Met Office 2008 Forecast: Trend of Mild Winters Continues
Met Office, 25 September 2008: The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.
Reality Check: Winter of 2008/09 Coldest Winter For A Decade
Met Office, March 2009: Mean temperatures over the UK were 1.1 °C below the 1971-2000 average during December, 0.5 °C below average during January and 0.2 °C above average during February. The UK mean temperature for the winter was 3.2 °C, which is 0.5 °C below average, making it the coldest winter since 1996/97 (also 3.2 °C).
Met Office 2009 Forecast: Trend To Milder Winters To Continue, Snow And Frost Becoming Less Of A Feature
Met Office, 25 February 2009: Peter Stott, Climate Scientist at the Met Office, said: “Despite the cold winter this year, the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue, with snow and frost becoming less of a feature in the future.
“The famously cold winter of 1962/63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850.”
Reality Check: Winter Of 2009/10 Coldest Winter For Over 30 Years
Met Office, 1 March 2010: Provisional figures from the Met Office show that the UK winter has been the coldest since 1978/79. The mean UK temperature was 1.5 °C, the lowest since 1978/79 when it was 1.2 °C.
Met Office July 2010: Climate Change Gradually But Steadily Reducing Probability Of Severe Winters In The UK
Ross Clark, Daily Express, 3 December 2010: ONE of the first tasks for the team conducting the Department for Transport’s “urgent review” into the inability of our transport system to cope with snow and ice will be to interview the cocky public figure who assured breakfast TV viewers last month that “I am pretty confident we will be OK” at keeping Britain moving this winter. They were uttered by Transport secretary Philip Hammond himself, who just a fortnight later is already being forced to eat humble pie… If you want a laugh I recommend reading the Resilience Of England’s Transport Systems In Winter, an interim report by the DfT published last July. It is shockingly complacent. Rather than look for solutions to snow-induced gridlock the authors seem intent on avoiding the issue. The Met Office assured them “the effect of climate change is to gradually but steadily reduce the probability of severe winters in the UK”.
Daily Express, 28 October 2010: IT’S a prediction that means this may be time to dig out the snow chains and thermal underwear. The Met Office, using data generated by a £33million supercomputer, claims Britain can stop worrying about a big freeze this year because we could be in for a milder winter than in past years… The new figures, which show a 60 per cent to 80 per cent chance of warmer-than-average temperatures this winter, were ridiculed last night by independent forecasters. The latest data comes in the form of a December to February temperature map on the Met Office’s website.
Reality Check: December 2010 “Almost Certain” To Be Coldest Since Records Began
The Independent, 18 December 2010: December 2010 is “almost certain” to be the coldest since records began in 1910, according to the Met Office.
Met Office Predicted A Warm Winter. Cheers Guys
John Walsh, The Independent, 19 January 2010: Some climatologists hint that the Office’s problem is political; its computer model of future weather behaviour habitually feeds in government-backed assumptions about climate change that aren’t borne out by the facts. To the Met Office, the weather’s always warmer than it really is, because it’s expecting it to be, because it expects climate change to wreak its stealthy havoc. If it really has had its thumb on the scales for the last decade, I’m afraid it deserves to be shown the door.
A Frozen Britain Turns The Heat Up On The Met Office
Paul Hudson, BBC Weather, 9 January 2010: Which begs other, rather important questions. Could the model, seemingly with an inability to predict colder seasons, have developed a warm bias, after such a long period of milder than average years? Experts I have spoken to tell me that this certainly is possible with such computer models. And if this is the case, what are the implications for the Hadley centre’s predictions for future global temperatures? Could they be affected by such a warm bias? If global temperatures were to fall in years to come would the computer model be capable of forecasting this?
A Period Of Humility And Silence Would Be Best For Met Office
Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 10 January 2010: A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”. In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
MODERATOR
In the heading, if the Met Office is singular and present then the verb should be “misleads”. If in the past, “misled”.
You may delete this message.
IanM
REPLY: That was exactly the headline at the GWPF, http://thegwpf.org/uk-news/2073-warm-bias-how-the-met-office-mislead-the-british-public.html
But in deference to our readers, I’ve made the change to “Misled” – Anthony
(facepalm) “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.” (/facepalm)
What?
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded.”
Already recorded, at least now they are admitting that they make up the numbers as needed !
-Jay
Why are data not in chronological order?
On this side of the pond – Costa Rica – I am accustomed to apparent chance/random recitations. However, I have come to depend on WUWT for orderly accounts.
best wishes for a thoughtful Advent, John
Look people, you have to understand that the temps outside your front doors are simply raw (data), and will not be accurate until adjusted and homogenized. Next summer after everyone forgets how cold it is, the Met will discover some heat that ya’ll are missing now and it will turn out that this winter is not nearly as cold as you are experiencing…
/sarc
Must be a stuxnet bug running loose in their computer. It is cold and wet. Not hot and dry.
A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office. No, no, no. I want to hear all their predictions, every single detail and them explain the minor difference was cause by the Y2K bug or Wikileaks.
The mixing of (expensive giga) gifts, politics and science, better rather naive scientists will always end up as bad news for science.
it only makes sense, if you are trying to measure the “warmest winter” then taking the top 15 measurements over the course of 150 days of winter makes sense … of course if you are looking for the “coldest winter”, then taking the fifteen lowest measurements would also make sense … seems like you could have both the warmest and coldest winter in the same year which of course tells us nothing about the average … thats some solid scientific method you’ve got there …
I really hate it when misleading stats are used by the anti-AGW brigade in the same way that the warmista do.
Example:
“The famously cold winter of 1962/63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850.”
Reality Check: Winter Of 2009/10 Coldest Winter For Over 30 Years
Since 30 years before 2009 means “since 1979”, there is nothing about these two statements that is contradictory, so why is this labelled “Reality Check”?
What is wrong with the Met office?
They make the available evidence fit the CONJECTURE, rather than allowing the evidence to form a proposition.
This method is that favoured by TV magicians and dubious salesmen
That should be added to – the evidence is also exaggerated to fit the conjecture
You’re re-reporting something that’s becoming a bit of an urban myth there. The quote that Dominic Lawson repeated was from a comment to a blog and didn’t come from the Met Office. That’s not the way they work out seasonal averages at all, but the myth seems to be developing a life of its own.
[ryanm: yes, this one has triggered my bull-crap meter. Dominic replied to my email asking where he found that quote. He said he didn’t remember. Sigh.]
The Met *staffer* ought to be informed that December, January and February are winter months. November is still an autumn month.
OK….there are a couple things in this article that confuse me. the following is at the core of my confusion:
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average.”
1) The data has already been recorded and yet in the next sentence it’s stated the readings take place between November and March. It is currently still December so how can the numbers be recorded for 3 months that haven’t even happened yet?
2) They produce an average based on the highest 15 reading between November and March. So they base everything from 15 readings over a period of 5 months? And they only look at the highest readings? No wonder they call it the hottest ever when they completely ignore the cold temperatures like they don’t exist.
If I have read the article wrong please let me know and help relieve my confusion.
To Steve at 9.23 am
Winter 1978/79 was a doozy too
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/8209333/Britains-coldest-winters-on-record-in-pictures.html
Yes, Let’s hear the Met Office predictions and the explanation how they got it so wrong. If I turned in work of this quality, I’d be sacked but the higher up the pay scale you go, responsibility matters less. This is what’s wrong with our country wether it be defence spending, transport, social services or weather forecasting. Time to get sacking – gross incompetence – your fired! (Apologies to the AGW cultists).
I read this from someone elses link in another thread, and yeah, I could feel the burn.
““This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
It would be nice if the above absurdity could be confirmed as a real Met Office staffer and not someone being malicious, because WOW…that is a pretty huge mozza ball hanging there. It wouldn’t surprise me if that is truly how they determine their average…..but to actually spill that can of worms seems almost too good to be true.
And what is most bothersome, is that they never ask themselves why they are consistently wrong in this regard.
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
Last time I looked at a calendar November was still in the Fall, not the Winter. Has global warming changed that?
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded.”
I’m sorry; I have to be misreading this – are we at the point of climate by dictate now?
The method described, taking the highest 15 temps between November and March and averaging them, does not seem to be a sound way of determine the average temperature of winter. Why not just average all the data in the winter months? Why they counting using November and March data when in the UK (according to wikipedia) winter is defined by meteorologists as December, January, and February?
These people are criminal.
I’m still impressed that Piers Corbyn is able to predict the MET office forecasts, before the MET office
cooks them up,sorry, publishes them:“Standard meteorology will consistently underestimate the lengths of cold periods and will grossly underestimate the severity of blizzard and snow deluges at times.”
(From: http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No37.pdf)
Piers also predicts the weather better than the MET office. Admittedly that particular bar is not set very high, but credit where credit is due.
Meanwhile ‘Prof’ Julia Slingo indicated to the UK parliament that the climate models must be correct, because they share code with the MET office weather prediction program…
“At least for the UK the codes that underpin our climate change projections are the same codes that we use to make our daily weather forecasts, so we test those codes twice a day for robustness”
(see http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/387b/38724.htm)
There you have it: buffoonery and talent – and where does the UK government go for advice?!
steveta_uk says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:23 am
I really hate it when misleading stats are used by the anti-AGW brigade in the same way that the warmista do.
Example:
“The famously cold winter of 1962/63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850.”
Reality Check: Winter Of 2009/10 Coldest Winter For Over 30 Years
Since 30 years before 2009 means “since 1979″, there is nothing about these two statements that is contradictory, so why is this labelled “Reality Check”?
Exactly, you beat me to it!
Another example:
The latest data comes in the form of a December to February temperature map on the Met Office’s website.
Reality Check: December 2010 “Almost Certain” To Be Coldest Since Records Began
Again a prediction for a three month period, DJF, is not contradicted by a extremely cold month. In 62/3 the snow started on Boxing Day and Jan/Feb were brutal, there’s plenty of time yet for a real ‘Reality Check’!
That 15 warmest was someone having a laugh. I was surprised at Dominic Lawson picking it up when it was so obviously a piss-take of the Met Office.
DaveE.
Are you sure you don’t want to use this picture instead? 😉
http://cheezburger.com/BrideOfDracula96/lolz/View/3916661760
@Ian L. McQueen- If you’ll permit an aside, I believe that the headline is in line with the standard British English practice of referring to a plural group (team, office, group, etc.) as a plural entity even when it’s referred to by a singular noun.
The visual effects of Global Warming . . . .
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1339632/Misery-airports-Heathrow-remains-closed-sun-forecast-tomorrow.html
I think the comment made by Admiral Bruce Fraser, CinC aboard the flagship HMS King George V as they closed in on the Bismark when his Met Officer handed him a forecast claiming the gale they were then battling through was easing when it patently was getting worse – “They trouble with you Bl**dy boffins is you refuse to look out of the scuttle!” (Scuttle – Naval term for that round thing with glass in it on ships…) I think the Met Office has now become so dependent on their CRU developed “Model” they no longer look at reality. I may be no mathematician or “climate scientist” – but as I have always understood “averages” it is the median value found by taking the highest and the lowest numbers in a set and ‘averaging’ them to find out what the middle value is… If you’re only measuring the hottest or the coldest – that’s bias and in my profession is known as “Expectation Bias” – I only take note of the things I expect to see or want to see…
But don’t expect the Met Office to acknowledge any bias or error – they’re Civil Servants and they NEVER admit an error.
The Met “misled” the public, but it is the media which dumbs them further down. For instance, in 2000, an article in the Independant, quoting Met officials assured everyone that snow would be a thing of the past due to warmer temps in winter. Now the Telegraph comes along today and assures everyone that snow is consistent with global warming. As if snow would occur with warmer temperatures.
Now who’s to blame for the mess? The Met, the Media or the public. I place the blame on the public because it should be quite apparent that the Met and Media are both full of crap, and the public should believe their lying eyes. Unelect these fools, my British cousins, and quit buying global warming propaganda rags like the Telegraph and Independant. Of course, I not picking on my British cousins, as we could do more here in the US as well. We’re working on it!
steveta_uk says:
>>
Since 30 years before 2009 means “since 1979″, there is nothing about these two statements that is contradictory, so why is this labelled “Reality Check”?
>>
Because 1963 and 2009 makes TWICE in a thousand years. It also makes it twice in 200 years, twice in 100 years (as we can pretend to know it was when we did not have records.) and even twice in fifty years if you like.
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
The last time I checked, Winter doesn’t begin until December 21’st, at the solstice. November temperatures are part of Autumn.
Get the seasons right before you publish data concerning them.
I am tempted to make some glib comment or sarcastic barb. The moderator would be forced to snip most of them so I won’t bother. The great sadness in this met office mess is that normally sound science has been subverted by ideology and pseudo religious faith away from evidence based deductive reason. I do believe the civil servants and politicians would better serve the public if they left entertainment to the professionals.
[ryanm: my filter is pretty low at the moment, try your best to be witty & snarky]
Anthony
can I nominate the following for Quote of the Week:
I mean WTF. No. Really. WTF.
Jay @9:19,
I don’t think The Total Idiot was being totally truthful.
He/she might just possibly be in a sarcastic mood!
Mind you, after the lies and propegander of the warmists over the last twenty years, it may be fact. They’ve done worse! 10:10 anyone?
Ed
Don’t blame Met Office scientists, blame their bosses, giving the orders that computer models are superior to any mortal, they must be followed to the last iota.
Data is essential, but models are more toys of super computer age than the fundamentals of science. Science is unlikely to make radical steps forward guided by computer models, that can only be achieved by the reasoning of an individual.
There are many individuals doing just that, and my small contribution (right or wrong) can be seen here: http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/LFC-CETfiles.htm
So the first question is this:
WHY, given that CET has been measured since 1659, can a standard CET ‘temperature’ not be used as the basis for measurements?
This article shows that the Met Office have changed the mechanism of assessment in a manner which is inappropriate. Namely simply picking the hottest days rather than the average temperature……..
I think you will find some even larger humble pie come Januaryh 2011 as the CET for December 2010 is going to smash through all the 20th century records and 2010 is already showing up on the HadCET graph as being BELOW THE 1961 – 1990 average for the whole year. By a significant amount………
The time has perhaps come to set up a new set of input parameters, including solar, oceanic, stratospheric, lunar and planetary, not to mention the potential for modification based on volcanic eruption (which will no doubt become predictable in time) etc.
Perhaps based on the concept of biphasic oscillations of different amplitude and periodicity.
Rather than starting the scare at the start of a 20 year warm phase………
We Want Piers Corbyn in the Met OfficeWe Want Piers Corbyn in the Met OfficeChanting mantras sans evidence is what warmistas do. So I’ll add the evidence. Because I really would like to see him there. I really don’t like Julia Slingo.
Piers Corbyn says he’s been right 85% of the time; he predicted the coldest winter here for about 100 years, well before it started; Boris Johnson Mayor of London believed him and therefore London is prepared; Piers is not alone…
The lack of satisfying explanations gets Leif upset – but hey, it works, and when that means having help at hand where needed, it’s the evidence that matters, not the explanations… and you only need enough evidence to show people you’re not phony, because then it’s time for action.
David A. Evans says: December 20, 2010 at 9:55 am
Can you give evidence please?
Jeff says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:23 am
“it only makes sense, if you are trying to measure the “warmest winter” then taking the top 15 measurements over the course of 150 days of winter makes sense … of course if you are looking for the “coldest winter”, then taking the fifteen lowest measurements would also make sense … seems like you could have both the warmest and coldest winter in the same year”
I was going to same something similar. The other inconvenient truth about this interesting statistical technique, is that if you have a warm two weeks at the start of November, then all the following readings from December through March are discarded. But why choose November as the starting point? It isn’t even a winter month.
Still, I’d like to see them announce ‘warmest winter on record’ after 3 more months where the mercury barely breaks above freezing. It would be worth suffering their hubris just to hear the reaction. At that point, most people will realize that the met office is run by people who are completely clueless on even the most basic tenets of recording temperatures.
I’d like to add to Dominic Lawson’s “A period of humility and even silence…..” by asking: Please could we have our money back?
When exactly did the Met Office stop their 3 monthly forecasts because on their own admission the forecasts were wildly inaccurate?
Yeah but didn’t the wags at the Met Office receive bonuses totalling over a million bucks earlier this year? Imagine if they got close with their predictions, they would have walked away with the national gross domestic product. Count yourselves lucky you poms, your country could have been in debt by now.
Steveta_uk
Perhaps you should re-read. If we are to presume that the coldest winter was 62/63 then we shouldn’t have anything close to it for another 1000. Or so said the Met. The silliness is in the original prediction as within 50 years it appears we are bearing in on another winter of similar severity.
This is where the utilization of sweeping statements – deliberately done in order to foster fear – is a problem. Now – if we statistically get a winter that achieves parity with the 62/63 winter, are you willing to agree that the Met has no idea what it is talking about?
For some reason there seems to have been a lull in global warming alarmism in the mainstream media, including nothing from the Telegraph’s Louise Gray for over a week now. To be honest i’m starting to worry about her – she could be trapped under a snowdrift somewhere; Or maybe she’s still cycling back from her holiday in Cancun?
DAE;
Don’t think so. Remember that the models use a median, not an average, for each day’s measurements. Medians just care about highest and lowest.
Dr. P.;
“begging the question” is indeed relevant, but you’re not using it properly. It means committing a tautology, assuming the conclusion in the premises.
Thanks to that lunatic Huhne, Britain is expected to provide 30% of its power via “renewables” by 2020. He plans to reach this target primarily by wind power.
The 3149 turbines we currently have are providing 0.1% of our electricity as I write this, just when we need it most in cold weather. The national power supply is currently creaking with a demand touching 60GW, and pulling almost 2GW across from France via the interconnector.
Huhne proposes to build another 10,000 – at enormous cost. That means, added to current capacity, and being generous, we can assume that wind will provide 0.5% of the country’s energy needs in similar weather conditions.
Can someone, ANYONE, please explain to me how this is supposed to work? Or how civilised society is supposed to function in the UK if Huhne gets his wish?
Paul says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:29 am
If that is so, it ought to have been verified by now. It does seem excessive, even for the activists at the Met Office
Snively MET Office Staffer admits to skewing temperature records — invents warmest winter on “record”. I wonder if NASA taught the MET Office how to do this as they have just invented the warmest year on “record”.
Maybe, as Willis pointed out in his last post, the models are so messed up that they just think its hot outside.
They should have listened to the Siberian Swans rather than their multi-million pound super computers which produces failed forecasts even faster than before.
Also, I should point out – particularly apropos to the topic of this thread:
Thanks to people like the Mystic Met office, the highest prediction made for energy demand in the UK this winter was out by 4 GW. – 4 GW! – that kind of miscalculation could have easily resulted in thousands of deaths if the current supply wasn’t so elastic, and with the bulk of the “30%” expected to come from wind, and without most of our coal generating capacity, it won’t be in the future.
The original headline is correct British English, and was written in the present tense, which is stronger than the now-“corrected” past-tense version.
[I agree. Fixed. ~dbs, mod.]
The climate con-con can’t hide the cold and snow. It’s a fatal flaw in their plans.
James Sexton says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:37 am
And what is most bothersome, is that they never ask themselves why they are consistently wrong in this regard.
=========================================================
Repeating the same behavior, expecting a different result………..
Unfortunately, giving accurate weather predictions will not bring them the money that hysterics will…..
Yup – heads need to roll at the met office. Even now they are busily rewriting history saying that cold winters were predicted by the climate models and are further proof of global warming.
Hansen is actually on to something brilliant when he uses 12-month running means for temperature, meaning he can begin to average parts of 2 summers with only one winter.
RYAN
I strongly suspect that the blog posting is a hoax /malicious post. I can’t believe this came from a Met Office staffer. Has the Met Office issued a rebuttal?
While they might have a good reason to take percentile values (I dont know what reason), Joe public in England is going to have even less faith in Met service after this one.
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded”
Just beautiful…………!
This from Steve’s blog today:
==========================================================
Oh and in case you wondered why the Met Office has been getting it so badly wrong, here’s Bishop Hill on its chairman Robert Napier.
Interesting fact: the Chairman of the Met Office board, Robert Napier, is or has been:
* Chairman of the Green Fiscal Trust*
* Chairman of the trustees of the World Centre of Monitoring of Conservation
* a director of the Carbon Disclosure Project
* a director of the Carbon Group
* Chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund UK
Source
He is also a member of the Green Alliance.
If we are supposed to reject the views of scientists, like Richard Lindzen, on the grounds that they have given speeches at thinktanks that have accepted money from oil interests, then I think its fair to say that we can safely discount anything said by the Met Office forthwith.
Katabasis, where can the data about output from the UK wind farms be found?
As for the bit about the average already being decided by the warmest 15 days in November, it’s clearly a wind-up.
Anthony, perhaps you should flag it as such? It does no good to keep repeating a blatant fallacy; the truth is bad enough and does not need embroidering with fiction.
Lucy Skywalker says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:28 am
It was a reader comment Lucy. If I remember correctly on one of Bookers blog posts where he was bemoaning the fact that the Met had screwed up the forecast again
DaveE.
In the normal world, you receive bonuses for good work and getting it right.
In the grey world of ‘climate science’, you get bonuses and grants for getting it wrong and misleading the public – see below.
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=5&sqi=2&ved=0CDIQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-1254081%2FMet-Office-staff-scoop-12million-bonuses-years-forecasts-wrong.html&rct=j&q=uk%20met%20office%20chief%20bonus&ei=wKgPTaubF8fBhAecn9G3Dg&usg=AFQjCNGNTNWPKTUV46YOCnTo367p2lYFvw&cad=rja
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
This quote is from January of 2010. It has nothing to do with the 2010-2011 winter. Even so, it was obviously premature, and incorrect.
Britain rewards failure.
£billions of taxpayers’ money spent on a supercomputer run by puppets. A quote from an old Sci-Fi programme called Doomwatch sums it nicely: “Apply political pressure to a scientist and he will do or say anything he’s told to.”
I wonder if they are also going to use this wondrous machine to ‘prove’ that Singapore, rainforests, etc., have higher concentrations of carbon dioxide, and other places like Arizona have less carbon dioxide, thus explaining the day/night temperature profile of these and other places.
Maybe they need to steel another few £billions from us to fund research into proving that one of the most basic equations in organic chemistry – hydrocarbon + oxygen -> carbon dioxide + water – is wrong because they’ve been told to think that only CO2 is important and water vapour is irrelevant.
The Met Office is a total disgrace. It costs about £350 million a year about half of which (a not inconsiderable sum of money) goes on generating climate change propaganda.
Its chairman, Robert Napier, was presumably awarded the job as a result of his previous success in transforming the WWF into a climate change propaganda organisation.
The Met Office itself states that it uses the same climate model for predicting seasonal weather as it uses for its climate change predictions. So it is not difficult to see why there is a bias toward predicting progressively warmer weather in its forecasts, since half of their funding depends on confirming that climate change is a problem..
The Met Office themselves have a misguided belief in the validity of their models.
They state that the ability of their models to predict what the weather has done in the past confirms their ability to predict future weather.
This is a total fallacy – if a model could not even reproduce the data used to construct it, it would be a sign of total incompetence on the part of its programmers. But the fact it can successfully reproduce the data used to construct it provides no confirmation that the model is a correct representation of the physical reality and therefore useful for predictions of future weather or climate.
I find it very hard to understand how an organisation can be allowed to spend many millions on constructing computer models while openly making it clear that they have no understanding of the basic principles of model validation. Presumably anyone within the Met Office who were to say “hold on – what we are saying about the validity of our models is nonsense” would find that they had made a career limiting move.
Katabasis says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:41 am
For the last half hour the wind has provided at a rate of 66Mw which is 27% of metered wind capacity of 2.43Gw installed.
There’s also another ~2.4Gw kicking about somewhere which I can’t imagine is doing a lot better. 🙁
DaveE.
James Delingpole has something to say about the Met Office, with links to Bishophill:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100069119/panic-and-fear-close-their-icy-tentacles-round-the-doomed-met-office/
Check the green credentials of the Met Office Boss …
Typo: “steal” not “steel”. Apologies.
Katabasis says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:52 am
Also, I should point out – particularly apropos to the topic of this thread:
Thanks to people like the Mystic Met office, the highest prediction made for energy demand in the UK this winter was out by 4 GW. – 4 GW! – that kind of miscalculation could have easily resulted in thousands of deaths if the current supply wasn’t so elastic, and with the bulk of the “30%” expected to come from wind, and without most of our coal generating capacity, it won’t be in the future.
=======
Based on Anthony’s solar post, I was looking at the Predicted_Sunspot_Numbers_and_Radio_Flux forecast on SWPC and noticed they are forecasting declining activity from mid 2013 – 2020. Not that one can put a lot of stock into forecasts but they do seem to get the general trend correctly. — http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/weekly/Predict.txt
Maybe geo-thermal plants in Iceland vs wind?
I see a lot of comments from the US asking why we don’t vote the establishment out… we can’t! Every major party is signed up to the AGW dogma. Icebergs could be floating up the Thames and our MPs would still be voting on where to site the next windmill. Were screwed.
Damn, that was supposed to be 2.7% not 27%
DaveE.
Henry chance said @ December 20, 2010 at 9:23 am
Must be a stuxnet bug running loose in their computer. It is cold and wet. Not hot and dry.
——————
More like the Sux2bMET virus. 😉
Sorry – we are screwed….cold fingers.
cutting their staff by 90% should limit their ability to make up data.
Exeter today:
“Hundreds of people have been working to minimise the disruption caused by the snow and ice in Devon but forecasters have warned there could be worse to come.
Exeter was covered by a couple of inches of snow during the early hours of Saturday morning and there was more snow on higher ground.
And the Met Office is expecting a similar amount of snow to fall today, followed by more snow later in the week. Overnight temperatures dropped to -13C (8.6F) overnight on Saturday and are expected to be around -5C (23F) during the night over the coming days.”
———
-13C? Colder than Chicago right now! My laughter at this situation with the MET is tempered by my concern for very some fine people over there. Not a very happy Advent, I fear….
http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/news/Staff-praised-big-freeze-efforts/article-3022498-detail/article.html
I enjoyed the Department of Transport comments in the piece. not sure how many others on here would read Private Eye, a political satire magazine in the UK, but they regularly commute the Department (DofT) to DafT. I liked it anyway!
Peter Miller says:
December 20, 2010 at 11:09 am
In the normal world, you receive bonuses for good work and getting it right.
In the grey world of ‘climate science’, you get bonuses and grants for getting it wrong and misleading the public – see below.
Wow. Economics and climate science have more similarities than I could have thought.
Ryan Maue says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:58 am
Hansen is actually on to something brilliant when he uses 12-month running means for temperature, meaning he can begin to average parts of 2 summers with only one winter.
He also averages two winters with only one summer if the average rolls monthly.
“For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average.”
Is this how an average is calculated?
Here is Dominic Lawson telling us about the MET Office’s measuring practices;
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/dominic_lawson/article6982310.ece
He also writes ;
“as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week”:
So….is it just hear-say? That really wood be good news.
Because if its true….it is ……tragic.
There are so many things in this world that I do not understand, and so many more that I might have understood by now if only I had applied my mind more diligently. But of all the things that I have been able to understand least, that I have not been able to come to understand at all, is how it is that so many people around the world who strike this onlooker as devoid of all understanding, manage to make a living at the expense of the public purse.
latitude;
not only forthwith, but henceforth, too also! 😉
The Met Office have just been awarded First Class Order of Merit for institutions not fit for purpose.
Is there anyone out there who would like to analyse Professor Manleys Central England Temperature data to 1974 for December and compare it to the spin the MET Office are placing on the low temperatures.
http://www.rmets.org/pdf/qj74manley.pdf
Sorry Mr Watts and Mr Moderator I know that the only thing worse than someone’s hobby horse is someone’s old hobby horse.
Two inches of snow and the most affluent part of the UK grinds to a standstill.
David A. Evans says: December 20, 2010 at 9:55 am
‘That 15 warmest was someone having a laugh. I was surprised at Dominic Lawson picking it up when it was so obviously a piss-take of the Met Office.’
Where’s the Met’s published denial then? I’ve never seen one – and you can be sure that outfits like the Guardian and the Independent would have bigged up the story to clobber us coldists (as a greenish friend of mine politely calls me) if so.
The quote from the “Met Office” has been tracked down by Misty on the Bishop Hill blog to a comment on the Daily Mail website from someone claiming to be a Met Office employee. It reads like a joke comment to me and no credibility can be given to it IMHO.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2010/12/20/cold-weather-payments.html#comments
On a bbc news special about the weather the forecaster explained how a change in the jet stream caused last years and this years winters.
That does not sound right to me, everything I have read suggests it is the mix of high/low pressure in the arctic oscillation.
Am I wrong? If not why did he not mention it and focused on the jet stream??
The blame game has started but in normal times the news media would have called in the Met Off to explain their incompetence. They don’t do that any more, not want the gov wants to hear.
As long as the MSM accepts claims by Hansen that he already knows that 2010 will be the hottest year ever, and as long as the MSM accepts from Hansen that November was the hottest ever even when the other data providers show differently, this Met Office nonsense will continue. The Arcitects of Salvation speak, and we shall bow reverentially.
The alarmist bias is so blatant, consistent and (now) contrary to non-insiders that one is reminded of how the intellectuals in Soviet-age Eastern Europe championed Communism despite what they saw in their daily lives. The disconnect persevered because family and professional lives depended on supporting the lie.
If you are so inclined, a survey that says it is representative of 95% of the surveyed, 19 out of 20 times means that only 1 in 20 times has it been done correctly. Such with temperature records and “projections”: the previous were in error, the next is not.
Try a Google for “we take the highest 15 readings between November and March” [about 2,520 results]
I thought this hoax was disposed of last January, here at WUWT and elsewhere.
The current weather conditions in the UK are completely consistent with the Met offices climate models.
Total crap.
Paul says: “You’re re-reporting something that’s becoming a bit of an urban myth there. The quote that Dominic Lawson repeated was from a comment to a blog and didn’t come from the Met Office. That’s not the way they work out seasonal averages at all, but the myth seems to be developing a life of its own.”
It’s going viral because it is perfectly consistent with the lunacy that pervades the UK bureaucracy.
The warming bias might have something to do with the following.
So if you believe that co2 leads to warmer winters then the output of the supercomputers must reflect this expectation.
Result = FAIL! FAIL! FAIL!
Here is the source
http://www.homesandcommunities.co.uk/robertnapier
“we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average.” What the hell type of average is that, what the hell type of winter is that?
Why wouldn’t you take all the highs and all the lows from Dec 21 to March 21 and average them. Surly you can find a super computer somewhere that that is up to the task. Heck my Mac could probably do it. For that matter give me a piece of paper and pencil and I could do it for them.
@Bertram:
You can find (almost) live data on pretty much every aspect of British energy production here:
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Interesting way of doing things.
But at the same time you can look at the opposite, take the lowest 15 readings, average those and then see if this is also (hmm at the same time too) the Coldest year on record.
Which kind of shows something I suppose.. (other than the stupidity of doing it this way..)
I think you have to regard anything that someone post on blog site, when they claim to have inside knowledge to be suspect in all cases and in this case it does not even make sense.
Bertram Felden, Dec 20th 11:03am –
“where can the data about output from the UK wind farms be found?”
Look on the website below (it doesn’t work on Chrome for some reason but does work on Firefox) and scroll down near the bottom to a table headed “Current generation By Fuel Type”. As at 20:15 UK time on Sunday it shows wind 0.1% current (no pun!) and 0.2% for the last 24 hours.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/
Joe Romm said the kids wouldn’t see Santa. The snow was gone forever because their parents drove gas hogs and polluted the planet. No more snow he says. No snow no sleigh.
He likes to scare kids.
Who are you going to believe, the Met or your lying eyes?
O/T but have you seen this?
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/SC1012/S00054/climate-science-coalition-vindicated.htm
Meanwhile, in sunny Australia where it is (supposed to be) summer:
Bitter summer freeze bites eastern states as summer gives way to snow and cold
Oops! Reference did not show:
http://www.news.com.au/national/bitter-summer-freeze-bites-eastern-states-as-summer-gives-way-to-snow-and-cold/story-e6frfkvr-1225974173962#ixzz18gazeBfF
Was this a joke? Surely it was…….!
Here in northern England the local weatherman, Paul Hudson, tonight said that the average temperature at the weather station at RAF Leeming was -9.8C for December. Our previous two coldest winters were in 1981 and 1963 and this is colder by far.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/
You couldn’t make it up!
It’s not just seasonal predictions that the Met/BBC get wrong – they regularly wrongly predict temperatures only a few hours ahead and even AFTER the event! The underselling of cold weather is the norm over here, because these government-funded quangos are merely towing the party (government) line on AGW. For example, the minimum night temperatures over the past 3 nights in my region (NW England) were “predicted” to fall between 0 deg C to -4 deg C (worst case). In reality, -10 to -14 deg C were actually recorded in my town, which is on the coast. At 10 am today, the temperature was still down to -10 deg C. These “errors” are never correct in retrospect, but are merely repeated.
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
_____________________________________________________________
This has satire written all over it, yet some people seem unsure whether or not to take it seriously. That, in itself, speaks volumes…..
See what happens when science is hi-jacked by those persuing a political agenda?
J Knight
“Unelect these fools, my British cousins, and quit buying global warming propaganda rags like the Telegraph and Independant. ”
Unfortunately, all the major parties have swallowed CAGW whole. There is no alternative with a prayer of being elected.
Similarly, although The Independent, The Guardian and the BBC are the most evangelical about CAGW, all the newspapers and all the TV stations default to the warmist position. Despite having two prominent warmist writers plus cut and paste of any old garbage press release about polar bears, The Telegraph has Delingpole, who alone makes it the most sceptical of the broadsheets. The Mail has Booker which makes it the only other paper to routinely run any sceptical stories – but even then most of it’s coverage is as unthinkingly warmist as everyone else’s.
Weather is not climate, but the British People are getting a solid dose of cold.
Somehow I figure the poll numbers are going to reflect this spot of weather…
Ian L. McQueen says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:14 am
Misled would indicate to me that the practice had ceased. Misleads that it continues. I bow to your judgement.
Sorry if already mentioned:-
“Met Office data suggests mild winter but don’t forget last year”
“Its “Barbecue Summer” was a washout while its “mild winter” was the coldest for 31 years, so you might be forgiven for taking the Met Office’s latest prediction with a pinch of salt.”
By Andy Bloxham 7:30AM BST 28 Oct 2010
Notice, data not forecast!
“Although the Met Office no longer issues long-term forecasts, their latest data suggest a high probability of a warmer winter for London, the East of England, Scotland and Northern Ireland.”
“As well as the milder winter, the computer concluded that almost all of Britain had a 40 to 60% of being drier than normal, with only the south coast more likely to see normal amounts of rain.”
“However, the Met Office warned that the figure were only part of the data used to build predictions for December, January and February’s weather but do not include such influential factors as the El Nino-La Nina high-low pressure system in the Pacific Ocean and the North Atlantic Oscillation, which partly governs the winds and storms which arrive in Britain from the west.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/8090325/Met-Office-data-suggests-mild-winter-but-dont-forget-last-year.html
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. How much do we pay these people? Anyway I’d better go and put another jumper on. brrrr
old44 says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
December 20, 2010 at 1:03 pm
Ian L. McQueen says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:14 am
Sorry
Misled would indicate to me that the practice had ceased. Misleads that it continues. I bow to your judgement. Should be “Has misled”? result of lack of space for headlines.
There is a completely logical explanation for the persistance of “Despite the cold winter this year, the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue, with snow and frost becoming less of a feature in the future.”
It enables the transition from the “Global Warming” script to move on to the “Climate Disruption” script. Only if “warming” is the expected mode can the cold be described as a “disruption”!
All that money going to research how to force change in public attitudes is not wasted.
I quote in part from Roger Harrabin article in BBC NEWS on January 16,2010 called MET OFFICE DEBATES LONGER TERM FORECASTShttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8462890.stm
“The UK Met Office is debating what to do with its long-term and seasonal forecasting after criticism for failing to predict extreme weather.
Some experts say the Met Office should stop longer-term forecasting because it damages the organisation’s reputation.
Others maintain that communication of the forecasts must be improved.
The Met Office has been criticised for failing to predict in its seasonal forecasts the UK would suffer this cold winter or the last three wet summers.
After being rapped for its now notorious “barbecue summer” press release, the winter forecast was expressed in probabilistic terms, with a 66% likelihood that the winter would be warmer than average and a one in seven chance that it would be colder.
The Met Office has now admitted to BBC News that its annual global mean forecast predicted temperatures higher than actual temperatures for nine years out of the last 10. ”
Has anything changed?
There are much more reliable weather forecast sites, so why are we poor taxpayers supporting the Met Office? Their accuracy, if the nonsense spouted on the BBC is included, is below random, i.e., noise. I believe they are just one more example of the complacency that sets in when an organisation is publicly funded (wherein lies the solution).
Booker also writes for The Telegraph.
Brian H says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:41 am
Dr. P.;
“begging the question” is indeed relevant, but you’re not using it properly. It means committing a tautology, assuming the conclusion in the premises.
===========
Thanks for pointing that out Brian H. The misuse of “begging the question” deserves correcting every time it occurs, as its use has become endemic in the English-speaking world. To beg the question is to commit a specific fallacy in logic, as you state, more commonly referred to as the circular argument. People ought to be using the phrase “to raise the question,” in the context used by Dr. P.
Given there is a perfectly usable phrase available (‘to raise the question’), the English language gains nothing by conflating the two phrases to mean the same thing.
Sorry for the lesson in informal logic. It’s a personal pet peeve of mine.
The Met Office is the same organization that pushes the 4 degrees rise by 2060.
If anyone has not looked at how insane 4 C by 2060 is, a simple exercise will do. If we are going to warm 4 degrees C by 2060, it means 4 degrees warming in the next 50 years or a rate of warming 4/50 or 0.08 C per year. Our current rate of warming trend [ least square trend slope ]since 2001 is 0.0042 C/year according to WOODFORTREES COMPOSITE INDEX This means that they are telling us that the globe will warm or 0.08/0.0042 or 19 times faster than today or the last 10 years. These people really do have global warming fever of the worst kind and it looks incurable. What is the cure for this kind of non science from a government run organization.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
December 20, 2010 at 11:22 am
Exeter today:
“Hundreds of people have been working to minimise the disruption caused by the snow and ice in Devon but forecasters have warned there could be worse to come.
Exeter was covered by a couple of inches of snow during the early hours of Saturday morning and there was more snow on higher ground.
And the Met Office is expecting a similar amount of snow to fall today, followed by more snow later in the week. Overnight temperatures dropped to -13C (8.6F) overnight on Saturday and are expected to be around -5C (23F) during the night over the coming days.”
CRS, Dr.P.H…
And come it did,this morning woke to 8 inch’s of snow here in Exeter
Cars and lorries having great problems moving.Met O got it right with the fact snow was coming it’s just the amount and intensity that they got wrong..oh and our now famous Haldon Hill fiasco occured again with lorrys stuck and gritters and snowploughs stuck behind them.All this in the warmist part of the UK..for the third winter on the trot
Henry chance says:
December 20, 2010 at 12:24 pm
The real reason Santa won’t be coming…
http://www.private-eye.co.uk/pictures/covers/full/1122_big.jpg
DaveE.
One way you can make difference is when your next prospective local council or parliamentary candidate knocks on your door, ask him/her to initial one of two alternatives:
I will / will not support increase in taxex related to the GW / climate change.
Then vote accordingly, and if elected hold him/her to account.
The UK Met Office is focused on global issues and hence this year has been pushing the global line that ‘2010 is the hottest ever’. This may be true or not, but it shows what many people in theUK are beginning to suspect, that it has neglected its primary purpose of giving the UK a clear indication of all local weather issues which may affect their lives. Hence the lamentably inaccurate forecasts for winter conditions. If they are set on proving global warming by any statistical scraping methods, they are not concerning themselves with cold weather, which is where most of the climate hurt in the UK comes from.
It would take a political decision at the highest levels to stop funding for the single-issue Met Office activities related to the UNO IPCC supranational entity, and to re-establish funding towards better all round locally meaningful climate science.
The Dominic Lawson quote of a MetOffice staffer is likely a steaming-pile of $#*%. What’s with journalists these days quoting blog postings and uncorroborated sources. I’d be really surprised if “Tony from Norwich” exists.
Bertram Felden says:
December 20, 2010 at 11:03 am
Katabasis, where can the data about output from the UK wind farms be found?
http://www.ref.org.uk/images/PDFs/wind.overview.2008.pdf
http://www.ref.org.uk/images/PDFs/REDs10/Wind%202010%20v1.pdf
The web reference for the BBC article on the MET OFFICE is
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8462890.stm
The old cliche is when you lie, you have to keep lying to cover up the original lie – and you have to remember all the lies so as not to trip yourself up.
By creating the false trends through the adjustment of the actual data that supports their hypothesis, they are lying, and that is why their forecasts are so far off. They forgot to keep lying.
The people running these propaganda offices were obviously born with no shame.
That one or some people were overwhelmed with shame would explain the release of the climate gate emails.
A method must be developed to shame these people, for gaia is shaming them big time, yet they still preach the mantra.
Real investigation by real media would have sorted them in the public eye years ago.
First shame the media then all else will follow.
How does a Climate Scientist at the Met Office know when he’s got a flat tire (tyre)?
It goes “tera flop flop flop flop…”
Three weeks ago when the first Arctic cold blast hit it was obvious that the Met Office could not even accurately predict the maximum and minimum temperatures for the next day; ie forecasting an overnight minimum 0f -2 for midland towns when it was -7.
We know that the Met have allowed an AGW expectation to creep into their seasonal weather forecasting program, rendering it hopelessly inaccurate and in particular the temperatures too high.
I now suspect they have allowed an AGW component into their short term weather forecasting program, also resulting in the forecasts for the next few days significantly underestimating the brutal conditions at hand.
If this is true, the science of the Met Office is not only politically compromised by green zealots, its forecasting is downright dangerous.
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded.”
They brought all the thermometers inside because it was too flippin cold to go outside to read them.
I’d bet a kwh worth of Scottish Power electricity that “Norwich Tony” was just “having a larf” with a work of satire.
He simply omitted the /sarc ending because he didn’t think it was required (that’s typical UK SOH as I see it)
Nice one mate that’s well worth a pint or two!
Keep your head down, though, otherwise Norfolk’s finest may try and stitch you up for an “unsolved” “Cyber-Crime” that happened in your neck of the wood last November:)
“As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
They don’t realize that Winter is only 3 months long and begins in late December? I must have missed the ‘new winter,’ or these people are stupider than Al Gore.
LeeHarvey says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:05 am
@Ian L. McQueen- If you’ll permit an aside, I believe that the headline is in line with the standard British English practice of referring to a plural group (team, office, group, etc.) as a plural entity even when it’s referred to by a singular noun.
LeeHarvey-
I accept and understand your explanation. It can be confusing. In my own defence (and excuse the off-topicness), I offer a quote: “The Met Office, using data generated by a £33million supercomputer, claims Britain can stop worrying about a big freeze this year…..”, which indicates that the writer considers the Met Office as singular.
I was also acting out of sensitivity to the number of times that I have seen the word “lead” used when the correct one was “led” (and similarly for mislead/misled)- substituting the name of the metal for “led”.
IanM
[Yes, in England, collective nouns take the plural. (And the crowd are going wild.) ~ Evan]
Here’s some clarification/more info about the 15 measurements:
http://heresycorner.blogspot.com/2010/01/however-cold-it-gets-this-is-officially.html#reply
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/03/aviation-pioneer-and-master-engineer-burt-rutan-on-global-warming/
Looks like either a comment taken out of context or an intentional goof meant to wreck havoc on the credibility of the MET.
Good for a wild goose chase if nothing else…
Monbiot explains the cold spell – it’s because of global warming and White ice and snow relecting solar rays heating the atmosphere. And something
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/20/uk-snow-global-warming
Mycroft says:
December 20, 2010 at 1:27 pm
CRS, Dr.P.H…
And come it did,this morning woke to 8 inch’s of snow here in Exeter
Cars and lorries having great problems moving.Met O got it right with the fact snow was coming it’s just the amount and intensity that they got wrong..oh and our now famous Haldon Hill fiasco occured again with lorrys stuck and gritters and snowploughs stuck behind them.All this in the warmist part of the UK..for the third winter on the trot
—-
REPLY: Mycroft, I have many dear friends & clients throughout Devon, and having dealt with this awful white-stuff in Chicago for the past 50 years, you have my sincere sympathy! I cannot believe the news photos & reports I’m getting from over there.
This is where the rubber-hits-the-road…..public policy (global warming-inspired fuel taxes etc.) is on the wrong path, resulting in tremendous economic hardships for the average citizen in terms of higher fuel bills, inadequate weather abatement (gritting equipment, ploughs etc.) and emergency services.
Sadly, we are now starting to see the price-tag for investment in the precautionary principle of CAGW. This is not likely to end well.
The MET says that they are a Public Weather Service, and do weather forecasts.
Including advance warning of extreme weather.
When you go to the MET website, About US, What We do,
They clearly say that they do day to day and long range weather forecasts.
=======================================================
Public Weather Service
The Met Office provides a range of information under the Public Weather Service (PWS), which is funded by the UK Government. This includes generating everything from day-to-day site-specific forecasts to long range forecasts.
We are also responsible for the National Severe Weather Warning Service, which aims to give advance warning of extreme weather to the public, businesses, emergency services and Government.
The aims of the PWS are to:
*
Produce weather forecasts which help the UK public make informed decisions about day-to-day activities.
*
Warn people of extreme weather to mitigate its impacts — contributing to the protection of life, property and infrastructure.
“we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average”
If they also took the lowest 15 readings we could have the hottest and coldest winter this year!!! Now that’s science 🙂
Just watched the BBC evening news, featuring of course a main article about the weather, in the middle of which was an interesting statement from Peter Gibbs, a Met Office forecaster. After sundry others were shown asking the question of whether the extreme cold was evidence that the UK weather was undergoing a ‘step change’, meaning that winters like this would become more common (whatever happened to ‘our children won’t know what snow is’?), Mr Gibbs said that, regarding our ability to forecast what the climate was going to do decades hence, that it was all but impossible and that the science was ‘new’ and ‘in its infancy’. Excuse me, but I thought that’s exactly what warmists have been doing for years – by such-and-such a year all the glaciers will be gone, whole countries will be flooded, it will be hotter/colder/wetter/dryer/windier….etc. Interesting! By the way, after the news My Gibbs gave the weather forecast – possible lows of -20C! Yes, that’s correct – minus twenty!!! Warmest year ever my @#*%!
@ John from CA
“Maybe geo-thermal plants in Iceland vs wind?”
The idea of construction an undersea power cable from Iceland to Britain to supply electricity generated from geo-thermal (and possibly also hydroelectric) power plants has been proposed at various times in the last few decades but nothing has been done.
The international banking crisis caused the collapse of the main Icelandic banks all of which owed a great deal of money to British depositors. That would have been an excellent opportunity for the British government to negotiate a deal with the Icelandic government whereby the British would cancel the Icelandic debts if Iceland paid in kind by supplying electricity over a certain number of years. After the equivalent value of the debt had been paid the Icelanders would be free to charge the going commercial rate for future energy supplies.
I wrote letters to the Times, Guardian and Telegraph with that suggestion at the height of the dispute between the British and Icelandic governments but not one newspaper published my letters or even drew attention to Iceland’s energy resources despite the fact that it is common knowledge that Britain will face severe energy problems in a few years owing to the decline in the output of natural gas and oil from the North Sea, the closure of conventional power plants to meet the EU’s targets for reductions in CO2 emissions, and the closure of nuclear plants that are reaching the end of their planned lives.
Earlier this year, however, the Planck Foundation produced detailed proposals for the repayment of Iceland debts to Britain and the Netherlands in the form of energy.
http://www.planck.org/projects/iceland/geothermal/
The alternatives to getting more of our energy from Iceland would be:
1) hope that “global warming” takes off to such an extent that the demand for energy in winter is greatly reduced.
2) import a lot more natural gas from Putin’s Russia and/or the Middle East.
3) build tens of thousands of wind turbines and hope that the wind blows when they are needed.
Unfortunately the British government seems to be relying on all three of the above.
Anything is possible says:
December 20, 2010 at 12:46 pm
‘See what happens when science is hi-jacked by those persuing a political agenda?’
Oh yes, indeed we do see. Can you?
Advice for met office computeers.
If the state of their “science” is inadequate to provide reliable policy advice for traffic maintenance operations a couple months in advance, what would suggest that it would not be orders of magnitude worse at providing policy proscriptions for energy and climate manipulations many decades into the future?
Re Steveta_uk
Ah, but this winter is already reaching 1963 values. And I remember 1963 – skated on the Fens – too brittle now sadly! Me that is, not the Fens.
TonyK says:
December 20, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Oops! I can just imagine when Peter Gibbs turns up for work tomorrow.
DaveE.
The Met Office were consulted by the UK Department for Transport in a report out in October concerning preparedness of the transport infrastructure for winter. In October they were projecting a warmer than average winter with around 70% confidence. The Met Office advised that there was a 1-in-20 chance of a severe winter this year, or any year. In 2008, then, there was thus a 1-in-8000 chance that we would have three consecutive severe winters. The Met Office complain that the general public don’t understand risk and statistics, but I have to say that I don’t favour 1-in-8000 odds, i.e. the likelihood of three severe winters in a row only likely to occur once every 8000 years. I’m afraid these are actual Met Office statistics. If THEY understand statistics and risk, they should be repenting in dust and ashes by now because those odds are just way too long. Something is driving the weather/climate that they have absolutely no idea about. Now, we know that the models that the Met Office use for climate change projections are the very same models as they use for weather forecasting – you might think they’d be different, but they categorically claim that they are the same.
With odds of 8000:1 I’m prone to question whether there is some bias or tomfoolery going on, and with the Met Office that’s a dead certainty. They are headed up by an eco-fanatic and are part of the UK Ministry of Defence.
Here are some extracts from the DfT report ‘The Resilience of England’s Transport Systems in Winter’ (July and October 2010):
“We have discussed these issues in some depth with the Met Office and their climate research team at the Met Office Hadley Centre…we are advised to assume that the chance of a severe winter in 2010-11 is no greater (or less) than the current general probability of 1 in 20…The probability of the next winter being severe is virtually unrelated to the fact of just having experienced two severe winters, and is still about 1 in 20. The effect of climate change is to gradually but steadily reduce the probability of severe winters in the UK…we need to understand and accept that the chance of a severe winter is still relatively small…the probability of next winter being severe continues to be relatively small.”
Remember – based on the Met Office models (on which the whole climate change scam is based), three severe winters in a row has a probability of 1-in-8000, or 0.0125%. Or, put it the other way, in 2008 the Met Office would have been 99.9875% certain that we would not have three severe winters on the trot. Start looking at these probabilities stacking up and understand that the global warming mantra is a scam.
We are always being reminded that weather is not climate. Fine. But when once-in-8000 year ‘weather’ events turn up you really do have to start asking questions. When the Met Office in their UKCP08 report were projecting much warmer summer and winter temperatures in UK to 70% and 90% confidence, that same year they would have put 99.9875% confidence on there not being three extreme winters on the trot.
@ScientistForTruth
A fantastic post. 8000-1! With links, worthy of a thread on its own that should be sent to every politician in the UK.
And the Chief Scientific Advisor too.
Awesome!
Christopher Booker writes for The Sunday Telegraph and consistently shows up the fallacies espoused by the warmists as well as the decisions that the UK’s politicians make on these same dubious bases.
As far as the Daily Telegraph is concerned, Louise Gray just seems to report unthinkingly the propaganda that she is fed. I think that Geoffrey Lean is the Telegraph’s real dangerman although his smugness will probably eventually be his downfall. Why does he have to preface some of his references to ‘climate change’ with the weasel adjective ‘dangerous’?
Then again, with reference to the BBC’s Met Office weather forecasts, in November before the recent snow conditions, the standard 10.30.p.m. report contained statements like ‘with clearing skies tonight, temperatures will fall sharply’.
Don’t they know that all the carbon dioxide is presumably still there?
Chas
D Lawson says…
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
I cannot believe I am reading this. Do they really believe people are stupid enough to appreciate his methods?
Interesting comment today on the BBC news, from a Met Office representative. Asked why they could not forecast 2 months ahead, he replied: “it is increadibly difficult to forecast so far into the future.”
The BBC interviewer failed to then ask how the Met Office can confidently give us an exact climate/weather prediction for 50 years ahead (that says the UK will be 6 degrees warmer.)
.
Incidentally, all this snow disruption we see at London Heathrow, Gatwick and on UK roads was directly caused by Greenpeace, the WWF, the Grauniad, the BBC, the CRU and New Scientist. Their shrill cries that “snow would be a thing of the past”, prevented any managers from investing in new snow-clearing equipment. Anyone who dared, would have been vilified, have their mug-shot in the newspapers, and perhaps even lose their jobs.
In recompense, I think that all of the above organisations should be fined substantial amounts, so that a snow compensation fund can be set up. The BBC should be fined $900 million, the charities $400 million and the newspapers $250 million each. That will teach them to meddle in politics.
.
I do hope the MET office budget was slashed ahead of the cuts in education, right? They should not be rewarded or spared with combination of bias and error.
The link for the Paul Hudson article is broken. Here is one that works:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2010/01/a-frozen-britain-turns-the-hea.shtml
Sadly, for the U.K. the institutional momentum behind AGW is to much to stop right now. The same thing may be happening in the U.S. as well, as we have already committed to the ridiculous U.N. program of sending taxpayer monies to third world countries for that asinine ” Green Climate Fund “. Short of a real full blown Little Ice Age beginning the AGW proponents will go into hibernation for a while and then return in 6-8 weeks and start cherry picking some anomalous temp. record in Timbuktu to bolster their case and the whole silly merry round will start again until next winter.
A smidgeon of cog-diss from the Independent’s Steve Connor? He mentions that the Met. Office’s Julia Slingo couldn’t get into work yesterday due to the snow, but then fails to question her “it’s only the UK that’s cold and look how mild it is in Greenland just now” bollocks:
The UK may be cold, but it’s still a warm world, says Met Office chief
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
She may have been one of the many thousands of people who failed to get to work yesterday because of the snow, but Professor Julia Slingo, the Met Office’s chief scientist, is adamant that the current cold weather is merely a natural fluctuation – and does not mean that global warming is all a myth…
…Last October, the Met Office warned the Government that Britain is likely to experience a colder-than-average start to the winter. But long-term forecasts are still notoriously difficult to make with any accuracy, as the Met Office discovered with its “barbecue summer” prediction. Professor Slingo said: “The key message is that global warming continues.”
full article at http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-uk-may-be-cold-but-its-still-a-warm-world-says-met-office-chief-2165492.html
(some interesting comments e.g. snow in Australian mountains, cool in California & Hawaii, -7C in Florida, and note that the now infamous “Snow is now just a thing of the past” page is still at number one in the Environment section).
So how come they don’t take the bottom 15 measurements and then average them out with the top 15? Surely that would produce a more accurate figure? Oh wait, accurate and unbiased temperature readings isn’t what we pay the Met Office to do, is it.
My bad…
The whole problem is that climate has now gotten into the weather (Heidi Cullen), now we’re really in trouble.
/sarc
The Met Office used to be a joke, but its become a real menace. It is now killing people. The problem is that this crazed warm bias leads to forecasts which are believed and acted on by public authorities and the public. We then have masses of people totally unprepared for the real weather as it happens. We have local authorities out of road grit, people running out of fuel to heat their houses, not enough plows and snow clearing equipment.
The most penetrating remark about this was made by the transport secretary Philip Hammond, with a subtlety that few will have understood what he was saying. He said in an interview that whether it made sense for Britain to spend more on winter preparedness depended on the advice given by the Chief Scientist, and if the advice was that this sort of weather was going to be more frequent, rather than just a one off, of course more money should be spent on preparation.
Get ready, finally, for a serious investigation of this stuff in the UK. There is finally a politically acceptable excuse for getting to the bottom of it. When the airports are closed, you have temperatures for weeks below zero, and the UK climate science community is still bleating on about the warmest year ever, and people are dying, you have, finally, all the excuse you need.
It won’t start as an investigation of global warming. It will start as an innocent attempt to learn from experience and decide policy about funding preparation for hard winters. But there’s no doubt where it will end up.
Let’s get something straight. The Met Office is the going to keep spouting this rubbish about it being the “warmest winter” or the “warmest year” ever until they are paid as much to speak the truth as they are to spread these lies.
The statistics tell us that in some parts of Britain this is the coldest winter ever recorded. Those statistics are then gathered by the Met Office and massaged, processed, and “adjusted” until they come out the other end of their computer as “the warmest” or “one of the mildest” years in “a continuing trend” of “underlying warming” due to “climate change”.
It’s just a pity that in an hour’s time another nine British pensioners will not be able to read this post because they will have died from the effects of the “underlying warming trend”.
To be honest, I’m not sure what to think of the met office any more, since their paradoxes. eg:
a) With global warming UK winters get milder.
b)Cold winters are predictable as the global climate gets warmer.
a) It will be a predictably mild winter because of global warming his winter (2009/10)
b) It would have been even colder had it not been for global warming. (an actual Met office comment after the coldest winter for 30 years)
become more and more the stuff of Alice in Wonderland, so its no surprise that even a parody may seem convincing to even the most astute mind.
If you do a search on Google News, you’ll notice thousands of reports of bad weather in the British Isles, but few if any mentioning any relationship even tangentially with the failure of AGW theory. If on the other hand though this were an unusually hot summer or warm winter I’m sure many hundreds or thousands would be seeking to make that connection very explicitly. Yet another example of how “objective” journalists skew their determination of what is “news” to serve the prevailing ideology.
LeeHarvey says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:05 am
@Ian L. McQueen- If you’ll permit an aside, I believe that the headline is in line with the standard British English practice of referring to a plural group (team, office, group, etc.) as a plural entity even when it’s referred to by a singular noun.
When I was at school ‘Data’ was considered a collective noun and took the singular. e.g “the data is correct”, in the case of sheep, the flock was in the field, not the flock were in the field. These days you would say “the data are correct” and to me it sounds terrible. Surely data is a collective noun describing a set of data points and should therefore take the singular.
Whilst I am off topic why do Americans shorten the science of mathematics to math and not maths?
Again it sounds terrible to our English ears.
Kate says:
December 21, 2010 at 12:29 am
“It’s just a pity that in an hour’s time another nine British pensioners will not be able to read this post because they will have died from the effects of the “underlying warming trend”.”
Take a look at how many we kill in the UK
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574
Last year just over 25,000, the year before 37,500. Pity help us this year.
Off topic, for the last 24 hours in the UK our wind generation capacity was approx 10% of our needs but only generated 0.1% of our needs.
http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Thanks for the link Katabasis.
Bookmarked 🙂 http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm
Is that “strike three, you’re OUT”?
oldgifford
‘Surely data is a collective noun describing a set of data points and should therefore take the singular’
No. Data is the plural of datum. It means ‘things given’. It’s not a collective noun. Whoever taught you it was a singular or collective was a sloppy teacher (and one who certainly did not have any idea of Latin). The teachers is wrong.
Richard K says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:23 am
A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office. No, no, no. I want to hear all their predictions, every single detail and them explain the minor difference was cause by the Y2K bug or Wikileaks.”
I agree! Please MET, don’t shut up. Keep forecasting. Please. More forecasts, more detail! How’s Jan. and Feb. looking???
Jeff says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:23 am
it only makes sense, if you are trying to measure the “warmest winter” then taking the top 15 measurements over the course of 150 days of winter makes sense … of course if you are looking for the “coldest winter”, then taking the fifteen lowest measurements would also make sense … seems like you could have both the warmest and coldest winter in the same year which of course tells us nothing about the average … thats some solid scientific method you’ve got there …”
There are good statistical sampling tools to help reduce bias such as SRS: simple random sampling. Every junior college student knows thus. Sadly it doesn’t appear they are interested in nonbiased sampling schemes.
Brian H says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:41 am
DAE;
Don’t think so. Remember that the models use a median, not an average, for each day’s measurements. Medians just care about highest and lowest.”
Actually the median is the middle value of a rank order. It’s less sensitive to the low and high values. That’s why you use median…closer to the middle of the distribution if you have extreme outlier. For example, the median of 0,1,1000 is 1
we are all in the same boat in australia they could not forcast when thay need to go to the dunny
Oldgifford
‘Data’ is the plural of ‘datum’, and so ‘data are…’ has always been the correct construct, although rarely used other than by pedants (my boss…).
Anyway, back to our experience – I agree with the earlier comment about the weather forecasts seriously understating the minimum temperatures. The overnight minimum the night before last (in east Hertfordshire, between London and Cambridge) was forecast as -4 deg C, whereas my wife’s car indicated that even at 8.30am it was -10, and was already rising. OK, last night wasn’t particularly cold by recent standards (only about -2) and was in line with the temperatures that were being forecast yesterday.
It is a remarkable change from the winters in 05-06 and 06-07, where frosts were a rarity (iirc, we had only 2 frosts all winter in 06-07 just north of London). Yes, it’s weather not climate, but surely it must have some of the more scrupulous scientists at the Met Office taking another look at their predictions and models.
I can’t believe that Peter Gibbs’ comments from the news last night were entirely correct – how can you possibly model the weather in the UK if you ignore the effects of the ocean currents in the north Atlantic? That is THE dominant driver or our weather.
But other experts maintain we are in for another big freeze. Positive Weather Solutions senior forecaster Jonathan Powell said: “It baffles me how the Met Office can predict a milder-than-average winter when all the indicators show this winter will have parallels to the last one.
“They are standing alone here, as ourselves and other independent forecasters are all predicting a colder-than-average winter.
“It will be interesting to see how predictions by the government-funded Met Office compare with independent forecasters.”
Sir David King (a well-known global warming doom monger) was on this morning’s BBC Today program. He did sound quite subdued and, amazingly, did not mention climate change as such. But what he said about the climate models was bizarre. He said that weather and climate predictions made by the climate models were excellent. Naturally the Today presenter didn’t have the wit to challenge him on this, despite the Met Office’s recent mild winter forecast and all the other dud forecasts from these ridiculous climate models.
King finished by making a plea for the government to spend much more on ever bigger and shinier super-computers, in order to improve the forecasts.
Sigh. I don’t know what world Sir David inhabits, but it’s not this one. Maybe he’s on Venus, where global warming really is a problem.
But here’s a hint about the world we ordinary people live in: GIGO.
Chris
Katabasis says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:41 am
“Thanks to that lunatic Huhne, Britain is expected to provide 30% of its power via “renewables” by 2020. He plans to reach this target primarily by wind power.
The 3149 turbines we currently have are providing 0.1% of our electricity as I write this, just when we need it most in cold weather. The national power supply is currently creaking with a demand touching 60GW, and pulling almost 2GW across from France via the interconnector. ”
The figures right now from NETA are zero for current value and last half hour, 0.1% for last 24 hours. So, as closely as can be measured, the current UK wind power contribution is zero. And this at a time when we need all the energy we can get.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: what utter nonsense. How long before the idiots in charge start to realise what is really happening?
We have Chris Huhne (who once said that the ERM was working well for Britain) in charge of our energy. Now that’s what I call a real climate disaster.
Note to our American friends who may not be familiar with the ERM. The ERM (Exchange Rate Mechanism, in which our interest rate was effectively set by Germany) turned out to be an utter economic disaster for Britain and we were eventually forced to get out of it. Once out of the ERM, Britain’s economy started to recover.
Chris
Paul Hudson (BBC) seems to be one of the lone sane voices at he BBC..
his blog article – ‘Whatever Happened to Global Warming’ may have even prompted the leaker/whistleblower…
(Paul Hudson received some of the emails concerning himself, a MONTH, before the rest were leaked)
As the ‘team’ complained about it amongst themselves and Michael Mann was going to have a word with Richard Black (BBC) to see what was going on (seem to consider the BBC a cheerleader for AGW)
From his current article –
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/paulhudson/2010/12/are-severe-winters-here-to-sta.shtml
“In my blog ‘could the sun cast a shadow on global temperatures’ I wrote about how Australian scientist David Archibald was convinced that prolonged weak solar activity could mean much colder winters in future. He wrote his paper in February 2009.
Perhaps we all need to get used to colder winters across the UK in the next few years. “
It is literally like Alice Through the Looking Glass in the UK at present. The MET Office has been steadily politicised over the last 20 years through the appointment of Global Warming Activists to the senior positions – and has become an instrument of policy for the Eco-Fascist tendency: WWF, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth. The current Head of the MET office is I understand the former Director of Global Warming Policy at WWF (former postings on WUWT went into this).
We have no hope of rational energy policy in this country until the MET office has been cleansed of the warmist political agenda which curently dominates every aspect of their work and world-view. The problem is that the entire Science Establishment of the UK has been successfully infiltrated by the Warmists over the last 20 years – from the Royal Society on downwards; there is no hope of this changing because £billions of taxpayers cash has been funneled towards thousands of lecturers, professors and research establishments – all on the gravy train of Global Warming is for Real. All of those thousands of ‘scientists’ and meteorologists would literally be committing career suicide if they dared to suggest that all of this collective insanity / groupthink was remotely in question.
Is Peter Gibbs a new sceptic hero? I think so, and you can grab a signed photo of him from ebay!
http://blackswhitewash.com/2010/12/21/met-offices-peter-gibbs-says-we-cannot-predict-climate/
Roy said
Quote
The idea of construction an undersea power cable from Iceland to Britain to supply electricity generated from geo-thermal (and possibly also hydroelectric) power plants has been proposed at various times in the last few decades but nothing has been done.
Unquote
Seems that you have been doing the same as me and thinking the same way. The costs are so low (if designed that way), the locations so flexible and the delivery system so simple, it just blows you away that it will not be looked at.
There are many places in the world where is is extremely viable and effective. As you siad it can be mixed and matched with hydro power, hydrokinetic preferably.
It gives constant power 24/7. Yes there were some hiccups most notably The Geyers in Kalifornia but those were down to bad design/survey but fighters have taken over closed plants and reopened them.
Complaints are made about the cost and risk of drilling holes. Thats normal and good survey and distribution of steam supplies will mitigate risks. The closer to the source, the lower the drilling costs but greater risk but payback, wow.
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
—–
Please note this is a spoof. It’s a guy like me who does not believe in AGW that wrote it. You really should update this post to note that it is not real.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1239908/Britains-big-freeze-hit-return-work-forecasters-issue-new-ice-alert-drivers.html
^^^^ That is a link to the source of that quote. Search for this post -( tony, norwich, norfolk, 3/1/2010 10:19) —— For fellow Americans they go Day/Month/Year so it would be 1/3/2010 to you and I when he made the post
Later on this guy admits it was a spoof.
I does our side no good to post wrong information.
I’m sure the models are excellent, for the first few hours of actual forcasts. But every day you add to them reduces accuracy by probably 25%, so that after 4 days, there can be no accuracy except by chance. And since climate models use the same code (why do the British say “codes” instead of “code”? It sounds like they’re trying to crack the Enigma machine or something, not write computer programs. It sounds strange to our American ears.) as weather models, you can’t expect a better result.
Another thing that bothers me about models. If you run the same model with the same parameters, say, 20 times, and get 20 different results, how can the model be predictive in any way?
I like this one from Goddard’s site –
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/12/21/met-office-chief-climate-scientist-has-difficulty-reading-maps/#more-12187
It looks like the Met Office does not share with the public what it gives to the government with respect weather forecasts and tells the opposite story to the public.
“Last October, the Met Office warned the Government that Britain is likely to experience a colder-than-average start to the winter. But long-term forecasts are still notoriously difficult to make with any accuracy, as the Met Office discovered with its “barbecue summer” prediction. Professor Slingo said: “The key message is that global warming continues.”
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/the-uk-may-be-cold-but-its-still-a-warm-world-says-met-office-chief-2165492.html
“But the official forecasters have said that this winter could be unusually mild and dry, with temperatures at least 2C more than last year’s big freeze in which snow and ice caused travel chaos across much of Britain.“
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/8090325/Met-Office-data-suggests-mild-winter-but-dont-forget-last-year.html
So who is fooling who and why?
But even more disconcerting is the following statement
“However, the Met Office warned that the figure were only part of the data used to build predictions for December, January and February’s weather but do not include such influential factors as the El Nino-La Nina high-low pressure system in the Pacific Ocean and the North Atlantic Oscillation, which partly governs the winds and storms which arrive in Britain from”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/8090325/Met-Office-data-suggests-mild-winter-but-dont-forget-last-year.html
How could one possibly produce a realistic winter forecast by excluding the very factors that have caused the last 3 very cold winters for UK and Europe , namely AO. They will never produce anything credible with this kind of science.
As apparent from previous similar climate cycles, the current cold weather is likely to continue to March 2011, also the year 2011 will likely be a cool year and we are in for 20 years of cooler weather despite all the empty assurances of Prof. Slingo that global warming is happening. Who cares what the temperature is 100 years from now when you are just trying to survive and keep warm today.
I sent this email last year to the Met Office and got the following response.
I see your latest news on climate change is the following.
“Climate could warm to record levels in 2010
Recently released figures confirm that 2009 is expected to be the
fifth-warmest year on record. (10 December 2009)”
Another example of counting your chickens before the eggs hatch.
Do us all a favour look up the meaning of the word science in the
oxford dictionary.
By the way Anthropogenic Global Warming is only a theory.
Eimear #####
17
London
And Very Very Cold
Dear Eimear,
Thank you for your feedback regarding Climate Change
We are sorry to learn that you are unhappy with a service the Met Office is providing. In order to best deal with your correspondence it has been forwarded to the Customer Feedback Manager who will respond to you as soon as possible. Your reference number is ##########.
We are committed to dealing with your query quickly and accurately, although this will be subject to the complexity and nature of your enquiry.
If you have any further questions or need additional information please contact the Weather Desk on 0870 900 0100 where one of our advisors will be happy to help you. The number is open 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Yours sincerely,
Tara
Weather Desk Advisor
Met Office, FitzRoy Road, Exeter, Devon, EX1 3PB, United Kingdom.
Tel: 0870 900 0100 or +44 (0)1392 88 5680 Fax: 0870 900 5050 Email: enquiries@metoffice.gov.uk http://www.metoffice.gov.uk
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Your personal details will be stored in our database. The information will not be passed to any third parties. Please advise us if you do not wish your details to be stored. The Met Office is an Executive Agency of the UK Ministry of Defence and is registered under the Data Protection Act 1998.
lattitude had it correct. How can the Chairman of the Meteorogical Office hold so many posts in organisations with a political stance to global warming? How can there be trust in his organisation? This system is corrupt and it’s not just its data.
Just listen to this unbelievable crap from an obviously nervous “Dr” Vicky Pope at the Met. Office., broadcast on November 26th.
What an absolute twat.
At least John Humphries tries to tie her down a bit.
Sorry. She is just a twat.
Sorry – forgot to post the link. It’s here.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9231000/9231192.stm
Does not detract from her twatishness.
The deeper you dig into the carbon industry cess pit …
Humility at the Met office are you joking. It is a political organisation. It now looks as daft as other political organisations.
This was their joint press release last year, it contains statements that are contradicted by their own science. The statement blamed the 2007 UK floods on climate change, but their own research found no evidence.
I wrote to them and asked what was going on?, and received a reply from the Met office that was intentionally unintelligible, and no reply at all from the learned Royal Society, or the Environment Agency. They are a joke!
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk:80/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20091124a.html
contradicted by.
http://www.ceh.ac.uk/news/news_archive/2008_news_item_05.html
Jeff Alberts:
‘(why do the British say “codes” instead of “code”? It sounds like they’re trying to crack the Enigma machine or something, not write computer programs. It sounds strange to our American ears.) ‘
perhaps “two nations divided by a common language” (various attributions)
Currently, December 2010 is the 3rd coldest in the HadCET record since 1659 with a value of -0.4°c. The deviation from the 1961-90 reference period is -5.2°c.
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/cet_info_mean.html
The next few days are very likely to bring sustained below zero temperatures to Central England. Somewhat milder conditions are expected after 27-28th Dec. Depending on the last decade of 2010, there is at least 30 to 40% chance to beat the monthly all-time low average set in 1890 (-0.8°c).
Since late November, daily mean temperatures have dropped below 250-year record lows twice. http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/graphs/HadCET_act_graphEX.gif
British Decembers have been getting increasingly colder in the last few years and this cooling process is ‘unequivocally’ accelerating. Climate tipping point ahead – remember, it may arrive without any warning… http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/02/100209191445.htm
Not really:
Moreover:
That’s not so. Fowler states, “Latin plurals sometimes become singular English words (e.g., agenda, stamina) …” As long as it’s OK to employ those words as singulars, it’s OK to do the same for “data.”
Because of its inconsistency with long-established and near-universal usage, and because, as Fowler shows, there is no real rule forbidding “data is,” “data are” will never be accepted–it will always sound odd or even affected.
It’s counterproductive to make an issue about it, because the people criticized will not change their habit, but be determined to pay no attention to any similar criticism in the future. This backlash is what happened 100 years ago after schoolmarm grammarians made a fetish of not splitting an infinitive, distinguishing between shall and will, etc. They lost the war, by going a bridge too far.