledgeable to the most expert body on volcanic ash, and chastises the airlines for not believing there was volcanic ash in the atmosphere because they couldn't see it. As I recall, the airlines got so fed up with the invisible ash, they sent a plane up with sensors to show that not only was it safe to fly through, there wasn;t even much measurable ash. So not only was the ash invisible, it didn't cause crashes, and couldn;t be measured. But hey, the mighty Met Office must not be criticised for its unevidenced and unproveable allegations right? 6) She believes that weather systems now hold more water than 50 years ago and therefore cause more devastating storms. Well what about 40 years ago or 90 years ago or 99 years ago. The figures for Dec/Jan temps are 2013/14 6.2,5.7 1974/75 8.1,6.8 1924/25 6.8,5.3 1915/6 5.3, 7.5 according to CET. So she's cherry picking and not applying science. In addition,. surely by her logic December and January would be the least likely time to have record rainfall, as they are generally much colder than say September/October in the Northern hemisphere. 7) She states that extreme weather is getting more extreme - with no supporting evidence. Judy Currys work on the other hand will show that hurricane activity in the US is at a very low level and has been diminishing recently. So all in all, pretty much what you would expect from a party apparatchik - not at all what you would expect from a scientist. But then as we discussed in point 1, she isn;t all that familiar with science.

Incredibly windy overnight, we lost power for most of the night. Town centre is closed due to power outage, and there are trees down everywhere. Neighbour has had both his cars smashed by a fallen tree. Heavy rain over the last 3 days has undermined tree roots, field are underwater, as are some villages such as Stedham. I worry about the next front due at the weekend, as the infrastructure and dangerous trees will not be repaired by then, there will be more structural and transport problems I feel. I'm in West Sussex.

Interesting. My post on this topic was removed. Will BFTVs post be removed, as it contains no information and refers to people who don't agree with him as "the anti-science " conspiracy crowd? Can we have a bit of even handed moderation here please?

The BBC will never admit they were wrong on AGW, much like Born From The Void and others on here, they are too firmly wedded to their positions ever to climb down. The reason I like Weather History's posts is that he always grounds his reasoning in data, unlike those who propagate the AGW fairy tale. Even their ridiculous line about "consensus" has been shown to be a case of data manipulation, graduate students posing a biased question and then coming up with a subset of a subset of a subset of respondents to come up with the famous 97% consensus figure. Anyway, here are some nice facts to supplement the "unusual weather" argument http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/06/19/a-data-review-to-supplement-the-uk-met-office-disappointing-weather-meeting/#more-88415

Dear weather - history, Always find your posts excellent, bit if a statto myself. What would you say the chances are now of us going sub 9 for annual CET at the end of May? I think we need to finish at 11.2 or below for May don't we? If we finish the year sub 9, will this be the first time since the mid eighties that we have had to sub 9 years in a decade? cheers

Global ice anomaly is positive, with the miniscule -400km of missing ice in the arctic dwarfed by the plus 900k of extra sea ice in the antarctic. Whatever the "believers" say, there is no mechanism for sea ice to remember that it was lower than ususal in summer, and there is no mechanism in their theories for explaining why there is so much more ice in the antarctic.