By Christopher Booker (excerpt from his Telegraph column)
First it was a national joke. Then its professional failings became a national disaster. Now, the dishonesty of its attempts to fight off a barrage of criticism has become a real national scandal. I am talking yet again of that sad organisation the UK Met Office, as it now defends its bizarre record with claims as embarrassingly absurd as any which can ever have been made by highly-paid government officials.
Let us begin with last week’s astonishing claim that, far from failing to predict the coldest November and December since records began, the Met Office had secretly warned the Cabinet Office in October that Britain was facing an early and extremely cold winter. In what looked like a concerted effort at damage limitation, this was revealed by the BBC’s environmental correspondent, Roger Harrabin, a leading evangelist for man-made climate change. But the Met Office website – as reported by the blog Autonomous Mind – still contains a chart it published in October, predicting that UK temperatures between December and February would be up to 2C warmer than average.
So if the Met Office told the Government in October the opposite of what it told the public, it seems to be admitting that its information was false and misleading. But we have no evidence of what it did tell the Government other than its own latest account. And on the model of the famous Cretan Paradox, how can we now trust that statement?
Then we have the recent claim by the Met Office’s chief scientist, Professor Julia Slingo OBE, in an interview with Nature, that if her organisation’s forecasts have shortcomings, they could be remedied by giving it another £20 million a year for better computers. As she put it, “We keep saying we need four times the computing power.”
==========================================================
I still say picketing the Met Office with this banner is the way to go:
Read the rest here:
Ooooo…. that really roasted their tushies! Quite an article.
Good to see Chris. Booker here; the only MSM journalist with a regular column which tirelessly criticises the AGW madness and the energy policies straight from Alice in Wonderland that result.
His book “The Real Global Warming Disaster” is a MUST read, particularly for anyone who doubts the political nature of the scam.
The MO doesn’t know when to quit digging, do they?
If you believe the Met Office had secretly warned the Cabinet Office, you would have to believe that the MET wanted to destroy it’s own reputation. By giving a wrong prediction, on purpose.
I don’t believe it for one minute.
There is no science in predicting the weather or climate. These guys are only playing the odds, just like gamblers.
A few warm years, and they predict a warming trend.
A few cold years, and they predict a cooling trend.
A few cold winters, and they predict warmer winters, because it’s unusual to get more than 1-2 extremely cold winter in a row.
There were a couple of cold winters, they figured the odds of it being even worse was a long shot. That’s all………
Then not being the brightest bulbs in the box, they tried to cover it up by saying they had really predicted a cold winter, but released a official prediction of the total opposite.
Truth is, this was a record breaking cold winter. So extreme, that if they could predict anything, there’s no way in hell they would have missed it.
Booker left out a big one…..
Australia had a white Christmas…..in the middle of summer
My old neighbor, farmer Joe Supchak (rest his soul), could predict the weather just sitting on his tractor and working outdoors back in the 1970’s. No $20 million dollar computer was required. The guy was uncanny. But then again, when your livelyhood depends on fickle Nature, you either become good at reading the wind, or you fail as a farmer. Rarely did his hay get wet. However, as any good warmest would recite, he was concerned about weather and not climate.
They won’t remember what was said a few months ago. Send that forecast to the memory hole!
So the UK taxpayers £37 Million wasn’t enough? Another £20 Million?
Shame on you Julia Slingo!
Even if we UK taxpayers gave you £100 Million you wouldn’t be able to give us an accurate forecast, you never will!
Slingo-“Very much confined to the UK and Western Europe”.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2011/01/09/slingo-“very-much-confined-to-the-uk-and-western-europe”/
The Met Office is no more. It has been renamed the Psychedelic Meth Office. Chill everybody, cold is the new warm.
I still believe the Met. Office is two different organizations. The short term forecasters, who are among the world’s best; and the climate modellers, who are useless. Unfortunately, the climate modellers have the ear of the senior management at the Met. Senior management put out the religious beliefs of the warmaholics.
So, when the short term forecasters came up with the news that December was going to be cold, management at the Met. paniced. They dare not release this report to the public; it would show that CAGW was not happening. So it was released secretly to the government .
Oh! what a tangled web we weave;
When first we practice to deceive. (Sir Walter Scott?)
Thank goodness for journalists like Mr Booker. Unfortunately, they are thin on the ground.
It is very good to see articles such as these in main stream newspapers. An investigation into the working practices and capabilities of the Met Office is long overdue.
Over the weekend, the Daily Mail has run a couple of stories on how useless windmills are in winter conditions where there is a blocking high causing winds to drop to near nothing
Only problem is, will the politicians read these articles and more importantly will they learn anything? I am not sure whether politicians can read (possibly explaining why political messages have to consist of short sound bites) and experience suggests that they do not learn from experience. The experience of winter 2009/10 should have been the final nail in the coffin of the rush for windpower, and yet nothing appears to have been learnt from that winter (also explaining why the UK was so ill equipped to cope with the wintery condition s of winter 2010/11).
Infinitely more computing power won’t help, because the fundamental assumptions underpinning the models are flawed. Investment needs to be rechanneled towards sensible data exploration, a prerequisite to sensible modeling. Cautionary Note: There aren’t many people who can do the required data exploration, as it does not conform to current mainstream paradigms of statistical inference.
I would like to see a graph of the accuracy of the Met Office forecasts over the years compared to the computing power available to them. I suspect that the forecast becomes less accurate as computing power increases. So why would we want to increase their available computational power yet more if the result is likely to be even greater inaccuracy of their forecasts?
It seems to me that they are “baking” certain assumptions into their models that are not reflective of the reality and the more computing power they have available, the more these assumptions are able to skew the forecast.
It would seem that weather forecasts are now suffering from the same problem as climate forecasts and that is the results from model runs is being weighted higher than are actual observational data. In order for this winter to have been warmer than average, the AO and NAO would have had to be in the opposite state as could have been observed very early on. That should have been their clue that maybe their computer runs were wrong. Mr. Bastardi was pointing out this very thing months ago. Seems to me they have too many computer scientists already and not enough meteorologists. They don’t need more computers, they need fewer of them. The more computers they get, the less accurate their long range forecasts become.
Chris. Booker is a tireless MSM journalist who has consistently written about the madness of AGW theory.
His book “The Real Global Warming Scandal” is a must read for anyone who doubts the political nature of this scam.
It just gets better and better, doesn’t it?
In three years, the MET will be able to make better forecasts at the same cost point. That is because according to Moore’s Law, CPU power doubles every 18 months – and voila, there the MET gets their 4x computing power, spending the same money 🙂 Imagine the savings if they were to close down until they have the necerssary tools to do their job.. 😉
In a word “Dogma”
Tim
Five bucks says the overpaid bureaucrats at the top of the poo heap in the Met Office won’t refuse their annual bonuses this year.
After all, incompetence and deceit has to have its rewards.
Here in the UK the Met Office is regarded with almost universal scorn. Their forecasts are not worth spending the time listening to; they do a reasonable job of telling you what is happening “right now” but anything even 12 hours ahead flummoxes them.
I know of three very professional events organisers which rely on either Corbyn or Bastardi for their weather forecasts, they discarded the Met forecasts a couple of years ago. These organisations are prepared to pay hard cash for forecasts which have a very high probability of being correct. The Met Office cannot (or will not) fulfill this requirement. The Royal Navy has provided its own weather forecasts since 1936, that’s how much the Senior Service trusts the Met!
Obviously they cannot have it both ways.
On the one hand they could have stuck with incompetent.
They seem to have opted for criminally negligent.
Why are heads not rolling ?
Richard North had a fair hand in writing that article and has been tirelessly covering the potential tragedy that is unfolding in the Sea of Okhotsk with 2 large ships still trapped in the ice.
As for the secret forecast. Why did Vicki Pap, (No, that’s not a typo), even bother going to the airport?
Also, is it my imagination or is there an unconscionably large number of female psientists in positions of authority?
Maybe they’re more malleable!
DaveE.
As pointed out by R. De Haan above, “Slingo-”Very much confined to the UK and Western Europe”. It’s not so, Slingo!
I wonder if the AGW bias of the UK MSM has prevented the coverage of this unfolding drama?
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2011/01/rescue-delayed.html
The comments alone would provide excellent fill for many column inches.
latitude says:
January 9, 2011 at 2:28 pm
well said!
Damn. I can see myself getting routed for my previous comment. It was not meant to be sexist. One of the best engineers I ever interviewed was female.
DaveE.
All the computer power in the world isn’t going to help as long as it is making its billions of calculations on the basis of incorrect assumptions…..
“We keep saying we need four times the computing power.” — Julia Slingo
All that would mean is that they could produce the same faulty forecasts four times quicker. Garbage in – garbage out…
The problem is not the computer power, but the programming. Garbage in, garbage out no matter how much computer power one has available. The problem is the models, the lack of knowledge and understanding of the climate system meaning that many factors are simply ignored or prescribed a wrong feedback, the biased input data, the false assumptions and the fact that one cannot predict a chaotic system.
If we were to spend less on modelling and more upon observation and accurate and detailed record keeping, we would have a much better understanding of what was truly going on.
Computers are nothing more than amplifiers. If you are smart and clever, they can make you very smart and clever. If you are stupid and dishonest, they can make you very stupid and dishonest. I will leave it to the reader as to which category I place the MET in.
Ah yes, the Cretan Paradox, attributed to Epimenides of Knossos, who may or may not have actually existed, and who allegedly claimed that “all Cretans are liars.”
Can we believe anything the Met office says anymore? What about when they contradict themselves? Surely one of two 180° conflicting statements must be true?
If they did in fact warn the Cabinet, and the Cabinet demurred from passing that warning on to the unwashed masses, can we really condemn the Cabinet, who can always claim that they (the Cabinet) were well aware that Met officials are pathological liars? Indeed, as are the Cabinet. They are all Cretans, metaphorically. The paradox is labyrinthian.
As Booker rightly noted, the Met Office – by telling us “we lied to you, honest Guv” – has dropped itself in a right little paradox. If indeed they did lie to us, then why should anyone trust them now? And, if they are lying now, then – erm – why should anyone trust them now?
Well better computers does mean they can be wrong quicker, but as the old saying goes
garbage in garbage out , if their basic assumption are loaded in favour of one desired outcome that is what they will get. But remember in climate science if reality fails to agree with the model , its reality which is wrong.
Jim Cripwell says:
January 9, 2011 at 2:43 pm
I still believe the Met. Office is two different organizations. The short term forecasters, who are among the world’s best;
The UK met office forcasts short or long have always been a joke,
http://s446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/?action=view¤t=Spike2.mp4
crosspatch says:
January 9, 2011 at 2:47 pm
I think you are absolutely right in that modelling has taken over the asylum. When I started sailing in the 70’s, all we had was a marine radio weather forecast from which we had to draw our own chart and synopsis, etc. You would look at a chart and say (in your head) this low pressure area is gonna move this way, and that high is gonna go over there, etc, etc and make up your own forecast, based largely on the collection of marine forecasts you had built up over the last few days AND your own obervations. I don’t know how many folk out there have actually had to do this – but the point I want to try and make is that the human brains interpretation of current observations is quite reasonable – i.e. without massive computer models, we can have a good guess at short term weather! But as the October storm of whenever (1987?) proved, in the MetOffice, observations were ignored in preference to ‘projections’! I suppose for older classically trained Met folk, its a bit like a detectives instinct, based on experience and observations, a detective tends to ‘know’ who the suspect is likely to be and so Met forecasters tend to be able to look at a chart and instinctively know what will happen. But instead of carrying on with such ‘gut’ feelings in forecasting, we now have detailed temp predictions, probability of rain at 30%, etc, etc – all of which has been calculated by computer model and, in the real analysis is no better than the weather forecaster of old who simply say ‘take your umbrella’ and a scarf!
Sad really – but even more annoying is that the 1500 or so employees of the Met office are paid for by the public to do something that really a handful were doing 30 yrs ago!
Actually, following my last comment, I’ve had another thought, which Booker missed: if we are to believe that the Met Office lied to us with a false prediction, whilst secretly giving the UK Government the genuine one, then that implies that the UK Government also lied to us by association, when it withheld the information.
So much for the first responsibility of government to protect its citizens. This is more serious than many are appreciating.
I don’t want to spoil anyone’s fun here, and I am as flabbergasted by the statements of the MET office as the next guy, but since when are we able to predict months ahead what kind of weather we are going to have? I am serious here, is that possible at all?
As far as my information goes, it is possible for maximally 5-9 days, and even then the reliability drops radically. And if my information is correct, the whole discussion is superfluous, and the MET office is as useful as a the famous groundhog from Punxsutawney, and they should simply put a sock in it. And we (including politicians) should simply not listen to them, whatever they say. Or am I missing some new developments here?
On the other hand, “winter” didn’t start until December 20. Today is January 9 and the UK is now expected to be warmer than normal for the rest of the winter. So it could turn out that winter will actually be above normal. They actually had a very cold autumn.
latitude says:
January 9, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Booker left out a big one…..
Australia had a white Christmas…..in the middle of summer
—————————————————————
Uh, not really. 99% of Australia had no snow whatsoever – it never does. There was a dusting here and there (mainly on the high peaks) around Christmas, but that is just unusual, and far from unprecedented. It happens every 8-10 years, and is quickly gone.
Not having a go at you, Latitude, but we don’t want to give ammunition to the warmies by overplaying our hand!
A faster computer only leads to the same result quicker and they already have that result and it is wrong. Why making it faster is not going to improve the prediction, unless the parameters are changed in the orignal computer. Only where else they could improve that and would need more computer power (maybe) is by including regional changes, but they even have less a clue about these demonstrated with so many contradictions and recent cool Summers/cold Winters not predicted. Don’t forget only December doesn’t make the Winter, there is still January and February to go yet. Though the second coldest December in England since 1890 does have some influence.
A bit off topic but this shows what total crap MSM, in this case the UK Telegraph are printing, total utter rubbish.
Elsewhere in the state, some 40 towns already affected by the “BIBLICAL ” floods are anxiously waiting for the waters to subside.
BIBLICAL, I don`t think so, note that the living areas appear to be built well above this biblical level flood.
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/Ausralianfloodlevels2.jpg
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/Australianfloods3.jpg
River levels have stayed stubbornly high and the latest rains also brought flooding on the Mary River, whose waters in the towns of Gympie and Maryborough were threatening to inundate scores of homes.
More than 200,000 people and more than 10,700 properties have been affected by the floods and the repair bill is estimated to reach $5 billion (£3.2bn).
X Share & bookmark
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/8248995/Australian-floods-Brisbane-threatened-by-rising-waters.html
johanna says:
January 9, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Uh, not really. 99% of Australia had no snow whatsoever – it never does. There was a dusting here and there (mainly on the high peaks) around Christmas, but that is just unusual, and far from unprecedented. It happens every 8-10 years, and is quickly gone.
Not having a go at you, Latitude, but we don’t want to give ammunition to the warmies by overplaying our hand!
==============================================
Johanna, I didn’t think that at all.
About the snow, the news here said 2 – 4 inches and some of the ski resorts opened.
That a light dusting was unusual. I don’t know what you guys call a light dusting.
2-4 inches can shut some of our cities down.
We wouldn’t call 2-4 inches a light dusting.
What makes it worse, is that deep down, you know that they are not proper English Chip Shop beef dripping fries!
No, they are effing euro, fried in sun flower, mayonnaise covered excuses for fries produced by cheese eating surrender euros, each one modelled on a wind turbine blade
About the snow, the news here said 2 – 4 inches and some of the ski resorts opened.
That a light dusting was unusual. I don’t know what you guys call a light dusting.
2-4 inches can shut some of our cities down.
We wouldn’t call 2-4 inches a light dusting.
—————————————————————
Meh, the biggest falls were around 10cm, and that was only on the high peaks (where no-one lives except for a few residents of snow resorts) and it was completely gone within a week. Skiing on 10cm of soft snow is not advisable. Oh, and the resorts never close – they do a brisk trade in mountain holidays in summer.
Just another MSM beatup, I’m afraid.
Met Office Notice to public at large:
If it cooling and it we said it would warm, then we secretly meant it would be cooling. If it is warming and we said it would be cooling, then we secretly meant it would be warming. If it is snowing and we said it would not, then we secretly meant that it would snow, but that snow is certainly a warmer kind of snow than it would be without AGW, and it freezes a bit differently than snow of the old type when the earth was colder. If all of this seems a bit confused and muddled, it is because the warming or new kind of warmer snow, is affecting our computers and if you give us a few million more in funding a year to buy warming-proof or warmer-snow-proof computers, we’ll unmuddle it for you.
____
Full disclosure: I’m a warmist (at least 75% so) but I can’t resist a bit of fun…
Johanna
I partly agree with you.
We definitely had no snow in Sydney
Or if we did, then I just slept through and it was gone.
But we have had a little rain.
Or perhaps a tad more than a little.
I thought AGW theory is that rain, rain will go away in Australia
and come back, never more.
Dang it – another mistake.
Oh well – I need a more expensive computer, that’s all.
@crosspatch says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:58 pm
“On the other hand, “winter” didn’t start until December 20. Today is January 9 and the UK is now expected to be warmer than normal for the rest of the winter. So it could turn out that winter will actually be above normal. They actually had a very cold autumn.”
Well just watch it go below normals for at least the second half of Feb and most of March.
For the pedantic.
The rainfall in Sydney has been quite trendless fro 1859 to the present.
R squared = 0.0001, whatever that means.
(I think it means that there is NO trend
Matt Briggs where are you when we need you?)
““If you look at the whole picture across north west Europe, there’s a higher chance of a cold winter than a warm one.”” – Met Office Spokesman, 28th October 2010.
source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/8090325/Met-Office-data-suggests-mild-winter-but-dont-forget-last-year.html
Kev-in-UK says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Unlike my comment which is missing a close blockquote after 30 years ago!
DaveE.
dave, UK – that is the one aspect of this whole enterprise that has floored me from the beginning. You’d think that your Government would step in and quickly deny this just to cover their own hinny but the longer they remain silent the more it looks like they are complisent in setting up their own citizens for hardship and death. I’d expect to hear more screaming about it but you Brits are so stoic.
Mike D. says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:39 pm
Ah yes, the Cretan Paradox, attributed to Epimenides of Knossos, who may or may not have actually existed, and who allegedly claimed that “all Cretans are liars.”
Can we believe anything the Met office says anymore? What about when they contradict themselves? Surely one of two 180° conflicting statements must be true?
If they did in fact warn the Cabinet, and the Cabinet demurred from passing that warning on to the unwashed masses, can we really condemn the Cabinet, who can always claim that they (the Cabinet) were well aware that Met officials are pathological liars? Indeed, as are the Cabinet. They are all Cretans, metaphorically. The paradox is labyrinthian.
THANKS Mike. A gem of a post. Reading that brought a very large grin.
latitude says:
January 9, 2011 at 2:32 pm
Booker left out a big one…..
Australia had a white Christmas…..in the middle of summer
It is best not to get too excited by summer snow in Australia. Such an event is not that uncommon (December being at the end of a ‘down under’ spring) and is mostly limited to moderately high (for Australia) altitudes with scant ground cover and perhaps just a day or two of around freezing temperatures. There was a saying in my family that it can always snow (in Australia) up until Christmas.
Meteorological winter (coinciding with the actual cold season) starts on Dec. 1.
“We keep saying we need four times the computing power.”
Always have, and always will.
Warmists really do not care about the truth. It is about money and control of the truth. These buzzards could care less about their incredibly poor record. They have Cameron believing the nonsense. Obama, one of the dimmest men ever to occupy the White House believes it. Other nations, knowing it is idiotic, want to use it to their own ends. None of which will be good for actual human beings, as opposed to the knighted misinformers.
Sell the Met Office computers and subscribe them to the Farmer’s Almanac. When the last of the computer modelers get sufficiently discouraged to resign and move on to sinecures at the United Nations agencies, recruit some genuine scientists to serve as responsible and trustworthy climatologists. By then they’ll be needing all new computers anyway [just joking…I think?].
QUESTION: How many Met Office climatologists does it take to screwup a climate prediction?
ANSWER: I don’t know, because the Met Office is still denying the FOIA request for that climate data.
“David, UK says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:55 pm
So much for the first responsibility of government to protect its citizens. This is more serious than many are appreciating.”
Actually, their prime responsibility, these days, is to keep us away from them. Notice how you cannot get anywhere near 10 Downing St anymore? 24hr police security everywhere. Ok, it is argued these security measures are required in the new age of terror. Well I say pooey to that! The age of terror is just an excuse.
Guy Fawkes had the right idea.
Slingo comes off like the Janet Napolitano of UK bureaucracy. Clueless, adept at changing the subject, uninformed about the workings of her own agency, and a national embarassment.
When McIntyre wrote her about her statement to the Parliamentary Inquiry of Jones that Mann’s methodology had been “thoroughly addressed in the peer-rev’d literature” and asked for citations to same, she replied:
= = = =
Dear Dr. McIntyre,
Thank you for contacting me regarding the Parliamentary Committee enquiry. The enquiry focused on the instrumental record and the robustness of the warming signal in the 20th century. As far as I’m concerned, the instrumental record is robust, as is shown on the Met Office website where the release of data and code is documented. I’m also aware that the IPCC AR4 WG1 Report had a special section devoted to the controversy around the Mann results. Of course the proxy reconstructions have greater uncertainty than the instrumental record particularly as one goes back in time. We accept that and as the AR4 discussed do our best to quantify it.
= = = =
blah, blah, blah.
So, how ROBUST is that old “warming signal” now?
And the “special section of AR4” that addressed the “Mann controversy”? Oh, yeah, that would be the manufactured acceptance of Wahl and Ammann – long after the IPCC deadlines.
This is “Through the Looking Glass” — “When I use a word”, Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less!”
As [Professor Julia Slingo OBE] put it, “We keep saying we need four times the computing power.”
Wii, Julia.
The Met Office would appear to be caught between a rock and a cold place.
btw.. how many cold blasts for the US Southeast does the latest Polar Express bearing down now make for the year?
I’d say, give Piers Corbyn the 20million, then he can retire and spend all of his time on a laptop giving us 80% accuracy on forecasts.
Oh, and then…..retire the Met Office…..sound like a plan?
Okay, I have to rethink that one….
Hmmmmmmmm…..single point failure vs multi-point failure?
Piers Corbyn vs Met Office……Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm?
Okay, okay……possible single point failure vs a known multi-point failure?
“Then we have the recent claim by the Met Office’s chief scientist, Professor Julia Slingo OBE, in an interview with Nature, that if her organisation’s forecasts have shortcomings, they could be remedied by giving it another £20 million a year for better computers. As she put it, “We keep saying we need four times the computing power.” ”
Standard bureaucratic song. ” if we have failed at our job, give us more money, more people and power and we will increase our efforts.
Loved this wry comment on the Autonomous Mind article that showed the MET office warm predictions: “What they ought to have done when that forecast became widely reported was simply say ‘We’re barely into winter. Come back in March’.
Met Office – Met Office’s chief scientist, Professor Julia Slingo OBE
“We keep saying we need four times the computing power.”
—————–
Piers apparently manages with a laptop. :o)
Why give the Met Office faster computing power so that they can make crap forecasts even faster?
UPDATE:
From the Christopher Booker article I read:
Here is the update on a possible unfolding tragedy:
WUWT: I suggest you keep an eye on this one.
“Jimbo says:
January 9, 2011 at 10:34 pm”
Maybe she watched an episode of Hitchers?
crosspatch says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:58 pm
On the other hand, “winter” didn’t start until December 20. Today is January 9 and the UK is now expected to be warmer than normal for the rest of the winter. So it could turn out that winter will actually be above normal. They actually had a very cold autumn.
You don’t actually fall into the group that believes that man controls the seasons do you?
Winter starts when nature decides, not on a specific date. When winters become longer than summers then the globe cools, autumn and spring are the change over periods between warmth and cold and vice versa.
If as expected that this northern hemisphere severe winter lasts to late March then there will be more of a cooling effect on annual temperature averages, if there is such a thing.
….’they could be remedied by giving it another £20 million a year for better computers.’
Sounds more like,”If you give us £20 million more, we will continue to deceive the public.”
Many posters above don’t seem to understand the Met Office requirement for more computing power. I believe it is because they do ‘ensemble projections’. They make a projection, alter the start conditions slightly and make another projection and so on. Each projection is worthless individually but magically, the more of them you average them the better your projections become (or so the Met Office seems to think).
Obviously, four times the computing power will make your magic projections twice as accurate 🙂
[But I was told 4x the computing power makes one’s prediction 16x as precise. 8<) Robt]
So, were they lying then or are they lying now? For certainly liars they are. I have e kitchen implement which has fewer holes than the Met’s credibility. I say, remove the roof then they can check their forecasts and predictions in real time.
I reckon we ought to save the UK taxpayer £20m and buy Julia Slingo one of those Weather Stones which you hang on your fence. You know how it works..
Stone wet – rain.
Stone dry – sun.
Stone swinging about – windy.
Stone covered in white stuff – snow.
Can’t see stone – foggy.
Works for me….
I volunteer to take professor Bingo (is that her name) out drinking so that I can show her that if only the bartender would give me four times the beer I would get four times as drunk.
For those who think the Met. office can do short term forecasting, spend some time on a small boat trying to make plans on the basis of their inshore forecast – the 24 hour bears some resemblance to reality, the 48 hour rarely does. But in recent years they have introduced a new tactic, that of the useless “forecast”. Frequently this summer they have said something like “Wind force 4 to 7” which tells you nothing. Even better, they apparently record a forecast as “accurate” if the actual conditions were within one Beaufort force of their forecast. So in this instance the forecast is accurate if the wind is anywhere from force 3 to force 8! Not a lot of use as a forecast.
David A. Evans says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:22 pm
Also, is it my imagination or is there an unconscionably large number of female psientists in positions of authority?
Maybe they’re more malleable!
Their (non-prediction) “forecast” of the climate-not-weather was so incorrect that the opposite was true.
So, she said they sent to true weather prediction to the government secretly, and she asked for another cool 20 million more pounds. That’s not malleable, that’s a lot of pluck.
First, with a woman like that, you might want to get ahold of the credit card statements over at the MET. Next, since my cousins across the pond are so brilliant and not as scientifically maleable, you’ll stop letting her weigh your trash, and go quietly build a coal plant (first one in 30 years in GB) right where her building now stands. With all that masculine resolve.
There you go, Partner. Zeke
What I think they do at the Met Office is look for previous years with similar patterns up to the present moment, and then assume the rest of the season is going to play out like the previous incidence of the same pattern. But past performance is not a predictor of future performance, as any old banker could tell you.
If they told the goverment the true version then told the public a fake version, what would that achieve? There’s a hundred thousand farmers, fishermen and county council road gritting managers who could sue them under the Trades Descriptions Act.
I’ve had more accurate tarot readings.
I agree that Booker’s book is a great read. For understanding the scandal of climate change politics and economics. How much more costly and painful the reductions would be than the warmists want to admit. Booker’s expertise and research on this question is top notch. There are books that explain the science better and more broadly, not that Booker does a bad job.