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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Now I ask myself, why this posting? Why is this of interest? I guess I then put 2+2 with the Met Office and East Anglia together and think this is clear indication of why we should not listen to the Met Office about climate change either? Problem is the NZ Met Service also identifies climate change as a major problem for our society in the near future…. see their web site. Or ignore facts as normal.
@Mike Ramsay: “I have recently been wondering who they are exactly. Who is capable of coordinating a global scam of this magnitude? And how is it possible that so many bright people could have been so completely taken in? This is a question that history, at some point, will demand an answer. Who is running the AGW political campaign?”
Good questions Mike, it is hard to imagine some Dr. No sitting on an island planning all this for sure. My take is that there were the original activists, mainly Maurice Strong and Hansen agitiating for something to be done about the burning of fossil fuels because it was popularly supposed that Venus had been destroyed by runaway greenhouse gases. They had a ready audience in the environmentalists ever on the look out for a cause to make us feel guilty for being here in the first place. Then the UN set up the IPCC whose sole role is to forecast the results of AGW and put these results to the politicians. Along the way we got Gore a high profile activist, and potential carbon trading billionaire who breathed more life into the movement. The IPCC attracted those scientists who supported the AGW theory and the thing snowballed. While it was doing so the oil companies realised there’s a lot of money to be taken from the little guy and they became supportive. As time progressed those people who, in common with the environmentalists, want world governement saw this as an open doorway to achieving it and joined the movement. The MSM has virtually been silenced by a continuous propoganda campaign telling them the vast majority of scientists support the AGW theory.
As for the scientific community, it’s a bit like Miss Congeniality where the beauty queen contestants all had to hope for “World Piece” to stand any chance of winning, so with the scientists the easy option for getting funding is “Climate ChanGE”. So it became the mantra, that plus the fact that you needed to have considerable status in the climate science community to go against the trend, the viciousness with which dissenting voices are treated would put off all but the potential kamkazi pilots of science.
Then came the “hockeystick” it was milk and bread for the activists and they rallied around it because it eradicated the MWP. I suspect many of them knew it was bunkum but seeing everyone taken it by it went along with it to get their political views on the agenda. Once they had done that, they were tied together in the Big Lie, McIntyre and McKitrick demolished it, but the Team did everything in their power keep it on the agenda because once off the agenda the second phase would be to ask why they weren’t able to see it as a fraud. Now they’re all in the Ship of Infamy together, and maybe not this year, or even next, but some time in the future they will be held to account for the corruption they’ve introduced into the scientific process and all of them will go down in infamy as the scientists who tried to fool the world with bad science.
So no Dr. No, more like a snowball gathering different people with different agendas for their own ends. Thank God for the Chinese.
The only really disappointing thing about that otherwise good article, John Peter, is that the author left out the most entertaining part. The 2035 date came from a mistranslated version of a Russian paper which claimed that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2350.
The entire claim rests on a typographical error.
The BBC would be well served in getting a private forecasting group to do their work – a group that is paid / rewarded for getting the forecast correct…. versus a government entity pushing the political agenda of AGW. I dont care what your politics are, making a warm forecast because that is what you want to happen will not make it so. Obviously people of the BBC are waking up to that fact – their listeners want an accurate forecast, regardless of their politics. At the end of the day, we all live in the real world, not some dreamland where we can control the weather with wishful thinking.
For those who dont read Joe Bastardi (of Accuweather), you should. He gets it – he knows that he gets paid for being right. He is obsessed with getting the forecast right and, as many have pointed out here, he has one of the best track records in the business.
They are the many various green organizations. Coordination is done at the top levels of them. There are several books which list names and numbers, I am behind on my reading, so any recommendation I would make would be dated. The greens made it a long term goal to infiltrate the government organizations which make/enforce the rules, and more importantly control the funding. Pick any government organization, gather the names of the top ten people and read their bios. Connections to green organizations will be fairly evident.
The Met Office is living in the past. Winters were warm in the UK ten years ago. They convinced themselves that it was a linear or exponential trend, and have been unable to extract their thought process from an outdated paradigm.
I believe the basic reason for these failed predictions is that carbon dioxide has been much over-rated as a climate driver in the past and we are now encountering an unexpected CO2-independent inflection-point in the complex of factors that really do drive our climate. As long as carbon dioxide remains as the ‘black beast’ of greenhouse global warming, I expect to see degraded weather forecasting.
Global warming myth dies of exposure
by Vlad Tepes
http://www
The Kiwi company that the beeb is considering subscribing to instead of the Met office, actually uses a consortium of forecast supplied by different providers – including the Met office.
The idea that you can get a more accurate forecast by combining several (inaccurate) forecasts is wholly consistent with the IPCC approach which purports to predict the future climate by aggregating 20 climage models.
Perhaps this is the sign of the new Po Mo science of the future. You don’t need a model or theory that works – that would be too difficult and involve all sorts of inconvenient tasks such as fitting theories with observation and carrying out deductive reasoning until the theory fits the data. In Po Mo science you just chuck everything into the cauldron and hope that the inaccuracies are all averaged away.
Jimbo (05:57:39) :
“It amazes me that there aren’t more sceptics within the Met Office. I mean if their computer models fail so badly for forecasts a few months away what faith should they put on GCM forecasts for 2050.”
The UK government’s view (and that of the whole political establishment) is that AGW is something they back to the hilt. They’re intolerant of doubt. Over the past 12 years of the Labour government, we’ve seen the politicisation of the Civil Service, that is, rather than give independent advice, come up with answers, which have a ring of independence, but which are ‘on message’. The job of the Met Office has become largely to beat the AGW drum.
In a place like that you can join in beating the drum, you can keep your head down, or you can leave. Very few would sound off about how the fundamental aims of the organisation were wrong, whatever their private views, and if they did they would be in for a hard time. Don’t forget, the Met Office is a branch of the Civil Service.
Also, you have to look at the wider climate which has been created, where the authors of papers with any connection to clmate, include a genuflection AGW in the same way that papers in the Soviet Union included a paragraph explaining how the work vindicated Marxist-Lenninist theory.
I’m not surprised there are few vocal sceptics in the Met Office.
Steve Goddard (07:31:01) :
The Met Office is living in the past. Winters were warm in the UK ten years ago. They convinced themselves that it was a linear or exponential trend, and have been unable to extract their thought process from an outdated paradigm.
Looks like there’s job security in that paradigm, with bonuses no less—getting bonuses for living in the past!
So why be as accurate as Piers Corbyn when you’d end up having to sell your forecasts to make a living?
/sarc off/
“nigel jones (07:51:19) :
[…]
Also, you have to look at the wider climate which has been created, where the authors of papers with any connection to clmate, include a genuflection AGW in the same way that papers in the Soviet Union included a paragraph explaining how the work vindicated Marxist-Lenninist theory.”
Nicely said. It will also have the same amount of success as Marxism-Leninism.
Oh, while we’re talking of it:
“dekitchen (06:52:31) :
Now I ask myself, why this posting? Why is this of interest? I guess I then put 2+2 with the Met Office and East Anglia together and think this is clear indication of why we should not listen to the Met Office about climate change either? Problem is the NZ Met Service also identifies climate change as a major problem for our society in the near future…. see their web site. Or ignore facts as normal.
”
Hi. Yeah i guess you got it. Nobody should listen to the Met Office because they’re dead wrong in everything they say. Who ignores the facts here?
It seems the Met Office has contracted a rather nasty case of pnemonia, coughing up one bad forecast after another. The masses now have a new sport: mocking the crass stupidity of the weather forecasts.
Somebody at the MET (and soon other such agencies) have finally figured out that they are being viewed as nothing more than a circus act, complete with clowns.
The Met Office was deliberately steered into the climate change agenda (rather than just weather forecasting) by their eco-imperialist and climate alarmist Chairman, Robert Napier. This was one of the first things Napier did when he got into the driving seat – he says so in a previous Annual Report. Napier, former WWF-UK Chief Executive, has his fingers in all sorts of government, UN, regulatory and tax pies. The Met Office has become a joke under his Chairmanship because of it because he’s incapable of leaving his own eco-imperialist agenda at home. If you try to infuse propaganda into weather forecasting you will soon come unstuck, as we have seen. You can’t fool all the people all the time.
Of course, Napier doesn’t see things that way. In mid-2008, Napier declared “During the last year I have been impressed, but not surprised, by our accurate forecasts…for the…season ahead.”
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/08/24/eco-imperialism-every-environmentalists-dream/
It’s important that the Met Office employees are ‘seduced’ by bonuses to keep them ‘on board’ and ‘on message’. As Jerry Ravetz said about climate models:
“…climate change models are a form of “seduction”…advocates of the models…recruit possible supporters, and then keep them on board when the inadequacy of the models becomes apparent. This is what is understood as “seduction”; but it should be observed that the process may well be directed even more to the modelers themselves, to maintain their own sense of worth in the face of disillusioning experience…”
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/
See here how Julia Slingo changed her tune and was seduced to keep ‘on message’ when she joined the Met Office as their Chief Scientist:
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/06/24/met-office-fraudcast/
Just in case it was not posted: Met Office computer accused of ‘warm bias’ by BBC weatherman
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1243846/Met-Office-accused-warm-bias-BBC-weatherman.html
A common symptom of global warming fever is the complete inability to detect measure and report cooling of any kind. Thos who have this fever will use terms like “negative global temperature trends ” or “neutral trend” or ” near zero warming ” or “slow natural variations” or” single –decade hiatus” and will go to any length in order to avoid using the term “cooling “. Looks like the fever has affected the entire Met Office. Cure? A week in Greenland.
Even the best of ’em can get it wrong sometimes:-
From The Sunday Times January 17, 2010
World misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown.
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.
WHOOPS! Is the IPCC on a contract too?
Mike Ramsey (04:52:34) quoted JohnG (04:29:05):
“As failed prophets throughout history have found: if your prophecies fail to materialise, you’re in deep trouble. It appears that the Warm Front discovered years ago that the globe just wasn’t going to cooperate as far as their predictions were concerned so they attempted to pull off the most expensive scam ever. They told us it was warmer than it really was; they continued to warn us that temperatures would go on rising; they admonished us that it was our fault. All these are proving incorrect. Can anyone explain why anybody is still listening to them?”
Mike continued: “I have recently been wondering who are exactly. Who is capable of coordinating a global scam of this magnitude? And how is it possible that so many bright people could have been so completely taken in?”
Mike: Think religion and churches, and how beliefs have been perpetuated through the centuries and even created in out time.
DirkH (03:18:21) wrote: “Leftists can maintain contradictory attitudes for quite a while until it makes them crack and they defect to the sceptics camp only to be replaced by younger leftists. Hansen is quite resilient in this respect but it’s obvious that it’s taking its toll on him. Same for Lovelock. You can literally watch them go insane. Or take Mojib Latif: He predicts something very similar to Joe D’Aleo but as soon as a newspaper quotes him he has to explain that he’s been misinterpreted.
“They all started out sane and look what became of them. Look at what’s left of the BBC.”
Cognitive dissonance.
A friend who was involved with a nuclear power plant used to invite some of those who attacked nuclear power for a tour of our nearby plant. When the “environmentalist” saw the many safeguards, he/she often dropped out of the “environmental” group, but never went back to explain to the others their change of mind.
IanM
Sitting here in my rocking chair, I reflect, without any academic references to hand to back things up, that the Meteorological Office’s predictions, mega-super-duper computers notwithstanding, are less accurate now than they were fifty years ago. For immediate forecasts (in newspapers), the only graphic we had then was a pressure map, amplified by a short written statement. This, together with a barometer and little basic gumption, worked fine. Weather forecasts on the wireless and television were factual, and were delivered with gravitas and without juvenile, patronising comment such as is forthcoming from the gullible sixteen-year-olds on work experience that pass as ‘weather experts’ today. Instead of ‘a low pressure system is passing north of x but is expected to move south . . .’ we now get, ‘It’s a case of showers all the way’ (what on earth is a ‘case of showers’?); instead of ‘a deep depression is approaching from the south-west . . .’ we get, ‘Don’t forget to wrap up against the wind’; instead of ‘ temperatures will rise sharply to a maximum of y degrees’ we get ‘Make sure your sunblock is handy’. It’s enough to put you off your drinking chocolate.
OT – Does any of the community here have any input on – The impact of Global Warming on Coral Whitening – My local newspaper had a bold scare story in which it is basically claimed that AGW is causing coral death due to rising sea temps. My thinking is that the claimed 0.5c increase in global atmospheric temps since 1875 could hardly have any impact of ocean temps due to its massive thermal mass. I am no scientist, but I would like to respond to the newspaper claim, pointing out their AGW bandwagon disinformation.
The article does mention other factors like solar irradiance, but this is glossed over – the reader is left with the definite conclusion that it is all because of AGW. Any advise would be appreciated – Kevin
OT but looks like the media are slowly coming to their moment of clarity. Warning: it contains the bottle / CO2 video.
BBC Ethical Man: In praise of scepticism
“…..I have no problem reporting that micro wind turbines don’t work or that cars can sometimes be more carbon efficient than public transport – if that is what the evidence suggests.
……….
That instinct to suppress evidence that challenges preconceptions is very dangerous. Any hint that the climate change science is anything other than transparent will – understandably – encourage people to be even more sceptical.
……..
That’s how scientific hypotheses get proved and – yes – disproved. And wouldn’t it be great if someone proved the science of global warming was wrong?”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ethicalman/2009/12/in_praise_of_scepticism.html
I’m not holding my breath. I’ll believe the BBC will fire the Met Office when it happens. They are both corporate members of the incestuous cabal that is the current politicised establishment in the UK and EU, and whose tentacles spread a long way. This has the appearance to me of a carefully spun story that is intended to convey ‘distance’ between them; but my guess is that having got their headline they’ll allow the story quietly to die.
They need to hire the best,and here they are.Adolf and Dr Joseph.In fact they are reputed to be running the BBC anyways. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8O-E_GN0Kg
When the Met Office speaks do you hear the sound of General Motors? There simply must be a virus that infects old organizations and brings on various cancers and decay. I believe it starts at the top and works its way down. I believe it has a lot to do with the absence of good, fresh blood on the board of directors and within upper level management. Its a real shame because we do need the best weather/climate products and cars/trucks; there is a market, but they just can’t do the work anymore.
If the Met Office used Peirs Corbyn’s services they would save a fortune as Peirs’s office isn’t much bigger than my dunny and probably has more paper in it. They could flog their computer and save us some money also.