After caring for my mother and selling our house after she died, I paid £71,000 to the Secretary of State for Transport to become the lease holder a flat in Thirlestane Court. I moved in on 24 April 95. The price was low because disadvantaged youth had been lodged in the flat and they had painted crude pictures of Batman on the walls. I spent much time earning about plastering, wallpaper and picture rails, and installing bookshelves to house all my meteorological journals. My flat receives strong sunshine from the east, south and west through the day, in marked contrast to my old home, and this was very cheering.
I spent much of my career in cloud photogrammetry trying to make sense of patterns of clouds over tropical oceans. See for instance all the little clouds - with some big ones - over a tropical ocean heated from below by solar radiation (page 2). They are highly structured and highly variable: had I come up with generalizations about order and reproducibility I would not have been doing my job properly.
Human affairs play a major part in science. The paper by P. J. Webster and G. L. Stephens, 1980: "Tropical upper-tropospheric extended clouds: inferences from Winter MONEX". J. Atmos. Sci., 37, 1521-41 is deservedly a classic - but WS contains factual errors, which should be pointed out on the basis of my eye-witness evidence of the particular clouds described (17 Dec 78). Fighting with Peter Webster for the publication of my own work (Warner 1982) which is full of factual information of which we remain lamentably short, I complained that WS wrote that anvil clouds had "bases in the vicinity of the freezing level," and that "the base of the extended cloud deck extends at least 700 km from the major convective region with a thickness of some 300 mb." I found these estimates to be gross exaggerations and complained that no "extended clouds" distinguished the WMONEX area. The classic contribution was on the general radiative aspects of large mesoscale anvils.
At Thirlestane Court I became friends with Frances Jessup, poet. With my old friend from sailing, Peter Wingfield-Stratford, we went to Blaenau Ffestiniog to see the mountain railway on which Peter and I had worked when I lived with him in London as a metallurgist with Johnson Matthey. He and Frances are shown in the photo below, taken on 28 June 98:
My favourite of Frances' poems is The Moth it is that Died.
"Girls just want to have fun" (Cyndi Lauper) and "Boys just want to go hunting" (Ted Nugent). Females are concerned with the nurturing of young life, which implies innovative structuring and low entropy. Males are more focused in their activities and less sensitive to distractions, so they are more logical and objective oriented.
Life is all about self-perpetuation, necessary for which is evolution, looking around for innovation, branching out anew. We hear about the statistical random distribution, and about stochastic processes. A random process is one lacking in deterministic governance. Natural processes are deterministic but chaotic, because of sensitivity to circumstances; they do appear to be random; randomness is just a mathematical ToBY - an early version of chaos theory, a Totally Brilliant Ydea. Evolution must essentially be unpredictable, chaotic. Were it predictable it would not be evolution. Unpredictability is an essential characteristic of weather patterns, women and everything else. [See the books Chaos. Making a New Science by James Gleick, 1987, Cardinal, and The Essence of Chaos by Edward N. Lorenz, 1993, The University of Washington] It becomes clear that:
Nations should be led by women (compare Queen Victoria or Margaret Thatcher) because females have greater general awareness than males. As explained by Michael Garstang in his wonderful book "Elephant Sense and Sensibility" (Academic Press, 2015) elephant society is matriarchal. The same applies to societies of whales and dolphins (Carl Safina, "Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel", Henry Holt, 2015). Human governments should contain a mixture of females and males - a variety of skills.
Don't be surprised when a mad young man shoots lots of other people for no apparent reason. Our distributions of human characteristics are likely to become wider and wider, with freakier and freakier extremes, as time goes on and the statistical characteristics of distributions themselves evolve and ever widen.
Don't be surprised when most of southern Pakistan disappears under water. "The role of upper-level dynamics and surface processes for the Pakistan flood of July 2010" were described by O. Martuis and co-authors in QJRMS, Oct 2013 Part A, 139, 1780-97. The Statistics of Extremes is not naturally Stationary; it should incorporate effects of Chaos. Extremes will become enhanced.
Do be prepared to countenance laws which allow us to cull human populations (of freaks and old people like me). This problem is unpalatable - like that of the elephants in Kruger National Park - now that park plus some of neighbouring Mozambique plus some of Zimbabwe. Nobody likes to cull into families of elephants (middling managers maybe, elephants no).
There should be a massive downsizing of the Financial Sector of the Economy. Of what value are Individual Savings Accounts, and Gift Aid which makes people fill in forms and transfer small amounts of money from one agent to another? The Law should be tamed, and a culture of Caring should be fostered - socialism under capitalist leadership, with safeguards in place through the whole of society akin to those which apply to leaders in democracies.
Multitudes of educated enthusiasts should be employed in Geophysics. We need Look-Up Tables - LUTs - results of detailed computations of geophysical processes like cumulus convection and sea-air transfers of mass and energy. LUTs should refer to individual localities like Hindhead, Surrey, or Poole, Dorset, or 1° S, 170° E. They should feature in computations of weather and climate. The Met Office should relocate to a place with more space, and be accompanied by neighbouring colleges and accommodation.
It seems clear that projections of weather and climate must eventually be tied to details of topographic features - coastlines and mountains and known singular localities. Follow the great radar meteorologist James W. Wilson, who selected as his top paper "Tropical island convection .. Nowcasting storm evolution" (Wilson et al., Mon. Wea. Rev., 129, 1637-55, 2001). Diurnal cycles are of overwhelming importance; see Caroline Bain et al., 2010: ,"Diurnal cycle of the intertropical convergence zone in the east Pacific", (J. Geophys. Res., 115, D23116, doi:10.1029/2010JD014835). See also my observations from "Southbound/northbound traverses on 5 July 1979" of convective sweepers - squall lines - triggered most probably via diurnal effects not obvious to observers at the time.
Gradual progress is being made, by thousands of individual 'searchers happily toiling away in their respective places of work. There is no longer any reasonable doubt about global warming and man's influence. There are many interacting influences; and chaotic, random, variations are necessary to allow evolution. Perturbations occur and mess things up. So it is not easy to make projections of weather and climate.
Seasonal outlooks have hitherto been notably absent from products disseminated by meteorological institutions. Because important influences occur at small scales with large amplitude it will always be difficult to produce seasonal outlooks. But much of the forcing occurs at very large scales and projectors should be able to see these influences coming. It would surely be interesting and productive to attempt to monitor and simulate in a balanced manner many of the principal forcing influences.
Qualities of a successful projector must be like those of a teacher of a large class of children. Teacher has to love them all and get to know how they behave by ceaseless vigilance; teacher has to develop senses of what's going on - to detect which child might be becoming dominant. So with a projector of seasonal outlooks. Sometimes it may become possible to be fairly confident as to what's going to happen; at other times not. Ceaseless vigilance and readiness to adjust is probably going to be necessary. A projector's customers should be enlightened about circumstances and given some education along the way.
If a cultural revolution does not occur soon we are doomed. Perhaps we could learn to communicate with a species of greater emotional intelligence than ourselves.