I’ve been given a link in email today to a public forecast page for July by weather prognosticator Piers Corbyn, which you can investigate in full yourself here. I find his web pages and forecasts hard to read, and even harder to accept any more, because in my opinion, he presents them like a carnival barker with overuse of exclamation points, bright colors, over bolded texts, random font changes, and fantastic claims. It tends to set off my BS meter like some tabloid newspapers do. Here’s his USA forecast for July:
[UPDATE: 7/8/12 – The full USA forecast has been made available by Mr. Corbyn and is available here for your inspection: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/usa-1207-july-inc-public-summary-news-page-full-fc-key-usa-maps-and-extremes-slat8a-prod-29jun.pdf ]
Some people say however, that despite all that unnecessary gaudiness, he makes accurate predictions. Because he’s made a public forecast and advertised its availability, urging “people to pass the links on”, here’s a chance to find out if he demonstrates the skill that is claimed.
He made this bold claim yesterday:
“Terrible weather is coming the world over this July so WeatherAction has issued free summary long range forecasts for USA and for Europe…”
He sounds like Joe Romm or Bill McKibben talking about “climate disruption”. Of course, it could just be another July in the northern hemisphere. Here’s the rest:
The USA pdf link is issued today on July 4th to go with the Europe link issued the day before. We urge people to pass the links on.
“We also expect very serious near simultaneous solar-activity driven deluges and stormy conditions around the world during our top Red Warning R5 and R4 periods. Any communication of the forecasts must acknowledge WeatherAction”
– Piers Corbyn, astrophysicist WeatherAction long range weather and climate forecasters
WeatherAction Free Summary Forecast for July USA:-
“Could it get worse? Yes!” – Extreme thunderstorms, giant hail and ‘out-of control’ forest fires’
pdf link = http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews12No32.pdf
(or no links twitpic = http://twitpic.com/a3y28b/full )
WeatherAction PUBLIC warning Europe July 2012 “Off-the-scale” Flood & Fire extremes likely (WA12No31)
pdf link = http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews12No31.pdf
(or no links twitpic = http://twitpic.com/a3p7pm/full )
The USA forecast map he provides is a bit hard to read, since it seems he scanned it in from print…note the dot patterns in the graphics. I present it here from his PDF page.
Here’s his forecast page for Europe:
He lists “off scale” weather in NW Europe is one of the claims. I wonder how one should define “off scale” weather.
As Carl Sagan once said:
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
So now that Mr. Corbyn has put forth some extraordinary claims, we can catalog here the evidence to support those claims, and revisit the results at the end of the month. I urge readers to continue to post both pro and con evidence here as the month progresses. I’ll put a link to this thread in the WUWT sidebar so readers can add information that might be relevant.
Since Corbyn is a fellow climate skeptic, let’s give him a fair but factual evaluation to find out if these claims hold up, of if he’s simply following the path of some prognosticators of the past, such as Jeane Dixon, who made claims so broad that even a small kernel of happenstance occurrences after the fact were used to justify confirmation of the prediction. According to the Wikipedia page on Dixon:
John Allen Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University, coined the term “the Jeane Dixon effect,” which refers to a tendency to promote a few correct predictions while ignoring a larger number of incorrect predictions.
I don’t know that is what is going on here with Corbyn or not, but since he’s put out an open 
forecast, let’s find out. Inquiring minds want to know.
UPDATE: here’s a video of Corbyn explaining his methods:
Piers has a certain style. But, i think you should judge him by his major competition, that is the Met Office. here is the link, http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/ The met office has come a cropper in recent years with their barbeque summers, which weren`t. On the subject of this May, Pier said it would be cold etc etc, and it was, i know, i live here. The dear old Met Office hedged it bets and said by and large it would be touch warmer than average. Asi t turned out i was bloody cold by may standards for three weeks, then we all got fried. Over all it was `average`, but it was actually nothing like average it was a tale of two extreme. On balance Pier was right.
Willis wrote:
“Carrie, you seem to be the only one that’s excited here.”
There are 174 posts on this thread so far. It would appear that Carrie is not the “only one that’s excited here”. If Anthony is going to do a follow-up on Piers Corbyn’s accuracy, I presume that means he will be using Corbyn’s more detailed product and not just his teaser page. Is that true?
Piers Corbyn was much more accurate than the MET office in the UK this year. In March this year there was concern regarding drought because of two successive dry winters. The MET office predicted dry April May and June with April the driest of the three. As a result, a number of water companies in the UK issued hosepipe bans on the 6th of April – by which time it had already started raining heavily. This led to the hilarious photo which WUWT blogged of an advert on a London bus about drought, while all the people waiting for the bus were soaked, in the middle of a downpour, holdng umbrellas. In contrast Piers predicted floods in April, a colder than average May and floods in June. The only bit he got wrong was that the last week of May was unusually warm, and so the statistics for the whole month looked very normal. I dont subscribe to his forecasts but from his webpage you could see that in May he predicted floods on the 6th and 7th June. He was out by one day – the flooding began on the 8th. I would say, give the guy a break. He is very interesting. He makes his predictions using a laptop, while the MET, who he outforecasts, are seeking ever more money for bigger computer systems.
daveburton says:
July 6, 2012 at 3:18 am
If Piers had said “If you calculate the actual energy released by the earthquake, and ignore the number of earthquakes, the energy released will go up” he would have been right.
But he didn’t say that. Instead, he made a very vague Nostradamus prognostication, one which you yourself have already used three different methods to calculate. Now you’ve finally found one that agrees with him … sorry, Dave, but that’s special pleading. When Piers makes a falsifiable prediction, then we’ll be able to determine if he was right or not.
But as it stands, it’s just like his other predictions of things like “searing heat” and “waves of thunderstorms” and “frequent low pressure”, none of which are anywhere near specific enough to be falsified.
w.
PS—You guys seem to be of the impression that I think Piers is a charlatan or a fraud or something. Nothing could be further from the truth. I think it’s great that he beats the UK Met Office (although that’s a pretty low hurdle). I think, as another poster said, that the world of climate forecasting would be much poorer without him.
I just wish that he would a) be much more specific in his forecasts, and b) publish them with full details after the fact so that we could see how well he is actually doing, rather than just speculating. I say this last because his habit of trumpeting his successes and ignoring his failures, quite frankly, makes my urban legend detector start to ring … if I were as successful as he claims, I’d be retrospectively publishing every one of my forecasts, good and bad, in full detail so that I could rest on my laurels. He doesn’t do so … which as I said, makes my detector start to ring.
Long term data from the Met shows that the wettest summers were back in the 18th and 19thC. After a trend to drier summers in the 20thC up to about 1970, the trend since has been to wetter ones since.
DEFRA however project drier summers ( and wetter winters, which incidentally have been getting drier in the last few years). Either their models are wrong or we are getting colder.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/07/06/english-summer-rainfall-trends/
I see Piers hasn’t turned up to defend himself…
I don’t know what to say about Piers, I like the connection with the magnetic fields of the Sun and Earth. He should expose his ideas more openly for the debate, show his formulas and graphs, not only the forecasts themselves.
I have to agree with Willis, particularly as he ‘stole’ nearly every salient point I intended to make here already! 🙂 🙂 🙂
I am a professional meteorologist responsible for forecasting operational threats to the electrical transmission and distribution system of a large eastern US energy company. Spring of 2011 I read several positive comments regarding Piers’ forecasts and thought that I would evaluate them (his US forecasts) for a year. My evaluation was done subjectively, noting on a calendar the various notable threats in Piers’ forecasts that could impact to our area and subsequently noting if they provided any useful signal of upcoming threats to our system.
Apart from his forecast for Hurricane Irene (which I would count as a decent success even though Piers’ forecasts for the remaining entirety (June – November) of the 2011 Atlantic TC season was poor), his forecasts offered no beneficial signal regarding operational threats. In the real world of operational forecasting, a forecast of “Heavy rain turning to HEAVY Snow with thunder snow” across the Upper Great Lakes, Ohio River Valley, and Blue Ridge from a low moving out of the Great Lakes into the Canadian Maritimes for day X *does not count as a successful forecast* for a heavy wet snow from the northern Mid-Atlantic through New England from a nor’easter on day X-2; that at least was a ‘close’ forecast. There were *many* forecasts for significant events that never happened, and visa versa. Again from my operational experience (for the US at least) Piers’ forecasts are at best worthless.
Richard Holle says:
July 6, 2012 at 12:28 am
Richard
I read your aerology thesis sometime ago and still have it bookmarked. I found it very interesting and , as far as I could determine with very little info from piers, you and he are on the same track.
Good stuff!
A fair test for a fair and honest man
Like a number of other UK commentators, I have bought and used Pier’s predictions. Sometimes he’s more-or-less spot on, other times he’s way out. By this I mean that he gets the weather around Birmingham, my home town, approximately right, sometimes, but certainly not always. I don’t mean I have done any careful statistical analysis of his predictions compared with what actually happened.
I attended a meeting at Imperial College (Piers’s old alma mater) at which he, and other sceptics spoke in Autumn 2010. He had said that he would explain his method and ‘reveal all’. He didn’t go into detail but, from what I remember, as others have said, his approach is based on the belief that the Sun’s output of solar wind, radiation (and magnetic field??) influences the upper atmosphere and the movement of the jet streams. It appears then that he applies some kind of pattern recognition, and examines what happened last time the Sun’s output pattern of charged particles etc was similar and how the weather responded. Please excuse my vagueness but I am not knowledgeable, and he did speak in generalities. This sort of fits with the forecasts I have bought. Sometimes they predict the weather pattern uncannily. Other times they are completely wrong. It’s as if the pattern has repeated and is the same, and then it doesn’t repeat, although Piers was expecting it to do so i.e. he seems to get it either completely right, or completely wrong.
Something like an objective comparison of weather predictions has been proposed by Roger Harrabin (BBC Environment correspondent) http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_9699000/9699478.stm. But whether it is, and whether it happens isn’t currently clear.
Willis argues that Piers should construct his own assessment of his prediction skill, and I agree that this would be a good thing to do. But it takes time and money to do this sort of work, and I am not sure that Piers has either. It would be a powerful marketing tool.
I don’t think he’s a charlatan. I think he’s tried to develop and refine his method. He’s running a business from which he makes his living so he’s not going to give away his method. This is frustrating because it’s therefore not possible to independently and critically examine his theory and the strength of the evidence supporting it. All we see is the output, the forecasts, and we have to pay for them. As a number of people have pointed out, people including farmers and food businesses do pay for the forecasts which is suggestive evidence that Piers’s theories seem to have some validity. Having said that there are a lot of gullible people ‘out there’, but I don’t think of farmers and food retailers as naïve dupes, so maybe Piers’s onto something. The frustration for all of us, he won’t tell us what!
His model is based, he believes, on physically plausible effects by the Sun, and the Moon, on the Earth’s atmosphere. This is, according to Piers, based on physically plausible, predictable mechanisms (which he won’t share). It’s on this basis that he predicts long-term weather patterns. The Met Office, as I understand it, uses CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) to predict how the atmosphere will behave three, four or five days ahead. Because of the inevitable chaotic behaviour of the atmosphere it’s impossible, no matter how big or expensive the computer, to predict further ahead than, say, five days. The Met Office seems to have no theory of what influences weather outside of CFD. So it’s stuck in CFD land. At least Piers seems to deal with physical effects (from the Sun and Moon) i.e. he’s dealing with effects that are causal and influence weather patterns in a physically plausible way.
I am with LC Kirk when he says:
“…I instinctively like the man and find him credibly sincere in his opinions and scientific conclusions. Don’t be put off by his presentation style, lack of graphical skills, Billingsgate accent or dishevelled, schoolmasterly appearance. You’re not looking at a slicko marketing job from Al Gore Incorporated here; you are looking at a genuine, intelligent human being, who does all his own work and is more concerned with the content than the medium.”
Piers isn’t slick. His presentations are amateurish, and opaque. He does look like an absent-minded professor, and he’s no media savvy ‘slicko’. He does tend to over-claim and he does overdo it with the !!!!! None of this matters if he’s right, and he’s onto something. The frustration is that he can’t, and won’t tell us more. Pity.
No need to share the method, but as already stated, the fact that he doesn’t release out of date forecasts for evaluation says everything that you need to know.
How many farmers, how many supermarkets -what size?
You’re reneging, WIllis.
I said, “if you object to counting only 8.0 magnitude earthquakes, then I suppose you could get a more meaningful measure by counting all 5.0-and-up earthquakes, weighted by energy released. Does that sound reasonable to you?”
You replied, “Sure, that sounds reasonable.”
But that was when you mistakenly thought that the calculation would put 2007 ahead of 2011 in earthquake activity.
Now that you know that by that “reasonable” measure the earthquake activity of 2011 dwarfed 2007’s earthquake activity (and every other recent year), you’ve changed your mind.
This is not a “special pleading.” This is a metric that you (correctly) agreed is reasonable. IMO, it is the only reasonable metric.
Simply counting earthquakes is not reasonable. A 9.0 earthquake releases 1,000,000 times as much energy as a 5.0 earthquake. Equating them is like equating a 500 lb conventional bomb (explosive yield equivalent to about 210 lbs TNT) to a 105 kiloton nuke. (For comparison, the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was 12-15 kilotons.)
The fact is that Piers’ earthquake warning last year was absolutely right. I don’t know whether he was very smart or very lucky, but he was unquestionably correct.
Dave
BTW, what’s the secret for embedding those graphs in your messages, Willis? I can’t seem to make it work!
REPLY: You have to have author privileges here to embed images – Anthony
daveburton says:
July 6, 2012 at 1:44 pm
Well, duh, of course you think that it is the “only reasonable metric”, because it is the only metric by which Piers is right. Is it a reasonable way to measure earthquakes? Sure. Does it prove that Piers is right? No chance, because that’s not what he predicted.
You don’t seem to have grasped my point, which I’ve been making all along. Piers’s prognostications, about earthquakes and in most cases about weather, are so general as to be unfalsifiable. As you have just shown, one earthquake metric supports his claim and one metric doesn’t … but you choose the one that supports his claim.
This is only possible because his claim lacks the required specificity to be either falsified or verified, as you have clearly proven.
So no, I’m not “reneging” on anything, I am simply reiterating what I’ve been saying since my first post on this thread—his predictions are like those of Nostradamus—they are pliable enough to twist them to mean whatever you want them to mean. And when they are not that pliable, people just ignore the fact that he said “New Mexico and Arizona”, and decide that they are “close enough”.
w.
PS—You are making the claim that Piers was right based on the fortuitous occurrence of one single large earthquake. Without that one earthquake, his results would show the opposite … do you know how many statisticians are rolling over in their graves regarding the foolishness of such a claim, based on a single occurrence?
Willis wrote, “Well, duh, of course you think that it is the “only reasonable metric”, because it is the only metric by which Piers is right.”
Wrong. There is no metric even marginally reasonable by which Piers isn’t right about this.
You didn’t like considering just the really big earthquakes (8.0 & up), because it was obvious that Piers was right. So I suggested the most precise metric: summing the energy from all the earthquakes which are big enough to be reasonably counted (5.0 & up), which you agreed was reasonable. But by that metric, too, Piers is obviously right.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise: There’s not really much difference between counting just the biggest earthquakes and counting all the earthquakes big enough to be reliably detected and counted, because because most of the energy released by earthquakes (and most of the destruction) is from the very biggest ones.
2011’s magnitude 9.0 earthquake released the same energy as 32,000 magnitude 6.0 earthquakes. In the big earthquake year of 2007 there were only 2,074 earthquakes between magnitude 5.0 and 5.9, so the 5.something earthquakes are nearly negligible in their contribution to the sum.
2011’s magnitude 9.0 earthquake released the same energy as 1000 magnitude 7.0 earthquakes. In 2007 there were only 178 magnitude 6.0-6.9 earthquakes, so the 6.something earthquakes are nearly negligible in their contribution to the sum, too.
That’s why it is reasonable to ignore the small earthquakes, and just consider the large ones: because that is a good approximation of the correct metric, which is to sum the energy released by all the earthquakes big enough to cause damage or be reliably detected and counted.
What’s not reasonable is equating earthquakes of wildly differing sizes, as in your bar charts.
Willis wrote, “PS—You are making the claim that Piers was right based on the fortuitous occurrence of one single large earthquake. Without that one earthquake, his results would show the opposite…”
Not really, Willis. Did you look at that list of biggest earthquakes since 1900?
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/world/10_largest_world.php
The 4th largest and the 11th largest earthquakes in the last 112 years have both occurred in the 15 months since Piers forecast “significantly enhanced earthquake activity.”
Willis,
Thanks for your comment. I’m sensitive, as a skeptic, to anything that feels like an automatic rejection of the off-beat. As a professional geologist, I am very aware of the inherent questioning that comes of thinking outside the consensus box. Skepticism in climate science, of which I am a solid supporter as it now goes, does, at times, have an element of if-Hansen-says-it-it-must-be-wrong. Or a Piers, in this case: he is outside the social box, for sure, and that tends to generate a belief (in all of us) that he is outside the reasoning box.
Piers, as others have noted, is a promoter. It is not in his professional interest to provide a baseball score, unless he is way beyond the curve. I get it. But perhaps Anthony and Joe would be better to discuss: how good is ANY prediction 1 month out?
This is the delimema of both warmist and skeptic alike: how far can you reasonably predict ANYTHING? If a 3 month forecast is, historically foolish, how can you blame the 2010 Russian heatwave or the current American heatwave on anything? If you can’t connect forward, can you really connect backward? As a geologist I build internally consistent stories to explain the current geology, but I know that those stories are not necessarily correct, but only consistent as far as the data goes – or most of it. That is why geologists have a career: the stories we made yesterday are not as good as the ones we make today, and we’re prepared to be paid to declare thus.
Thanks again.
D.
P. Solar says:
July 5, 2012 at 11:16 am
Has any publicly funded business ever gone out of business?
DaveE.
Dave, you still haven’t responded to my underlying problem with Piers’s claim, the vagueness that underlies all of his claims. He makes no mention of how we are to measure the earthquakes. There are three obvious possibilities–number, magnitude, and energy released. By two of the three measures, there is nothing unusual. By the third one, energy released, there is an anomaly, although it does not appear to be statistically significant.
However, Piers didn’t say which measure he was talking about, so I’m sure if there had been a bunch more earthquakes you would have claimed victory as well. After all, he didn’t say that the earthquakes would be more energetic, as you keep claiming. He said, and I quote:
Note that there is not one word in there about “more energetic earthquakes”, Dave. Three separate times, he said “More earthquakes”. So for sure, if there had been more earthquakes, you would still be claiming victory even if they were not strong earthquakes. Since there weren’t more earthquakes, you now claim victory because there were some strong ones.
And that is the problem. His forecasts are so vague as to allow a host of interpretations, and people can pick the most favorable.
I thought that there might be a way out, in that it should be possible to test his related claim that there are “More Earthquakes near solar activity minima”. We have decent earthquake records of large quakes for a couple of solar minima. The problem, of course, is that 2011-2012 is not a solar minimum … the last solar minimum was in 2008, before that in 1996, and before that in 1986 … and I see no shred of evidence supporting his claim of “more earthquakes” in the record for those years.
Of course, the problem once again is that Piers has left himself a way out, saying that there will be more earthquakes “near” solar minima … more Nostradamus vagueness, what does “near” mean? Within ± one year? Within ± five years?
So go ahead, Dave. When Piers says “more earthquakes”, you are free to claim he is right because a couple of the ones that did occur were quite powerful … but PIERS DIDN’T PREDICT MORE POWERFUL EARTHQUAKES, HE PREDICTED MORE EARTHQUAKES. And guess what …
There haven’t been more earthquakes. Period. There have been a couple more powerful earthquakes, but there have not been more earthquakes.
w.
Greetings to all Citizens of Science. There’s a lot here and I havn’t read it all. Some comments:-
1. THANK YOU (Ok apols for caps) Anthony for posting these SUMMARY FORECASTS (and no apols for these caps).
2. Please distinguish between forecast material and views you may have on type-faces etc.
3. Anthony, I think you are partly confusing news pieces about forecasts – or forecast adverts – with the forecasts themselves which are not difficult to understand at all. In fact they are more precise than any around of more than a week ahead in terms of what and when (let’s say compared with UK Met0).
4. Willis Eschenbach, I am ASTOUNDED (no apols for caps) at your remarks. In the old Climate Sceptics group you and I used to communicate quite a lot and I always found your contributions excellent and objective and helpful and when you report here I still do. However look please be real. You are treating a summary eye-grabbing (it was said) page on the month as all their is and being wantonly derisory of what is said there – which in fact is pretty unambiguous. It also makes clear the timings etc are in the full forecast.
Our WeatherAction USA forecasts cover 10 pages and the whens and whats are spelt out.
[Btw subscribers don’t complain about color coding there, in terms of colors there is less use in Europe forecasts and less colour again for Britain+Ireland, but let’s keep to content] .
It is NOT (no apols for caps) the case that this forecast detail or summary could apply to almost any July. At the end of the month I invite you to compare our forecast with the last 10 July’s and see to which actual obs it is closest in term of
(i) General development summary and extremes – ie summary page
(ii) Detail in 8 corresponding date-wise weather periods through each of the July’s.
And, (iii) If standard Met underestimated strengths of deluges etc in their one or two day ahead forecasts during our R5 and R4 activity periods.
The usual warmist ‘assessment’ by listing of mistakes (and there will be some) is just dishonest. what has to be assessed is what was forecast against all the possibilities that might reasonably occur and against what others said (although that is often nothing)
In order to do this I make available for publication on this site the FULL 10 pages of forecast for July USA as the pdf. I am aware this will upset some subscribers and will make it up to them somehow by extending their site download access by another month.
5. There are a lot of subscribers in USA, Europe and Brit+Ire who subscribe again and again and rate our forecasts very highly and indeed ‘swear by them’ for usefulness allowing for stated uncertainties (and bear in mind these are one shot generally rather than UKM0 5 or more shots). Growers in Britain were VERY grateful for our May forecast which spelt growing problems and that is what they suffered. We get fantastic support from forecast users.
6. The claim that we hadn’t admitted/discussed/ assessed the warm 4th week in May is totally false. I object to arrant falsity being posted on WUWT (Anthony it is libel). The consequences of public and private discussion has been SLAT8A (Solar Lunar Action Technique 8A) under which this July forecast is produced. USEFULNESS is our guide to forecasts rather than word games to be ‘right’ a la UK-There-will-be-some-weather-M0. Usefulness coupled with defined boundaries of uncertainty give us weather bets. so read on.
7. For completeness this month we have NOW (6/7 July) also posted our EXTREME Warnings Brit+Ire JULY Forecast SUMMARY PAGE as issued 28Jun (very similar to ’45d’ forecast issued 15 June) http://twitpic.com/a4q45r/full
On this we said that we had a 60% confidence that England+Wales will be the wettest of the 247 Julys since 1766 (and 85% confident in wettest 5%). NOW we estimate with 85% confidence that it will be the wettest out of 247 years of records and 95% sure it will be in the wettest 5%. Anyone care to bet?
8. We – a friend known to be a proxy for me – attempted to place a bet with William Hill that the Olympic opening ceremony in London on 27th July will suffer disruptive downpours etc. The word came back from the new boy on the block that “Piers Corbyn was £14,000 ahead on his betting account with us before we closed it (in around 1999) so we errr…”. Anyone care to bet?
8. Thanks very much Spartacus is Free, SteveC, Bryan and others for putting the facts.
9. Our long range weather forecasts have proven significant skill – inc peer review stuff on UK gales and more detail since – see http://www.weatheraction.com/pages/pv.asp?p=wact45
– especially the pdfs which cover our early USA trials. For information, not there, of the Accuweather extreme weather events listed in their annual summary for 2011, ALL of them were predicted by us. This success was not due to overforecasting (ie always saying, eg, there will be a hurricane tomorrow).
We predicted Hurricane Irene formation to within one day from 12 weeks ahead and improved on standard Mets track forecast in special short range ‘End game’ forecasts:-
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews11No12.pdf
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews11No14.pdf
Concerning one ignorant remark on bets etc:-
(i) The peer reviewed report on gales forecasts years ago stated the success was not due to overforecasting but real significant skill, and
(ii) ALL our month ahead etc bets were on the William Hill account which was £14000 ahead to me when they closed it. I had no other betting account.
10. Our Earthquake forecasts are public TRIALS and being developed. They too have skill various observers have commented but they are still only trial status.
11. Evidence-based science is the only science
People are making a mountain out of a mole hill here. Piers Corbyn has done some very basic research science – something any astrophysicist could have done. He has gone back to basics: he has studied past weather patterns and looked for correlations between them and heavenly objects and their relative positions, particularly the earth, moon and the sun. It’s no big deal that it has unsurprisingly worked in part. The only surprise is that it appears to have worked better than would have been expected. His untested, hypothetical explanations are just that and obscure the simple process behind his predictions.
The real take home lesson is that our theoretical climate science contains many even more untested theoretical hypotheses and they are failing miserably. He beats the UK BOM. I probably could too: just bet against every long term forecast they make. It is not so much a reflection upon him as a reflection of the mendacious pseudoscience that is promoted as climate science and the real world phenomena it neglects to consider and their unscientific methodology. Climate scientists probably are amazed to see real scientists so excited over how close CERN has got to the experimental confirmation of the Higgs Boson. To them it has been computer tested so it exists so finding it is no big deal.
When one astrophysicist with a laptop does better than billions of dollars of research and equipment and thousands of so called scientists the guy with the laptop should be the least of our worries.
This morning on the BBC news channel the news team plus the Met team had an extended discussion about the series of severe flooding incidents affecting the UK.
The poster of the UK with the Jet Stream south of the UK was produced.
This poster was first shown by BBC less than a month ago.
Its almost identical to Piers graphic shown almost 4 months ago
All are agreed now that its a Jet Stream problem.
The Met men said “lots of research going on” melting ice caps was mentioned as being a cause.
Solar activity influencing the stratosphere was not mentioned.
The Met men were trying to portray that the Met was ‘ahead of the game ‘.
In reality the Met team seem to be predicting the past.
Piers was not mentioned even though he and his forecasts are well known and in the public domain.
The whole discussion carefully avoided the ‘Piers elephant in the room’.
Is the BBC as an impartial broadcaster of weather/climate news?
It stinks all the way to the stratosphere!
I am not sure where my other post has gone, I know it takes time of course, but just on a couple of false statements
(i) We DID say more powerful earthquakes or words to that effect
(ii) Why are you going on about earthquakes, these are not the subject of the post and are trial forecasts only?
(iii) We never said May would be ‘the coldest ever’
If people have to make up false versions of our forecasts in order to prove them wrong we cannot advance.
Come on citizens, science please.
PC
PS I am sending the full pdf
Thanks Piers. Your forecasts are certainly more accurate than those of the crowd at the CBC in Canada.
The Canadian Farmer’s Almanac used to be based on extra-terrestrial influences and I noted their very accurate blizzard warning for the NE US 3 years ago (February) – got it within 3 or 4 days, 5 ft of snow. Now they have a new computer with ‘proper science and spout warmist BS – quite a lot (lots of hot-cold-wet-dry). It turns out (I checked) that the blizzard warning was written the previous March.
I believe their methods used to be very similar to yours though they said it included the position of Jupiter.
Piers Corbyn (@ur momisuglyPiers_Corbyn) says: @ur momisugly July 6, 2012 at 9:02 pm….
Thank you for making the entire 10 page forecast available to WUWT. I for one have been dying of curiosity. We use Wunderground (Hubby’s decision) much to my disgust. The maps there are great but the forecasts So-So. I normally do my own “forecasting” based on the maps. For the last year or so that has been difficult because the Jet Stream has changed and the weather no longer routinely comes from the west as it used to. The change is messing up the forecasters too. Last week I saw the forecast change four times for the next day.
Piers Corbyn (@Piers_Corbyn) (July 6, 2012 at 9:02 pm) wrote:
“I make available for publication on this site the FULL 10 pages of forecast for July USA as the pdf.”
Anthony? Moderators? I still don’t see any link.
Thanks if you can find time to provide.
Piers: Thanks for stopping by.