From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Following on from the heatwave that never was, the Met Office decided to hype Storm Betty. There was talk of half a month’s rainfall, maybe as much as 80mm:
The reality was much more mundane. Ballypatrick in N Ireland saw the most rain, 36mm, and the extremes in England and Scotland were much less than that:
As for winds, they forecast gusts up to 70 mph in exposed places, and 55 mph widely:
https://twitter.com/metoffice/status/1692492075319628258/photo/1
Sure enough, they found a handful of extremely exposed sites. Capel Curig, for instance, sits at an altitude of 216m in the middle of Snowdonia:
https://twitter.com/metoffice/status/1692780913619341821/photo/1
But down in the real world, the winds were a gentle breeze, even on that west coast of Wales, according to the Beaufort Scale:
But Gentle Breeze Betty does not have quite the same ring to it!
This is quite consistent behaviour from the Met Office. After all, they believe in an imaginary climate crisis. Now they manufacture an imaginary heatwave and imaginary storm to support the imaginary climate emergency. In their minds, this is all quite logical and correct.
The consistency of their behaviour is ‘consistent creep’
Based upon a foundation of the precautionary principle.
They have set a perfect and inescapable trap for themselves:
We’re great fantastic ultra-scientific and know everything about weather….and climate and we are constantly getter a bigger better supercomputerWe are your ultimate ‘go to source’ for weather/climateAnd a lot of people, UK Gov. not least, have bought into that. Why not, when you’re a small child (or have the mentality of one) it’s nice to have a comfort blanket, a strong father figure and a benign & caring mother.
Met Office fits all those
It’s the last of those features that traps them – mothers always tend to err on the side of ‘caution’. On top of that, strong fathers can not be seen to fail.
Hence if any sort of threat appears on the horizon, small children (we all are really) inside Met Office will consult (read = program) their authority (the supercomputer) and it will duly confirm their (Mother’s in this case) concerns and Mother will tell her children to ‘watch out, there’s a monster about’
And they have to do that every single time – else if A Monster does show up and Mother hadn’t said anything, Father is gonna find himself in a lawyers office explaing his unreasonable behaviour and the Comfort Blanket is gonna vaporise.
The (mission) creep comes in in that Met Office have to keep pace with an ever increasingly shrill, strident and paranoid media – else they’re dumped and some other comfort blanket is found.
Hence Met Office is a reflection of society at large.
Repeat again: At some point we really are going to scare ourselves (unnecessarily) to death.
We are going to do something soooo dumb as to extinguish ourselves.
The Burning of Biomass Could Not Be A Better way to do that.
Let’s try to do some Real Science on that and that alone – NOT a trawl thro mountains of minutia, trivia and seemingly obvious things and thus confuse Cause with Effect.
Because Ammonium Nitrate and Glyphosate do exactly that – They Burn Biomass.
Ammonium Nitrate is The Cause of the rising atmospheric CO₂ – insanely because it’s use results in a decrease of (natural) absorptions = exactly contrary to what everyone thinks, what they think they see and most esp, what they are told.
That stuff is the cause of the (self inflicted) mess we are in right now and we’re doing All The Wrong Things to try get out of it.
So we’re down to a single cause for variable weather again, are we Peta?
Ammonium Nitrate is it?
That’s about as mad as claiming CO2 is the sole cause of a slightly warming planet.
Just be glad he didn’t get onto “sugar consumption”…
Throughout history, tyrannical regimes have had well funded propaganda machinery, the Met Office is that useful idiot
Useful?
Useful to them.
I have always believed weather reporting described the worst possible situation so the population would be warned and could prepare for the worst. If the worst doesn’t happen, it’s no big deal. If the weather is worse – especially if it results in loss of life, people want the blood of the forecasters.
This shouldn’t apply at all to climate science, of course. Climate science should be reporting past and future norms. I like models, but most of the current models miss the norm by a wide margin.
Once you create your fantasy realm you need to populate it with monsters, villain, and dwerps in need of rescue.
Predictions are hard. Especially about the future.
The MET Office got this one wrong. It happens. The questions to ask are:
1) How often do they get the warnings wrong?
2) How often do they get the warnings right?
3) How often do they not give warnings that they should have done?
4) When they are wrong, is it consistently biased towards the concerned or assuring?
5) Are there certain classes of events that the MET Office are better at or worse at predicting?
6) Any other questions that you can think of that are useful…
Anyone can have a bad day and make a mistake. Is it consistent?
Yes, not only consistent, but purposely consistent – they have sold their souls to the green devil
I prefer to think of the Bureaucracies as Demon Spawn of the Globalist One World Ruling Elite. It is the politicians that are the soul sellers.
That’s not the point. It’s about the MET office catastrophizing everything.
All good questions. Might I add another one:
How often has the MET Office (or the BBC) apologised when they their forecast turns out to be massively wrong? Or even made a public statement admitting they got it massively wrong.
That is a good question.
It shows whether they are interested in improvement or concealment.
Neither I think that it is conscious and deliberate.
By forecasting an extreme of weather be it wind, rain, sun, snow and whatever then a constant stream leaves an impression on many impressionable people. Even if the event doesn’t happen in their locale then it must have happened elsewhere because the Met Office said it would. It’s a win win for the Met Office Alarmists.
Micheal Fish’s There’s No Hurricane forecast would have been blamed on Climate Armageddon making it suddenly get worse on landfall.
It is not about wrong or right predictions but their purposefully incorrect assignment of root cause and working with their co-conspirators in the global press, on the payroll of the Corporatocracy, to whip up a State of Fear in the severely undereducated public school “gradiates” that is the problem.
Once they over-stimulate the populace’s amygdala over every fart in a skillet, they never follow up with so much as a ‘never mind’ let alone an explanation of what they might be doing wrong because there is very little science behind their reporting outside of the “Political” Science variety.
Their overblown hyperbole, insinuating every storm to be evidence of the impending end of days, is consistent and they should be subject to prosecution for their intentional misrepresentation of the science for the purpose of alarming the public. This is akin to global media repeatedly shouting “FIRE!” in a crowded theater.
I got anecdotal report that the rain in East Anglia was very heavy overnight Friday-Saturday for a couple of hours. But no reports of any flooding, rivers overflowing, nothing like that.
The Met Office is has become hysterical about the weather. They warned against high temps when it was going to reach 80F in August. Completely silly. In line however with the overreaction of last summer.
This year, unusually, there are no UK moorland fires so far
Meanwhile in another part of the wood, Bloomberg is reporting that the latest UK off shore wind auction may attract… no bids. Because the rate is set too low. So much for the falling cost of wind power!
In my part of Shropshire it was heavy Friday night but had mostly dried up by the morning thanks to the wind. Went to an agricultural show on Saturday expecting the fields to be a morass, but that all dried out quickly.
We realists know that, once all the proper associated costs are added to wind & solar (including end of life disposal), they are far more expensive than fossil fuels or nuclear – without increasing taxpayer subsidies, there is no business case for them, they only reason they get built is because the subsidies, CfDs & constraint payments are continually milking the taxpayer cow, resulting in high unit prices
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/exposing-the-hidden-costs-of-renewables
https://davidturver.substack.com/p/why-eroei-matters
I was camping in it. There were a few breezy periods and a two-hour period of noticeable rain. Other than that it was just a typically crap British weekend. I had no idea it was a named storm till I got home and read this!
I try hard not to be cynical; I give everyone the benenfit of any doubt and I take the trouble to look for some doubt. But the Met Office and the media are just LARPing disaster with their new “named storm” malarky.
I’ve heard the explanation for wanting to name each modest deviation from the average, but it’s baloney; it’s self-aggrandizing, and it dilutes the message so it won’t work when we really need it.
To the Met Office: do your job; give us the best forecast you can manage, then let the nation decide whether you’ve been heroes or not.
At about 08:15 on that Saturday morning I noticed on the Earth.nullschoolI website that there was a tight F9 gale at the Fastnet Light house off S.Ireland — presumably the aforesaid Storm Betty. But by 10:00 it had fizzled out to exactly the gentle breeze Paul records.
Never seen a weather system dissipate at quite that pace before. I did take a screen shot at ~08:30, but it was already beginning to unravel.
I was interested because only the week before, the BBC TV had done a feature on the disastrous 1979 Fastnet Yacht race where 5 yachts foundered in a similar ‘instant storm’ and some 22 crew were drowned. That storm arose undetected by the met office until too late.
Yet the French had predicted it.
The book by one survivor of that terrible event is ‘Left For Dead’.
A brilliant and harrowing read.
It all goes back to the big storm of October 1987 when Michael Fish, the forecaster, assured viewers that there was not a hurricane on the way. The approaching weather system then tracked further north than expected and caused widespread destruction along the south coast of England and next swerved north into East Anglia. Over 20 million trees were lost that night. It hit us at about 7.30 am and ripped the lead roof off our outhouse.
The Met Office were heavily criticised for not warning us and so have, ever since, been crying wolf every time a storm approaches.
No, it’s pure climate alarmism hyperbole, nothing to do with recovering their dignity
Disagree. They’vce been doing it since before the climate hype took off…
It’s been a smooth transition from one to the other
I tend to agree there was an element of that in the 1990s. The 1987 storm killed 18 people, after assurances of “no hurricane”, it also took out at least 15 million trees* and left people without electricity for up to two weeks and total of £2 billion in damage.
After a cock-up like that it is understandable that forecasters would err on the side of caution.
Now of course a new generation is concentrating on man made climate change
*Those trees, a similar number to those sacrificed to renewable electricity in Scotland made almost as many headlines as the 18 deaths. Strange
You’re right, Ben, the angle probanly shifted with the generation change.
Spent a great day on Saturday at the 147th Minsterlyy Agricultural Show. Bit breezy in the morning, but was fine most of the day. Got a bit sunburned.
The Met Office are so desperate to be the bastion of climate alarmism, their search for adverse weather conditions and to label them, has gone into hysterical overdrive
Long gone are it’s days of being a weather service, it is now a full on propaganda unit of the globalist elite bomber command
It has shunned science and honesty and integrity and now sits firmly in its Pandemonium ivory tower, likely head quartered in Davos
Its a shameful embarrassment to decades of democracy, gained by the sacrifice of those who fought tyranny in two world wars
Can ardent BBC supporters purchase “I survived Storm Betty” tee-shirts?
Proceeds to help fund out-of-work “activist journalists” as more and more people realize the mainstream media is full of hot air (which probably generates more of a weather impact than Betty did).
The Met office seems to be a microcosm of what is happening n the greater world. At one level its full of alarmist nonsense whilst at another the regular forecasters are in fact telling as near the truth as they can.
One should discriminate between the ‘political wing’ of the Met office and its rank and file meteorologists.
It’s the meeja wots hiding the big pitchur-
As the planet burns, the world’s media wilfully ignores the big picture (msn.com)
Only the likes of intrepid Crikey soldier on against such a tide of wilful silence surrounding the dooming.
The devastation of Storm Betty..
I’m sure that there are some statistics involved in any weather forecast — ” … and a 30% chance of rain” for example. Unfortunately, it is difficult to communicate such statistics to the general population. And if they are not in the forecast and a 20% event occurred there would be headlines blaming the weather forecasters for someone’s washed-out picnic or a cancelled sporting event.
Likewise Hilary…
Didn’t I just predict she was gonna run around near top of Baja Peninsula (I said near Ensenada) at around 14:00hrs PST Sunday and promptly vanish
I got it wrong, she was 2 hours late.
A girl’s prerogative of course.
sorry
That dry weather created a lot of dust, added to which would be the (normal) wildfire smoke, traffic smut and other pollutions
They’d have been swept up by that high pressure system and dropped in a banana shaped curve, into the water, around the south eastern flank of that system.
Sol would have heated that water more than it would had the water been clear and there is The Exact Path that Hilary followed as she approached land
Hilary was a child of Soil Erosion
“Storm Betty”
It’s ridiculous to name thunderstorms.
Tom, not if you are trying to set a record for annual number of “named storms”….
Oooh Betty! The Met Office has done another whoopsie!
Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em
Here in the US The Weather Channel has been naming winter storms for years.
(I’m waiting for a warning about Furious Flurries Fred one of these winters.)
Apart from assertions, Mr Homewood offers up no data to confirm his opinion of …..
“”Betty–The Storm That Never Was”
One such is a dud that Trawscoed did not have strong winds.
Well no, tis true …. because it wasn’t expected to have as it’s outside of the warning area.
The other wind data he gives merely confirms the warning to be correct,
“Sure enough, they found a handful of extremely exposed sites.”.
Well, yes tis true … because they are the ones reporting in real time.
There are others eg.
Caernarfon a/p EGCK Max gust reported at 190250Z 48 KT (55mph)
Valley EGOV Max gust reported 190220Z 50Kt (57mph)
And as for rainfall amounts, he again confirms the correctness of the forecast by saying “Ballypatrick in N Ireland saw the most rain, 36mm”.
And further…
Homewood: “Following on from the heatwave that never was, the Met Office decided to hype Storm Betty. There was talk of half a month’s rainfall, maybe as much as 80mm:”
Indeed so (LOL) …
https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/northern-ireland/weather-in-ni-set-to-improve-after-storm-betty-causes-havoc/a1826510883.html
“The Co Down village of Katesbridge was heavily affected by the rain, receiving more than half a month’s worth of rainfall in under 12 hours. The area saw 45.4mm of rain, with their August average is 84mm.”
BTW: Katesbridge is on low ground.
As for “up to 70 mph in exposed places”
“exposed” = unlikely to have an anemometer there
Not disproved.
And then we have the, oh so clever “But Gentle Breeze Betty does not have quite the same ring to it!”
And the uncritical “skeptics on here lap it up uncritically – which, of course why he posts here.
In pictures:
“Betty–The Storm That Never Was” ……
(Yes in Eire – where the storm was forecast to track over and cause most issues)
https://www.rte.ie/news/2023/0819/1400542-weather-storm-betty/
https://www.met.ie/meteorologists-commentary/storm-betty-to-impact-ireland-friday-18th-august-2023#:~:text=Storm%20Betty%20will%20track%20up,difficult%20travelling%20conditions%20are%20expected.
The graphics and forecasts are UK Met office. The Irish met only named the ‘storm’
Its a major problem worldwide different Met offices
They use computer models which are ok for general wide area forecast but then try to use the same models for more detailed predictions, which they are hopeless at mainly because it will give different answers for the multiple runs of the model.
Weather forecasting skills which they are trained for and often have long experience are replaced by the computer graphics output of the models which are passed on to their weather communicators/journalists to make public – who dont have the meteorological forecasting training
Our interest in this post is not for the consistent behavior of the Met office, which we all already know about. It is the sad fact that these folks have nothing better to do with their time (I carefully avoided using the word “talent.” If their imaginary climate crisis did not exist they would be out of a job of making up news.
re: “ There was talk of half a month’s rainfall, maybe as much as 80mm “
Okay – here’s how bad the Metric system really is: Every time I see a precipitation amount in mm (millimeters or 1/1000ths of a meter) I have to convert that mentally to cm to be meaningful!
(Space your fingers 1 mm apart? CAN YOU DO IT? Now try 1 cm – point made?)