The Met Office and the BBC - More AGW Alarmism

[Teddy Bear]

We commented a little while back on how the BBC had re-contracted with the Met Office to do their weather reports, despite the previous appalling predictions made by them.

Among the motives mentioned there, then additionally you have to know their shared political goal with regard to the spread of global warming propaganda is the same. Any other weather forecasting organisation that are good at their job, don't use the rubbish statistics as that of the Met Office. But for the BBC to use them, they wouldn't be able to continue their bullshit brainwashing.

Big, hot, shiny orb in sky caused by 'climate change' says UK Met Office

By James Delingpole

Is “climate change” to blame for the smog in Moscow and the peat fires which have swept across Russia and devastated 30 per cent of its wheat harvest?

But of course, says a man from the Met Office, as reported in a BBC bulletin so predictably skewed towards AGW alarmism it might just as well have been taken from a press release by the World Worldlife Fund. (And which is the other expert the BBC decides to quote on this issue? Why none other than the Russian head of “Climate and Energy Programme” at the WWF, who – quel surprise! – sees the fires as a clear sign that greenhouse gases must urgently be reduced).

For a more balanced perspective, try this interview with Pat Michaels on RT.

Or this interview with Piers Corbyn.

Michaels believes the Russian heat wave has more to do with a “jet stream anomaly”, while Corbyn – whose WeatherAction long range forecast predicted the heat wave – says it is caused by “circulation patterns caused by a combination of solar activity and the phase of the moon.” Similar climatic patterns – a heat wave in Russia, flooding on the Indian subcontinent and wet English summers – were experienced 132 years ago. We have been here before, in other words. Nihil novi sub sole.

Yeah but Corbyn and Michaels are both sceptics so of course they’re bound to play down the Climate Change problem. Well maybe but the stubborn fact remains that there has been no net global warming since 1998. It may feel hot right now if you’re in Moscow or parts of the USA, but there are other parts of the world which are experiencing abnormally cold conditions, as C3headlines reports here. The Pacific is experiencing unpredecented cooling, Argentina is colder than Antarctica, Santiago in Chile has had its coldest July since 1908.

But don’t expect to hear much about this inconvenient cold from the Met Office or the BBC. It doesn’t fit their narrative.

[Teddy Bear]

The Plot Thickens!!!

While the following excellent article is not specifically about the BBC, but about the Met Office, we can draw conclusions about the relationship between the two based on what is revealed by it.

While 'Green Fingers' usually means good with seeds, the word that springs to mind in this case is SEEDY, and that's really an understatement. For what should be trusted organisations that we rely on for good information, that without will do damage to our society, both in the case of the BBC and their partners in crime - the Met Office, their corruption and greed is impervious to this requirement. Both not fit for purpose!

The green hijack of the Met Office is crippling Britain
By Christopher Booker 8:00AM GMT 26 Dec 2010

By far the biggest story of recent days, of course, has been the astonishing chaos inflicted, to a greater or lesser extent, on all of our lives by the fact that we are not only enjoying what is predicted to be the coldest December since records began in 1659, but also the harshest of three freezing winters in a row. We all know the disaster stories – thousands of motorists trapped for hours on paralysed motorways, days of misery at Heathrow, rail passengers marooned in unheated carriages for up to 17 hours. But central to all this – as the cry goes up: “Why wasn’t Britain better prepared?” – has been the bizarre role of the Met Office.

We might start with the strange affair of the Quarmby Review. Shortly after Philip Hammond became Transport Secretary last May, he commissioned David Quarmby, a former head of the Strategic Rail Authority, to look into how we might avoid a repeat of last winter’s disruption. In July and again in October, Mr Quarmby produced two reports on “The Resilience of England’s Transport System in Winter”; and at the start of this month, after our first major snowfall, Mr Quarmby and two colleagues were asked to produce an “audit” of their earlier findings.

The essence of their message was that they had consulted the Met Office, which advised them that, despite two harsh winters in succession, these were “random events”, the chances of which, after our long previous run of mild winters, were only 20 to one. Similarly, they were told in the summer, the odds against a third such winter were still only 20 to one. So it might not be wise to spend billions of pounds preparing for another “random event”, when its likelihood was so small. Following this logic, if the odds against a hard winter two years ago were only 20 to one, it might have been thought that the odds against a third such “random event” were not 20 to one but 20 x 20 x 20, or 8,000 to one.

What seems completely to have passed Mr Quarmby by, however, is the fact that in these past three years the Met Office’s forecasting record has become a national joke. Ever since it predicted a summer warmer and drier than average in 2007 – followed by some of the worst floods in living memory – its forecasts have been so unerringly wrong that even the chief adviser to our Transport Secretary might have noticed.

The Met Office’s forecasts of warmer-than-average summers and winters have been so consistently at 180 degrees to the truth that, earlier this year, it conceded that it was dropping seasonal forecasting. Hence, last week, the Met Office issued a categorical denial to the Global Warming Policy Foundation that it had made any forecast for this winter. Immediately, however, several blogs, led by Autonomous Mind, produced evidence from the Met Office website that in October it did indeed publish a forecast for December, January and February. This indicated that they would be significantly warmer than last year, and that there was only “a very much smaller chance of average or below-average temperatures”. So the Met Office has not only been caught out yet again getting it horribly wrong (always in the same direction), it was even prepared to deny it had said such a thing at all.

The real question, however, is why has the Met Office become so astonishingly bad at doing the job for which it is paid nearly £200 million a year – in a way which has become so stupendously damaging to our country?

The answer is that in the past 20 years, as can be seen from its website, the Met Office has been hijacked from its proper role to become wholly subservient to its obsession with global warming. (At one time it even changed its name to the Met Office “for Weather and Climate Change”.) This all began when its then-director John Houghton became one of the world’s most influential promoters of the warmist gospel. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and remained at the top of it for 13 years. It was he who, in 1990, launched the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change, closely linked to the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia (CRU), at the centre of last year’s Climategate row, which showed how the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC had been prepared to bend their data and to suppress any dissent from warming orthodoxy.

The reason why the Met Office gets its forecasts so hopelessly wrong is that they are based on those same computer models on which the IPCC itself relies to predict the world’s climate in 100 years time. They are programmed on the assumption that, as CO2 rises, so temperatures must inexorably follow. For 17 years this seemed plausible, because the world did appear to be getting warmer. We all became familiar with those warmer winters and earlier springs, which the warmists were quick to exploit to promote their message – as when Dr David Viner of the CRU famously predicted to The Independent in 2000 that “within a few years winter snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event”. (Last week, that article from 10 years ago was the most viewed item on The Independent’s website.)

But in 2007, the computer models got caught out, failing to predict a temporary plunge in global temperatures of 0.7C, more than the net warming of the 20th century. Much of the northern hemisphere suffered what was called in North America “the winter from hell”. Even though temperatures did rise again, in the winter of 2008/9 this happened again, only worse.

The Met Office simply went into denial. Its senior climate change official, Peter Stott, said in March 2009 that the trend towards milder winters was likely to continue. There would not be another winter like 1962/3 “for 1,000 years or more”. Last winter was colder still. And now we have another even more savage “random event”, for which we are even less prepared. (The Taxpayers’ Alliance revealed last week that councils have actually ordered less salt this winter than last.)

The consequences of all this are profound. Those who rule over our lives have been carried off into a cloud-cuckoo-land for which no one was more responsible than the zealots at the Met Office, subordinating all it does to their dotty belief system. Significantly, its chairman, Robert Napier, is not a weatherman but a “climate activist”, previously head of WWF-UK, one of our leading warmist campaigning groups.

At one end of this colossal diversion of national resources, permeating every level of government, we have the hapless Mr Quarmby, who feels obliged to follow the Met Office and advise that the present freeze is a “random event” and calls for no special responses – with the results we see on every side. At the other, fixated by the same belief system, we have our Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, hoping we can somehow keep our lights on and our economy running by spending hundreds of billions of pounds on thousands more windmills.

More than once in the past week, as our power stations have been thrashed way beyond normal peak power demand, the contribution of wind turbines has been so small that it has registered as 0 per cent. (See the website for the New Electricity Trading Arrangements: Google “neta electricity summary page”, and find the table of “source by fuel type”.) At the heart of all this greenie make-believe that has our political class in its thrall has been the hijacking of the Met Office from its proper role. It’s no longer just a national joke: it is turning into a national catastrophe.

[Teddy Bear]

What is the point of weather forecasters who are too embarrassed to announce their predictions?

That, according to the Met Office is their current position. They claim they knew we were going to have a severely cold winter but only reported it to the government as they were too embarrassed to make this claim public following the 'BBQ Summer' debacle.

So what is the BBC doing using this shambles? If they're either too incompetent to get it right, or too insecure to announce it when they do, then they're really not fit for purpose.

Come to think of it, they're a prefect match for the BBC!

Met Office knew big freeze was coming but hushed it up

By Rachel Quigley
Last updated at 8:19 AM on 4th January 2011

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The Met Office warned ministers to expect an ‘exceptionally cold winter’ but then kept the prediction secret from the public.

The forecaster decided not to reveal the information because it was embarrassed after wrongly predicting a ‘barbecue summer’ in 2009, BBC analyst Roger Harrabin said.

Instead of a seasonal forecast, it offered only monthly snapshots.

The disclosure raises questions over whether transport authorities and councils could have been better prepared for the cold snap which brought chaos before Christmas.

As temperatures fell to a record low, train services were badly disrupted, roads were covered by snow and thousands were stranded at Heathrow as flights were cancelled and the airport struggled to clear the backlog.

Last night Mr Harrabin said: ‘With Britain shivering through a third winter in a row, shouldn’t the weather forecasters have warned us well in advance? Why didn’t the Met Office tell us?

‘The truth is it did suspect we were in for an exceptionally cold early winter, and told the Cabinet Office so in October.

‘But we weren’t let in on the secret because the Met Office no longer publishes its seasonal forecasts due to the ridicule it suffered for predicting a barbecue summer in 2009.

‘It did forecast in November that December would be bitter, but many of us may have taken the prediction with a truckload of salt.’

Last night the Met Office confirmed it had passed on the advice, but a spokesman denied that withholding it from the public was motivated by embarrassment.

‘We did brief the Cabinet Office in October on what we believed would be an
exceptionally cold and long winter,’ she said.

‘Despite media claims to the contrary, the decision not to publish any more seasonal forecasts came after we undertook public research about the way in which we deliver the weather.

‘It was the public who decided that a monthly outlook would be more useful than a seasonal forecast to give a general indication of what the weather will be like for the following month.’

The Met office was widely criticised in 2009 for predicting a barbecue summer which turned out to be a washout.

Mr Harrabin, who made his comments in the Radio Times, is one of the BBC’s most respected figures.

He has been reporting on the environment for more than 20 years and lectures at Oxford and Cambridge universities.

His claims come after the forecaster was criticised for its advocacy of climate change.

Campaigners have claimed it has become too interested in calling for action to cut carbon emissions.

They say it is in thrall to a belief that temperatures will rise in the long term, and so has neglected its focus on accurate short and medium term forecasts.

The BBC announced last year that it was considering dropping the Met Office as its official forecaster after 87 years. But in July it decided to extend the contract for a further five years.

The Cabinet Office said that Met Office forecasts are shared ‘as appropriate’ but could not say if roads authorities, airports and water companies had been passed the explicit deep freeze alert.

A spokesman said: ‘The Met Office provides the Government with regular updates throughout the year to inform short, medium and longer term planning. This information is shared as appropriate between departments and with local responders.

‘Government departments have, since winter 2009, continued to enhance preparedness and build resilience, informed by Met Office advice as well as the recommendations from David Quarmby’s review into last winter’s disruption and Dame Deirdre Hine’s review of the 2009 swine flu pandemic.’

[Teddy Bear]

An even more scathing article on the subject in the Express, further showing how much bullshit is the Met Office claim.

WHY THE MET OFFICE DIDN’T DARE TELL US IT WAS GETTING COLD

Thursday January 6,2011
By Leo McKinstry

THE bitter winter maintains its icy grip on Britain. This week has already seen heavy snowfall over large parts of the north and west, while last month was the coldest December since records began in the 17th century.
What has been almost as shocking as the plunging temperatures has been the lack of preparedness from the Government. The big freeze apparently arrived without any warning, plunging most of the country into chaos. Much of the transport network was reduced to paralysis before Christmas. Too many roads were left ungritted. Airlines complained about the lack of de-icing equipment for planes.

Yet it has now been claimed the Government was actually told that the arctic weather was on its way and astonishingly this advice was kept secret.

According to BBC correspondent Roger Harrabin the Met Office specifically informed Cabinet ministers in October that Britain was facing “an exceptionally cold winter”. But this advice, said Harrabin, was not disclosed to the public because “the Met Office no longer publishes its seasonal forecasts due to the ridicule it suffered for predicting a barbecue summer in 2009”.

WelI would take all this with a shovelful of gritting salt. It sounds like a desperate act of spin by the Met Office to cover up yet another embarrassing fiasco. The boast about informing the Cabinet smacks of an attempt by the organisation to shift responsibility for its own catastrophic failings.

Are we really to believe that the Met’s forecasters privately gave their gloomy forecasts to ministers, who then for some inexplicable reason decided to form a conspiracy of silence against the public?

In any case it is no defence by the Met Office to say that it knew the truth but decided to keep it hidden from everyone except ministers. After all it is an outfit almost wholly funded by the taxpayer, to the tune of £170 million. Its primary duty should be to keep the public informed.

For the Met Office to say that it will not provide seasonal forecasts simply to spare its blushes after a string of calamitous errors is a national scandal and this irresponsible behaviour prompts the question as to why it should continue to be funded at all.

The spin should not be allowed to mislead us. The reality is that, in keeping with its atrocious recent record, the Met Office did in fact predict a mild winter. In October, at the very time it was supposedly telling the Cabinet that subzero blizzards were imminent, it clearly stated on its website that there was “a 60 to 80 per cent chance of warmer than average temperatures” this winter. But this upbeat prediction was completely out of tune with the work of private forecasters, most of whom were anticipating a severe cold snap.

As Jonathan Powell of Present Weather Solutions said with remarkable prescience: “It baffles me how the Met Office can predict a milder than average winter when all the indicators show that this winter will have parallels to the last one.”

The truth is that the Met Office’s credibility is shot to pieces. Its long-term forecasts are about as reliable as those of Nostradamus. This latest shambles is only in keeping with the dismal pattern of recent years. In 2007 its experts predicted a long, dry summer only to see Britain hit by the worst floods in living memory.

In 2009, right in the middle of a trio of glacial winters, it predicted that “snow and frost will become less of a feature in the future”. Similarly 2010 was hailed as likely to become “the warmest year on record”, a now laughable claim.

This sorry performance has been achieved despite the vast sums of public money lavished on the organisation. On top of the £170 million-a-year running costs the taxpayer also had to fork out £33 million for a colossal high-tech computer which is so large that it uses enough energy to power more than 1,000 homes. Yet most private forecasters do much better with far less expensive equipment.

The reason the Met Office is failing so badly is simple: over the past 20 years it has been hijacked by the radical green movement, with the result that it seems like a propaganda arm of the global warming industry. So politicised is the body that it is as much about climate change as about providing accurate weather forecasts.

At one stage it changed its name to the “Meteorological Office for Weather and Climate Change” to reflect its submission to green orthodoxy.

This mentality runs through all its operations. Former director John Houghton was instrumental in setting up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international body that has been hugely discredited in recent years.

Robert Napier, the Met Office chairman, is not a weather man by background but an evangelist for green politics. Among his other positions are chairman of the Green Fiscal Commission and director of the Carbon Disclosure Project. Even the BBC’s own weather staff have openly suggested that the Met Office’s computer models might be biased in favour of the global warming theory.

Like all dogmatists the leading figures at the Met Office are in denial about the world around them. There is no hard evidence that the earth is heating up and all their shameful proselytising will no longer deceive anyone, especially not the shivering British public which has to pay through the nose.

[Teddy Bear]

This latest article by Christopher Booker concerns bias both by the BBC and the Met Office.

How BBC warmists abuse the science
Sir Paul Nurse, president of the Royal Society, is an expert in genetics, not climatology, writes Christopher Booker.

The timing was immaculate. Last Tuesday, across a two-page extract from the memoirs of Peter Sissons, the senior BBC newsreader, was the headline: “The BBC became a propaganda machine for climate change zealots – I was treated as a lunatic for daring to dissent.” The previous evening the BBC had put out a perfect example of the zealotry which had made Mr Sissons, as a grown-up journalist, so angry. Horizon’s “Science Under Attack” turned out to be yet another laborious bid by the BBC to defend the global warming orthodoxy it has long been so relentless in promoting.

Their desperation is understandable. The past few years have seen their cherished cause crumbling on all sides. The Copenhagen climate conference, planned to land mankind with the biggest bill in history, collapsed in disarray. The Climategate emails scandal confirmed that scientists at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had distorted key data. The IPCC’s own authority was further rocked by revelations that its more alarmist claims were based not on science but on the inventions of environmental activists. Even the weather has turned against them, showing that all the computer models based on the assumption that rising CO2 means rising temperatures have got it wrong.

The formula the BBC uses in its forlorn attempts to counterattack has been familiar ever since its 2008 series Climate Wars. First, a presenter with some scientific credentials comes on, apparently to look impartially at the evidence. Supporters of the cause are allowed to put their case without challenge. Hours of film of climate-change “deniers” are cherrypicked for soundbites that can be shown, out of context, to make them look ridiculous. The presenter can then conclude that the “deniers” are a tiny handful of eccentrics standing out against an overwhelming scientific “consensus”.

Monday’s Horizon exemplified this formula to a T. The scientist picked to front the progamme was Sir Paul Nurse, a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, now President of the Royal Society (which has been promoting warmist orthodoxy even longer than the BBC). The cue to justify the programme’s title was all the criticism which greeted those Climategate emails leaked from Sir Paul’s old university, East Anglia, showing how scientists had been manipulating their data to support the claim that temperatures have recently risen to unprecedented levels.

One of the two “deniers” chosen to be stitched up, in classic BBC fashion, was the Telegraph’s James Delingpole. He has spoken for his own experience on our website. Still worse, however, was the treatment of Professor Fred Singer, the distinguished 86-year-old atmospheric physicist who set up the satellite system for the US National Weather Bureau. We saw Nurse cosying up to Singer in a coffee house, then a brief clip of the professor explaining how a particular stalagmite study had shown temperature fluctuations correlating much more neatly with solar activity than with levels of CO2. This snippet enabled Nurse to imply that Singer’s scepticism is based on one tiny local example, whereas real scientists look at the overall big picture. No mention of the 800-page report edited by Singer in which dozens of expert scientists challenge the CO2 orthodoxy from every angle.

The most telling moment, however, came in an interview between Nurse and a computer-modelling scientist from Nasa, presented as a general climate expert although he is only a specialist in ice studies. Asked to quantify the relative contributions of CO2 to the atmosphere by human and natural causes, his seemingly devastating reply was that 7 gigatons (billion tons) are emitted each year by human activity while only 1 gigaton comes from natural sources such as the oceans. This was so much the message they wanted that Nurse invited him to confirm that human emissions are seven times greater than those from all natural sources.

This was mind-boggling. It is generally agreed that the 7 billion tonnes of CO2 due to human activity represent just over 3 per cent of the total emitted. That given off by natural sources, such as the oceans, is vastly greater than this, more than 96 per cent of the total. One may argue about the “carbon cycle” and how much CO2 the oceans and plants reabsorb. But, as baldly stated, the point was simply a grotesque misrepresentation, serving, like many of the programme’s other assertions, only to give viewers a wholly misleading impression.

Another came after Nurse had defended his old university’s part in the Climategate emails. Inevitably he claimed that various reports had cleared the scientists involved of any wrongdoing, without mentioning that every one of the inquiries had carefully avoided the scientific questions at the heart of the row. (Yet another superficial parliamentary report last week, despite the heroic efforts of Labour MP Graham Stringer, was rendered meaningless by the same central evasion.)

Nurse then held up a copy of The Sunday Telegraph, showing the headline over one of my columns: “The worst scientific scandal of our generation”. He implied that this referred only to Climategate, which would have been absurd. My article in fact explained how the emails merely shed further light on all the other ways in which the scientists involved have for years been finagling data crucial to the warmist case, by exaggerating the recent rise in temperatures and eliminating all the evidence that past temperatures have often, through natural causes, been higher than they are today.

Although Sir Paul presented himself as the champion of objective science, he frequently showed that, for all his expertise in cell biology, he knows little about climate. The fact that someone is an expert in one particular field – even if he is President of the Royal Society – gives him little more authority to pronounce on issues with which he is unfamiliar than a man holding forth in a pub.

Far from it being “science” which is under attack from all those experts who dispute the orthodoxy on global warming, the truth is the very reverse. It is the dissenters who are trying to speak for genuine science, against those who misuse its prestige to promote a cause which has too often betrayed the very essence of proper scientific method.

The fact that the BBC has been turned, in Peter Sissons’ words, into a mere “propaganda machine” is scandal enough. But a far greater scandal is the way the authority of science has been hijacked to serve a fatally flawed belief system which threatens to inflict irreparable damage on the future of us all.

Is Met Office again playing games with its weather data?
Dr Benny Peiser and Dr David Whitehouse, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), have written to John Hirst, chief executive of the beleaguered Met Office, asking for an explanation of a press release issued by his organisation on January 20 and headed “2010 – a near record year”. This won headlines by claiming that last year was hotter than any other in the past decade.
When the two men examined the original data from which this claim was derived – compiled by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and the Met Office’s Hadley Centre – it clearly showed 2010 as having been cooler than 2005 (and 1998) and equal to 2003. It emerged that, for the purposes of the press release, the data had been significantly adjusted.
Comparing the actual data for each year, from 2001 to 2010, with that given in the press release shows that for four years the original figure has been adjusted downwards. Only for 2010 was the data revised upwards, by the largest adjustment of all, allowing the Met Office to claim that 2010 was the hottest year of the decade.

I asked the Met Office to comment on what seems like yet another embarrassing example of juggling with the figures. It denied the charge and I shall report on its lengthily evasive reply, once the GWPF has had a more considered response from Mr Hirst.

[Teddy Bear]

We have long noted the shared agenda of the BBC and the Met Office in their promotion of Man Made Climate Change.

The only difference between them in the repercussions involved in adhering to this faulty science, is that the BBC can ignore the evidence that shows how tainted is this agenda to pursuit it further, while the Met Office has to make predictions based on this 'science'.

With all of their predictions predictably wrong, as is always the case if one fails to properly observe reality, they can then be judged, and hopefully punished.

It will happen too to the BBC one day, it will just take a little longer - that's my prediction.

Forecast failure: how the Met Office lost touch with reality
Ideology has corrupted a valuable British institution

It has been a glorious sunny week in Britain — it feels as if summer is finally here. As Andy Murray was winning Wimbledon, temperatures on Centre Court exceeded 40˚C in the sun. Northern Ireland has been hotter than Cancun. The papers have begun their annual drip-feed of stories about ‘tombstoning’ — young people throwing themselves from cliffs and bridges into water. It is hard to believe that it was just a few weeks ago that the Met Office braced us for a ‘colder-than-average’ July and a decade of soggy summers. Not so hard to believe that they held a crisis meeting recently, to discuss why they have got the weather so wrong for so long.

Only this week has Britain had a small taste of the kind of temperatures the Met Office has been promising for over a decade. In September 2008, it forecast a trend of mild winters: the following winter turned out to be the coldest for a decade. Then its notorious promise of a ‘barbecue summer’ was followed by unrelenting rain. Last year, it forecast a ‘drier than average’ spring — before another historic deluge that was accompanied by the coldest temperatures for 50 years. Never has the Met Office had more scientists and computing power at its disposal — yet never has it seemed so baffled by the British weather.

But there is no paradox. It is precisely the power of this technology in harnessing climate scientists’ assumptions about global warming that has scuppered the Met Office’s predictions — and made it a propagandist for global warming alarmism. It has become an accomplice to a climate change agenda that now affects where and how we travel, the way houses are built, the lights we read by. And its errors are no laughing matter to tourism industry chiefs in Cornwall and the north-west, who say the Met Office’s false warnings of dire summers cost hundreds of millions of pounds in cancelled bookings.

For some time, the Met Office’s longer range forecasts have served a political purpose. They tend to be issued just before the United Nations annual end-is-nigh summit in November, so they can have a powerful impact if they are sufficiently scary. But for 12 of the last 13 years, the Met’s temperature forecast has been too high. As Warren Buffett likes to say, forecasts tell you little about the future and a lot about the forecaster. Recently, the Met Office has decided that global warming means colder summers in Britain (due to North Atlantic sea temperatures pushing the jet stream south). But they may have to readjust their forecasts again.

With this record, if the Met Office were a secondary school, it would be subject to special measures and intensive monitoring. Instead its directors shower praise on themselves. ‘Our successes during the past year form a strong base from which we can go forward,’ they write in their annual report. Say it often enough, and people will believe you. In the recent spending announcement, the Treasury rewarded the Met Office with a new supercomputer so it can develop ‘its world-class research base’. Being so wrong so often is a costly business.

The Met Office doesn’t need a new computer. It needs a new computer model and updated assumptions to replace its HadCM3 model, which builds in an average warming of 0.2˚C a decade in response to rising greenhouse gases. Although emissions have been higher than expected, global temperatures have been flat for 15 years. The Met Office’s own temperature series even shows a small decline since 2006.

In an interview last month in Der Spiegel, the German climate scientist Hans von Storch — a rare exception to climate science’s cult of omertà — admitted that in model simulations, a 15-year pause occurred less than 2 per cent of the time and a 20-year pause not at all. If the current standstill continues for another five years, he said, ‘We will need to acknowledge that something is fundamentally wrong with our climate models.’ Perhaps that is why, at a February conference on avoiding dangerous climate change, Dr Julia Slingo, the evangelical chief scientist of the Met Office, warned of the ‘urgent need’ to shift discussion away from the average global temperature and instead focus on changes in rainfall and weather patterns.

The Met Office has a lot to lose in terms of its reputation. Britain is something of a global leader, second only to America in providing the most authors and review editors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose periodic reports are seen as the bible of global climate change. Of those from Britain, nearly a quarter work for the Met Office. ‘I have Julia Slingo on speed dial,’ Sir John Beddington quipped towards the end of his tenure as the government’s chief scientific adviser.

When making their case, climate experts indulge in the widely shared misapprehension that scientists are much more intelligent than non-scientists. So when in 2010 Dr Slingo appeared before the House of Commons Science and Technology committee to talk about the Met Office’s take on the Climategate emails, she treated MPs like patsies.

At issue was the discredited ‘Hockey Stick’, a temperature series that purportedly showed static temperatures for 900 years and a sharp increase in the 20th century. Dr Slingo told MPs that the relevant chapter in the IPCC report had been subject to the ‘most robust peer review process’ seen in any area of science.

Lawyer
Had the Met Office been worried that the peer review had failed? ‘Not at all, no,’ Dr Slingo replied. Anyone with the briefest acquaintance with the facts would know that this was a fairytale — yet the only MP to vote against the committee’s rubber stamping of the science was Labour’s Graham Stringer, an analytical chemist by training.

Thanks to the Climategate emails, we know that in private, climate scientists saw things very differently. At the very least, one of them wrote, the Hockey Stick was ‘a very sloppy piece of work’. In this respect, there is more integrity in the NHS than in British climate science. Bound and gagged though they may be, at least there are whistleblowers in the NHS.

Worse was to come. Last November, the Labour peer Lord Donoughue tabled a written question asking whether the government considered the 0.8˚C rise in the average global temperature since 1880 to be ‘statistically significant’. Yes, came the reply. Douglas J. Keenan, a mathematician and former quant trader for Morgan Stanley, knew the answer was false. With Keenan’s help, Donoughue tabled a follow-up question. The Met Office refused to answer it, not once, but five times. Its refusal to clarify its stance left the energy minister, Baroness Verma, in an awkward position. Only then did it confirm that it had no basis for the claim.

The Met Office’s record of obstruction and denial should give pause to even the firmest believer in global warming and illustrates the profound incompatibility of state science (which climate science has become) and the real thing. ‘We should listen to the scientists — and we should believe them,’ said Ed Davey, the Climate Secretary, earlier this year. Yet his department has officially sanctioned the anti-scientific practice of withholding data. The climate secretary has denounced sceptics and other non-believers as ‘crackpots’ — an attack conforming to a key feature of what the philosopher Karl Popper defined as pseudoscience. Genuine science invites refutation; pseudoscience tries to silence dissent.

Scepticism in science should always be welcomed. With climate science, it is necessary. As Davey remarked in his speech, ‘the science drives the policy’, but last month might well mark the moment when the government’s energy policy lost all contact with reason. It doesn’t take much to imagine how Mrs Thatcher would have galvanised her government if she had been told Britain was sitting on the richest shale gas deposits in the world. Yet the Cameron government pushes on with the Energy Bill to implement the 2008 Climate Change Act and its colossal £404 billion price tag.

Last month saw Ofgem warn of power rationing; the government agree a price guarantee for nuclear power; and in effect a £10 billion transfer from British to French taxpayers via state-owned EDF. In Brussels, Ed Davey told the EU to adopt unilateral emissions cuts, despite the fact that even Germany is having second thoughts about this strange form of economic suicide.

None of this would be happening without climate scientists — led by those at the top of the Met Office — raising the alarm and behaving like propagandists. ‘We seem to be losing the communications battle,’ Dr Slingo told the conference on dangerous climate change in February. Winning the battle meant personalising the narrative about what climate change might mean in the future, she said. This is not science. It is political spin from the same playbook that brought us Tony Blair’s ‘dodgy dossier’ on Iraq. It comes as no surprise that the Met Office retains PR consultants to help with its climate change message.

At the very least, the Met Office has a duty of care to the rest of us: to be balanced and objective, to admit when they’ve got it wrong, not to indulge in speculation and to tell us what they don’t know. The Met Office has not discharged that duty. Politicians, in the grip of a mania, have told us we must defer to scientists.

But Britain is in this mess because scientists became political cheerleaders. In doing so, they abandoned science as the disinterested pursuit of knowledge. Failure to predict the weather is, in the scale of things, the least of it. With the cost of climate change policies approaching half a trillion pounds, the Met Office is setting itself up for the largest case of public misfeasance in British history.

[Teddy Bear]

Anybody in this country will be grateful if the storms have not seriously affected their homes and lives, although everybody here will be sick of it.
David Vance makes an interesting observation on just how the Met Office predicted the weather to be this winter.

RAINING RAINING…
By David Vance
The BBC appears to have overlooked what the MET OFFICE told us the weather was going to be like but for your information here is what they said…

SUMMARY – PRECIPITATION:

Confidence in the forecast for precipitation across the UK over the next three months is relatively low. For the December-January-February period as a whole there is a slight signal for below-average precipitation. The probability that UK precipitation for December-January-February will fall into the driest of our five categories is around 25% and the probability that it will fall into the wettest category is around 15% (the 1981-2010 probability for each of these categories is 20%).

Perhaps the BBC could investigate why the Met Office is allowed to pontificate on “climate change” when by its own words it has NO IDEA as to what our weather will do?

[Teddy Bear]

Christopher Booker reflects on the failed predictions of the Met Office over recent years, due to their adherence to try and relate everything to their AGW agenda. One only wonders why the BBC still affords them such deference.

UK weather: it's not as weird as our warmists claim
Misconceived EU and UK policies provide a better explanation of the floods than 'climate change'

Christopher Booker

Inevitably, in the wake of all these dramatic storms and floods, the usual suspects, eagerly abetted by the BBC, Channel 4 News and Sky, piled in to claim that the latest “extreme weather events” – coupled with blizzards in 49 of the 50 American states – are clear evidence of man-made global warming. At their forefront, proclaiming that “all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change”, was that arch-climate proponent Dame Julia Slingo, chief scientist at the Met Office; that same Met Office that, back in November, was predicting that “precipitation” for the three months between December and February was likely “to fall into the driest of our five categories”, and would more likely than not take the form of snow.

This is also, of course, the same Met Office that in March 2012 was assuring us that April to June that year would be drier than average, with April the driest month, just before we enjoyed the wettest April ever; that in October 2010 forecast that December would be 2ºC warmer than average, just before the coldest December since records began; and that in April 2009 said it was “odds on for a barbecue summer” with “below average” rainfall, just before the heavens opened for months on end.

Even more significantly, this was the same Dame Julia who, in 2010, told MPs that the global warming-obsessed Met Office relies for its short-term forecasts on the very same £33 million super-computer that it uses to provide the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) with its most valued projections of what the weather will be like in 100 years’ time.

As we know, since the 17-year “pause” in the rise in global temperatures made a nonsense of all those IPCC computer models, the warmists have sought to prop up their faltering religion by seizing on any “extreme weather event” they can lay their hands on, hot, cold, wet or dry. These recent storms and floods have been as manna from heaven for the likes of our “climate change” secretary Ed Davey, Lord Stern, the Great Moonbat and Bob Ward, the spokesman handsomely paid to spout all the required mantras by Jeremy Grantham, the billionaire climate zealot who has funded no fewer than two institutes at leading London universities.

Another Grantham luminary, and leading light of John Gummer’s “independent” Climate Change Committee, is Sir Brian Hoskins, wheeled on to preach the word by the BBC Radio 4 Today programme on Thursday. Although there might be “no simple link” to any of “these extreme events around the world”, he said (as they always do), nevertheless the increase in rainfall and atmospheric humidity, melting polar ice, temperatures likely to rise by “four to five degrees” by the end of the century and the threatening rise in sea levels, could only lead any sensible person to one conclusion.

All true science, of course, has here been thrown out of the window. There is no rising trend in atmospheric humidity. Put the Arctic and the Antarctic together and there is more polar sea ice today than at any time since satellite records began in 1979. Not even the IPCC predicts a temperature rise of 5ºC. The latest Nasa Grace satellite data on sea levels, which have been modestly rising since we emerged from the Little Ice Age 200 years ago, shows that, on the trend of the past decade, the rise by 2100 would be just 6.7in.

For proper evidence-based science these days one has to step outside the hermetically sealed bubble of warmist group-think and look to that array of expert blogs and websites that provide the data necessary to thinking straight. On the belief that Britain has recently experienced unprecedented rain, for instance, look at the analysis of the Met Office’s England and Wales rainfall data sets on Paul Homewood’s website, Not A Lot Of People Know That. There is no upward trend in our rainfall. Even January’s continual downpours made it only the sixteenth wettest month since records began in 1766. Even if this month’s rain adds a further 200mm (8in) to the December-January figure, the resulting 650mm would still be way short of the 812mm (32in) recorded between November 1929 and January 1930.

The real lesson of this episode is not that we are seeing unprecedented rain, but that, across the board, a whole raft of misconceived EU and UK policies have been horribly caught out. We now further have an official admission from the Environment Agency that the reason why it so disastrously abandoned dredging of our rivers such as the Thames and those needed to drain floodwater from the Somerset Levels when it took control in 1996 was that absurdly expensive new EU waste management rules made it “uneconomical” to dispose of the silt dredged out of them.

A real madness has taken over here, as we saw in that weird rant last week from the pitifully ill-equipped Mr Davey, when he lashed out at his “wilfully ignorant” Conservative colleagues for “parrotting the arguments of the most discredited climate change deniers”.

Whether or not it was he who described Owen Paterson as “climate stupid”, the one minister who has so far made a practical and informed contribution towards saving the Somerset Levels from any repeat of their present horror story, Davey claimed that these people were in danger of undermining the whole of Britain’s present energy policy. That, of course, is precisely what a growing number of better-informed people than himself would like to see.