From the ever reliable Guardian (Leo Hickman) comes this story. All weather events will now be taken as evidence of global climate change!

Met Office brainstorms UK bad weather Washout summers. Flash floods. Freezing winters. Snow in May. Droughts. There is a growing sense that something is happening to our weather. But is it simply down to natural variability, or is climate change to blame? To try to answer the question the Met Office is hosting an unprecedented meeting of climate scientists and meteorologists next week to debate the possible causes of the UK’s “disappointing” weather over recent years, the Guardian has learned. Tuesday’s meeting at the forecaster’s HQ in Exeter is being convened in response to this year’s cool spring, which, according to official records, was the coldest in 50 years. The one-day gathering will be led by Stephen Belcher, head of the Met Office Hadley Centre and professor of meteorology at the University of Reading, and will include up to 20 experts from the UK’s leading climate research institutions. The “roundtable workshop” will attempt to outline the “dynamical drivers of the cold spring of 2013”, but attendees are expected also to debate the “disappointing summers of the last seven years”. Official records show that above-average temperatures in summer last occurred in 2006, a season that had above-average sunshine hours, and below-average rainfall. The only summer since then to give us average conditions nationally was in 2010. The meeting will also discuss the washout summer of 2012 and the freezing winter of 2010-11. The Met Office said it had never held a formal meeting in this way to discuss possible causes behind the UK’s unusual weather of recent years. …

But rather than admit that climate models have become a fiasco, it would seem that the “establishment” is now “circling the wagons” and rationalising to be able to connect all weather events to “man-made climate change” – defined as being anything over and above “natural variability”. Why would the “natural variability” of just the last 150 years be the benchmark. Why would the Little Ice Age or the Roman Warm Period or the Medieval Warm Period not be part of the “natural variability” to be used as the reference? If the flood levels in Germany this spring reached the same level in Passau 500 years ago, why wouldn’t the weather/climate of 500 years ago also be part of “natural variability”?

If the UK spring this year was the coldest since the 1890’s then it surely proves that weather events today are much the same as 130 years ago. Even the great 2011 Tohoku quake and tsunami were events that were a repeat of something that happens every 1000 years or so. It was not “unnatural” just because it had not happened for 1000 years. Anytime a weather event today is merely a repeat of an event which has taken place in the past, then the preponderance of probability is that it is a part of natural variability.

Everything not within a discernible “natural” pattern is not due to anthropogenic effects. It may well be in the realm of what we don’t know that we don’t know.

The Guardian goes on:

…. One attendee at the meeting, Doug Parker, professor of meteorology at the University of Leeds, said: “We are universally finding that the links between the weather and climate communities are increasing and overlapping. Most climate issues reduce down to questions about what weather events are like, and the representation of short-term weather events is a key challenge in climate modelling. People are increasingly conscious that there is a change [to our weather]. There have been informal discussions in our communities about this for a while now. The key question is whether this is down to natural variability alone, or whether climate change is now projecting on to, and adding to, natural variability. I am going to the meeting with my eyes and ears open.”

But – it seems to me – with a closed mind!

A Met Office spokesman said: “We have seen a run of unusual seasons in the UK and northern Europe, such as the cold winter of 2010, last year’s wet weather and the cold spring this year. This may be nothing more than a run of natural variability, but there may be other factors impacting our weather there is emerging research which suggests there is a link between declining Arctic sea ice and European climate – but exactly how this process might work and how important it may be among a host of other factors remains unclear.”

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Tags: climate change, global warming. medieval warm period, Little Ice Age, Met Office, Roman Warm Period