Met Office 1.5C Lies And Shenanigans

The UK Meteorological Office thinks there’s a not insignificant chance that the annual mean global surface temperature in 2024 will exceed 1.5C above pre-industrial (defined as the average global mean surface temperature for the years 1850-1900). That’s about the only thing they might be right about. The rest of the article is just pure climate change propaganda and lies by omission.

The anticipated two-stage spike in global temperature has received a temporary and partial boost by the current El Niño event warming the tropical Pacific. But, says the Met Office’s Prof Adam Scaife: “The main driver for record-breaking temperatures is the ongoing human-induced warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution.”

Prof Scaife continued: “With a month to go, 2023 is almost certain to be the warmest year on record, exceeding the current record set in 2016 which was also boosted by an El Niño event.”

Global average temperatures are measured as the difference between 1850-1900: a proxy for the Industrial Revolution. The global average temperature for 2023 is expected to be below 1.5 °C, but next year’s forecast suggests for the first time that values of 1.5 °C or above cannot be ruled out.

Let’s look at the facts shall we. 2016 global mean surface temperature was boosted by a super El Nino which actually first started developing in late 2014 and continued to develop throughout 2015, peaking at 2.6C in Autumn/Winter 2015, as you can see from the following ONI (Oceanic Nino Index) tabulated 3 monthly running figures:

The 2023 El Nino is a minnow by comparison (currently peaking at 1.8C), rating officially only as ‘moderate/strong’, which is predicted to max out very soon and wind down thereafter.

Global mean surface temperature due to El Nino spikes in the year after the El Nino peaks in the ocean (usually late autumn/winter - hence El Nino = ‘boy child’, a reference to Christmas and the birth of Christ). So please Adam Scaife of the Met Office, tell me how global temperature managed to spike so spectacularly beginning July 2023 when the current El Nino was just getting going if, as you claim, global mean surface temperature “received a temporary and partial boost by the current El Niño event”? Smells like bullshit to me. What smells even more strongly of bullshit is your additional claim that “the main driver for record-breaking temperatures is the ongoing human-induced warming since the start of the Industrial Revolution.” The long term warming trend cannot have driven the spectacular and sudden acceleration in global warmth which we have observed since July 2023 (currently ongoing). That is an abuse of the English language and a violation of the law of causation and is deliberately deceptive. What Scaife does not mention, at all, is the eruption of Hunga Tonga in January 2022, which injected a vast amount of water vapour into the stratosphere, most of which is still there.

So, if we do exceed 1.5C in 2024 or in 2025 or soon thereafter, the main culprit is unlikely to be a moderate El Nino or the alleged ‘build up’ of man-made greenhouse gases; it’s rather more likely to be, dare I say it, stratospheric water vapour radiative forcing translating to net warming at the surface of the planet. Alarmist climate scientist Myles Allen dared say it, as I have pointed out in previous posts, so it’s not like I’m just some random blogger spouting climate denialism and climate disinformation on Substack!

Nick of the Met, who is perhaps not quite yet Dun being stoned, has this gobbledygook to say:

The average global temperature for 2024 is forecast to be between 1.34 °C and 1.58 °C (with a central estimate of 1.46 °C) above the average for the pre-industrial period (1850-1900): the 11th year in succession that temperatures will have reached at least 1.0 °C above pre-industrial levels.

The Met Office’s Dr Nick Dunstone, who led the forecast, said: “The forecast is in-line with the ongoing global warming trend of 0.2 °C per decade, and is boosted by a significant El Niño event. Hence, we expect two new global temperature record-breaking years in succession, and, for the first time, we are forecasting a reasonable chance of a year temporarily exceeding 1.5 °C.”

Dr Dunstone concluded: “It’s important to recognise that a temporary exceedance of 1.5 °C won’t mean a breach of the Paris Agreement. But the first year above 1.5 °C would certainly be a milestone in climate history.”

The Paris Agreement is widely accepted to refer to a long-term average of 1.5 °C, rather than an individual year. A Met Office-led paper published in the journal Nature earlier this month suggested a means of immediate recognition when the Paris Agreement guard rail has been reached.

Exactly, that’s the problem for climate hysterics: even if 1.5C is exceeded in any given year, this doesn’t necessarily mean that we’ve blown the 1.5C Paris target, and there’s no way of knowing if we’ve blown the 1.5C threshold until statisticians review the past two decades of data - and that’s way too long for climate hysterics to wait to declare a new, improved ‘1.5C climate emergency’. So what to do? Betts of the Met has the answer: consult the Ghost of Climate Change Future and see what he has to say, and combine his warnings with the testimony of the Ghosts of Climate Change Past and Present and thus designate their combined testimonies as ‘present’ for the purpose of informing policy here and now! There, climate Scrooged. No really, a friend thought I was actually joking when I quoted this from Betts of the Met’s recent paper published in Nature:

To smooth temperature wiggles in model projections of future climate, the latest IPCC assessment report, AR6, defined the 1.5 °C mark and other global warming levels (GWLs) in terms of projected 20-year averages relative to the average for 1850–1900. The year of exceedance of a GWL is the midpoint of the 20-year period at that level. By this definition, 1.5 °C of warming would be confirmed once the observed temperature rise has reached that level, on average, over a 20-year period — in other words, a decade after crossing the 1.5 °C level. That risks a delay in recognizing and reacting to the crossing point (see ‘Current global warming levels’).

We propose a new indicator — the 20-year average temperature rise centred around the current year. This is estimated by blending observations for the past 10 years with climate model projections or forecasts for the next 10 years, and taking an average over the combined 20-year period. This ‘current global warming level’ (CGWL) indicator meets our two criteria — it allows consistency with established IPCC definitions, and provides an instantaneous indicator of current warming.

LOL. Not a joke. The Met Office is absolutely desperate to be the first to inform us that we’ve passed the threshold of ‘dangerous’ global warming and that consequently we must give up our cars and gas boilers immediately and probably start sucking carbon out of the atmosphere or spray the stratosphere with reflective sulphate aerosols or something - anything for Gaia’s sake, to save us all from imminent Thermageddon!