From the organization that can’t forecast its way out of a paper bag, and then can’t bring itself to tell the public about long range forecasts anymore, it has come to this. OK, I’m not against citizen science, but when you start asking the “Chemtrail” watchers to do “science” to help check your models, there’s no hope for you. They apparently have no idea what they are getting themselves into asking for contrail watching. If they thought they were going to catch flak for long range forecast issues, just wait until the Chemtrail people start in on them.
Check out these statements:
Researchers are also urging schoolchildren to blow bubbles to measure wind speed and direction near the ground, to reveal how the built environment affects the wind, as well as watching cloud movement to record wind direction in the sky.
The Open Air Laboratories (Opal) survey also involves the public recording how hot or cold they feel as part of efforts to see how people might cope with temperature changes.
…
Scientists are also keen to discover what confuses people about climate change so that they can widen public understanding of the topic.
Dr Geoff Jenkins of the Met Office said: “We’re asking people to get outside observing and measuring the weather.
“What they see and record will be useful for checking the systems we use for forecasting weather and predicting climate.”
How hot or cold they feel? Sure that will reduce the “uncertainty” The only thing missing is tea leaves or tarot card readers.
Barking mad they are. Either that or this is simply a propaganda tool to engage children in the idea that they can do something supposedly useful to “change the climate”.
Full story here
Details on the project here: http://www.opalexplorenature.org/climatesurvey
The contrail submission page is here It’s a hoot.
What a superb story – you couldn’t make it up. I usually check the Telegraph of a morning, but was running late today and missed this one. I must stay in more …
Thanks to a pair of UEA researchers the citizens of Norwich will soon have extra contrails visible over the city centre:
http://www.edp24.co.uk/what-s-on/model_planes_to_fly_above_norwich_during_festival_1_816167
I here by nominate weather stone David for the noble climate peace price in observable physics for which automagical properties makes Met Office completely superfluous and who’s removal would save the poor tax payer of the down sized British empire quiet the sum, which would be very beneficial to the rest of the union de fortress Europa and therefor the rest of the populated world since EU would require less import tax.
Some might think this to be all BS, so I kindly remind them holes in the big A that the government of fortress Europa has already decided upon even how many trees one can legally have growing on ones own property of legally designated grazing fields (and this is per field basis and not per field size.) So more ‘an what can be constituted as 60 trees, it’s a god damn forest (so, OMG don’t break the law, apply instead for forrest subsidies.)
I wrote to my MP in February to complain that the Met Office failed to predict the bad winter just passed, and could he comment on the fact that the Cabinet Office seemed to know about it, according to Harabin at the BBC, while the public didn’t.
He wrote back with input from MP Robathan from the MoD, who claimed that the Met Office had warned the Cabinet Office that there was a 40% chance of a cold winter in 2010/11 (So there!). He did not have a good reason why this had not been publicised outside of the Cabinet Office, other than that, apparently, surveys showed (the MO) that the public did not want long range forecasts more than a few weeks in the future!
As I pointed out to my MP, a 40% chance of a cold winter was the same as saying there was a 60% chance of NOT a cold winter. I guess I shall not get a response to that.
I can just see the next story a year from now:
“Kindegarden children report a +3.23 m/s wind increase from warming”
LMAO…these jokes never end!
Ulric Lyons says:
March 4, 2011 at 9:46 am
Do you have a question about climate change?
Perhaps there’e something you don’t understand, or would like to know more about. Who better to ask than the climate experts at the Met Office ?
————————————–
I found this one interesting:
“Q: Isn’t the recent warming due to the growth of our towns and cities?
A: No. The climate is warming everywhere because of carbon dioxide emissions. Temperatures in cities are unnaturally high because of the warmth from heating homes, heavy traffic, high concentrations of people and heat stored in buildings and concrete.
Our observations come from urban and rural arrears on land and from the sea, which covers 70% of the Earth.
We manage data from cities carefully to ensure they do not skew our understanding of climate change.”
So… just as we suspected. They *manage* (ie. “adjust”) data from cities, not to ensure that it does not skew the proper temperature record, but to ensure that “they do not skew *our understanding* of climate change.”
This type of wording does not happen by accident. It goes through several levels of approval with bureaucrats revising it at every level to make sure that cover their backsides.
This was just the laugh I needed before calling it a day and going home for the weekend.
This is an obvious attempt, as stated above, to indoctrinate the children. There can’t be any valid scientific reason for this; it is 100% public relations nonsense.
This reminds me of the day last year when my daughter came home with PETA brochuers. I asked why and she explained that her teacher had taken the day off so that she could go protest the Ringling Bros. Circus and one of the PETA people had volunteered to be a substitute teacher for the day. These whackos will do anything they can to get their fingers on our children. It helps if you think of them like you would a sex offender, and take the same precautions to keep your kids safe. 🙂
The Open Air Laboratories (Opal) survey also involves the public recording how hot or cold they feel as part of efforts to see how people might cope with temperature changes.
Oh My God. Just loony toons…
I once had two employees, with a third seated between them.
Roughly every day, the woman would complain that it was too cold, the man that it was a bit warm, and the guy in the middle said he didn’t notice anything.
After a few months of calling facilities and / or adjusting warm (guy complains) colder (woman complains) I went to the local hardware store and bought a “recording thermometer” (that, sadly, I’ve not seen in the garden departments in a while).
It was LIG and had little colored bits that moved to the extreme of temp on both the hot and cold columns.
Hung it on the middle cube.
Every day I’d look a it. 72 F +/- 1 F.
Every day the first few weeks, the man and woman would ‘sneak a peak’… then return to their cubes.
Complaints ceased….
The first recorded instance of the boiling frog metaphor morphing into its dialectical opposite. Say hello to the freezing frog metaphor.
biddyb says:
March 4, 2011 at 10:34 am
You’re being thick. They don’t care.
All they are interested in is getting you to read the propaganda that accompanies the ‘games’. Your data will be plotted on the maps and thereafter never be referred to again (by the Met Office).
It will end up in the big bit bucket in the sky.
I’ve just been out side walking with my dog, it’s freezing!, I felt very cold, could someone pass this very important information on to the met office.
As for the contrails don’t they hang around longer when it’s colder up there in the atmosphere.
And “Chemtrail” is this the same as cloud seeding and geo-engineering?
And Conspiracy? sometimes you just have to call a spade a spade!
Ooo! look at the pretty Bubbles!
So now instead of “garbage-in-garbage-out” we have “bubbles-in-hogwash-out”. I believe we’re making progress in the conversion process here. No telling what horror story a bubble-fed computer model that constitutes the largest single source of electric power consumption in all of London might generate. Possibly the oceans will explode into a cloud of CO2 filled bubbles that will salt down all the arable lands, rendering the planet a barren waste-land and leaving only sea gulls on a salt-shrimp diet and a bubble-fed supercomputer left to inhabit the earth.
I’m embarrassed to be british. (small ‘b’)
The most idiotic of scientists could devise a simple method for counting & measuring contrails. Just point a camera at the sky, take a piccie every minute or so, and get a computer to count.
As has been pointed out, how can you differentiate reports, especially when the timing will be off by several minutes.
It is pure propaganda.
I nominate this blog post as the best headline of 2011!
Uri Gellar, the famous “psychic” of the ’70s, used to do a variation of this. On his TV appearances he would bend a spoon “with his mind,” and then tell the people watching at home to check their cuttlery drawers and notice how many spoons were now bent out of alignment. Even though the shows were pre-recorded, hundreds of people would watch the episode, check out their cuttlery, and write back in amazement at how many of their spoons were now bent.
Come to think of it, where is Uri these days? He isn’t consulting for… . No. Surely not.
I am going to have to be much more observant in the future. I am 67 years old and have been watching contrails since jets became common, but I cannot remember ever seeing a contrail that became as dense as close to the plane as in the picture at the beginning of this post.
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air,
They fly so high,
Nearly reach the sky,
Then like my dreams
They fade and die.
Global warming`s always hiding,
I’ve looked everywhere,
I’m forever blowing bubbles,
Pretty bubbles in the air.
When shadows creep,
When I’m asleep,
To lands of hope I stray!
What better way to get people educrated about climate than having them do pointless busy work and fooling them into thinking they are making some sort of objective measurements? Then they will feel included in the scientific process and become personally and emotionally invested in the main-scheme skyence para-diggum.
Can I write off my bubble soap and the laser range finder that we will all use to determine the distances these things are so as to calculate speed? There has to be a tax deduction for that.
Seriously. This makes blood-filled, exploding skeptic commercials seem sane. This is a cry for help.
The only reason for using bubbles is that the children are too young to be allowed to throw darts, the usual method for weather and/or climate prediction by the Met Office.
Must say I missed this in the Telegraph.
I do like blowing bubbles and watching them fly about, some drop quite quickly and some float up high there doesn’t always seem to be any reason as to which do what so I had better get me a grant and a research team together. (might be useful in the current financial “climate”)
James Bull.
Since people exhale CO2 and the kids are using their exhaled breath to blow bubbles, aren’t the Met Office encouraging kids to pollute the air with greenhouse gas?
Oh noes!
This is pure indoctrination to convert people to the religion of CAGW. The “experiments” aren’t in the least scientific and the organizers of the site wouldn’t recognize scientific rigor if they tripped over it. Everywhere is the implicit message that humans are causing climate change and human activities are bad. There’s the usual inane “studies” demonstrating flame retardant contamination of pond mud without a single mention of the concentration of the chemicals (with our ability to detect chemicals at concentrations of parts per billion or trillion who should be surprised at this finding).
The reason for sponsoring activities like these is to make people more ready to go along with far more repressive government “climate change” policies in the future. One book which should be a must read for everyone is Cialdini’s Influence which is a catalog of subtle ways in which people can be influenced in a particular direction. The one study that Cialdini described that has a bearing on this British project was to have psychology students go door to door and ask people to sign a petition on some obscure topic. Then, the psychology students went door to door again and asked people if they would put up a large sign on their lawn in favor of the subject of the petition they’d signed. Such individuals were far more likely to agree to putting up the sign than a group of people who had never been exposed to the petition. Perhaps WUWT should sponsor a surface stations project for elementary school children to go and photograph local weather stations and describe all of the factors that can make the station record temperatures higher than they actually are. Also, pupils could be asked to grow plants in jars with differing initial concentrations of CO2 to see if CO2 is toxic to plant life or not.
About a month ago I called Governor Rick Scott’s office on a heavy day of chemtrailing they were doing in SW Florida. I didn’t call it chemtrails over the phone rather I called it geo-engineering, weather modification, and radar enhancement the air force was doing as there are not nearly that many commercial plane in our skies that can do all that spraying. I told his office we sell sunshine in our state and the tourists don’t want the sun blocked out making our skies disgusting with all that pollution of barium aluminum mixture.
Two days later the chemtrails stopped and have not come back to SW Florida since. I bet the Governor made some inquires about the air force activities. I’ll find out tomorrow when my brother talks to him. USA Today had an article on the 27th about geo-engineering and now this Telegraph article, are telling. I think the jig is up and you will be hearing a lot more about this stuff soon.
And we British taxpayers have to pay about £200 million for this drivel! They should be privatised and have to compete in the open market…………At least it would knock a little chunk of our national debt!!!!