Climate Projections 2009
Inspired by the Met Office’s Climate Projections 2009, I decided to try my own climate predictions. 
I found a dataset on the Met Office web site listing mean temperatures in central England from 1659 to 2009. I decided to do a bit of analysis. I pasted the data into Excel 2007 and produced this graph.
Interesting how winter temperatures are much more variable than summer ones.
I fitted a liner trend line over the annual average temperature and projected out 100 years. This predicts an increase of just under half a degree in the next hundred years, which (interestingly) will actually be _lower_ that our current average temperatures, because were are currently in a period of unusually warm years.
It’s tempting to look at the last few data points and think that they seem to be trending upwards, but that’s a dangerous assumption. If you saw this section of the chart in isolation, for example, you might think there was a climate catastrophe going on.
An increase of about 3.5 degrees! This data is 1698 to 1733, when annual average temperatures rose steadily from 7.63 to 10.47 degrees. Global warming? No. Just a local anomaly, occurring waaay before widespread use of fossil fuels.
No doubt my analyses are somewhat oversimplified. The Met Office apparently disagrees with my findings, according to UK Climate Predictions 2009 (UKCP09), which predicts hotter, drier summers and warmer, wetter winters coupled with more frequent extreme weather. You can see Dr. Vicky Pope explaining some of the science behind the paper in this video. They have much bigger computers and a bigger budget than me, but I’ve always thought that the weathermen would do at least as good a job if they just looked out of the window occasionally ;-)