May 03, 2015

Those good ol' hundredths of a degree again!

Being by far the longest instrumental temperature record available, the Central England record (CET) is always of interest, even if it has little generalizability to other places.

The latest statistics that have been dragged screaming from it by Warmists are given below.  In case it is not obvious, let me mention that most of what they did ignored the whole record.  They used only the data after 1900.  Interesting?  You can of course prove all sorts of dubious things by carefully choosing your starting point from a longer record.  It's one of the classic ways of lying with statistics.

The one use they did make of the whole record was to assert that 2014 was the hottest year ever.  But, like all such claims so far, it is based on temperature differences of hundredths of one degree Celsius, which even Warmists in their saner moments concede is not statistically significant -- and hence not significant in any other way either. We read in the body of the journal article:

"The annual CET value for 2014 was 10.93 °C, the highest in the 356 year series. However, it is worth noting that, at approximately 0.06 °C above the previous 2006 record, we cannot be entirely certain that 2014 was the warmest on record. Parker and Horton (2005) state that for annual mean CET values to be deemed significantly different a 0.25 °C [a quarter of a degree] difference is required."

Note that "0.06".  In plain English, six hundredths of one degree! They've sure got some impressive results there!  They couldn't even squeeze a quarter of a degree out of it.

The rest of the research was games with models, models of the sort which have repeatedly been shown to have no predictive skill.  What a waste of time!


Last year was the hottest since records began for central England and new research predicts the country is going to get even warmer.

A study found that there was 'significant and substantial increase' in the likelihood that the UK will experience another record-breaking year because of man-made climate change.

Findings suggest that summers today are 22 times more likely to be hot compared to the climate of a century ago.

Detailed analysis of the Central England Temperature (CET) charts - the world's longest instrumental temperature record dating back to 1659 - showed human activities have a large influence on heatwaves across the country, scientists have found.

Published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the discovery is all the more remarkable given it is such a small area of the world.

His team used climate simulations to calculate the likelihood of very warm years when there is just natural forces on the climate and no human influence, such as burning fossil fuels, and then when there is both these and human influence.

The change in the likelihood of warm years due to human influences on the climate was then calculated.

The researchers then observed the CET and picked out the warmest years from the record since 1900, plotting these onto a graph to calculate the odds of warm years happening now and a hundred years ago.

The model based method suggested at least a 13 fold increase due to human influences on the climate, whilst this rose to 22 times using the observation approach.

SOURCE

Attribution of the record high Central England temperature of 2014 to anthropogenic influences

Andrew D King et al.

Abstract

In 2014, Central England experienced its warmest year in a record extending back to 1659. Using both state-of-the-art climate models and empirical techniques, our analysis shows a substantial and significant increase in the likelihood of record-breaking warm years, such as 2014, due to human influences on climate. With 90% confidence we find that anthropogenic forcings on the climate have increased the chances of record warm years in Central England by at least 13-fold. This study points to a large influence of human activities on extreme warm years despite the small region of study and the variable climate of Central England. Our analysis shows that climate change is clearly visible on the local-scale in this case.

SOURCE

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