Tony Brown's Cooling England

Speaking of credibility, I've noticed that Tony Brown is a bit of a darling at Judith Curry's blog.  His hobby is the surface temperature record for central England.  I admire him for his "profound" tenacity but not for his interpretative ability.  I've written about his WUWT ponderings before, when he was trying to argue that central England was a "good proxy" for global surface temperatures and drawing all sorts of oddball conclusions.  Today I noticed him popping up in the comments to the David Archibald article at WUWT (archived here), writing:

climatereason says (excerpt, my bold italics):

October 5, 2013 at 11:40 am
...here is CET to 1772. Temperatures have been dropping sharply for a decade. We are back to the climate of the 1730′s.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
tonyb

Here's the chart to which Tony linked:

No, Tony Brown, Central England is not back to the climate of the 1730s

Tony has a case of confirmation bias.  He claims that "we are back to the climate of the 1730s".  To see if he's correct, we'll have to go to the longer record than the one to which he linked, which doesn't go back that far.  Let's first look at the long term decadal record for HadCET, which is better than annual temperature anomalies when considering climate change.  The trend becomes obvious:

Data Source: HadCET

The 1730s decade is the teeny orange bit wedged between all the blue columns at the left of the chart above. Now to look in closer, here are the temperature anomalies from 2001 to 2012 and the temperature anomalies from 1731 to 1742 - the anomaly is from the twentieth century average:

Year	Anomaly	Year	Anomaly
1731	0.35	2001	0.43
1732	0.19	2002	1.10
1733	0.97	2003	1.00
1734	0.30	2004	0.98
1735	0.04	2005	0.94
1736	0.80	2006	1.32
1737	0.42	2007	0.98
1738	0.31	2008	0.46
1739	-0.30	2009	0.61
1740	-2.66	2010	-0.67
1741	-0.20	2011	1.20
1742	-1.14	2012	0.20
Average	-0.08	Average	0.71

Some years in the 1730s were quite warm compared to the century as a whole.  But the climate back then was nothing like what it's been like lately, as indicated by surface temperature.  Since 2001, the average temperature for central England was 0.71 degrees above the twentieth century average while the twelve year period since 1731 was 0.08 degrees below the twentieth century average.  The two periods are hardly comparable.

Have temperatures been "dropping sharply"?

Tony Brown writes that "Temperatures have been dropping sharply for a decade."  Let's see:

Data Source: HadCET

The above chart shows that 2010 was a cold year in Central England.  That year also happened to be the hottest year on record globally, equal to 2005.  On the other hand, the following year, 2011, was the second hottest year ever  in the 350 year record of central England temperatures, after 2006!

Here are the two periods compared in an animated chart, with the temperature scale held constant for easy comparison:

Data Source: HadCET

The only similarity I can see is that both periods can be measured as anomalies from the twentieth century mean in degree Celsius!  

Here is an animation of more periods for central England.  Look particularly at the first part of last century, to 1969, compared to the time since 1970:

Data Source: HadCET

Who is Tony Brown trying to kid?  I don't know if he really thinks the world is about to enter another ice age or not, but if he does he's deluded.  

Data Source: SkepticalScience.com

In regard to what will happen in central England, that's another matter.  At the macro level, here are the IPCC AR5 projections for temperature change under two emissions scenarios from the Summary for Policy Makers, page SPM-34 (click for larger version):

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 page SPM-34

If the above is anything to go by, then England will get warmer if we keep burning fossil fuels.  Maybe not as much as some areas but more than others.  If we were to cut emissions and follow the RCP2.6 emissions pathway then temperatures in England might change very little from those of the period 1986-2005.  However the opportunity to do that is fading fast.