Desperation: Brit Met Office Blames Normal Weather on Warming

A fellow blogger, William Teach at Pirates Cove, likes to make fun of the global warming crowd by pointing out how they blame any deviation from average weather as abnormal, so called "HotColdWetDry".  Now he will have to revise that to "HotColdWetDryNormal" since the head British Meteorological  Office is blaming to currently cooling winters in England, a reversion to the norms of the recent past,on global warming.

Via Watts Up With That.

English Winters Back To Normal–Julia Blames Global Warming!

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

So just how cold have Britain’s winters become? Well, according to the Central England Temperature series, not very! The winter just gone ranks an unremarkable 187th coldest in the 354 years since the index started in 1660. Figure 1 shows just how unremarkable it has been. The 2012/13 winter finished at 3.83C, a fraction above the mean over the whole record of 3.72C.

Slingo also talks about the 5 year trend, so let’s look at that as well.

There has certainly been a sharp drop away from the abnormally mild winters between 1998 and 2008, but this only takes us back to the sort of winters that were prevalent during most of the last century, and still much warmer than the 19thC. The current 5-year average is 3.6C, exactly the same as the average temperature from 1980-89. And from 1960-69, the average was, you’ve guessed it, also exactly 3.6C.

Thomas Wyke - Thames Frost Fair -1683-1684

Yes, there does appear to be a warming trend from the late 1600s through the present.  This is, in fact, the end of the Little Ice Age, when the Thames often froze over, and the inhabitants of London held 'Frost Fairs' out on the ice. It was also, probably not coincidentally, a prolonged period of low sunspot activity known as the 'Maunder Minimum'.  Sunspots have been declining for a couple of cycle now, and we may be entering another minimum.  If so, you may want to start looking at snow shoes and skates in catalogs and on line...