From the GWPF: Met Office To Hold Crisis Summit On Epic Forecast Failures
The Met Office’s temperature forecasts issued in 12 out of the last 13 years have been too warm. None of the forecasts issued ended up too cold. That makes the errors systemic and significant.
Met Office To Hold Summit On Disappointing (sic) UK Weather
The Guardian, 14 June 2013: Climate scientists and meteorologists are meeting next week to debate the causes of UK’s disappointing weather in recent years.
Washout summers. Flash floods. Freezing winters. Snow in May. Droughts. There is a growing sense that something is happening to our weather. But is it simply down to natural variability, or is climate change to blame? To try to answer the question the Met Office is hosting an unprecedented meeting of climate scientists and meteorologists next week to debate the possible causes of the UK’s “disappointing” weather over recent years, the Guardian has learned.
Met Office 2008 Forecast: Trend of Mild Winters Continues
Met Office, 25 September 2008: The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average. It is also likely that the coming winter will be drier than last year.
Reality Check: Winter of 2008/09 Coldest Winter For A Decade
Met Office, March 2009: Mean temperatures over the UK were 1.1 °C below the 1971-2000 average during December, 0.5 °C below average during January and 0.2 °C above average during February. The UK mean temperature for the winter was 3.2 °C, which is 0.5 °C below average, making it the coldest winter since 1996/97 (also 3.2 °C).
Met Office 2009 Forecast: Trend To Milder Winters To Continue, Snow And Frost Becoming Less Of A Feature
Met Office, 25 February 2009: Peter Stott, Climate Scientist at the Met Office, said: “Despite the cold winter this year, the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue, with snow and frost becoming less of a feature in the future. “The famously cold winter of 1962/63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850.”
Reality Check: Winter Of 2009/10 Coldest Winter For Over 30 Years
Met Office, 1 March 2010: Provisional figures from the Met Office show that the UK winter has been the coldest since 1978/79. The mean UK temperature was 1.5 °C, the lowest since 1978/79 when it was 1.2 °C.
Met Office 2010 Forecast: Winter To Be Mild Predicts Met Office
Daily Express, 28 October 2010: IT’S a prediction that means this may be time to dig out the snow chains and thermal underwear. The Met Office, using data generated by a £33million supercomputer, claims Britain can stop worrying about a big freeze this year because we could be in for a milder winter than in past years… The new figures, which show a 60 per cent to 80 per cent chance of warmer-than-average temperatures this winter, were ridiculed last night by independent forecasters. The latest data comes in the form of a December to February temperature map on the Met Office’s website.
Reality Check: December 2010 “Almost Certain” To Be Coldest Since Records Began
The Independent, 18 December 2010: December 2010 is “almost certain” to be the coldest since records began in 1910, according to the Met Office.
Met Office Predicted A Warm Winter. Cheers Guys
John Walsh, The Independent, 19 January 2010: Some climatologists hint that the Office’s problem is political; its computer model of future weather behaviour habitually feeds in government-backed assumptions about climate change that aren’t borne out by the facts. To the Met Office, the weather’s always warmer than it really is, because it’s expecting it to be, because it expects climate change to wreak its stealthy havoc. If it really has had its thumb on the scales for the last decade, I’m afraid it deserves to be shown the door.
BBC Analysis: A Frozen Britain Turns The Heat Up On The Met Office
Paul Hudson, BBC Weather, 9 January 2010: Which begs other, rather important questions. Could the model, seemingly with an inability to predict colder seasons, have developed a warm bias, after such a long period of milder than average years? Experts I have spoken to tell me that this certainly is possible with such computer models. And if this is the case, what are the implications for the Hadley centre’s predictions for future global temperatures? Could they be affected by such a warm bias? If global temperatures were to fall in years to come would the computer model be capable of forecasting this?
A Period Of Humility And Silence Would Be Best For Met Office
Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 10 January 2010: A period of humility and even silence would be particularly welcome from the Met Office, our leading institutional advocate of the perils of man-made global warming, which had promised a “barbecue summer” in 2009 and one of the “warmest winters on record”. In fact, the Met still asserts we are in the midst of an unusually warm winter — as one of its staffers sniffily protested in an internet posting to a newspaper last week: “This will be the warmest winter in living memory, the data has already been recorded. For your information, we take the highest 15 readings between November and March and then produce an average. As November was a very seasonally warm month, then all the data will come from those readings.”
Met Office 2012 Forecast: Drier than average conditions for April-May-June
Met Office 3-month Outlook, 23 March 2012: “The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier-than-average conditions for April-May-June as a whole, and also slightly favours April being the driest of the 3 months. With this forecast, the water resources situation in southern, eastern and central England is likely to deteriorate further during the April-May-June period… This forecast is based on information from observations, several numerical models and expert judgement.”
Reality Check: Wettest April for 100 years
April: 2012 had wettest April for 100 years, Met Office says “It has been the wettest April in the UK for over 100 years, with some areas seeing three times their usual average, figures from the Met Office show. Some 121.8mm of rain has fallen, beating the previous record of 120.3mm which was set in 2000.”
June: June on course to be wettest in a century: Flooding, storms and persistent showers have blighted the country in recent weeks putting this June in line to become one of the soggiest in 100 years.
25 June: Spring is wettest in Britain for 250 years – England and Wales are on course for the wettest late spring and early summer for 250 years, experts said yesterday. June has just seen its fourth washout weekend and yet more downpours are forecast. Now it is feared combined rainfall for April, May and June will break the record of 13.2in (336mm) set in 1782 and be the highest since records began in 1766.
Met Office 2013 Forecast: Feb-March Above-Average UK Temps More Likely
Met Office, 20 December 2012: For February and March the range of possible outcomes is also very broad, although above-average UK-mean temperatures become more likely.
Reality Check: Met Office confirms coldest March in more than 50 years
Press Association, 29 March 2013: This March is the coldest in the UK since 1962, forecasters have confirmed. After weeks of speculation about whether this miserable March would top the list, the Met Office has announced it is the coldest in 51 years according to provisional statistic.
Paul Hudson: Met Office global forecasts too warm in 11 out of last 12 years
Paul Hudson, BBC Weather, 10 February 2012: Although this discrepancy is within the stated margin of error, it is the 11th year out of the last 12 when the Met Office global temperature forecast has been too warm. In all these years, the discrepancy between observed temperatures and the forecast are within the stated margin of error. But all the errors are on the warm side, with none of the forecasts that have been issued in the last 12 years ending up too cold. And, in my opinion, that makes the error significant.
Martin Rosenbaum: The Met Office and its seasonal problems
BBC Open Secrets, 23 December 2010
As Britain remains cold and snowy, an interesting little dispute has boiled up between the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) and the Met Office over the quality of longer-range weather forecasting.
And this is illuminated by documents obtained by the BBC under freedom of information from the Met Office. These shed new light on the problems faced by the Met Office in its public communications and the strategies it has adopted for tackling them.
The Met Office is under attack from the GWPF, for its “poor advice” on the likelihood of a harsh and cold winter.
The GWPF is drawing attention to a map published on the Met Office website in October which indicated that the UK was likely to experience above-normal temperatures in the ensuing three-month period.
For the GPWF, which is sceptical of the Met Office and other mainstream analysis of global warming, this is evidence of a Met Office tendency to under-predict cold weather and over-predict mild winters…..
Kasuha says:
June 15, 2013 at 1:02 am
“DirkH says:
June 14, 2013 at 3:36 pm
Just to give a rough impression; the simulation of a chaotic system develops an error that grows EXPONENTIALLY over time. Meaning – each DOUBLING of computer power buys you a CONSTANT increase in forecasting horizon in the optimal case.
__________________________________________________________
If engineers believed that, we wouldn’t have jet engines today.”
Incredible claim showing no knowledge of the history of technology. What was invented first, the Messerschmitt Me 262 or iterative computer models?
“Fortunately, making better models is not just matter of putting in more CPU power.
Being overconfident in immature models is bad.
But so is being too scared to even attempt to advance.”
Knowing history definitely helps.
I understand these is a proposal by the Met Office to introduce Smart Thermometers in the Uk. Embarrassing forecasts will become a memory of the past.
It’s a foregone conclusion the spin will be all about how any changes are due at least partly to reduced ice and that is somehow caused by ‘warming’ – conveniently overlooking recent lack of.
taxed said:
‘What’s been screwing things up for the Met Office?
ln a word the “jet stream”.
There has been a consistent trend of the jet stream taking a more southern track during the summer since 2007, and with a less consistent trend during the winter since 2008/09.’
The “jet stream” as a popular term is (another) American import. The first I ever heard about the jet stream was when I lived in the USA in the 80s. In Britain the weather was always explained in terms of blocking highs and depressions. And really it still is, because the jet stream typically goes across the north side of the high known as the “Azores high”, which of course moves about a bit, so there is a very strong correlation. At the moment the high is disappointingly far south, that is it is staying by the Azores instead of pushing up to Biscay or France or England.
The mean position of the Azores high probably reflects climate change in action – of the solar variety.
Rich.
The trouble is that they think they know it all and cannot be wrong. This is UK type institutional thinking of the worst kind.
Their forecasts are wrong because their models are wrong. forecasts are good for three days MAX not six months or one hundred years.
Perhaps they need a new chief scientist the present one is wore up. (An old Lincolnshire term for kn—–ed)
How can they brainstorm anything when they have sold their integrity to the devil. Yes that’s harsh, but they take home their salary’s on the proviso that they constrain their output, if not their thinking to the religious and political co2 beliefs of senior management.
I can understand that many must feel in a difficult situation, they have mortgages, families to feed, kids to raise, and for many, sacrificing their academic integrity is much the lesser of two evils. Who can blame them.
The met office will continue to perform badly until the suffocating influence of the current management team has been removed and replaced with open minded individuals who value honest scientific integrity unencumbered by any preconceptions.
The biggest mistake the MET ofice make is thinking they are experts on climate. Its as simple as that. They are experts at meteorology. When they finally realise this and also realise that the “climate scientists” that advise them are charlatans then they will improve their climate forecasts…. by not making any.
Is this an admission that their models do not work? If so, what about all the input the Hadley centre produced for IPCC AR4?
William Astley
“Meetings of the 20 experts from the UK’s leading climate research institutes will not help the UK develop low cost energy sources and will not help the UK develop a strong industrial base to purchase food from southern latitudes.”
But they will warm the climate with hot air.
J Martin says:
June 15, 2013 at 2:45 am
“I can understand that many must feel in a difficult situation, they have mortgages, families to feed, kids to raise, and for many, sacrificing their academic integrity is much the lesser of two evils. Who can blame them.”
Yeah who can blame a statist rent-seeker for being greedy. Any taxpayer maybe? I surely can. What gives them the right to eternal welfare when any worker in the private sector depends on producing enough surplus to justify his keeping his job, while the state takes a larger and larger share? Oh look at the poor statists; there might come a day where one of them might lose his job!
There might come a day where the parasites have killed their host; the UK is very close to it.
I think many are missing the true agenda here. This is not the failure of the Met Office, this is a (partial) failure in a global attempt to adjust world politics into a One World Government. The ‘world climate’ arm of this subversive global enterprise was decided in a secret 2006 meeting arranged by the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme, by One World Net and chaired by the Biased Broadcasting Corporation (the BBC).
Cambridge Media and Environment Programme
(which was part funded by the BBC … !!)
https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/cambridge_media_and_environment
One World Net:
http://oneworld.net/file/oneworld-international-foundation/oneworld-international-foundation
Biased Broadcasting Corporation:
http://biasedbbc.proboards.com
There is a new article by Christopher Book about this secret BBC meeting in today’s Telegraph that is worth reading. He says:
Quote:
“A key moment in developing the new party line was a “high-level seminar” in 2006, attended by a bevy of top BBC executives. It was organised by Roger Harrabin, one of its senior environmental correspondents, and Dr Joe Smith, a geographer and climate activist from the Open University. They had set up the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme to promote the consensus line on global warming, funded by, among others, the Department for the Environment (then in charge of government policy on climate change) and WWF, one of the leading warmist pressure groups.”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/8901365/The-BBCs-hidden-warmist-agenda-is-rapidly-unravelling.html
.
In short, the elevation of weather into a global problem was one arm of a wider political agenda to take over the beliefs and consciousness of a nation and (if possible) the world. The BBC was to the national and global mouthpiece of that political goal, but the BBC needed reports to base their propaganda upon. It was to be the Met Office’s job to provide the biased ‘facts’ that the BBC was going to spout to the world and thus ‘demonstrate’ that the entire world had a problem. Of course a World Problem required a World Government to tackle it.
The SARS virus was used in much the same fashion. Even worse – who can forget the World Health Organization (WHO) announcing to the world that the 2009 H1N1 flu epidemic had become a ‘World Pandemic’, simply because 100 people who were already ill had supposedly died in Mexico. It was later claimed that drugs companies had put pressure on the WHO to announce a pandemic, so they could sell their nearly outdated stocks of Tamiflu. And it is true that drugs companies did indeed make a killing from this. But in addition here was yet another World Problem, just like Global Warming, that required a world organisation to deal with it. I remember traveling to remote locations in Africa and the Near East, and there were medical staff in all the airports – on the advice of a WHO-organised pseudo-World Government.
For IPCC, read WHO. Same goals, same methodology.
World organisations trump national governments, and tell the world what to do, and this is exactly what the One Worlders want – a One World Government. And if they are given a One World Taxation system and a One World Bank they are 90% of the way towards achieving their goal. This is what the Carbon Credits scam was designed to achieve. Its just a shame that their bank and their credits are now worthless (crocodile tears smiley face).
.
However, there are real tears on the other side of the fence, and the project is not goin according to plan (courtesy of the climate). As the Global Warming Policy Foundation notes about the Met Office’s Emergency Meeting Over Increasingly Unusual UK Weather, – “There’s only one problem: UK weather isn’t unusual at all”. In reality, the only ’emergency’ here is that the One World Government enterprise is unravelling at an alarming rate:
Quote:
There’s only one problem: UK weather isn’t unusual at all.
http://www.thegwpf.org/central-england-temperature-seasonal-trends/
.
A list of attendees at the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme / One World / BBC secret meeting in 2006. Andrew Lane is the contracts manager who sealed the contract with the Met Office:
Specialists:
Robert May, Oxford University and Imperial College London
Mike Hulme, Director, Tyndall Centre, UEA
Blake Lee-Harwood, Head of Campaigns, Greenpeace
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Niels Bohr Institute, Copenhagen
Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
Andrew Dlugolecki, Insurance industry consultant
Trevor Evans, US Embassy
Colin Challen MP, Chair, All Party Group on Climate Change
Anuradha Vittachi, Director, Oneworld.net
Andrew Simms, Policy Director, New Economics Foundation
Claire Foster, Church of England
Saleemul Huq, IIED
Poshendra Satyal Pravat, Open University
Li Moxuan, Climate campaigner, Greenpeace China
Tadesse Dadi, Tearfund Ethiopia
Iain Wright, CO2 Project Manager, BP International
Ashok Sinha, Stop Climate Chaos
Andy Atkins, Advocacy Director, Tearfund
Matthew Farrow, CBI
Rafael Hidalgo, TV/multimedia producer
Cheryl Campbell, Executive Director, Television for the Environment
Kevin McCullough, Director, Npower Renewables
Richard D North, Institute of Economic Affairs
Steve Widdicombe, Plymouth Marine Labs
Joe Smith, The Open University
Mark Galloway, Director, IBT
Anita Neville, E3G
Eleni Andreadis, Harvard University
Jos Wheatley, Global Environment Assets Team, DFID
Tessa Tennant, Chair, AsRia
BBC attendees:
Jana Bennett, Director of Television
Sacha Baveystock, Executive Producer, Science
Helen Boaden, Director of News
Andrew Lane, Manager, Weather, TV News
Anne Gilchrist, Executive Editor Indies & Events, CBBC
Dominic Vallely, Executive Editor, Entertainment
Eleanor Moran, Development Executive, Drama Commissioning
Elizabeth McKay, Project Executive, Education
Emma Swain, Commissioning Editor, Specialist Factual
Fergal Keane, (Chair), Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Fran Unsworth, Head of Newsgathering
George Entwistle, Head of TV Current Affairs
Glenwyn Benson, Controller, Factual TV
John Lynch, Creative Director, Specialist Factual
Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy
Jon Williams, TV Editor Newsgathering
Karen O’Connor, Editor, This World, Current Affairs
Catriona McKenzie, Tightrope Pictures
Liz Molyneux, Editorial Executive, Factual Commissioning
Matt Morris, Head of News, Radio Five Live
Neil Nightingale, Head of Natural History Unit
Paul Brannan, Deputy Head of News Interactive
Peter Horrocks, Head of Television News
Peter Rippon, Duty Editor, World at One/PM/The World this Weekend
Phil Harding, Director, English Networks & Nations
Steve Mitchell, Head Of Radio News
Sue Inglish, Head Of Political Programmes
Frances Weil, Editor of News Special Events
With thanks to:
Andrew Orlowski of the Register, Tony Newbery of Harmless Sky, Guido Fawkes, Andrew Montford of Bishop’s Hill and others.
.
The Met Office should have been reading my material published since 2008.
I told everyone then that I had noticed a reversal of the earlier trends in jet stream behaviour from around 2000.
Bruce Cobb says:
June 14, 2013 at 12:31 pm
Here’s what they should do: Write out a number of possible forecasts, from colder to warmer, and drier to wetter on separate slips of paper, then hire a chimpanzee to “choose” one of the slips. Guaranteed to be more accurate than what they’re doing.
===========================================================
It would be considered animal cruelty to have a chimpanzee involved with climatology.
And it would be below the dignity of a chimp to be in the same working group as most “professional” climatologists.
Latimer Alder – June 14, 12.49pm – loved it..!
But there is another solution. The DECC is the Department of Energy and CLIMATE CHANGE – so surely the thing for the Met Office to do is simply to ask the DECC to change the climate..?
Next they will say that climate change will prohibit any accurate forecast.
Well, hasn’t it?
See ~ owe to rich
Am a keen user of the jet stream maps, as l find this the best way to show the trends in the weather patterns that are taking place. lt makes me aware of things that l would otherwise miss.
Over recent years the Azores highs have been moving northwards over the Atlantic. Which causes the jet stream to dive down south near NW europe . lt was this weather set up that gave us the wet spring in 2012.
The thing which always puzzles me is this – for such a small country, we get a lot of weather…
Constant forecasts of warm temperatures affect the perceptions of the credulous that it really is warmer. It just drones on ominously. (I stopped reading the Chicago Tribune, but when I did, the Enron treasurer’s weather man brother constantly published forecasts on the high side. They create a perception mistaken for proof.) They will keep doing it, because they are selling anything they can and fear sells.
ABM = Anything But the Models
The MET Office must be publicly funded.
The Met Office would make better forecasts with an old pine cone and a piece of dry seaweed.
They are utterly rubbish.
Richard Verney
I am currently writing a piece for the very purpose you mention. The met office misunderstand the nature of the British climate through history. As I think I have mentioned before until last year their web site proclaimed that climate was static until man started emitting large quantities of C02. With a mind set like that it is very difficult to make headway with them
The period around 1500 to 1540 was around as warm as today. They have excellent archives at the Met Office which amply demonstrate this.but ironically it appears that whilst I make extensive use of it the Climate scientists don’t.
For those who haven’t seen my reconstruction of CET here is one of the graphs from it
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/08/the-curious-case-of-rising-co2-and-falling-temperatures/
tonyb
THe key issue is looking at the assumptions of the Met Office computer models and seeing if they hold up in reality.
Reality tells us the following things:
1. Hale Cycles of 22 are detected in weather series, albeit with a bit of ‘fuzziness’ since each sunspot cycle is of slightly variable length.
2. Several other cycles of longer duration also occur, including a lunar cycle of 18.6 yrs, a Gleissberg cycle (which appears to correlate with a PDO cycle) etc etc.
3. Solar events impinge upon weather patterns, hence predicting solar events would appear to be critical in predicting weather.
Although I don’t think I could model things perfectly, I think it’s fairly safe to say that the whole basis of Met Office modelling is pointless beyond 5 days out.
Stephen Wilde.
So you noticed a change in the jet stream since 2000? That is nothing I noted them as being relevant to British weather for the period 1530 onwards in my article.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
This from;
http://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/long-slow-thaw-supplementary-information.pdf
13) Due to its geographical location British weather is often quite mobile and periods of hot, cold, dry or wet weather tend to be relatively short lived. If such events are longer lasting than normal, or interrupted and resumed, that can easily shape the character of a month or a season. Reading the numerous references there is clear evidence of ‘blocking patterns,’ perhaps as the jet stream shifts, or a high pressure takes up residence, feeding in winds from a certain direction which generally shape British weather.
—- —–
On a more serious note the jet stream is of crucial importance to us but I don’t think we understand its huge effect on our climate very well
tonyb.
tony b
Its true what you say about adding money to the Exeter economy..Unfortunately their AGW ponderings are adding extra money to our fuel bills!!