Inside the new climate row as Mystic Met Office goes cool on warming

[FarCenter]

Analysis Britain's Met Office has come under fire for two pieces of crystal-ball gazing involving global temperature and British rainfall. On Christmas Eve, the Met's temperature prediction for the UK was quietly revised downwards, and only merited a press release this week after physics blog Tallbloke's Talkshop noticed the change.

According to the Met's Richard Betts, an IPCC lead author and head of the Met's Climate Impacts team, the new projection the result of new climate models, with different inputs.

The new temperature prediction is 20 per cent lower than the previous estimate, with a mean deviation of 0.43°C above the 1971 to 2000 average over the next five years. If it holds true, then global temperatures will have experienced a 20-year standstill, with no statistically significant warming. The Met didn't predict, as the BBC erroneously reported, a 0.43C increase in global temperature over the next five years.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/01/12/met_predictions/

"Prediction is very difficult; especially about the future". Attributed to Niels Bohr.

[spanone]

1. humans can keep their heads in the sand until their asses are on fire...won't matter

mother nature couldn't care less what we 'predict'

[longship]

2. ^^THIS^^

99% of all lifeforms that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. The universe doesn't care one bit about humans, or any other life. Life is just part of the universe at it is today, at minimum on Earth, but possibly even widespread. At some time in the future our solar system will become unsuitable for all life as we know it. The same is possibly true for the universe as a whole.

But, I agree that humans need to do something drastic about climate change if we want to continue living on this Earth.

[mn9driver]

3. The revised prediction is for the UK.

I don't think they're making any larger statement about global warming with this revision.

On edit, the article indicates otherwise. Even so, I'll be interested to see what some of the other model updates show.

[Viking12]

4. More RW distortion.

Do a little research on your sources before you post this bullshit.

[muriel_volestrangler]

5. Sadly, The Reg is on the far right, when it comes to climate

Why an IT website thinks it can pontificate about climate science, I don't know, but don't trust a word the bastards say about it. I don't know if it's company policy, or if it's just Andrew Orlowski, and they're happy to let him talk whatever bollocks he wants. But he, like the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, loves painting everything as a 'row', or a 'scandal'. The "20-year standstill" is the standard denier lie - by taking a starting point of 1998, after a huge 1 year increase in temperature, they then pretend that there's no statistical significance in a 20 year trend after that. But you can't pick a staring point to suit yourself, and then say you're going to look at a long-term trend after that. Unless you have a physical theory for why there was a huge jump in just one year, that doesn't apply to any other year in the next 20. Which they don't have.

For some reality on the denier "it all changed in 1998" claim, try this: