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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Rupert Murdoch’s Sky News has a major presence in the UK. Sky can use any source it chooses for weather forecasts. Does it use Met Office or another source? If Sky currently uses the Met Office why aren’t all concerned Brits lobbying for Bastardi or Corbyn?
and these are very small. It may be, as the Met Office suggests, that the observations are wrong, not the model.” :O)
Don’t believe your lying eyes. And on the topic of bias:
Nothing is going to change the head of the UK Met. Office is a former head of the UK World Wildlife Fund and an environmental campaigner, its just jobs for the boys. The BBC are now being seen by the public, the license payers, as going through the motions trying to obtain the best financial deal with the Met Office for the next 5 year contract.
Almost signed, sealed and nearly delivered.
ScientistForTruth (08:30:31) :
liked your comic
http://buythetruth.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/heretic.jpg?w=500&h=349
Jeff L (07:21:24) :
“For those who don’t read Joe Bastardi (of Accuweather), you should. He gets it – he knows that he gets paid for being right.”
An inconvenience the Met doesn’t have to worry about. Salaries and bonuses will still flow. If you’re wrong, so what?
ScientistForTruth (08:30:31) :
“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.”
But it’s unlikely he was appointed and his subsequent actions were a surprise to whoever appointed him, as he ploughed his own furrow. He was obviously selected to shift the Met Office to promote an agenda already agreed at a high level. It all fits in with the statements we’ve heard from politicians about “Britain taking a lead on Climate Change”, “millions of green jobs” and all the rest. If the government didn’t approve of the direction the Met Office was going in, funds would soon have dried up and Napier would have been persuaded that his talents would be more fruitfully applied elsewhere.
The problem is that the short term and particularly, mid term forecasts are being laughed at; not good for the propaganda effort at all. You can come out with arguments as to why the long term climate forecasts have nothing to do with weather forecasting, but the fiascos will cause the long term forecasts to be seen in the same light. If a maths lecturer demonstrates clearly that he’s lost with school algebra, who’s going to give him a serious hearing when he gives a lecture on Galois Theory?
@richard M
My vague impression from the chaos&order popsci TV program, was that patterns can be predicted if these same patterns have happened before. It is then a matter of understanding the underlying conditions that resulted in those patterns. Then as reality unfolds in the present, we look and see if similar underlying conditions are arising, and if they are, we can have a good idea of the resulting patterns which are likely to appear, just as they did before.
But all this assumes that the underlying conditions we have now have a precedent. If the climate is being forced in an unprecedented way as the AGW crowd seem to keep stating, then that forcing, which is operating on a chaotic system, will produce a new pattern that has no precedent.
I think, perhaps, then, that the theorists who believe the sun is the real driver, have a better chance at predicting future climate than do those who believe unprecedented CO2 is the driver, simply because, if we want to know what new climate order the chaotic weather will produce when forced by the sun, we just need to look at past solar history and the resulting order produced in the Earth’s climate. But if the CO2 is really the driver, then we have no way to know what new climate order will arise out of the CO2 forcing on chaotic climate, because it has never happened before, and being chaotic, the order it produces, whatever shape or form it takes, cannot be anticipated.
A new forcing, creates a new order, but that order, being new, can’t be predicted. The simple linear notion that “more CO2 means more warming” doesn’t make sense in a chaotic system with feedbacks. Yes it will mean something, it may result in something, a new state or order, but after a few iterations through chaos, the resulting form will be unrecognisable, if the CO2 forcing is really as novel as some believe.
Sorry to keep repeating this, but I just wonder whether it is worth anything.
“Professor Chris Folland from the Met Office said a re-analysis of weather science might even show that the actual temperature measurements have under-recorded recent warming – making the Met Office forecast even more accurate than it appears.”
“Under -recorded recent warning” WTH? If the data don’t agree with your model you adjust the data? Is this how the climatology community works – if so, they are no scientists!
% accuracy figures are given for corbin and bastardi.
There must be data to back up these figures?
Please point me to this data
Government motors, government news, government weather forecasting, government everything.
People need to rise up and throw off the shackles. Just say no. Eliminate the agencies. All that government does can be done by the private sector, or not done at all. If there is no demand for it, if the free market doesn’t want it, then it shouldn’t be done!
It’s not just the Met Office. Imagine life without NASA, NOAA, the EPA, or any government run anything. Imagine the very least government imaginable. Then demand that.
You would probably get better long term weather predictions from Old Moore’s Almanac than from the Met Office!
And it only costs £2.20 for a whole year ahead!
Also, it must be pretty good to have lasted since 1697.
Send Donald Trump over there to straighten Dr. Folland out.
“You’re Fired”.
The Brits will get a bang out of watching Trump whittle down the panel of contestants every week.
Better yet, pipe the water directly from the Thames into Dr. Folland’s shower.
He can then tell us how under-reported the warming has been.
nigel jones (10:18:41):
“[Napier] was obviously selected to shift the Met Office to promote an agenda already agreed at a high level.”
The same thing happened at the once great Economist, after John Mickelthwait was appointed Editor in Chief by the Economist’s board [interestingly, the Wikipedia page describing the foundation that selects the Editor in Chief, and how it operates, is gone now].
As an Economist subscriber for over thirty years, I saw how quickly it became a strong advocate for AGW when Mickelthwait was appointed in 2006. Now, in every issue you can find statements such as, “CO2 is colorless, and you cannot see it pouring out of the smokestacks into the sky.” [quoted from memory]. The Economist now constantly trumpets the AGW/climate catastrophe scare as an established fact, in every issue. The Economist’s adoption of the AGW agenda since Mickelthwait’s promotion is glaring. And there is rarely a letter to the editor published that contradicts its AGW lobbying.
It is clear how this came about. Prof Richard Lindzen explains, using actual examples, how easily a professional organization can be hijacked by only one or two individuals in the right positions: click
As a former chief executive officer of an organization that operated according to written rules and bylaws, I was aware of how very easy it is to steer a private agenda. It takes time, knowledge of the organization and its committees, subcommittees and bylaws – and the right person placed in the right position. Most organizations, whether public companies or private foundations, are obligated to follow the direction of motions made and voted on. They are based on Roberts Rules of Order or their own adopted version of Parliamentary Procedure, amended from Roberts to fit the particular organization.
In committees and subcommittees motions can be done very informally, such as, “After discussion, if there are no objections…” The committee’s unspoken vote then appears in the meeting minutes, and is routinely approved at the next meeting along with the rest of the committee’s actions and decisions.
By skillfully building on individually minor and apparently inconsequential past motions, a point is reached where the entire organization is on record as supporting an agenda that would have never been accepted if presented to the membership as a major change in direction. Having seen this from the inside, like Dr Lindzen I can see what is going on within professional societies, publicly traded companies and foundations. People have learned to game the system.
Government bodies are even easier to game. The top person is appointed according to the spoils system. If one administration doesn’t change the focus of an organization like the Met Office, the next one can. Usually it is not necessary to replace anyone; a simple understanding is reached where the top person keeps his job in return for promoting the new agenda. In government bodies there is no need for sometimes pesky votes; policy is interpreted by the boss, and everyone [who wants their job] falls into line.
Newspapers are the same. The Editor in Chief sets the course. That is the reason that every major U.S. newspaper and television network, even Fox [which is only seen as conservative by comparison with the rest of the alphabet networks] generally promotes AGW, and gives little if any acknowledgment to truly blockbuster stories like the East Anglia emails.
In a rational world there would be a diversity of opinion due to fierce competition between the major news outlets. But there really is none. They assign no reporters to scoop their competitors regarding global warming issues: it is all AGW all the time. Contrary evidence is routinely ignored.
If it were not for the internet, the populace would never hear another point of view than AGW. It doesn’t take much foresight to see that an upcoming target for government censorship will be the internet. They won’t call it what it is – censorship – but that’s what it will be. Control of the population, along with the ability to radically increase taxes, requires control of all major media outlets.
Richard M (06:51:43) :
“Do not try to use the chaotic nature of weather to debunk climate predictions. I started along this path at one time and it leads nowhere. It gets down to timescales. It doesn’t mean that a significant change in climate can’t happen on short timescales, however, it is unlikely. Just like weather can generally be forecast up to 3-5 days in advance (with occasional misses). Climate should be predictable 100-150 years in advance (assuming 30 years is a good definition of climate units).
The problem is not chaos. The problem is the lack of knowledge of the underlying principles of climate change.”
One of the features of the deterministic chaos displayed by or climate is that the future cannot be precisely determined by observing the patterns of what happened in the past. Trends are of no use and the only way climatology will move forward is if, as you say, we start to understand the underlying principles about how simple physical systems interact to produce the order we see in the quasi-cyclical climate change behaviour.
Climate is a ‘hard’ problem and science isn’t yet getting anywhere close to understanding it or delivering accurate long-term forecasts.
@ur momisugly KPO (09:11:43) :
OT – Does any of the community here have any input on – The impact of Global Warming on Coral Whitening –
—————————————————
Here are a few articles on this site which might help (apologies if you have already read these):
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/11/not-as-bad-as-we-thought-coral-can-recover-from-climate-change-damage/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/01/oh-snap-co2-causes-ocean-critters-to-build-more-shells/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/13/sea-sponges-soak-up-carbon-like-a-sponge/
Ref – Smokey (11:52:19)
_____________
Great summary. How to fix it?
I urge you to post this as a comment on one or more UK newspaper or BBC sites.
Hear, hear!
@ur momisugly geronimo (07:01:40) :
Another impetus was the “template” that had been set up by prior successful finger-pointing at manmade atmospheric gasses being responsible for the ozone hole and acid rain. o this looked like another “winner” to trend-followers.
A further impetus was that the cast of “villains” — corporate America, especially auto, oil, and coal companies — made an appealing target to demon-hunting Democrats.
Thanks for mentions (by ‘Engineer’ etc).
May I recommend interested people read our WeatherAction News Release 2010 number 6 entitled:- Met Office hides forecast failings behind nowcast spin as Warmers’ Empire crumbles. Just go to WeatherAction.com and look at Latest News & events Number 6 pdf with pics.
You will see
(1) We at WeatherAction predicted using our Solar Weather Technique (SWT) the cold winter period in Ireland, Britain & Europe 6months ahead – BEFORE all others and in much more detail than all others who even got it remotely right – and NB it will return. We also predicted various bouts of heavy snow & ice in USA etc and the very cold period now/developing further in N Korea, N China & SE Russia.
(2) The SWT can deliver real real long range warning of extremes of eg snow to timing of a day or so before standard meteorology has even thought of what might happen in those periods.
(3) The SWT can also reliably (95%) state in advance of standard meteorology when standard meteorology will be likely to notably underestimate amounts of (eg) snowfall. These improvements in short range forecasting come directly from SWT predictions of solar-magnetic influences on frontal activity and on the motion of the jet stream. Links to videos on this are included in the pdf WAnews2010No6.
Thank you,
Piers Corbyn
The BCC should sue for any payments made to the Met Office since their forecast have clearly been manipulated and distorted to cover up the cooling trend. How come their rivals got it right? If the global cooling trend continues, this will make the Met Office even more vulnerable and will eventually be exposed as delinquent in their duties. Tax payers should be demanding answers and the Met Office held to account. It’s obvious there should be a royal commission or such like into all this.
@ur momisugly KPO (09:11:43) :
OT – Does any of the community here have any input on – The impact of Global Warming on Coral Whitening –
You can go to this WUWT index page and click on the second and third stories for more on coral:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/page/2/?s=coral
“KPO (09:11:43) :
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 …”
Willis Eschenbach is the man:
1. Coral reefs, which are the major CaCO3 shell formers, produce CO2. This daily
production often drives the pCO2 in the local ocean around the reefs to levels three
times the world average … without harming the reef. Go figure.
see: http://climateaudit.org/2006/04/09/hansen-and-schmidt-predicting-the-past/
esp.:
http://climateaudit.org/2006/04/09/hansen-and-schmidt-predicting-the-past/#comment-48219
sunscreen could be to blame for bleaching:
http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/docs/2008/10966/abstract.html
even in very low concentrations
Also, in the Red Sea coral doesn’t bleach – water temperature there is 34 degree C. See wikipedia for instance.
Pascvaks (13:15:05),
There are certainly ways to fix it. But they are not pleasant, and it is doubtful that the country has what it takes. Possible. But not likely.
Maybe we can fight off the inevitable in November. We’ll see then.
The temperatures in the BBC’s forecast for Dublin, Ireland differ considerably when compared to AccuWeather and Weather Underground.
Take these figures (all in deg C) for Thursday, 21 Jan:
BBC: Low 11 – High 11
ACU: Low 3 – High 9
WU: Low 4 – High 9
If the Beeb’s bias is that transparent, why bother with a forecast at all!?
Ref – Smokey (16:14:42) :
“Pascvaks (13:15:05)”
“Maybe we can fight off the inevitable in November. We’ll see then.”
__________________________
Glad to hear you’re an optimist. November? OK! The glass is half full:-) Let’s hope and …(that other thing folks aren’t suppose to say anymore.)