The Met Office seems to be ramping up its cries of climate alarmism at the moment. Last week we were told that there was a “climate risk” to crops that “would bring global famine”. This was based, as usual, on computer models.

Today the Met Office has issued a new alarmist press release, claiming that the UK has a High risk of unprecedented rainfall. Unsurprisingly, this has been parroted by the BBC, the Telegraph, the Guardian and the Independent. The press release is based on an open-access research paper in Nature Communications. There’s even a video.

The press release includes this graphic, which has to be one of the most ridiculous diagrams ever produced by climate scientists.

The picture at the top right says “Our climate has also changed, so older observations may no longer be relevant”, and literally shows observations being thrown into the rubbish bin. The so-called “solution”, is to run computer models and use them instead, and one of the so-called scientists involved claims that “Our computer simulations provided one hundred times more data than is available from observed records”. Are these people really so stupid that they think that the output of their computer models is not only equivalent to, but even better than, real observations? Finally there is the (predetermined) “outcome” which of course is a dark red warning sign. Only data since 1980 is used, so earlier periods, when there were many bad winter floods, are ignored.

The Met Office makes the following claim:

“New innovative research has found that for England and Wales there is a 1 in 3 chance of a new monthly rainfall record in at least one region each winter (Oct-Mar).”

So when the observations over the next few years don’t support this, we can dump the Met Office’s computer model in the bin and go back to looking at the real data again. But that won’t matter – the alarmist press release has been spread widely across the media, as required.

Here’s a reminder of what the IPCC says about flooding:

In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.

The climate scientists should of course be aware of this, but they simply sweep it under the carpet, preferring instead to carry out science by anecdote, talking about the floods in the 2013/14 winter.

Regional climate modelling is notoriously unreliable, as is modelling of clouds and rainfall. Here is a rather vague statement on this from the IPCC AR5 SPM.

There has been some improvement in the simulation of continental-scale patterns of precipitation since the AR4. At regional scales, precipitation is not simulated as well, and the assessment is hampered by observational uncertainties.

Again, there is no mention of this in the press release or the paper, the only admission being that their model “is still not perfect”.

Thanks to Howard Goodall for alerting me to this.