Willis Eschenbach notes that the COP predictions from the Met Office, which I highlighted here, are all over the road.
He writes:
In the most recent one, they didn’t make a prediction, but they included the historical record, so let me start with that:
I’ve put rulers on it so we can read the happenings. This is WRT the year 1900, and since then we’ve warmed by about three quarters of a degree (0.75°C) …
Now, here’s the predictions:
COP4—2.3°C for land, 1.8°C for global.
COP5—1.8°C
COP6—about 1°C
COP7—0.8°C
COP8—Somehow, we’re now back to 1.8°C … hmmm …
COP9—New baseline, very short prediction. However, despite that, they still manage to overestimate the warming …
COP10 … no prediction …
COP11—They are claiming 0.8°C warming since 1975 … the reality is about half a degree … they can’t even get the historical numbers right.
COP12—No prediction …
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I think it’s time we take their crayons away from them.
Time to send the cops after them? It is amazing that the best of the climate science is so bumbingly bad at any sort of prediction, maybe they should consult a psychic? Likely would get better results.
The UK is currently suffering “the worst drought since 1976”, according to official reports, (only in the east and south of the country), although there is hope, the Met Office have forecast a dry summer.
Xlnt Willis. The temp traveling wave which always promises a breakout, but never delivers!
Miss Cleo Predicts it all…
The met office are nothing but a bunch of propagandists on global warming. Unfortunately, during the era of “it’s only a lie if you get caught” government which made lying acceptable, the Met Office were taken over by a bunch of eco-nutters and accountants.
The former good science they used to do was sidelined to make way for the new commercialism of selling scaremongering. (AND THEY STOPPED PRODUCING FORECASTS WITH ANY INFORMATION THAT ANYONE COULD USE TO SHOW THEY WERE WRONG … I.E. WITH NO REAL INFORMATION).
They have consistently got their global temperature “forecasts” (propaganda more like) wrong, and yet they continue to make absurd forecasts even claiming that they are amazingly accurate only being 0.06C/year wrong (the same or same period PR admitted that they had predicted average warming per a year of 0.05C/year).
You really couldn’t make it up. One of the worlds premia weather forecasters have been turned into a propaganda machine …. and they don’t even do forecasts any longer. E.g. if you look at our local forecast it will be “white shading on brown” … white stands for: rain, snow, cloud, fog. Lighter shading stands for sunshine (easily mistaken for white on brown). In other words, when you look at one of their forecasts you don’t know if it is going to rain, snow, be foggy, cloudy, or sunny.
Which is about par for their global temperature forecasts and shows their complete lack of scientific credibility.
And the nail in the coffin, is that they have this bee in their bonnet that “cosmic rays cannot possibly affect the weather … because we are the experts on clouds”.
In other words, the little science they still have left is based on mystical beliefs and lack of research into cloud formation and they singularly deny the clear correlation between solar activity and climate.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadcrut3.html
Still hiding the decline: declining temperatures hidden by a side ad.
Hasn’t anyone ever noticed that, in the very first figure above, the temperature only dropped between 1940 and 1950 after which it started climbing again. If that was the reality then why was there so much talk in the 1970’s about us going into the next ice age. To me that is a sure sign that the temperatures in that first graph have been manipulated. And I remember, some time ago, actually seeing a temperature graph, published in the 70’s, depicting steadily dropping temperatures up to the 70’s. But I seem to have lost the reference.
Is there a statistically sound relationship between the increase in available computer power and the randomness/consistancy/chronology of the errors?
To give an explicit example of how the Met Office will never admit they were wrong. The winter before last, we had some work done on the House and I needed to fix the roof before winter. So I planned a day and watched and listened to the forecasts before it got dark (i.e. when I could get the work ready for the next day). There was absolutely no mention of snow.
The next day I work up to snow and everyone was so ill-prepared that the M8 (the major motorway from Edinburgh to Glasgow which goes over no more than a small hill) was blocked and people had to sit in their cars for up to 8hours. This made every in the area extrememly angry. There were parents with kids who were totally unprepared having to wait without even being allowed to go to the toilet!
Now, everyone knew the Met Office had failed to forecast the snow, but up comes a Met Office spokesperson who said: “yes we did forecast the snow”. Apparently (it may have been a Sunday) they forecast it late at night …. in other words when the snow started falling in the NW they realised that it was going to keep on falling and so “forecast it”.
In other words, “forecast” in the Met Office now means “something we already see happening”.
As far as I can see we could replace the whole Met Office with someone sitting on St.Kilda ringing in if it is snowing there – or better still we could take all the eco-nutters, accountants, and propagandists from the Met Office and stick them on St. Kilda (an uninhabited island) … and make them stay there until they can get a forecast right! (… I’m really being kind, there’s only one kind of weather …. horizontal rain and/or sea spray! … but it will still take them years to work that out)
Thanks Willis.
I find the way they scale the x-axis to be odd, especially in COP11; 15 years between major ticks? It’s as if they don’t actually want you comparing one to the other.
“This is WRT the year 1900, and since then we’ve warmed by about three quarters of a degree (0.75°C) …” And this is the figure that must be given to the public, time and time again. I am sure the majority of voters, who hear the Hansens of this world, think warming has been many times this figure.
my mum told me If I did not stop playing with myself I would go blind ,the met office gooses did not take there mums advice
Good idea the rulers to make it all more readable.
As shown in this detailed examination at Judith’s site: http://judithcurry.com/2012/03/15/on-the-adjustments-to-the-hadsst3-data-set-2/ removal of the majority of the variation from the pre-war SST data leads to the false impression that the later rise is an event in itself.
Having made speculative “adjustments” that remove over half the variation their still can’t get their models to match the remaining variation. A subject Bob Tis’ has looked at several times.
As John Kennedy of UK Met Office points out in that thread, the models are “tuned” to reproduce 1960-1990 climatology. This is then spuriously taken to be representative of earlier and later climate.
In tuning to such a short period they actually guarantee they will not catch any longer scale variation. Their failure to predict the lack of warming since 2000 is actually designed into their method.
I suggest they employ Colo. Go with a proven winner, I say.
http://www.ohio.com/news/break-news/ohio-zoo-gorilla-makes-mega-millions-prediction-1.287618
Looks like a job well done to me. Thanks.
A veritable melange of variation that will provide fine fodder for future social policy commentators. But by then we will have had the second Reformation, one that ensures an incontestable (blinded) division between science and policy makers (funding), much as the first Reformation saw the division between Church and State a desirable development.
@dennisambler says:
“The UK is currently suffering “the worst drought since 1976″, according to official reports, (only in the east and south of the country), although there is hope, the Met Office have forecast a dry summer…”
This is, of course, nothing to do with the fact that the last large reservoir built in the UK was in 1975. Since then, the population, particularly in the South East, has soared. But no major new storage infrastructure has been built since the Water Companies were privatised, and had to pay for their own investment…
Global Warming is such a useful excuse….
P.van der Meer asks about so much talk in the 1970s about global cooling. Well, there wasn’t much talk among scientists about this. Even then the consensus was warming….which has happened (how about that for a prediction!). There was a lot written then by journalists about cooling though. Stoat had a paper in BAMS about this I recall.
If, instead of models, we used a room full of monkeys…….?
dennisambler says:
April 16, 2012 at 12:30 am
The UK is currently suffering “the worst drought since 1976″, according to official reports, (only in the east and south of the country), although there is hope, the Met Office have forecast a dry summer.
A dry summer? Yes please, for the last three years I have been trying to spray the weeds on my drive & paths in the garden, I can only do it when it is still & dry, i.e. no rain for 24-48 hours. I get the occasional free evenings & weekends. I have only managed it successfully the once because of stiff breezes & rain!
What the Met Office frequently do is “Nowcasting”, as Piers Corbyn calls. They were doing this in the Summer back when we had floods, & in the winter snows, they actually forecast very little. The winter they got called out their winter forecast was 30% chance of milder than usual, 30% chance of as mild as usual, & 40% chance of being colder than usual. For ma as an engineer, they’re the same figures as they are statistical contructs. Their problem is very simple, when you have such dogma that everything you do & say must be linked in with Global Warming, you start a vicious spiral, when it is cold it is weather, when it is warm, it is Climate Change, simple!
Juraj V. says:
April 16, 2012 at 1:10 am
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climatechange/science/monitoring/hadcrut3.html
Still hiding the decline: declining temperatures hidden by a side ad.
—————————————————————–
Right click on graphs and left click “see image” and you will get the full graphs on a new page (firefox). Interesting that the whole cooling of 10 plus years in the anomaly graph is hidden on the main page. 🙂
pwl says:
April 16, 2012 at 12:08 am
Time to send the cops after them? It is amazing that the best of the climate science is so bumbingly bad at any sort of prediction, maybe they should consult a psychic? Likely would get better results.
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How about hitting them with an astrologer? One who did some solar research…
See:
http://bourabai.narod.ru/landscheidt/new-e.htm
and:
http://landscheidt.wordpress.com/
P. van der Meer says:
April 16, 2012 at 1:16 am
“Hasn’t anyone ever noticed that, in the very first figure above, the temperature only dropped between 1940 and 1950 after which it started climbing again. ”
Yep, in direct contrast with Hubert Lamb
“It soon became clear, however, that carbon dioxide was not the whole story. Despite increasing production of this gas, with more and more industrialization and the ever increasing burning of oil and other fuels, the temperature trend reversed.
Thus, quite recent climatic trends have forced us to recognize that climatic changes and fluctuations are forever going on, even in our own times, and that we have to reckon
with changes brought about both by natural causes and the actions of Man.
The decline of prevailing temperatures since about 1945 appears to be the longest-continued downward trend since temperature records began.”
Time to link to the late John Daly again
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stations.htm
The UK has on average a drought every 5 – 10 years, the problem with the UK agencies definition of what constitutes a drought is much lower than the standards of countries such as the USA or Australia, clearly when the general public reads / hears news reports, reports that advise the country is experiencing a drought they are not going to understand that a drought under the UK Environmental agencies definition would not even be newsworthy in the vast majority of countries across the globe.
A good indication of how severe a drought actually is, is to look at the insurance claims from business or buildings due to soil problems or subsidence, remarkably the latest figures for the UK do not support the claims of the Environmental agencies that the UK is suffering a drought.
The UK has experienced less than average rainfall in parts of the Island, however the main problems are to do with the inadequate infrastructure to supply drinking water to the South East of the UK, this combined with the huge increase in the population which currently increases by 450,000 people a year (the equivalent of adding a city the size of Bristol each year) and which mostly moves to the South East of the UK is clearly going to put huge strains on water resources.