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:
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.