“Gordon Brown yesterday promised a full review of how the country had coped with the coldest winter for 30 years”
Heckuva a job there Brownie.
From the Telegraph:
Met Office to review forecasts after failing to warn public of fresh snow
The Met Office has admitted that it failed to warn the public of the heavy snow that brought swaths of Britain to a standstill on Wednesday.
Forecasters conceded that they did not spot the widespread snow storms that caused transport disruption and a surge of weather-related accidents until it was too late. Up to six inches fell in parts of the South West, with drifts of 7ft in Wales.
Even when the full extent of the threat was realised, flaws in the Met Office’s bad weather warning system meant that the public were not adequately informed, officials said. The system will now be reviewed.
…
Thousands of Britons endured nightmare journeys to work after waking up to several inches of snow despite reassurances that their regions would escape the worst of the latest flurries.
Hundreds of flights were cancelled at Heathrow, Gatwick and regional airports, while schools that had only just reopened were again forced to shut their doors.
Accident and emergency departments reported “unprecedented” numbers of patients, many suffering suspected fractures after slipping on ice.
An 18-year-old college student who died after locking himself out was last night feared to be the latest casualty of the weather. Police believe Nathan Jobe froze to death after falling from a window while trying to gain access to his home in Mountnessing in Essex.
In the Peak District, pregnant 40-year-old gave birth to a healthy baby boy after a mountain rescue team transported a midwife to her snowbound home. Melanie Pollitt had sought advice on the Mumsnet website about her labour pains before calling for help.
Gordon Brown yesterday promised a full review of how the country had coped with the coldest winter for 30 years, after councils were forced to cut their gritting by a half to conserve dwindling stocks.
==============================
I like Richard North’s (EU Referendum) take on it:
They got it wrong and keep getting it wrong.
Now for the reality check, more than adequate testimony that the Met Office is a waste of space.
===============================
Heh.
Seems like the Met Office has a terminal case of botchulism.
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Wakefield Tolbert (20:32:24) :
Nice art, but it’s a bit late the to buy tickets to the show after the fact.
The supreme test was predicting this Winter before it hit, not afterwards.
Yes but the Met gives itself a score of 8/9 for forecasting.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/pr20100114.html
Plus a bunch of citations from businesses saying well done thankyou.
It’s enough to puke.
Would this be the same Met Office whose Head only recently claimed (see here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/08/all-of-england-covered-by-snow/#more-15032 ) that they were amongst the most accurate 0-5 day forecasts in the world? At this point, I wouldn’t trust them to report yesterday’s weather. Actually, I don’t trust them to report yesterday or any previous temperatures after all that pasteurising and homogenising.
Thank goodness most people have short term memories!
They could sack the lot, shut down the numerous CO2 generating super computers and get Joe Bastardi’s highlights for free. (That way they could also blame the Americans for stuffing it up).
Dr.T G Watkins(Wales) (18:32:24) : After two enjoyable hours reading WUWT plus links, I’ve come to the conclusion that the only way to deal with the issue is by laughing!
It has been recently confirmed that many Met Office staff received diplomas from the University of East Anglia. (see here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qcnzwQt9vI )
J. Peden:
Easy, brother.
Why come here?
Well, to pour over things, and hopefully find answers.
And at that, while saying I’m not some climatologist might seem damning, that’s just dandy–because most of the Climate Deniers are not real climatologists either. 1% at most. And for some odd reason (and this should NEVER be) we’re getting more than a few articles showing up on corporate-sponsored and AEI sites written by…engineers.
No call for concern yet? Not even the tinny, deadpan ring of an alarm bell going off yet?
Which was exactly my point, or goad, if you please.
Also: The charts clearly show some warming that correlates to increased Co2, regardless of the debate over Al Gore using his magic alpha rays under the influence of Soros, and the faux, hard Right Wing Blogosphere moral outrage of the alleged ClimateGate scandal (which merely showed some researchers are human and have attitudes, and that only 5% of the data was lost, and that even at that it is readily available elsewhere).
And surely we know the heavy snowfall (global warming puts more vapor into the air) and the shifting weather patterns that bring them are no contraindicative of AGW.
Anybody remember the performance-related-bonus-endowed self-congratualting UK MET Director John Hirst recently “bragging” over and over on BBC TV….
that…..and I quote in caps (and he says this BS repeatedly!) :
“OUR SHORT TERM FORECASTS ARE AMONG THE BEST IN THE WORLD.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/8443687.stm
Cue Charlie Brown laugh: HAHAHAHAHA
Pathetic.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
OK, I’m holding my breath for the truth from the PM… wait a minute… I’m feeling faint… why is everyone spinning?… Grandma, is that you?… [thud]
Patrick Davis (20:53:27) : wrote
quote [grit bins] located near footpaths/road sides etc in the 70’s, you’d always find grit in them in winter. Try finding one in the UK now, you won’t. [] they’re all gone. unquote
Not in Coney Weston: there’s a bin on the biggest corner and the old couple who live next to it tend to scatter a bit around on really bad nights. I expect they got sick of the crunch of cars going into the ditch.
People are being a bit harsh on the Met office, forgetting how complex is the situation. It’s not like a nice big continent with solid predictable fronts, the UK’s environment includes hills next to a shallow cold sea and a big deep warm one, continental dry cold air, moist maritime air and the polar front, all mixed up, all confused and frequently chaotic in the mathematical sense. The radars are fine — you can get the feeds from the Met Office site — but just last week I watched a big lump of snow trundle across the North Sea, turn from a line into a vortex and trundle off again. Until it stopped you would have been able to predict its arrival within ten minutes, wrongly, of course, but it would have been easy to do.
When a change in temperature of one degree means the difference between a snow storm (questions in the House) and a moderate amount of rain (ho hum), you can see that all the computing power in the world is not going to help. If they honestly said ‘today we can’t tell what the weather is going to do’ they might get some respect from intelligent listeners, but can you imagine what the Press would say?
Maybe they should say ‘today the weather patterns are mathematically complex’ when it’s all gone unpredictable, just as a warning to those of us who have read about Lorentz.
JF
AKA The Happy Few.
Wakefield:
You’ll need much better ammunition in this forum. But feel free to stick around and read more. You’ll receive a wonderful education.
“Julian Flood (22:24:28) :
Not in Coney Weston: there’s a bin on the biggest corner and the old couple who live next to it tend to scatter a bit around on really bad nights. I expect they got sick of the crunch of cars going into the ditch.”
I’d say that’ll be an exception rather than the rule, but given how far further north Coney Weston is compared to say Portsmouth, this is not a big surprise. My folks live in Hampshire and they were snowed in. There used to be a grit bin at the end of the road. It was removed quite some years ago.
Wakefield Tolbert (22:10:39) :
Watch Al Gore’s movie again. The C02 rise comes after the warming.
That’s what the ice cores tell us.
How long has it been warming?
Since the 1850’s.
When did the C02 start to rise?
Are you absolutley sure of this?
Ahhh, they meant the the British version of the billion when counting computations. In which case they probably mean simply that the 30 million £ computer had petaflop capability. Still kind of disappointing… considering…
A fully networked and highly scaleable 10 teraflop machine was available for about 400k over two years ago provided enough of them would be bought. I’d imagine that they could have cut off 25% of the cost over 2 years.
TanGeng (19:06:30) : Err they spent 30 million pounds on a machine that can only do 1000 billion calculations a second!???? [snip]
What do you want to bet that the Met supercomputer shows up for sale on eBay sometime soon? The Brits are broke due to their investments in frozen windmills and worthless Euro carbon offsets. They need to recoup some of their losses somehow, and the darn thing spits out embarrassing garbage. Two birds, one eBay stone. I mean, we’ve all been there, right?
Wakefield Tolbert (22:10:39) :
Wakefield, if you are truely here to mull things over, the first thing you need to see is that, from what you have said, you are not even at the Ballpark, much less on the field and playing.
You are lost in irrelevant and illogical “reasoning”. You are probably simply projecting the notion that scientific thinking is like your thinking. It isn’t. Btw, how do you come by your knowledge as to what Science and the Scientific Method is? Do you practice hard science, did you take much science in your schooling?
I’ll give you a hint: science is not politics or propaganda designed to move crowds. And the validity of any scientific result or study is not dependent upon who does it or funds it.
Wakefield Tolbert (20:32:24) :
Are you serious???????? or maybe just very very new to the AGW caper. Go do some reading, improve your knowledge and come back, that should take you about 2 months.
re: Big oil
I’m sick of this one. Firstly, the govt. grants received by warmist scientists outweigh funding to skeptics by about 1000 to 1
Secondly, if big oil is putting-up money for skeptics, IT IS THEIR OWN money they are putting-up. Alarmists money comes from YOUR POCKET AND MINE. To clarify for you, alarmist money is someone elses money, easy to splash around and well over 100 billion has been splashed around already.
Now when you go away to do your research, take the time to find out which “big oil” and how much they are paying to which skeptics and let us all know so we can get some.
The MET forecasters are like those experts who recommend dozen ways to pick up women… but can’t get a date.
“the proportion of Denialists among all in Climatology”
Wakefield, the real Denialists are the AGW Believers, who think that Natural causes simply can’t be causing any current significant warming, assuming for the sake of argument that there is a time period of “current warming”. They have gone to the extremely absurd length of trying to deny the existence of the MWP, and by extention, the Roman Warm Period and the Holocene Optimum. They also “deny” out of hand anything which challanges their simple Postulate that CO2 is causing any current warming, which they enter into their Models as the necessary cause of any current warming, thus presupposing that which they should be instead proving – a.k.a., “begging the question” – and instead start making adjustments in temperature records and as necessary in any other factors entered into their Model algorithms so as to preserve their Holy CO2 Postulate. And they also just make things up as needed. They call playing with their “play station” Models, “doing experiments”, and they are not joking.
They also deny the correct use of the Scientific Method. So they are not doing real Science, and that’s a Denialism they have even come to personify and have succeeded in passing on to a great many people, especially given the money they have been able to command for doing their “work” and otherwise propagandizing populations.
J. Peden:
Easy, brother.
Why come here?
Well, to pour over things, and hopefully find answers.
My friend, you’ve proven your argument about AGW to be little more than a vehicle to vent on your political philosophy.
Since you have given us a few links here (and yes I’ve looked at them all) here is one from me to you.
Please do me the same courtesy I did of you and watch the video all the way to the end.
Now please take a minute to ponder the links you posted, search around for figures and info that actually have some basis in fact. Propaganda is everywhere my friend….always has been….I’ve grown up in an environment where I get to see information manipulated on a daily basis….I have articles from newspaper reports that I’ve been interviewed for on my wall. I keep them in view as a reminder not to fall for them…
Good luck….the truth is pretty easy to find once your bullshit meter has been celebrated correctly:)
It seems that WUWT is being invaded by AGW bots. Their offensive (meant in every sense of the word) has started.
Wakefield Tolbert (20:49:57) :
You win, numbers do matter. I only have one comment.
The Wright brothers wanted to publish their motorised flight theory. They were told to buzz off by all the recognised journals. In the end, just to be able to get a PEER REVIEWED paper out, they had theirs published in…………..BEE KEEPERS MONTHLY ffs
The blog you refer to is for lemmings
Mr. Blanchard.
Better Ammo than the graph that shows the trending from the hard working men and women doing the actual climate research?
OK…OK…
I’ll play the game…fire at will.
Mr. Peden.
I somehow do NOT get a distinct impression that the work done by RealClimate and hundres of other institutions across the planet is made to move crowds or make some Orwellian nightmare propoganda.
And if this arena is so highbrow for the efforts, then surely the results will be QUITE interesting to the workers over at RealClimate, no?
If someone or some instistitution besides the AEI or Lord Monkton wishes to put for the real effort, then I can promise you that the majority of real climatologists will be more than happy to listen.
And the validity of any scientific result or study is not dependent upon who does it or funds it.
True, but then along the same vein I dare not ask my wife’s hairdresser Tina about climate change.
Nor Lord Monckton and his street theatre. He’s a nice guy and bully for him on that count. Probably cool to have a beer with at the local pub. But alas, he’s not a climatologist.
Shall I now ask him about small engine repair or titration as well?
Baa Hummbug:
Are YOU serious?
(and do extra question marks make this more of a question?)
Gasoline, or petrol, as the Brits have it, does indeed get the cost reimbursed from the end pocket of the consumer. And oil companies get or at least in the past have gotten vast sums from government entities.
I don’t blame people for funding their pet projects, but sources DO need to be carefully considered.
Outspent 1000-1?
Where did you find that?
Wakeboreder, give it up. There are no co-eds, poli-sci majors, or enviro studies types here. You’re out of your depth. Go back to the Huffington Post, RC or wherever you came from. Or maybe try that stuff at CA and see how you do?