Margaret Thatcher did sell off council homes - cheap - to sitting tenants in a desperate attempt to make capitalists of the poor. That the houses that she did sell off are now no longer available to those who don't have the kind of regular job that alows them to get a mortgage from the banks does make it difficult for UK town councils to fulfil their statuatory duty to find housng for "at risk" families
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The George Monbiot articulates the old-fashioned socialist dogma on the subject doesn't make him either a "commie" - the species is now extinct - or a fruitcake. While I personally have reservations about seeing "the total housing stock as a common resource" I do share the perception that the free market is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself.
Exercising eminent domain to house the homeless could upset a lot of people, but the concept of emminent domain is on the statute books all over the world
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though there's not much precedent for using it to house the homeless. The compulsory billetting of kids evacuated from London early in WW2 might well be seen as such a precedent.
George Monbiot argues that is climate change driven by global warming, with the crucial change being lower sea ice cover in the Arctic - presumably the Barents and Kara Seas.
Any "rut" that weather gets into for a few years to almost a decade is typically blamable on shifts in the Pacific Ocean.
There is also the matter that eastern USA, Canada near eastern USA and UK and NW Europe have some sort of a "track record" of getting harsh winters during minima of the ~11 year sunspot cycle, especially every other one. These mostly-every ~22-23 harsh winters in those areas are known as Hale winters. And the current solar minimum is a Hale one and notably especially protracted by a couple years, like the one around 1799 that was a harbinger of the "Dalton Minimum" (solar activity taking a major downturn that lasted around or a bit over 25 years).
It is strongly hypothesized that Hale solar minima have some effect on cloud formation patterns, causing weather shifts that cause NW Europe, eastern USA and Canada near eastern USA to get harsh winters.
With the ~64 year periodic item showing up in HadCRUT3 having just entered its downturn phase and the Sun looking like it's going into a near-repeat of the Dalton Minimum, and UK having above-world-average "climate sensitivity" to solar variation, multidecadal oceanic stuff and CO2, I expect UK to not have a high rate of repeating 1990-2007 warm winters before about 2035. For that matter, UK has some chance of another harsh winter around 2021-2022, and another really bad one or maybe back-to-back 2 notably especially bad ones in a row around
2032-2033.
There is also the matter that there is some preponderance of evidence that in previous global warm spells such as Medieval, Roman and Minoan warm periods (warmed by Milankovitch cycle combo being more favorable than now, combined with solar variation being in roughly 1,000 year cycle upticks), UK was notably running warmer rather than colder.
And 1998-to-now global temperature by many accounts is barely to just a little ahead of the Medieval and Roman warm periods, and by many accounts not exceeding the Minoan warm period. So, it appears to me that global warming to Minoan Warm Period levels warms UK rather than cools UK.
As a result, I would not blame the 3-in-a-row harsh winters in UK on AGW, but on factors having lifetime of 3 years to about 3 decades.
In the 2035-2070 stretch, I expect global temperature to increase by a majority of 1 degree C and UK to warm very sharply, especially UK winters. Maybe around 2050-2060 comes a time when London is largely protected from significant snowstorms by AGW, or after the possible Hale winter around
I would contrast the HadCRUT3 index to the GISS one, since GISS has significant sea areas represented by land temperature determinations in recent years. The GISS global temperature anomaly index also has the
1998 spike ("century class El Nino") supressed and followed by more warming in comparison to HadCRUT3, HadSST2, and the UAH and RSS lower troposphere indices.
For that matter, I like to give a bit of extra weight to HadSST2 - the sea surface temperature component of HadCRUT3. One reason is that there is low opportunity for anthony Watts and his ilk to blame the post-1948-or-so uptick there in growth of "urban heat islands". After that, I like the RSS and UAH lower troposphere indices - despite those including some "middle troposphere" that is thirdway to halfway by "pressure levels" from surface to where increase of GHGs cools the atmosphere rather than warms it. Satellite determinations of atmosphere "general layer" temperatures in global and regional scale have low contamination from growth of urban heat islands.
For that matter, the fast-growing major-heat-island Phoenix AZ is at most an occaisional slightest blip of smallest-dot-size that sometimes-maybe-occaisionally shows up in RSS lower troposphere monthly temperature anomaly mapping. For that matter, the I-95/Rte-1 corridor in eastern USA including NYC is only a slight and very-small-size and often-nonexistent blip in RSS mapping of monthly temperature anomalies. So, it appears to me that Anthony Watts and his ilk cannot blame growth of urban heat islands for any significant amount of warming reported by the UAH and RSS indices.
Furthermore, the UAH lower troposphere index throughout its existence (revised to latest version, which is from beginning of 1979 to now) reports about 75-81% as much global warming in that time stretch as the GISS index does.
This group should discuss electronics, and leave the "real work and conclusions" to people who can design electronics.
All this AGW crud is posted by people who want to show how smart they are, specifically by blathering about "intimate details and analysis" that is both off-topic and untestable.
There is a near sudden drop of about 0.3C (a -0.3C anomaly) that appears right about 1945 and forward in SSTs. A shift in the COADS database occurred then, moving primarily from another source (for example, from US vessels using engine intake measurements) to instead UK insulated bucket measurements starting in 1945. Does the HadCRUT3 SST portion (HadSST2, I think) of their dataset deal with this yet? Or not? If so, in what manner and what is the effect?
Do you know right now?
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You wrote earlier, "I consider myself a serious 'amateur scientist' in climatology, meteorology, and atmospheric science in general."
Just how serious?
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I heartily applaud anyone attempting to understand and follow any particular part. But I've still yet to see anyone here engage themselves in the development of their own simplified Earth model that can start from simple initial conditions (impossible ones, even) and use basic physics to then over time reproduce something akin to the Hadley and polar cells. It's not that hard.
The 1945 SST example illustrates just the smallest tidbit of the difficulty of assimilating raw data into global datasets. Which is a whole other kettle of fish.
Like I said, it's better to leave the conclusions to those actively doing the work. It's hard enough to follow along. At least, it has been for me. Perhaps you are special.
A paper from Naomi Oreskes, Kristin Shrader-Frechette, and Kenneth Belitz in 1994 takes some time to delve into terms like confirmation, validation, and verification and deals with falsification issues. You might read it. You'd be better informed.
The focus of the IPCC reports are on the trustworthiness and relevance of assessments ("the degree of correspondance between models and the real world they represent.") As far as that goes, I'd refer you to "Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis."
I'd love to see more design questions and informed answers.
I grew up in Minnesota. Minnesotans laugh at cold and snow; if it's not still snowing by April 15, they're disappointed: ,,,--- Minnesota Temperature Conversion Chart
50 Fahrenheit (10 C) New Yorkers try to turn on the heat. Minnesotans plant gardens.
40 Fahrenheit (4.4 C) Californians shiver uncontrollably Minnesotans sunbathe.
35 Fahrenheit (1.6 C) Italian Cars won't start Minnesotans drive with the windows down.
32 Fahrenheit (0 C) Distilled water freezes Minnesotans water gets thicker.
0 Fahrenheit (-17.9 C) New York City landlords finally turn on the heat. Minnesotans have the last cookout of the season.
-40 Fahrenheit (-40 C) Hollywood disintegrates. Minnesotans rent some videos.
-60 Fahrenheit (-51 C) Mt. St. Helen's freezes. Minnesota Girl Scouts sell cookies door-to-door.
-100 Fahrenheit (-73 C) Santa Claus abandons the North Pole Minnesotans pull down their earflaps.
-173 Fahrenheit (-114 C) Ethyl alcohol freezes. Minnesotans get frustrated when they can't thaw the keg.
-459.4 Fahrenheit (-273 C) Absolute zero; all atomic motion stops. Minnesotans start asking, "cold enough for ya?"
-500 Fahrenheit (-295 C) Hell freezes over. The Vikings win the Super Bowl
All I know about this issue right now is that the ~1940 bump correlates well with a PDO index spike at a time AMO was high, and correlation with PDO and AMO remained good after then all the way to now.
However, I don't know what HadSST2 did to account for the ~1945 measurement change.
The ~1940 bump also shows up strongly in Barents Sea and Nuuk Greenland, which show amplified versions of global temperature variations especially when due to AMO and PDO.
GISS likes to make adjustments for changes in measurement instruments, and they still show the ~1940 bump and the ~1950 dip.
Actually, it looks untestable to John because he doesn't have a clue about the subject. This isn't about intelligence, it's about knowledge, and outside of electronics he is in the lamentable state of knowing so little that he doesn't realise how little he knows.
No wonder that he wants us to concentrate on electronics (except when he fells like posting a recipe) since this is his - only - strong suit.
Ravinghorde should be ambitious enough to be gaga like me. At the moment he's gaga like every other right-wing nit-wit - if he's got a brain, he doesn't use it to think for himself, but to merely pick and recycle the silliest ideas he can find in the Telegraph.
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