Met Office 2008 Forecast: Trend of Mild Winters Continues
Met Office, 25 September 2008: The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.
Reality Check: Winter of 2008/09 Coldest Winter For A Decade
Met Office, March 2009: Mean temperatures over the UK were 1.1 °C below the 1971-2000 average during December, 0.5 °C below average during January and 0.2 °C above average during February. The UK mean temperature for the winter was 3.2 °C, which is 0.5 °C below average, making it the coldest winter since 1996/97 (also 3.2 °C).
Met Office 2009 Forecast: Trend To Milder Winters To Continue, Snow And Frost Becoming Less Of A Feature
Met Office, 25 February 2009: Peter Stott, Climate Scientist at the Met Office, said: “Despite the cold winter this year, the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue, with snow and frost becoming less of a feature in the future.
“The famously cold winter of 1962/63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850.”
Reality Check: Winter Of 2009/10 Coldest Winter For Over 30 Years
Met Office, 1 March 2010: Provisional figures from the Met Office show that the UK winter has been the coldest since 1978/79. The mean UK temperature was 1.5 °C, the lowest since 1978/79 when it was 1.2 °C.
Met Office July 2010: Climate Change Gradually But Steadily Reducing Probability Of Severe Winters In The UK
Ross Clark, Daily Express, 3 December 2010: ONE of the first tasks for the team conducting the Department for Transport’s “urgent review” into the inability of our transport system to cope with snow and ice will be to interview the cocky public figure who assured breakfast TV viewers last month that “I am pretty confident we will be OK” at keeping Britain moving this winter. They were uttered by Transport secretary Philip Hammond himself, who just a fortnight later is already being forced to eat humble pie… If you want a laugh I recommend reading the Resilience Of England’s Transport Systems In Winter, an interim report by the DfT published last July. It is shockingly complacent. Rather than look for solutions to snow-induced gridlock the authors seem intent on avoiding the issue. The Met Office assured them “the effect of climate change is to gradually but steadily reduce the probability of severe winters in the UK”.
Daily Express, 28 October 2010: IT’S a prediction that means this may be time to dig out the snow chains and thermal underwear. The Met Office, using data generated by a £33million supercomputer, claims Britain can stop worrying about a big freeze this year because we could be in for a milder winter than in past years… The new figures, which show a 60 per cent to 80 per cent chance of warmer-than-average temperatures this winter, were ridiculed last night by independent forecasters. The latest data comes in the form of a December to February temperature map on the Met Office’s website.
Reality Check: December 2010 “Almost Certain” To Be Coldest Since Records Began
The Independent, 18 December 2010: December 2010 is “almost certain” to be the coldest since records began in 1910, according to the Met Office.
Met Office Predicted A Warm Winter. Cheers Guys
John Walsh, The Independent, 19 January 2010: Some climatologists hint that the Office’s problem is political; its computer model of future weather behaviour habitually feeds in government-backed assumptions about climate change that aren’t borne out by the facts. To the Met Office, the weather’s always warmer than it really is, because it’s expecting it to be, because it expects climate change to wreak its stealthy havoc. If it really has had its thumb on the scales for the last decade, I’m afraid it deserves to be shown the door.
A Frozen Britain Turns The Heat Up On The Met Office
Paul Hudson, BBC Weather, 9 January 2010: Which begs other, rather important questions. Could the model, seemingly with an inability to predict colder seasons, have developed a warm bias, after such a long period of milder than average years? Experts I have spoken to tell me that this certainly is possible with such computer models. And if this is the case, what are the implications for the Hadley centre’s predictions for future global temperatures? Could they be affected by such a warm bias? If global temperatures were to fall in years to come would the computer model be capable of forecasting this?
A Period Of Humility And Silence Would Be Best For Met Office
Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 10 January 2010: A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”. In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
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Also, I should point out – particularly apropos to the topic of this thread:
Thanks to people like the Mystic Met office, the highest prediction made for energy demand in the UK this winter was out by 4 GW. – 4 GW! – that kind of miscalculation could have easily resulted in thousands of deaths if the current supply wasn’t so elastic, and with the bulk of the “30%” expected to come from wind, and without most of our coal generating capacity, it won’t be in the future.
The original headline is correct British English, and was written in the present tense, which is stronger than the now-“corrected” past-tense version.
[I agree. Fixed. ~dbs, mod.]
The climate con-con can’t hide the cold and snow. It’s a fatal flaw in their plans.
James Sexton says:
December 20, 2010 at 9:37 am
And what is most bothersome, is that they never ask themselves why they are consistently wrong in this regard.
=========================================================
Repeating the same behavior, expecting a different result………..
Unfortunately, giving accurate weather predictions will not bring them the money that hysterics will…..
Yup – heads need to roll at the met office. Even now they are busily rewriting history saying that cold winters were predicted by the climate models and are further proof of global warming.
Hansen is actually on to something brilliant when he uses 12-month running means for temperature, meaning he can begin to average parts of 2 summers with only one winter.
RYAN
I strongly suspect that the blog posting is a hoax /malicious post. I can’t believe this came from a Met Office staffer. Has the Met Office issued a rebuttal?
While they might have a good reason to take percentile values (I dont know what reason), Joe public in England is going to have even less faith in Met service after this one.
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded”
Just beautiful…………!
This from Steve’s blog today:
==========================================================
Oh and in case you wondered why the Met Office has been getting it so badly wrong, here’s Bishop Hill on its chairman Robert Napier.
Interesting fact: the Chairman of the Met Office board, Robert Napier, is or has been:
* Chairman of the Green Fiscal Trust*
* Chairman of the trustees of the World Centre of Monitoring of Conservation
* a director of the Carbon Disclosure Project
* a director of the Carbon Group
* Chief executive of the World Wildlife Fund UK
Source
He is also a member of the Green Alliance.
If we are supposed to reject the views of scientists, like Richard Lindzen, on the grounds that they have given speeches at thinktanks that have accepted money from oil interests, then I think its fair to say that we can safely discount anything said by the Met Office forthwith.
Katabasis, where can the data about output from the UK wind farms be found?
As for the bit about the average already being decided by the warmest 15 days in November, it’s clearly a wind-up.
Anthony, perhaps you should flag it as such? It does no good to keep repeating a blatant fallacy; the truth is bad enough and does not need embroidering with fiction.
Lucy Skywalker says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:28 am
It was a reader comment Lucy. If I remember correctly on one of Bookers blog posts where he was bemoaning the fact that the Met had screwed up the forecast again
DaveE.
In the normal world, you receive bonuses for good work and getting it right.
In the grey world of ‘climate science’, you get bonuses and grants for getting it wrong and misleading the public – see below.
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&cd=5&sqi=2&ved=0CDIQFjAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailymail.co.uk%2Fnews%2Farticle-1254081%2FMet-Office-staff-scoop-12million-bonuses-years-forecasts-wrong.html&rct=j&q=uk%20met%20office%20chief%20bonus&ei=wKgPTaubF8fBhAecn9G3Dg&usg=AFQjCNGNTNWPKTUV46YOCnTo367p2lYFvw&cad=rja
“This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
This quote is from January of 2010. It has nothing to do with the 2010-2011 winter. Even so, it was obviously premature, and incorrect.
Britain rewards failure.
£billions of taxpayers’ money spent on a supercomputer run by puppets. A quote from an old Sci-Fi programme called Doomwatch sums it nicely: “Apply political pressure to a scientist and he will do or say anything he’s told to.”
I wonder if they are also going to use this wondrous machine to ‘prove’ that Singapore, rainforests, etc., have higher concentrations of carbon dioxide, and other places like Arizona have less carbon dioxide, thus explaining the day/night temperature profile of these and other places.
Maybe they need to steel another few £billions from us to fund research into proving that one of the most basic equations in organic chemistry – hydrocarbon + oxygen -> carbon dioxide + water – is wrong because they’ve been told to think that only CO2 is important and water vapour is irrelevant.
The Met Office is a total disgrace. It costs about £350 million a year about half of which (a not inconsiderable sum of money) goes on generating climate change propaganda.
Its chairman, Robert Napier, was presumably awarded the job as a result of his previous success in transforming the WWF into a climate change propaganda organisation.
The Met Office itself states that it uses the same climate model for predicting seasonal weather as it uses for its climate change predictions. So it is not difficult to see why there is a bias toward predicting progressively warmer weather in its forecasts, since half of their funding depends on confirming that climate change is a problem..
The Met Office themselves have a misguided belief in the validity of their models.
They state that the ability of their models to predict what the weather has done in the past confirms their ability to predict future weather.
This is a total fallacy – if a model could not even reproduce the data used to construct it, it would be a sign of total incompetence on the part of its programmers. But the fact it can successfully reproduce the data used to construct it provides no confirmation that the model is a correct representation of the physical reality and therefore useful for predictions of future weather or climate.
I find it very hard to understand how an organisation can be allowed to spend many millions on constructing computer models while openly making it clear that they have no understanding of the basic principles of model validation. Presumably anyone within the Met Office who were to say “hold on – what we are saying about the validity of our models is nonsense” would find that they had made a career limiting move.
Katabasis says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:41 am
For the last half hour the wind has provided at a rate of 66Mw which is 27% of metered wind capacity of 2.43Gw installed.
There’s also another ~2.4Gw kicking about somewhere which I can’t imagine is doing a lot better. 🙁
DaveE.
James Delingpole has something to say about the Met Office, with links to Bishophill:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100069119/panic-and-fear-close-their-icy-tentacles-round-the-doomed-met-office/
Check the green credentials of the Met Office Boss …
Typo: “steal” not “steel”. Apologies.
Katabasis says:
December 20, 2010 at 10:52 am
Also, I should point out – particularly apropos to the topic of this thread:
Thanks to people like the Mystic Met office, the highest prediction made for energy demand in the UK this winter was out by 4 GW. – 4 GW! – that kind of miscalculation could have easily resulted in thousands of deaths if the current supply wasn’t so elastic, and with the bulk of the “30%” expected to come from wind, and without most of our coal generating capacity, it won’t be in the future.
=======
Based on Anthony’s solar post, I was looking at the Predicted_Sunspot_Numbers_and_Radio_Flux forecast on SWPC and noticed they are forecasting declining activity from mid 2013 – 2020. Not that one can put a lot of stock into forecasts but they do seem to get the general trend correctly. — http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/ftpdir/weekly/Predict.txt
Maybe geo-thermal plants in Iceland vs wind?
I see a lot of comments from the US asking why we don’t vote the establishment out… we can’t! Every major party is signed up to the AGW dogma. Icebergs could be floating up the Thames and our MPs would still be voting on where to site the next windmill. Were screwed.
Damn, that was supposed to be 2.7% not 27%
DaveE.
Henry chance said @ur momisugly December 20, 2010 at 9:23 am
Must be a stuxnet bug running loose in their computer. It is cold and wet. Not hot and dry.
——————
More like the Sux2bMET virus. 😉
Sorry – we are screwed….cold fingers.
cutting their staff by 90% should limit their ability to make up data.