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.”
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I still say picketing the Met Office with this banner is the way to go:
Read the rest here:
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.”
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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.