"exmetman" wrote in message
...
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)

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That is for England and Wales, not the UK.

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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

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Again, that is the Central ENGLAND temperatures, not UK or even England and
Wales.
================================================== ======

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?

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!

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AFAIK The Met Office UK statistics, which are based on official weather
stations readings, only run from ~1910.
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Hope this helps,

Cheers, Alastair.