From the London Times, signs that the Met Office might need a refresher course in basic forecasting skills and bonuses revoked. While I’m often critical of NOAA’s climate issues, the forecasts from NOAA put The Met Office to shame in terms of accuracy and detail. And, NOAA staffers don’t get bonuses, period.
Excerpts from the Times article by Steven Swinford
BUFFETED by complaints about its inaccurate weather forecasts, the Met Office now faces being dumped by the BBC after almost 90 years.
The Met Office contract with the BBC expires in April and the broadcaster has begun talks with Metra, the national forecaster for New Zealand, as a possible alternative.
The BBC put the contract out to tender to ensure “best value for money”, but its timing coincides with a storm over the Met Office’s accuracy.
Last July the state-owned forecaster’s predictions for a “barbecue summer” turned into a washout. And its forecast for a mild winter attracted derision when temperatures recently plunged as low as -22C.
Last week the Met Office failed to predict heavy snowfall in the southeast that brought traffic to a standstill. This weekend a YouGov poll for The Sunday Times reveals that 74% of people believe its forecasts are generally inaccurate.
By contrast, many commercial rivals got their predictions for winter right. They benefit from weather forecasts produced by a panel of six different data providers, including the Met Office.
Despite criticism, staff at the Met Office are still in line to share a bonus pot of more than £1m. Seasonal forecasts, such as the one made in September, are not included in its performance targets.
John Hirst, the chief executive of the Met Office, insisted last week that recent forecasts had been “very good” and blamed the public for not heeding snow warnings. He received a bonus of almost £40,000 in 2008-09.
Metra already produces graphics for the BBC, including the 3-D weather map that made some viewers feel sick when it was introduced in 2005. Weather Commerce, Metra’s UK subsidiary, has already usurped the Met Office in supplying forecasts to Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer and Waitrose.
…
The Met Office was bullish, though, saying: “We have always been in the strongest position to provide the BBC with accurate and detailed weather forecasts and warnings for the UK.”
h/t to many WUWT readers
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p.g.sharrow “PG” (21:24:26) :
The Old Farmer’s Almanac they have a story on the waning of Global Warming, You can find it here:
http://www.almanac.com/content/global-warming-wane
By Roger Harrabin.
The Met Office has now admitted to BBC News that its annual global mean forecast predicted temperatures higher than actual temperatures for nine years out of the last 10.
So over forcasted warming is transformed by re-analysis to under-recorded recent warming making the Met Office forecast even more accurate.
Thank you Sir Humphrey.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8462890.stm
Recently the Met Office took it upon themselves to get 1700 scientists to sign a petition supporting the UEA/CRU. As a publicly funded organisation I wondered how they had found the budget/staff resources to carry out this, clearly out of remit, activity. So I wrote to them asking who had authorised the spend and how much it had cost in terms of wo/man hours. This is the response:
“1. Any documentation related to the approval for the spend of public funds in the pursuit of signatures to support the Met Office;
No documentation was produced relating to the approval for the spend of public funds in the pursuit of signatures.
It should be noted that the signatures referred to above were collected on behalf of the UK Science Community to show support for the statement below, not in support of the Met Office.
We, members of the UK science community, have the utmost confidence in the observational evidence for global warming and the scientific basis for concluding that it is due primarily to human activities. The evidence and the science are deep and extensive. They come from decades of painstaking and meticulous research, by many thousands of scientists across the world who adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity. That research has been subject to peer review and publication, providing traceability of the evidence and support for the scientific method.
The science of climate change draws on fundamental research from an increasing number of disciplines, many of which are represented here. As professional scientists, from students to senior professors, we uphold the findings of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, which concludes that ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal’ and that ‘Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations’.
2. The budget for the pursuit of the signatures and the actual spend made by the Met Office in terms of wo/man hours and any other expenses made in this exercise.
It is estimated that over the four to five days taken to collect signatures and produce the statement that a total of around 30-35 hours of staff time – spread across several staff – were used.
There was no budget set for this activity. There was no overtime paid, the time committed was done so alongside the normal roles of the staff involved. There were no other expenses occurred in this exercise.
I hope this answers your enquiry.”
You will note their robust defence of an unaccused “scientific community”, and what appears to be an obsession with proving global warming is real and anthropogenic. I noted the other day that the Guardian, right there with the BBC on AGW is now using Accuweather. It is a shame that the, once worldwide respected, Met Office has now become little more than a propogandist for AGW. And if they have the nerve to tell me that 2009 was warmer than 1976 I will explode!
As told by TOFA themselves (excerpt) it doesn’t seem quite so … medieval:
Chris Folland wants us to believe that snow and ice are now indicative of warm weather.
Despite criticism, staff at the Met Office are still in line to share a bonus pot of more than £1m.
Government can do this. They can give themselves raises even with poor performance. Everyone else has to live in the real world.
Governments should be hiring people like Piers Corbyn and Joe Bastardi, shouldn’t they?
Corbyn says he’s right 85% of the time (exactly how?).
Of course BBC can use Corbyn instead. 🙂 Anyway BBC can’t get stuck in global warming belief without scientific base (only fraud/IPCC/Cliamtegate) during a little ice age if they want to survive.
(Btw, are predictions of the sun more than 27 days into the future good?)
Bonuses?
???????????????????
Is the Met connected with AIG? Are they Wall Street traders? Used car salesmen? Since when do public employees get “performance” bonuses? For what?
GB is a weird country, but really?
For a long time I have rejected the propaganda gloss that the political fight is between Party A and Party B. I think the real battle is and has been between public employees and everybody else. Privatize the BBC, the Met, NOAA, NASA, every University, every agency, the whole shebang.
Quis custodiat custodium?
Yes, but all this chat about Met Office forecasting accuracy is just a side-issue. The important thing is how accurate they were with the bonuses forecast.
How can any real scientist, let alone a climatologist (Folland) persist in a view that the model is correct and that the observations must therefore be in error ???
On Mombiot’s blog. The comments are hilarious 99 to 1 against. I admire Monbiot for hacking it though….
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/jan/06/cold-snap-climate-sceptics
This is one of the funniest ones:
I was wondering when the climate change lobby was going to get its mitts off and explain away the cold weather.
I have nothing to say other than that I keep warm by tearing up climate change books and articles and stuffing them under my jumper.
I knew they must be good for something and it works for me.
Seriously though I would say Monbiot has lost all credibility and it seems he’s been taken as a joke by most of the commenters. What even funnier though, he apparently does not realize it!
Last one you can snip if you want but it is so funny:
I greatly admire Mr Monbiot’s courage, lowering his jewels so squarely on the chopping block of this whole affair. Time will vindicate or emasculate him but I suspect history will be not judge him kindly in either event.
The BBC’s Paul Hudson (weatherman) wades in http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1243846/Met-Office-accused-warm-bias-BBC-weatherman.html
Prof Mobbs: “”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.”
I observed a foot of snow outside my door for the past two weeks. I observed p***ing down rain for most of the “barbecue” summer, which they are now telling me is going to be the hottest on record, once they’ve finished “adjusting” the data.
The Met Office has been infiltrated by the Greens and is little more than a propaganda machine for the AGW movement, scarcely interested in forecasting the weather, and only able to get it right, in the short term, i.e when the weather can be seen on the West Coast of Ireland the Met Office can tell us with 65% accuracy what it will be in the UK on the following day.
I’ve never before read any of Monbiot’s blogs however, I read some of the posts at the link posted by VG. Crickey, Is this man for real?
“The ghost of Big Jim Cooley (00:29:46) :”
The finger pointing continues and computer models are biased. LOL It really cannot get any better than this, can it?
O/T, but related.
“The World has been misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown. A WARNING that climate change will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued it.
Two years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world’s glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
In the past few days the scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before the IPCC’s 2007 report.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6991177.ece
More evidence that the MSM is slowly realising how badly they have been duped.
The Met Office, like the BBC are public-funded, so there’ll be a lot of “singing from the same hymnsheet”. Their governmental masters probably won’t take kindly to the BBC dropping the Met Office, so I’ve no doubt something will be cobbled together, after all they will want to present a united front in respect of their doom-ridden climate change prophecies, won’t they?
As a government employee myself, I wouldn’t get too exercised about the million pound bonuses. Most of it will be going in pay outs of about £150 to staff on salaries not greatly higher than the minimum wage.
On another topic, our friend Mr Pachauri won’t enjoy this prominent story in the Sunday Telegraph today http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7005963/Taxpayers-millions-paid-to-Indian-institute-run-by-UN-climate-chief.html
I hope this works. From today’s Sunday Telegraph if looking on a later date
look for the cartoon from the 17th January
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/matt/
sums up nicely the feeling of how accurate the Met Office is
Small wonder they don’t get it right beyond a few days, and that seasonal and climate predictions are rubbish.
Back in the 60’s, Edward Lorenz showed that a system like climate, which is driven by deterministic chaos, accurate long-term forecasting is impossible. Doesn’t matter how much money is spent on a big computer, or how good the understanding of the individual climate mechanisms, climate sensitivity to initial condition will confound the result. The way forward is to look at quasi-cyclical events, such as the sun cycle, AO e.t.c, which at least give a general idea of what is to come.
Corbin and Bastardi seem to better than the Met does by employing this approach.
I would hope not only the BBC dump them but also ITV/Channel 4 as well.
There is no competition. Therein lies the problem.
Can we also drop the BBC for television broadcasts?? That would be like getting rid of the NKVD and Pravda all at once.
.
I watched a nice little pop science programme about chaos and order. It seemed to say that simple rules can behave chaotically, and that chaos can create patterns and order, but, those patterns are not predictable.
Intuitively, this is a reason I’ve been sceptical of AGW models, but I wonder if anyone could comment on if this is right or wrong headed thinking:
AGW activists claim that whilst the weather is chaotic, the science can figure out the boundary conditions of the climate. They also claim that whilst the climate has dealt with high levels of CO2 in the past, CO2 is now rising in an unprecedented way.
OK, I can accept that the climate has patterns (order out of chaos), but we only know what those patterns are from observing history (we know about the LIA, MWP, and so on (quibble over their extent of course)).
I say “only from history” because whilst patterns do arise out of chaos, like sand blowing in the wind forms sand dunes, those patterns are not predictable, they are merely obvious once we see them. Any new pattern is not predictable. So, AGW activists claim that the current CO2 forcing has been unprecedented and far faster blah blah. In effect they are saying that something new is happening. So how can they predict the new pattern that will arise out of chaos forced in a different way?