Readers may recall my story from last night about the Met office and their spectacular failure of a forecast for April. See Met Office April Forecast: “…drought impacts in the coming months are virtually inevitable.”.
Today I got confirmation of the PR being foisted on the UK public surrounding that forecast, and I don’t think even Josh could outdo this one, it is one for the books.
This is British humor at its absolute finest (FAIL added by AW):
Photo by Delemere Lafferty with a h/t to commenter RichieP
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
This is hardly dry humour!
Why do the Brits announce droughts on buses?
Saw on Twitter today… Love it! And yes a perfect description of both the weather and our crazy water shortages.
So now the bus drivers are forecasting the weather…Oh wait… I get it, the bus drivers USED to be UK Climate Scientists!
It’s the wrong kind of rain
They are desperately trying not to look as stupid as usual. The flooding now is due to 18 months of lack of rain. The ground is hard and the water is running straight off. Except that that is another pack of their usual PR BS. The ground is as soggy as it has ever been and that is why the water is now running off into the rivers. But it isn’t all the MO although they are pulling the strings. Remember there was a summet about 4 weeks ago which it is believed included several NGOs like greenpeace and the MO. They declared a drought and a hose pipe ban and that the drought would last through the summer and on to Noel.
It seems the MO couldn’t even forecast the torrential rain 10 days ahead when weatheraction could. Ah, hold on, I forgot. They haven’t got their new, new £60m computer yet. If they had they have failed to predict the rain before the end of the summet.
Josh says:
May 1, 2012 at 11:16 am
You surely cannot resist one of your famous (infamous) cartoons, can you??
This is British humor at its absolute finest (FAIL added by AW):
This is british establishment at it’s absolute stupidest.
Ah Anthony – sigh. You know, we have to live here. By the way DirkH it is buses, not busses – busses are kisses, but that’s another story. There are many wonderful things about living in the UK but our politicians are not one of them. Yes, they (mostly) all support CAGW theory even though the science is completely bust.
It is so they can raise the taxes and control us. They all support the BBC who support the Met. office. It’s like an evil, self-supporting cabal. And, of course, they all support the EU, all the more to remove democratic government from the UK and, eventually, from the US where the EU disease will spread like leprosy.
Never forget Anthony, Willis, Tall Bloke et al – we have few things to support us in our time of need but you and this wonderful website are a constant source of intellectual and spiritual nourishment. Please – keep on keeping on.
“This is certainly their finest hour!”
It is an absolute miracle how the British won the Battle of Britain or even went through WWII as one of the first three great Allies. Their meteorologists must have been a lot better in those days than they are today.
Get rid of the MET Office as soon as possible. It costs too much. Way too much.
It’s on buses because when in droughts we aren’t allowed to use hosepipes,fill home swimming pools etc etc also we are encourage to conserve and use water butts for gardens.
It’s rained pretty much every day since the drought became official….But it does seem like an age since we had decent rain. Very odd for south England. 🙂
Brilliant. It really is 1984 (war is peace, freedom is slavery, etc.).
Never mind the rain Winston, this is a drought.
Good FAIL, but there’s no patent on dumb.
MSNBC –
“Breaking News – Osama Bin Laden killed one year ago today.”
The British that won the Battle of Britain were brave patriots. They were not loony leftists seeking to destroy Britain. We must come to recognize the danger we are in from the socialists and communists and their destructive agenda. Remember Churchill? He certainly was a great man and a great patriot.
Priceless!
MtK
////Every casual conversation you have with an acquaintance or stranger begins with a sarcastic remark about drought. This is the worst thing that could happen to the authorities who claim the drought (which is caused entirely by mismanagement) is somehow our fault, global warming, global weirding or whatever. Massive win for us.
The only way this post would be better would be to have it read aloud by the Monty Python men pretending to be women. And some Spam, of course.
I am an Aussie and lets face it the Brits ( “Poms” as we call them ) really are not the go to people on drought. It is little wonder they are confused and disoriented on such a topic. But the UK Met Office really have scored an own goal here, well done boys and girls. “Every picture tells a story” and “a picture is worth a thousand words” indeed.
Len says:
May 1, 2012 at 11:33 am
The British that won the Battle of Britain were brave patriots. They were not loony leftists seeking to destroy Britain. We must come to recognize the danger we are in from the socialists and communists and their destructive agenda. Remember Churchill? He certainly was a great man and a great patriot.
Yes, we know. Remember, he was half-Yank (on his mother’s side), a matter of considerable pride amongst knowledgable Americans.
A bronze bust of Churchill used to have a prominent place in the Oval Office, that is until our President sent it back (to the British Embassy, IIRC). Something about lingering anti-colonial sentiment from his muslim polygamist Kenyan fore-fathers. Never mind that Churchil oversaw the dismantling of the Empire; facts should never get in the way of the frisson of a politically correct leftist gesture.
Sweet. One to add to the best-warming-headline-evah!
Someone on another thread today asked why we (In the States) can’t find another Reagan. Well, Brits, where is the 21st Century Maggie T? (BTW: Live here in states – actually Canadian – wife English from [dare I admit it] South End).
It makes you wonder how the media manipulation will go when the Met office improves to say 1 in 10 predictions? I do hope the internet is appreciated as an independent source in the free-thinking pockets of the UK in much the same way technology was used in the Arab Spring and ongoing in China. Monopolies of information, commerce, and thought are coming down everyday as a result of new models of electronic exchange.
Yeah, but you can have a huge down pour and still be in drought. Drought is when the resevoirs are not their usual levels, sometimes caused by using too much compared to it’s input or at other times wasting it via leaks.
A huge downpour will not fill the resevoir. In fact a lot of the rain will just go into the rivers and out to sea as it’s coming down too fast to soak into the ground and provide a long term supply of water for the resevoirs. We need a lot of rain. Months of rain like the recent downpour to really fill the resevoirs.
As has been said above, this is the wrong type of rain. We need a constant drizzle for sometime to wet the ground so that proper rain can soak into it rather than just run off causing rivers to burst their banks.
John V. Wright,
We in the US have not just the BBC but NBC, MSNBC, CBS, ABC and CNN completely in the tank for NOAA and NASA/GISS. I will admit that our National Weather Service gets it right more often than your met office. But we have more than our fair share of socialists in positions of power.
As an aside, leprosy is not particularly contagious. Influenza would have been a better analogy.
Actually, in defense of the Met Office, they have won the Exeter 20/20 cricketing competition in recent years (and a five-a-side competition). So – their inability to forecast the weather does not come at the expense of sporting activities.
http://sport.exeter.ac.uk/eventsandactivities/corporateactivities/corporatechallenges/
Let’s hear it for the plucky crooked damp climatologists – undaunted by insurmountable odds, facts, or the lack of computational resources.
Hip hip!