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Eugine_Nier comments on Separating the roles of theory and direct empirical evidence in belief formation: the examples of minimum wage and anthropogenic global warming - Less Wrong
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Comments (65)
http://xkcd.com/1321/ (SCNR).
More seriously, are you implying that any increase in the variance is irrelevant so long as the mean doesn't change much?
Who predicted that Britain would no longer have snow or Manhattan would be under water by 2014?
I never said anything about an increase in variance, temperature records haven't been around long enough for it to be hard to find record setting temperatures somewhere. Also, I notice you're shifting your hypothesis from "temperatures are rising" to "variance is rising".
As for the argument in the linked comic, when wine grapes can be grown in England and Newfoundland, as was the case during the medieval warm period I'll start taking arguments of that type seriously.
The Climatic Research Unit for the no more snow in Britain. The Manhattan underwater one (or at least the West Side Highway) is Jim Hansen.
Regarding the wine point, it is doubtful if wine grapes ever grew in Newfoundland, as the Norse term "Vinland" may well refer to a larger area. From the Wikipedia article:
Also, wine grapes certainly do grow in England these days (not just in the Medieval period). There appear to be around 400 vineyards in England currently.
Reading your referenced article (Independent 2000):
Clearly the Climatic Research Unit was not predicting no more snow in Britain by 2014.
Regarding the alleged "West Side Highway underwater" prediction, see Skeptical Science. It appears Hansen's original prediction timeframe was 40 years not 20 years, and conditional on a doubling of CO2 by then.
Yes, but some googling suggests that average snowfall in England hasn't changed very much over the 2000s, which doesn't seem consistent with the linked article.
"Over the 2000s" is certainly too short a period to reach significant conclusions. However the longer term trends are pretty clear. See this Met Office Report from 2006.
Figure 8 shows a big drop in the length of cold spells since the 1960s. Figure 13 shows the drop in annual days of snow cover. The trend looks consistent across the country.
I think the first question here is whether we have reached agreement on the forecasts being wrong, not what excuses should be made or conclusions drawn from said wrongness.
Yes, I'm sure they were, and that those were the basis for the mistaken prediction. Your point?
I think we have agreement that:
A) The newspaper headline "Snowfalls are now just a thing of the past" was incorrect
B) The Climatic Research Unit never actually made such a prediction
C) The only quoted statement with a timeline was for a period of 20 years, and spoke of heavy snow becoming rarer (rather than vanishing)
D) This was an extrapolation of a longer term trend, which continued into the early 2000s (using Met Office data published in 2006, of course after the Independent story)
E) It is impossible to use short periods (~10 years since 2006) to decide whether such a climatic trend has stopped or reversed.
I can't see how that counts as a failed prediction by the CRU (rather than the Independent newspaper). If the CRU had said "there will be less snow in every subsequent year from now, for the next 20 years, in a declining monotonic trend" then that would indeed be a failed prediction. However, the CRU did not make such a prediction... no serious climate researcher would.
From the article:
Does heavy snow cause chaos in England now?
Is snow a 'very rare and exciting event' in England now?
If we asked them, would they not know first-hand what snow is, anymore than they know first-hand what wolves are?
You can't?
What's the date?
By your reaction, and the selective down votes, I have apparently fallen asleep, it is the 2020s already, and a 20-year prediction is already falsified.
But in answer to your questions:
A) Heavy snow does indeed already cause chaos in England when it happens (just google the last few years)
B) My kids do indeed find snow a rare and exciting event (in fact there were zero days of snow here last winter, and only a few days the winter before)
C) While my kids do have a bit of firsthand knowledge of snow, it is vastly less than my own experience at their age, which in turn was much less than my parents' experience.
If you are a resident of England yourself, and have other experiences, then please let me know...
Well, all the quotes I gave were drawn from http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/snowfalls-are-now-just-a-thing-of-the-past-724017.html which was 14 years ago. That sounds like it'd cover 'within a few years'. And as for the exact 20 year forecast of 2010, well, that's just 6 years away. Not a lot of time to catch up.
Yes, looks like the usual chaos you could find in the '80s and '90s to which the predicted 'chaos' was being compared as being greater.
And has your region changed much? And is your anecdote very trustworthy compared to the nation-wide changes in snowfall since 2000 (not much) when these predictions were made?
I notice you're shifting your hypothesis from ‘it's not getting any warmer than in the 1990s’ to ‘it's still not as warm as it was in the 1000s’. ;-)