By Paul Homewood.
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This really is quite blatant propaganda from the Met Office:
“The UK’s set of climate projections are the best window we have on how climate change is likely to affect us out to the end of the century,” said Professor Jason Lowe OBE*, the lead for UKCP – the UK’s climate projections.
The latest iteration of climate projections for the UK were released in 2018, updating the set from 2009. In the early days of climate projections, users were able to examine features such as the expected rise in average temperature for a given location at a particular time of year. “But users also need an understanding of what extremes of weather will be like: What will be the maximum temperature in summer? Or how much rain will fall in the heaviest rainfall events,” added Professor Lowe. Being able to interrogate the data in this way is exceedingly important for a whole range of user groups, from the rail industry to water companies and from town planners to the energy sector.
In 2019 there was a programme of additions , including a rollout of a new set of projections which examine climate extremes on a grid of 2.2km. This provides new capability to resolve the fine detail of weather extremes and predict events such as flash flooding, based on new capability to resolve the dynamics of thunderstorms.
In addition to more local detail, information is needed on uncertainties associated with future extremes, in order to support assessments of risks at the city-scale, for example. Later this week the Met Office will be releasing a further update which will add new probabilistic projections on the hottest and wettest weather extremes. Dr Simon Brown, who led this extension, explains: “This work provides a range of plausible outcomes for rare events expected on average once every 20, 50 and 100 years, for a range of emissions scenarios. This will allow planners to weigh the risk of different outcomes against the costs of adaptation.”
Ahead of the release of the data for the whole of the UK, the Met Office has released information for Exeter which shows the impact that climate change could be expected to have on the city.
Currently, in Exeter there is around a one-in-twenty chance of the city recording daily maximum temperatures exceeding 33.0 C, in a given summer. However the figures show that even with a mid-range scenario of greenhouse gas emissions (RCP4.5), this value would be more likely than not to exceed 35.0 C by 2090, while maximum temperatures of over 40.0 C cannot be completely ruled out.
The figures for rainfall extremes are also higher in the future than now. Currently, there is a likelihood that in one winter out of twenty the city will see a single day with over 45mm of rainfall, but by 2090 the same figure is nearly 50mm; around a 10 per cent increase of rainfall on the heaviest day for rain in winter. The projections show that values of around 60mm cannot be ruled out completely.
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Most of the claims of “more extreme weather” concern high temperatures in summer, and are based on the RCP4.5 emissions scenario, which projects 3C of warming by 2100. Hardly surprising then that, if this occurs, summer high temperatures will also rise.
But equally, cold days in winter will correspondingly become less extreme. So, in overall terms, the weather will not become “more extreme”.
If you moved from Glasgow to London, would you say that the weather in London was more extreme, just because it was warmer on average? Clearly not, and this Met Office report is a disgraceful abuse of the English language.
What extreme weather means to most people is blizzards, gales, heavy rainfall and so on. And there is no evidence that any of these will get worse.
Apart from summer temperatures, the only other evidence the Met Office offers is:
The figures for rainfall extremes are also higher in the future than now. Currently, there is a likelihood that in one winter out of twenty the city will see a single day with over 45mm of rainfall, but by 2090 the same figure is nearly 50mm; around a 10 per cent increase of rainfall on the heaviest day for rain in winter.
But is there any evidence that winter rainfall has become more extreme in recent decades? Not according to the England & Wales Rainfall series:
https://climexp.knmi.nl/data/pHadEWP_daily_qc.dat
The wettest winter day was in December 1960. It is true that the second and fourth wettest days occurred in December 2013 and February 2020, but no statistician would draw conclusions from such outliers.
When you look at the top 50 rainfalls, you find that they were much more common in the 1970s to 90s.
Unfortunately the series only dates back to 1931, but if we look at a long running station such as Oxford, the whole Met Office projection completely falls to pieces:
https://climexp.knmi.nl/data/pgdcnUK000056225.dat
There have been fourteen winter days with rainfall of 30mm and more since 1827, and extremely rare event which happens on average every fourteen years. The last occurrence was in 1995, and the wettest day was in 1888.
A long time ago, the Met Office realised the public would not be spooked by threats of warm weather, so jumped on the extreme weather bandwagon. Consequently every bit of bad weather is now blown up and “blamed” on global warming, while dodgy projections are served up to scare the public.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
October 17, 2020 at 08:03AM
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