By Christopher Booker (excerpt from his Telegraph column)
First it was a national joke. Then its professional failings became a national disaster. Now, the dishonesty of its attempts to fight off a barrage of criticism has become a real national scandal. I am talking yet again of that sad organisation the UK Met Office, as it now defends its bizarre record with claims as embarrassingly absurd as any which can ever have been made by highly-paid government officials.
Let us begin with last week’s astonishing claim that, far from failing to predict the coldest November and December since records began, the Met Office had secretly warned the Cabinet Office in October that Britain was facing an early and extremely cold winter. In what looked like a concerted effort at damage limitation, this was revealed by the BBC’s environmental correspondent, Roger Harrabin, a leading evangelist for man-made climate change. But the Met Office website – as reported by the blog Autonomous Mind – still contains a chart it published in October, predicting that UK temperatures between December and February would be up to 2C warmer than average.
So if the Met Office told the Government in October the opposite of what it told the public, it seems to be admitting that its information was false and misleading. But we have no evidence of what it did tell the Government other than its own latest account. And on the model of the famous Cretan Paradox, how can we now trust that statement?
Then we have the recent claim by the Met Office’s chief scientist, Professor Julia Slingo OBE, in an interview with Nature, that if her organisation’s forecasts have shortcomings, they could be remedied by giving it another £20 million a year for better computers. As she put it, “We keep saying we need four times the computing power.”
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I still say picketing the Met Office with this banner is the way to go:
Read the rest here:
Ooooo…. that really roasted their tushies! Quite an article.
Good to see Chris. Booker here; the only MSM journalist with a regular column which tirelessly criticises the AGW madness and the energy policies straight from Alice in Wonderland that result.
His book “The Real Global Warming Disaster” is a MUST read, particularly for anyone who doubts the political nature of the scam.
The MO doesn’t know when to quit digging, do they?
If you believe the Met Office had secretly warned the Cabinet Office, you would have to believe that the MET wanted to destroy it’s own reputation. By giving a wrong prediction, on purpose.
I don’t believe it for one minute.
There is no science in predicting the weather or climate. These guys are only playing the odds, just like gamblers.
A few warm years, and they predict a warming trend.
A few cold years, and they predict a cooling trend.
A few cold winters, and they predict warmer winters, because it’s unusual to get more than 1-2 extremely cold winter in a row.
There were a couple of cold winters, they figured the odds of it being even worse was a long shot. That’s all………
Then not being the brightest bulbs in the box, they tried to cover it up by saying they had really predicted a cold winter, but released a official prediction of the total opposite.
Truth is, this was a record breaking cold winter. So extreme, that if they could predict anything, there’s no way in hell they would have missed it.
Booker left out a big one…..
Australia had a white Christmas…..in the middle of summer
My old neighbor, farmer Joe Supchak (rest his soul), could predict the weather just sitting on his tractor and working outdoors back in the 1970’s. No $20 million dollar computer was required. The guy was uncanny. But then again, when your livelyhood depends on fickle Nature, you either become good at reading the wind, or you fail as a farmer. Rarely did his hay get wet. However, as any good warmest would recite, he was concerned about weather and not climate.
They won’t remember what was said a few months ago. Send that forecast to the memory hole!
So the UK taxpayers £37 Million wasn’t enough? Another £20 Million?
Shame on you Julia Slingo!
Even if we UK taxpayers gave you £100 Million you wouldn’t be able to give us an accurate forecast, you never will!
Slingo-“Very much confined to the UK and Western Europe”.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/slingo-“very-much-confined-to-the-uk-and-western-europe”/
The Met Office is no more. It has been renamed the Psychedelic Meth Office. Chill everybody, cold is the new warm.
I still believe the Met. Office is two different organizations. The short term forecasters, who are among the world’s best; and the climate modellers, who are useless. Unfortunately, the climate modellers have the ear of the senior management at the Met. Senior management put out the religious beliefs of the warmaholics.
So, when the short term forecasters came up with the news that December was going to be cold, management at the Met. paniced. They dare not release this report to the public; it would show that CAGW was not happening. So it was released secretly to the government .
Oh! what a tangled web we weave;
When first we practice to deceive. (Sir Walter Scott?)
Thank goodness for journalists like Mr Booker. Unfortunately, they are thin on the ground.
It is very good to see articles such as these in main stream newspapers. An investigation into the working practices and capabilities of the Met Office is long overdue.
Over the weekend, the Daily Mail has run a couple of stories on how useless windmills are in winter conditions where there is a blocking high causing winds to drop to near nothing
Only problem is, will the politicians read these articles and more importantly will they learn anything? I am not sure whether politicians can read (possibly explaining why political messages have to consist of short sound bites) and experience suggests that they do not learn from experience. The experience of winter 2009/10 should have been the final nail in the coffin of the rush for windpower, and yet nothing appears to have been learnt from that winter (also explaining why the UK was so ill equipped to cope with the wintery condition s of winter 2010/11).
Infinitely more computing power won’t help, because the fundamental assumptions underpinning the models are flawed. Investment needs to be rechanneled towards sensible data exploration, a prerequisite to sensible modeling. Cautionary Note: There aren’t many people who can do the required data exploration, as it does not conform to current mainstream paradigms of statistical inference.
I would like to see a graph of the accuracy of the Met Office forecasts over the years compared to the computing power available to them. I suspect that the forecast becomes less accurate as computing power increases. So why would we want to increase their available computational power yet more if the result is likely to be even greater inaccuracy of their forecasts?
It seems to me that they are “baking” certain assumptions into their models that are not reflective of the reality and the more computing power they have available, the more these assumptions are able to skew the forecast.
It would seem that weather forecasts are now suffering from the same problem as climate forecasts and that is the results from model runs is being weighted higher than are actual observational data. In order for this winter to have been warmer than average, the AO and NAO would have had to be in the opposite state as could have been observed very early on. That should have been their clue that maybe their computer runs were wrong. Mr. Bastardi was pointing out this very thing months ago. Seems to me they have too many computer scientists already and not enough meteorologists. They don’t need more computers, they need fewer of them. The more computers they get, the less accurate their long range forecasts become.
Chris. Booker is a tireless MSM journalist who has consistently written about the madness of AGW theory.
His book “The Real Global Warming Scandal” is a must read for anyone who doubts the political nature of this scam.
It just gets better and better, doesn’t it?
In three years, the MET will be able to make better forecasts at the same cost point. That is because according to Moore’s Law, CPU power doubles every 18 months – and voila, there the MET gets their 4x computing power, spending the same money 🙂 Imagine the savings if they were to close down until they have the necerssary tools to do their job.. 😉
In a word “Dogma”
Tim
Five bucks says the overpaid bureaucrats at the top of the poo heap in the Met Office won’t refuse their annual bonuses this year.
After all, incompetence and deceit has to have its rewards.
Here in the UK the Met Office is regarded with almost universal scorn. Their forecasts are not worth spending the time listening to; they do a reasonable job of telling you what is happening “right now” but anything even 12 hours ahead flummoxes them.
I know of three very professional events organisers which rely on either Corbyn or Bastardi for their weather forecasts, they discarded the Met forecasts a couple of years ago. These organisations are prepared to pay hard cash for forecasts which have a very high probability of being correct. The Met Office cannot (or will not) fulfill this requirement. The Royal Navy has provided its own weather forecasts since 1936, that’s how much the Senior Service trusts the Met!
Obviously they cannot have it both ways.
On the one hand they could have stuck with incompetent.
They seem to have opted for criminally negligent.
Why are heads not rolling ?
Richard North had a fair hand in writing that article and has been tirelessly covering the potential tragedy that is unfolding in the Sea of Okhotsk with 2 large ships still trapped in the ice.
As for the secret forecast. Why did Vicki Pap, (No, that’s not a typo), even bother going to the airport?
Also, is it my imagination or is there an unconscionably large number of female psientists in positions of authority?
Maybe they’re more malleable!
DaveE.
As pointed out by R. De Haan above, “Slingo-”Very much confined to the UK and Western Europe”. It’s not so, Slingo!
I wonder if the AGW bias of the UK MSM has prevented the coverage of this unfolding drama?
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/01/rescue-delayed.html
The comments alone would provide excellent fill for many column inches.
latitude says:
January 9, 2011 at 2:28 pm
well said!
Damn. I can see myself getting routed for my previous comment. It was not meant to be sexist. One of the best engineers I ever interviewed was female.
DaveE.