On 14/02/2014 16:57, exmetman wrote:
Hi

I read an article in the Guardian today and it has me puzzled. Lord Stern states in the third paragraph of that article that climate change has arrived and is now happening. This may be correct , but what he says next to support his claim is not:

"Four of the five wettest years recorded in the UK have occurred from the year 2000 onward"
"Over that same period, we have also had the seven warmest years"

With regard to the rainfall in the UK I use as my evidence the UKP dataset maintained by the UKMO and which dates back to 1766, and is in fact the oldest instrumental record of its kind in the world.

Image:England Wales Annual Rainfall (1766-2013)

You will see from the graph of the England Wales Precipitation series that only two and not five of the years since 2000 are in the top five wettest years (2000 & 2012), the next 21st century year 2002 appears at number 11. So instead of four out of five its 2 out of 5, or to be fair its 2 out of 10! What a whopper.

The second one is worded ambiguously in my opinion - what I think he's trying to say is that 7 of the warmest years have occurred since 2000. As far as I can tell Lord Stern is still talking about the 'UK', as he was in the sentence before with regard to rainfall. So he is talking about UK temperatures and not global temperatures, and therefore I use as my evidence here the Central England Temperature series, which is also maintained by the UKMO and dates back in its monthly form to 1659.

Image:Monthly CET Annual Anomalies for 1908 - 2013

As you can see in the rank tabulated list above, of the top 'seven warmest years', only three of the top seven occurred in this century 2006 (#1), 2011 (#2) and 2002 (#5), so why did Lord Stern say that 'we had the seven warmest years' when we only had three?

No idea. OTOH taking your top 7
(funny choice I prefer top 10 or 20 ToTP style)

21st Century 3 out of 14 = 21%
20th Century 3 out of 100 = 3% (and they are all in the 1990's)

BTW What was special about 1949? that put it in the top 7?

If you wanted to highlight it you could more reasonably point out that 6
out of the top seven warmest years have occurred since 1990.

I'm obviously missing something or other here, and I'm sure someone will explain what Lord Stern did mean in his article and point out what evidence he is using to support his claims about the five wettest and seven warmest years in the UK. Believe it or not, I'm a climate change agnostic, but I do have a passion for weather statistics, and hate it when someone is being more than a little misleading in using them!

Bruce.

http://xmetman.wordpress.com/2014/02...get-his-facts/

How interesting. I had taken his claims at face value without actually
bothering to go back to the primary sources. I hope he can back up his
claims as the AGW deniers will otherwise pounce on any minor mistake.

Thanks for looking into it.

I think we will need to get hammered badly at least at another couple of
times like this winter before the last few true sceptical scientists (as
opposed to deniers for hire) will admit that AGW is real.

I don't ever expect to see Lord Lawson, Monckton or Delingpole recant.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown