Global warming alert! Global warming alert!
From the same nation that brought you the ClimateGate scandal comes the weather bureau that admits it’s odds of forecasting the weather correctly are the same as if it did it by flipping a coin.
The Daily Mail UK reports the wild weather story:
This is our own famous Met Office, which last September confidently predicted a warmer than average winter for Britain. Tell that to Eurostar passengers stuck in the Channel Tunnel for 18 hours before Christmas, the breakdown of their trains blamed on the coldest weather for 15 years.
Not until late November did the Met Office tone down its prediction by saying that there was a ‘50 per cent chance’ of a mild winter.
Spinning a coin could have given the same result – not one you would expect from an organisation that spends nearly £170million a year, has 1,500 staff and a team of scientists operating a £30million supercomputer capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second, with a carbon footprint the size of a small town.
Yet even with this brand-new computer in action since last August, on December 10 the Met Office predicted that it was ‘more likely than not that 2010 will be the warmest year in the instrumental record, beating the previous record year which was 1998′. That prediction stands unchanged.
How could the Met Office be so wrong, both about its barbecue summer and the mild winter? And could the answer to that question have anything to do with its remarkable transformation in recent years?
To repeat the oft-asked question, why should we believe these guys can predict the weather in 100 years when they can’t predict the weather next week?
Source: Daily Mail UK via Bluegrass Pundit
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