Bill Giles has got himself into the Daily Mail trying to explain why its been a terrible summer (I thought England had done OK and it was just Scotland). So, what does he say: basically its all the fault of the deluded British public for expecting warmer weather due to the doomsday global warming:-
“Our beloved planet is certainly getting warmer, but because of the poor way the message has been put across, a lot of people believe this means hot, dry summers and milder, wetter, stormier winters.” (Bill Giles 2011 Mail)
And why do we believe it will be a lot warmer … perhaps it is because of similar comments by supposed experts like this:-
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said. (Independent 2000)
As the old joke goes: “how many climate ‘scientists’ does it take to have an argument: just one and long enough for the climate to have changed”. I’ve no doubt that if one were able to search the BBC archives we’d find a very similar comment from him about expecting warmer summers and milder winters. And now he has the gall to suggest the fault is the UK public are seeing too much warmer weather on holiday and that if only they stayed at home in our terrible summers of late, that we’d learn to appreciate that global warming is the worst possible outcome for us in Britain. You can’t make up logic like that!
Reminiscent of Orwell’s 1984 wherer the Ministry of truth, where the hero worked, spent its timegoing throughold recprds and rewriting them.
Of course Orwell worked for the BBC before writing it so one sees where he got the idea.
Hotter summers and mild winters were precisely what warmists were predicting right up to the point when they spectacularly failed to happen. Now they are trying to claim that they never actually said that at all and it was all a misunderstanding caused by the media misleading the public. The thing that I find annoying is the lack of humility from people who are so consitently proven wrong, still claiming to be 100% in the right and calling anyone who disagrees a denier.
Their complaints about the media misleading the public might stand up a little better to scrutiny if it was second hand reporting by some journalist, but no! It was staffers from the Met Office standing in front of the gogglebox telling the audience that global warming means we will get warmer winters and hotter summers.
It was the same people who each and every year predicted it would get around 0.05C warmer each year and when at the end of the 9years they had only been wrong by 0.06C they claimed their global temperature predictions were a huge success!
Michael Fish took the blame for the failure to forecast the October 1987 storm which struck Southeast Britain. In fact it was Bill Giles who made the late evening forecast, Fish did the 6 p.m. forecast. I made a diary note the day of the storm. Fish stopped protesting his innocence when he realised his notoriety was selling his book. Giles claims in the Mail article “the weather [this year] is the same as it is every year in Britain”. What do we need forecasters for then? Just a calendar and a record of last years weather would do fine.
The article says “Despite the recent washout, Bill Giles, 71, claims we are not having a uniquely bad British summer”, and “He said it was a myth that the summers were hot and there was a sprinkling of snow every winter a generation ago”. The man’s suffering from selective memory loss. There’s a lot of it about recently, especially among News International executives, NOTW editors and senior Met police officers – must be catching.
The Met Office says “It was the coolest June across the UK since 2001” and “June was rather wet over much of central southern and south-east England, with over 150% of normal rainfall in places”. It also says “Sunshine totals overall were close to normal”, whereas the Mail article (was it quoting Giles?) says “Last month [June] there was above average sunshine – and temperatures hit 33C during the Wimbledon Championships”.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/2011/june.html
Someone is being “economical with the facts”, and in this case it doesn’t appear to be the Met Office. I don’t have a link, but I’m sure it was when Giles was in charge that BBC forecasters stopped mentioning that London temperatures were consistently 2 or 3 degrees higher than the surrounding home counties.Any suggestion of UHI (Urban Heat Island) effect was politically inconvenient.