By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
There’s another pseudo-science Weather Attribution organisation to add to the list, called ClimaMeter, which the BBC has been bigging up lately.
According to the BBC’s Science Correspondent, David Gregory-Kumar, the winds from Storm Darragh were 5% stronger because of climate change – see here.
ClimaMeter’s analysis, complete with fake charts and meters, is the usual sloppy mix of GIGO computer models, deliberately designed to garner headlines. The models are, of course, programmed that warmer oceans and air make for stronger storms.
According to their website, ClimaMeter is “an experimental rapid framework for understanding extreme weather events in a changing climate”, which is the opposite of how science is supposed to work.
But forget about their shoddy models, What does real world data tell us about storm trends?
We know that the hype about Storm Darragh was not backed up by the wind speeds measured away from clifftops and mountain sites. In reality, as far as England and Wales were concerned, Darragh was only a run of the mill storm.
And according to the Met Office, UK storms have been getting less strong since the 1980s and 90s, not stronger, which would be the case if ClimaMeter’s models were correct.
This is what the Met Office said in their State of the UK Climate report this year:
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/joc.8553
And another recent Met Office study declared they could find no trends on storm windiness since 1969:
When the data disagrees with the model, you scrap the model.
Of course, the authors of this latest study know this full well. But they have no interest in the integrity of science, only the rapid generation of headlines which suit their agenda.
Even the science disagrees with their models. As HH Lamb wrote about the Little Ice Age in “Climate, History and The Modern World”:
“The spread of Arctic ice to Iceland and of polar water to the region of the Faroes meant that the surface of the North Atlantic between there and southeast Iceland became 5C colder than is usual today. Consequently there was a greatly strengthened thermal gradient between latitudes 50 and 61 to 65N.
This seems to have been the basis for the development of occasional cyclonic wind storms over the part of the North Atlantic exceeding the severity of most of the worst storms of modern times”
HH Lamb – pp217-218
It is not exactly rocket science. Any half competent meteorologist knows that extratropical storms feed off the temperature differential between warm and cold air. The bigger the differential, the stronger the storm. And with the Arctic warming faster than the tropics, this differential is reducing.
Insurance Says No!
It is ironic that the BBC story centred on some poor chap in the Midlands who tried to claim from his insurance for his TV aerial which blew off during Darragh.
Quite rightly the insurers said the policy only covered storms, and Darragh was not a storm where he lived, as wind gusts were only 53 mph, 2 mph below their threshold.
In fact, based on sustained winds, not gusts, most of the Midlands only experienced winds of between 20 and 30 mph, a strong breeze on the Beaufort Scale. Storms are only classified as such when sustained winds reach 55 mph, not gusts as the BBC wrongly imply. (see the RMS explanation here).