“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.
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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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17:45 GMT on 16/01/2010. Here’s another goody from the Met office, with a very revealing quote!
“All models have biases and these are very small. It may be, as the Met Office suggests, that the observations are wrong, not the model.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8462890.stm
Everyone is missing the point on climate models. They can only replicate PAST climate. They have been calibrated on the solid records available from the most impeccable sources, CRU, GISS and CDRC. Their accuracy is impeccable in predicting known results. But as Yogi Berra said, “predicting is hard, especially about the future.”
I just went through a review of the 9 pages of references, a total of 537 papers, on Chapter 9, Understanding and Attributing Climate Change, of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report AR4. I did not read all of the papers. From the titles, I selected those that appeared to address attribution. By searching the web by the title, I was able to find the abstract on nearly all of the papers and the complete PDF on most of the papers. I COULD NOT FIND ANY PAPERS DESCRIBING ANY EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE OF ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING (AGW). To put it in context, it reminded me of a debate among theologians about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. The evidence behind AGW amounts the Argument from Ignorance, the models using (their definition of) natural causes alone cannot replicate the observed global warming; therefore, it must be caused by humans. Now all of a sudden the AGW alarmists have discovered NATURAL VARIABILITY and that is the cause of the cooling.
http://www.socratesparadox.com
> M White (05:25:39) :
>The MetOffice has a different view of itself
>“The big chill — how did we do?”
>http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2010/pr20100114.html
>
>See” Weather warnings we put out, and the subsequent weather”
That is absolutely hilarious. They must be psychic. They certainly report their predictions like the psychics. Someone call James Randi. 🙂
The Met office’s answer to the weather vs climate issue is that climate models are completely different to weather models. Just because they make a poor weather forecast does not mean they cannot predict the future climate. Modelling the climate is far simpler than modelling the weather and they are completely separate operations.
What’s more, climate models ARE validated. They can model climates in the past correctly, and the only way they are correct is if the CO2 contribution is included in the model.
Personally I’m still skeptical 🙂
John Page (09:41:25) : Gordon Brown’s ‘reviews’ are famous.
John, that is another Taxpayer paid for Quango then.
The one that was formed to advise Councils about Salt and Gravel levels after last year’s debacle was a great success wasn’t it?
Jimbo (09:25:35) :
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/
Great site, thanks for posting it.
Two years ago I emailed “theweathernetwork.com” the major Canadian weather forecasters to remark that their two week forecasts nearly always showed temperatures turning up near the end of the period. I ventured the explanation that the weather was much colder starting in the fall of 2007 and that their acceptance of AGW gave them a bias toward abandoning forecasting from a scientific basis and going on faith that temperatures “had to” lift up out of the cold spell. Time and again, the upturn didn’t happen. I decided to make my own two week forecasts by modifying theirs a few degrees downward and I wound up more often than not with much more accurate forecast over the winter, spring and the following cool summer than they did. I emailed them informing them of this but neither of my emails were replied to. I wish I had kept a record of this. I’m certain that the UK Met Office had the same faith-based bias. I am willing to bet (a token!) that the UK Met will have much better forecasts from now on as they jetison the climate models from their wall-to-wall mega computer. It is magical the timing of Climategate and the cold winter have virtually dropped the AGW movement in its tracks, although there is still a lot of whimpering. Oh yes they will rationalize and quietly swing out from under it by discovering that we are going to have a perfectly natural hiatus in AGW for 30 years or so. They will go over 30 years of their past stuff and show that they didn’t …exactly say this and they actually meant that… and probably some of them will even be trumpeting in a new Ice Age.
“Wakefield Tolbert (20:32:24) :
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/climate-change-deniers-vs-the-consensus/
I assume some of you have seen the above graph. ”
Hi WT. Say, what are you doing on this thread? Are you here to defend the warm-biased MET forecasts because the beautiful image you linked to has convinced you that they must be right and reality must be wrong? You’re trying to talk other people here into your own delusional way of thinking. Are you sure you have the slightest chance of success?
A CO2 addict’s first step to recovery is admitting that they have a problem.
I would settle for balloon launches (literally: radiosonde, a balloon-hoisted unit that measures various atmospheric parameters and transmits them back to a fixed receiver on the ground) every two or three hours (at critical meteorological times, eg. tornado season here in the states) instead of every twelve hours.
This is with an eye toward fine-grained observation of mid and low-level winds and moisture levels for input to the usual RUC and GFS weather prediction models the NWS/NOAA uses here in the states for wx prediction.
.
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bruce:
I just went through a review of the 9 pages of references, a total of 537 papers, on Chapter 9, Understanding and Attributing Climate Change, of the IPCC 4th Assessment Report AR4. …… I COULD NOT FIND ANY PAPERS DESCRIBING ANY EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE OF ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING (AGW).
Yeah, when I was looking at the TAR I was really surprised and put off to find tons of references at the end of a chapter which gave no indication of what they actually related to. I immediately viewed this as very unprofessional, unscientific, and almost certainly a tactic to imply that the references supported the chapter but at the same time didn’t say why they did and even made it hard to read further. So I didn’t, betting that their references were irrelevant to what the ipcc was saying except in not supporting it.
This kind of tactic was already known and described by Christina Hoff Summers in her book “Who Stole Feminism”. She found that the references the “gender feminist”, Feminazis gave for their many claims very often either didn’t exist, didn’t say what the Feminazis said they said, were incorrect anyway, or actually said the opposite. It was pitiful, and very irritating. Such people don’t know what they are playing with here in the real world.
Incentive pay; a good idea. Forces one to really scramble to ‘get it right’ regardless of philosophy, current group-think et al.
Can we go one step further?
Put the weather-forecasting service ‘out for bid’; base the payment of performance bonuses (above the agreed-upon base rate) on accuracy and actual ‘hit rates’ on a monthly accuracy scorecard.
I’ll bet we wind up with a LOT more ‘balloon’ launches (upper air meteorological observations, measurements) as a result too … simple surface msmts (wind, temp, humidity, pressure) can only indicate so much in the way of ‘atmospheric happenings’.
Time to let private enterprise innovate in this stodgy ‘old’ field?
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Roger (08:03:03) :
If you take the trouble to research Wakefield Tolbert….
Somebody had to do it, thanks. He also made a pretty good case right here at WUWT for this very same uselessness, so I guess he’s pretty trustworthy in that respect. Maybe he works for the Met Office.
Perhaps it’s time for the Met office to consult with Piers Corbyn…?
” J.Peden (03:20:44) :
~”Take your dirty hands off me, you Ape.”
The correct quote is:
George Taylor: Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!
It just struck me where this quote (probably) originated –
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRG6ahCs_t0&hl=en_US&fs=1&]
Famous scene from “Planet of the Apes” with Charlton Heston.
.
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@Bruce said on January 15, 2010 at 6:06 pm
> Everyone is missing the point on climate models.
> They can only replicate PAST climate. They have
> been calibrated on the solid records available from
> the most impeccable sources, CRU, GISS and CDRC.
> Their accuracy is impeccable in predicting known results…
You are giving them too much credit. The UEA HCRU Penn State climate models are accurate only when the Midaevil Warming Period and the Little Ice Age are removed from the data. So, how accurate is that?
Newt Love (my real name) newtlove.com
Aerospace Technical Fellow, Modeling, Simulation & Analysis
ScientistForTruth (04:37:07) :
Yes, but don’t forget that the Met Office can routinely predict out to 1000 years ahead – their Dr Vicky Pope said so in 2007:
“Much longer predictions are run, typically…predicting the next 100 to 1,000 years.”
Even I, on an aged desktop, can “make predictions.” This is a long, long way from “predicting.”
In October 2008, I printed out the 5 day forecasts for the month. I checked the number of overlapping days changed each forecast, which was ~2½ average. That means they have about 3 different attempts at each day. If they count the number of days correctly forecast, that will be about 3× the number of correct forecasts. I wonder which they quote?
It sounds like a sort of “brittle chain” where once something unfounded gets into he literature, it is very hard to spot the errors and very hard to correct.
Errors can’t be helped, but there seems to be a lack of concurrent alternatives being spawned that follow their own paths. That’s how evolution is supposed to work, no?
Many tout “the consensus” as a matter of great confidence, but I feel the opposite about it. If there were three prominent theories then I’d feel like alternatives were being pursued and so we’re likely to get the best answer sooner. But when it is a monopoly theory, I feel it is actually more likely to be wrong.
Activists would then claim that I would question the Earth being round, but it is telling that they have to resort to such an extreme simple thing to make that point.
So, dear activists, “consensus” means it’s more likely to be wrong. Care to disagree?
The MET Office is a national institution which has become infected with the governments political plan to dress everything up in spin.
It no longer is it sufficient for the MET Office to try to predict the chaotic airflow around the British Isles they are also required to sex up all their output as the political lap dogs they have become.
The MET Office’s wholehearted support for human caused Global warming derives from the political realisation that climate change can be used to control the population much as a fear of hell allowed the church to control the population until the very recent past.
That the MET Office has prostrated itself at every opportunity is the reason for the MET Office talking down the snow risk.No repeat heavy snow risk means there can be no challenge to global warming.
It has been sad to witness the MET Office slide into the abyss of deceit and spin.
Furlough the responsible elements of the Met office and outsource to a commercial forecaster for a trial period to compare performances….
It must be that new computer Deep Something that they got. I suspect the software has a few sign errors left in it, you know, a – sign where there should be a + and vice versa. Does wonders to your results.
Prepare yourselves for announcements about debugging being going on …
Cat amongst pigeons article in The Times (Jan 17th, 2010) …
BBC forecast for Met Office: changeable
Oh I get it, UK tax payers get to pay twice for nowcasts before turning to Corbyn and Bastardi to get forecasts. Don’t you just love it.
_Jim (12:43:55) :
It just struck me where this quote (probably) originated – Planet of the Apes
Yes, I didn’t pay any attention to the movie way back when it first appeared, but more recently it’s been brought back on cable. One outlet had a “Channel of the Apes” fest two Thanksgivings ago, for example. I’m seeing a lot of movies that were made even before I was born that make much more sense and communicate much more info than occurs now.
The correct quote is:
George Taylor: Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!
Thanks, Kate, I knew I didn’t have it right. That’s much better. But Wakefield no doubt had no idea what I was talking about anyway, except maybe that he was acting like an Ape in trying to tout some kind of primate “consensus” = ape-ing.