Uh oh, the Met Office has set the cat amongst the pigeons

A terrific essay, understandable by laymen, such as myself. I encourage all to head over to Bishop Hill and read the full missive.

You can fool some of the people some of the time, contrary to what the civil servants at the Met Office thought – you can’t fool all of the people – all of the time Goddammit!
‘Bout time some real time employment expenditure retrenchment was made at the Met Office – with the UK CET showing a decline in average annual temperatures – the game is up.
The UK branch of the scientific warmist cabal and arguably ‘consensus central’ – is stuffed and judging by this article [see below] the same could be said of the German warmist klimatekrieg too:
http://notrickszone.com/2013/05/26/max-planck-institute-for-meteorology-prognoses-confirm-model-forecasts-warming-postponed-hundreds-of-years/
Alarmist Consensus – over and out.

“Met Office has set the cat amongst the pigeons”
More of a red herring than a cat. Only Keenan cannot tell the difference.
REPLY: Mr. Telford, who is on the government climate science payroll, would do well to embrace this:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
– Upton Sinclair

-Anthony

From Athelstan’s link, a thing of beauty (for those of us who are fans of the absurd):
“…prognoses confirm forecasts…”
Deliciously unintelligible. Just like “…has correctly predicted that temperatures will…”, it has no semantic value. In the old days, a student would flunk a college essay for such locutions. These days they count as vindication of a scientific theory and bring millions in funding.

It’s an interesting essay but what are we to take away from it? That statistically speaking the planet isn’t actually warming after all? This seemed to be the sceptical argument from the early days but over the years hasn’t it moderated to be more along the lines of “we agree that the planet has warmed but we disagree as to the proportion that is man-made?” Is that now no longer the case? Are we, for example, to assume that the recently lauded low climate sensitivity studies are invalidated and the sensitivity should really be 0?
I ask because it looks like the “sceptical view” (if such a thing can be said to exist with any broad agreement) can’t make it’s mind up what it thinks, as long as it’s not what “the other guys” think, and you can bet that “they” will point this out.
Don’t take this the wrong way – I’m no believer in CAGW – but I don’t think this kind of flip-flopping helps anyone’s case. It’s reminds me of this scene from Galaxy Quest 🙂

The Met Office is the UK National Weather Service, founded in Aug of 1861. In recent years, forecasts based on the Carbon forcing model provided increasingly inaccurate long range predictions as barbie summers went cold and damp, as mandatory hose pipe bans were met with floods and the ‘warmest winter on record’ guesses were the coldest of the century. For decades the Met Office excuse was that with faster computers, long range accuracy would improve dramatically. Lavish Cray Super Computers have not improved Met guesses. With over 30,000 cold related deaths this winter due to energy poverty, the abject failure of their warmest winter bet could not be ignored, so on April 9, 2013 the Met announced that they would no longer provide ‘public’ long range forecasts, but would continue to provide that ‘service’ to the government….wink, wink. The government that pays Met operations and doesn’t mind exchanging tax money for worthless dribble….will continue to fund the charade….with no Met staff reductions. Unhappy with the official Met announcement of this change, i posted this version in comments at WUWT, now worth repeating:
The Met Office has admitted that predictions about weather and climate are beyond the ability of charlatans with super computers, and have therefore switched to the seance with poltergeist form of forecast. Future predictions will be made by the ghost of Marcel Marceau….”the mime who brought poetry to silence”….offering the public the same level of accuracy and entertainment of our recent long range forecasts.
Perhaps if the Met masters had not invested 30% of the Met pension fund in Carbon futures, there would be a more objective view of Earth’s non CO2 driven climate future.
Just saying.

What did we UK taxpayers get for buying the Met Office a shiny new number cruncher – nothing.
Will David Cameron finally realise that supporting Green Initiatives [Daddy in Law has wind farms] has to be dropped and huge subsidies for wind and solar contraptions has to stop.
A small part of the money saved could be spent on hiring a really competent Chief Scientific Officer.

@Oldseadog
i’ll try and Tweet Harribin and see what he says,no doubt the same rubbish “that its still a warming trend”
Would ask others to do the same if they are signed up to Twitter

From the Bishop Hill post:
A Parliamentary Question that has been tabled in the House of Lords is formally answered by HM Government as a whole. In practice, HM Government assigns the Question to a relevant ministry or department. In our case, the Questions have been assigned to the Department of Energy and Climate Change
So a Parliamentary Question requesting an answer that showed there was NO statistically significant temperature change was put to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC).
The PQ was effectively: “Is there a valid reason for half of your headcount and funding?”
I think we can all see why there was a reluctance to answer.
As they have been forced into answering: “No valid reason”. Where do things go from here? The UK DECC is currently subsidizing inefficient energy production at £18 Billion a year ($28 Billion) for no valid reason and in doing so hugely inflating the costs of energy. Just in the first two weeks of March 2013 2000 people died of cold in energy poverty and since 2003 more than 250,000 UK citizens have died of cold in energy poverty..
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/elderhealth/9959856/Its-the-cold-not-global-warming-that-we-should-be-worried-about.html
This is NOT an academic argument more people died of cold in UK in the last 10 years than military and civilian deaths in the Iraq war!
While I understand people wanting to protect their budgets, headcounts and tenure, they have to realize the lethal effects of the decisions made by politicians based on the reported figures. It is time for a VERY public inquiry with no attempts to hide data or obfuscate reasoning.

Love the cartoon!

From the post: “This means that the temperature rise could not be reasonably attributed to natural random variation — i.e. global warming is real.”
The sentence is a little confusing and clumsy. Presumably it means that the rise is statistically significant, and therefore represent something other than statistical errors, errors in measurement, and so on. It represents a real rise.
The term “natural random variation” could be taken to mean that natural causes are excluded as a reason for the rise, which, I suspect is not what is intended here.
Statistical significance does not in itself exclude natural variation as the major factor.