Anthony Watts of WUWT infamy favours David Archibald, who makes funny sunny predictions. This time Archibald is asking if Central England will have a sudden drop in temperature for a bit. He bases his surmise on "wiggle matching" with the temperature drop in 1740. The Archibald post oddly enough comes straight after a post by a physicist denier, rbgatduke, who slammed Christy and Monckton for what he saw as their abuse of statistics and charting.
Anyway, I thought I'd do some pattern matching of my own to see how well that would have worked for David Archibald in the past. I've superimposed the bit around 1740 onto what look like the closest matches later on. Same as David Archibald did only he just did it for the current period.
Here's the result - you'll probably have to click on the animated gif chart to see the larger version.
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| Source: Adapted from UK Met - Hadley Centre |
So there was a dip in the late 1879, but not as great as the 1740 drop, other than that nothing. Like David Archibald says, we'll have to wait and see. With the jet stream the way it is, climate change and the weather in the UK being a bit weird lately, I suppose anything could happen.
There is a paper on the 1740 event written by Dr Phil Jones but I can't find a full copy. Here is another paper by Dr Jones (2008) that touches on the subject and is a good read in its own right; and a myth-buster.
Update:
Here's an animated chart for anonymous in the comments, to put the weather in the UK during March 2013 and December 2010 into context of the whole world. Winter still happens, it's just that when taken over the whole world, the earth's land and sea surfaces are considerably warmer than they used to be early last century. There are still "cold" records being set, but not nearly as many as "hot" records.
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| Data source: NASA |
