Our Warminista friends have been rather quiet lately about “runaway global warming’ mainly because their credibility has been shot to pierces over the Cliamategate scandal and the fact that the weather has simply not been playing ball with their dire predictions at all. Nowhere is this more so than in the United kingdom, Europe and North America where we have seen three years of colder than usual winters. Now I expect that warming fools like our resident J(trust me I’m a scientist but I won’t tell you what I am qualified in)M will insist that what we are seeing here is “weather” and that it is not the same as “climate”, well frankly I think that JM is talking out of his over rated (by himself) arse.

Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its “mild winter” schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year’s mythical “barbecue summer”, and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.

He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people – notably in farming – are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.

He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy.

I have not a clue whether his methods are sound or not. But when so many of his forecasts seem to come true, and when he seems to be so consistently ahead of the Met Office, I feel I want to know more. Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.

Is he barmy? Of course he may be just a fluke-artist. It may be just luck that he has apparently predicted recent weather patterns more accurately than government-sponsored scientists. Nothing he says, to my mind, disproves the view of the overwhelming majority of scientists, that our species is putting so much extra CO? into the atmosphere that we must expect global warming.

The question is whether anthropogenic global warming is the exclusive or dominant fact that determines our climate, or whether Corbyn is also right to insist on the role of the Sun. Is it possible that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world? The Sun is incomparably vaster and more powerful than any work of man. We are forged from a few clods of solar dust. The Sun powers every plant and form of life, and one day the Sun will turn into a red giant and engulf us all. Then it will burn out. Then it will get very nippy indeed.

 

Weather is to climate in the same way that the one millimetre mark is to the the one Metre mark on a measuring stick, it really is just a matter of “scale” because when you get enough “weather” measurements and consider them together you get climate. Surely this is an uncontentious observation on my part?   You see I can’t get past the fact that despite the claims that “this is one of the hottest years on record” we have experienced a rather cooler and somewhat wetter year here in my part of the world and that I have been consistently seeing reports of record cold temperatures in the northern hemisphere so I wonder just how the “hottest year” claim is arrived at because as far as I understand how averages work if large parts of the planet have experienced extraordinary cold weather this year  then it must be the case that more of the planet has had extraordinarily warm weather  for longer periods than usual  but I have heard no such reports of longer and hotter summers … well at least not enough to balance out the reports of colder and more severe winters

I freely admit my limitations on the science and the maths but I do know that those who make dire predictions and prognostications about the weather and climate require more than just a bit of luck which is why we see most predictions drawn on a scale larger than the seer’s lifetime. That way the prognosticator can safely sell their predictions to the world knowing that they will never have to answer the obvious questions when they are shown by events to have been on the wrong track.

Personally I reckon that the next couple of Christmases will be just as white as the last few in the UK and I base that on nothing more than a sort primal “I feel it in my water”  instinct unlike the sort of assertions we  get from our Warminista friends I admit that I could be entirely wrong and that with humility we all have to accept that the only  true validation of any prediction comes in the fullness of time.

Cheers Comrades