[Honestly now: who has low-energy bulbs, and how many? Poll]

Only my kitchen doesn't have energy saving bulbs since it's got spotlight fittings. Every other room in the house does though.

I mainly fitted the energy saving bulbs to save money rather than to stop global warming. Apart from lighting, my only other electric usage is the TV, computer and washing machine so using energy saving bulbs has knocked quite a bit off my electricity bill.

I did have this thought though... If everyone starts being very energy efficient will the electricity generating companies will have to put up their prices to avoid loosing money because they are selling much less electricity?

[February CET]

When 'proper' scientists use temperature data measured to one decimal place in a series of calculations (say for example in NWP), do they use one decimal place in every step of the calculation or do they use more but give the final result to one decimal place?

In my mind, if you only used 1 decimal place in each step, then every step in the calculation would introduce a larger margin of error in your final result do to cumulative rounding errors. Can anyone stop my brain from huring and confirm how this is actually done?

[February CET]

I don't know, but I do know that strictly speaking they ought not to do so unless they are measuring in the first instance to that degree of accuracy, which I suspect they are not. Any number they quote to 2dp, otherwise, will be subject to an error of about +/- 0.05.

Consider my CET guess rounded down to 4.7 anyway

[February CET]

re this

I'm going for 4.73C

I wish I could both read a temperature to that accuracy and perhaps be able to do a temperature forecast more than 3 hours ahead to 1 decimal accuracy!

Come on be real, temps are read to 1 decimal place.

Therefore the average MUST be to the same decimal place.

Its is NOT more accurate giving 2 decimal places, honest, believe me. Its just make belief.

No regular official figures are given to more than one decimal place. Look on the Met Office or WMO(World Meteorological Organisation) if you don't believe me.

Can you explain why the Hadley centre give the monthly CET readings to 1 decimal place and the yearly average to 2?

Example:

2006 4.3 3.7 4.9 8.6 12.3 15.9 19.7 16.1 16.8 13.0 8.1 6.5 10.82

[February CET]

I'm going for 4.73C - This is the average February CET for Februarys where the preceeding January CET > 6.9C

[Annual CET 2007]

Here is my pseudo-science CET guess:

Wikipedia reckons the global temperature went up by 0.6C in 20th Century.

YEAR CET average for past 10 years=10.46C

From glancing at the UK Yearly CET data I reckon we have gone up by about 1C which is 0.4C higher than the global average. This suggests that some of the warming we have seen is due to the prevailing synoptics rather than the base temperature of the earth.

I believe this means we could still get a period of 10 years with average cet of 10.06(ish)

Therefore my guess is 9.9C