About Climate In 2011

Rod Liddle writes:

Anyone got a shovel? We’re cut off from the world, here in north Kent, a foot and a half of snow in the garden, the lanes impassable and no sign of respite. The only answer is to get pissed, I suppose. That’s usually the answer. But sooner or later I will have to walk four miles to buy fags.

The Met Office predicts that this will have been easily the coldest November since 1993, and perhaps beyond. This will, in turn, mean that Autumn will have been slightly colder than the mean, or around about average at best. December is projected to be colder than usual too.

Last winter (Dec-Jan-Feb) was 2 degrees colder than the mean, and the coldest winter since 1978/9. Spring was 0.2 degrees above the mean for 1971-2000, summer 0.6 degrees above the mean. Overall, then, it is likely that 2010 will be around the mean, or a little below, that of the last forty years.

Does this tell us anything about global warming and climate change? Nothing whatsoever. However, it does tell us a little bit about the AGW evangelists, including the Met Office, who, at this time last year, were predicting that 2010 would be the hottest on record, and that we would be all dying of skin cancer or thirst by now as a consequence of AGW. Will we hear them admit, definitively, that this was very far from being the case? And will we, as a consequence, have a more intelligent debate about climate in 2011?