Hehe, crazy Brits…

Enjoy.

The Scottish Government Attempts to Play God

So they have a report out that has to do with adapting to climate change (thanks to the CA Forum for finding this!) and this stood out:

…on the proposals for a strategic centrally co-ordinated plan for adapting to climate change…

Erm, beg pardon, but isn’t centrally planned adaptation…Intelligent design? I’m all for adaptation. I think that it is the best response to changes that inevitably will happen (whatever their sign/magnitude) but it is what people have always done to changes in their environment. So aside from violating seperation of Church and State 😉 Scotland and Big Cousin Haggis now will tell you how to react to the weather! I say, is your umbrella quite up to code sir? It seems your coat is in violation of section c3-r-26-j, eh wot? I’ll have to write you a fine.

Now that sounds familiar…

What is it about the things this guy says? It all seems to fit with something, but I can’t put my finger on it. 😉

1066 and what not

Having a little fun with temperature data here. If you live in the UK, this may be of interest. I’m going to have a little fun with one of the oldest temperature records in the world. Central England Temperature. Should be fun. Well, what’s the verdict? Have a look:

Ah ha! It’s warming! That ought to silence us deniers, right? Wait. Let’s do a double take here for a moment. I looks like it has been warming in Central England for 300 years! Not only that, we are of course only able to see that it is presently warmer now than during the depths of the Little Ice Age. Hardly news. But its warming faster right? Well that’s testable, let’s look at the rate of change, shall we?

Damn! Looks like rate of change isn’t really increasing. Accelerating warming? Hardly.

Incidentally, we might expect some creeping urban and microsite biases. Sure, these are probably at least partly corrected for. So why does the mostly rural record subject to much of the conditions at the Armagh Observatory disagree? That’s a puzzler for you.

The trends are different, the simple explanation is that CET is biased. In which case it should show, in reality, very little warming at all (but not none! I don’t want to be label a “denier” here! Oops to late!)

Here’s a bit of interest to you: The actual series, monthly:

Which probably looks like red noise, but there is a cyclic 12 moth pattern in there. The change in the temperature over 300 years is dwarfed by monthly temperature variation. The rate of change between months is also huge:

So Central England has warmed slightly, evidently becuase of some change. Perhaps Carbon Dioxide, perhaps the sun, and almost certainly due in part to urbanization (even if you believe its been corrected for, clearly any correct means urbanization is known to have warmed it). It certainly seems the former is the most popular explanation, and the latter two maligned fringe positions in the highly politicized science of Climatology. But I still think they are more likely. By the way, getting back to Armagh, it’s pretty damn well correlated with solar cycle length, evidently:

From this essay by Joe D’Aleo, by the way, and I admit it’s rather old:

Click to access intellicast.essay.pdf

So to things to think about, if you live in the UK: any global warming your experiencing is mostly due to Urban Heat Islands and the Sun. Oh, and it’s trivially small, nothing you don’t already deal with on a month to month basis. Indisputably it isn’t accelerating.

Well, that was fun.