An Honest Climate Debate

Met Office seasonal forecasts to be scrapped March 6, 2010

Met Office seasonal forecasts to be scrapped

BBC News, Friday, 5 March 2010

The Met Office is to stop publishing seasonal forecasts, after it came in for criticism for failing to predict extreme weather.

It was berated for not foreseeing that the UK would suffer this cold winter or the last three wet summers in its seasonal forecasts.

The forecasts, four times a year, will be replaced by monthly predictions.

The Met Office said it decided to change its forecasting approach after carrying out customer research.

Explaining its decision, the Met Office released a statement which said: “By their nature, forecasts become less accurate the further out we look.

Read the rest here

Mother Nature still defies the Met Office January 16, 2010

Mother Nature still defies the Met Office

By Christopher Booker
The Telegraph, 16 January 2010

Barely a month after last predicting, on November 28, that Britain would enjoy “a milder than average winter”, the Met Office last week came in for yet another mighty pasting, for failing to forecast the renewed snowfalls and freezing temperatures which brought traffic to a halt again in much of the country. In some northern towns, roadways were so icy that people had to crawl across them on hands and knees.

Two independent forecasters who did foresee the return of Arctic weather, and are predicting that there will be more, are Britain’s Piers Corbyn (who relies on solar activity for much of his prediction) and the US meteorologist Joe Bastardi of AccuWeather, who largely bases his forecasts on movements of air and ocean currents. Unlike the UK Met Office, of which both are highly critical, neither has been blinded by imagining that rising levels of carbon dioxide play a key part in shaping the weather.

Mr Bastardi, who was predicting months ago that both Europe and America were in for an abnormally cold winter (while the Met Office was about to get it hopelessly wrong for the third summer and winter in a row), is now predicting that this year’s cold weather, with renewed snowfalls, will last at least until March. Last month, according to Rutgers University in the US, saw the second greatest extent of snow cover in the northern hemisphere since records began in 1966. Meanwhile the state of Florida experienced sub-zero temperatures for the longest period in 100 years. (For more details see Anthony Watts’s Watts Up With That blog.)

Mr Bastardi is also wondrously scornful about that recent prediction of the UK Met Office’s very expensive computer models that 2010 will be “the warmest year on record”. Those poor guys, he says, are relying on an El Niño event in the Pacific which is simply not happening as they hoped.

Read the rest here

UK Met Office chief receives 25 pc pay rise January 6, 2010

Met Office chief receives 25 pc pay rise

By Christopher Hope and Martin Evans
The Telegraph, 5 Jan 2010

According to a copy of the organisation’s latest annual report and accounts, John Hirst, the organisation’s chief executive, received between £195,000 and £200,000 in pay and bonuses in 2008/9.

The figure is a 25 per cent increase on the £155,000 to £160,000 “pay equivalent” for Mr Hirst in 2007/8. Mr Hirst had joined midway through the previous financial year in September 2007.

The remuneration package – which includes salary, performance pay, overtime and other allowances – is more than the £192,414 salary paid to Gordon Brown this year. Mr Brown receives £130,594 in Prime Minister’s salary, and £61,820 as MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath.

Seven other directors received pay rises of between 3 per cent and 33 per cent. The biggest rise went to Nick Jobling, the Met Office’s chief financial officer, whose total salary jumped by a third to up to £100,000. Campaigners said the payments were “jaw-dropping”.

The large pay rises for the management of the Met Office came despite a series of widely criticised forecasts, including a warm winter in 2009/10 last October.

This followed its much lambasted forecast of a “barbecue summer” last year which drew strong criticism after heavy rainfall saw the wettest July for almost 100 years.

The organisation’s prediction of a mild winter in 2008-09 was also criticised after heavy snow fell last February and parts of southern England had their coldest night for 20 years in January.

Read the rest here

UK Met Office climate scientist: World temperatures set for record highs August 1, 2009

World temperatures set for record highs

The Telegraph, July 28, 2009

World temperatures are set to rise much faster than expected as a result of climate change over the next ten years, according to meteorologists.

In the last few years the world has experienced a “cooler period” since record high temperatures in summer 1998.

This has been used by global warming sceptics as proof that greenhouse gases are not causing a rise in temperatures.

However a new study by Nasa said the warming effect of greenhouse gases has been masked since 1998 because of a downward phase in the cycles of the sun that means there is less incoming sunlight and the El Nino weather pattern causing a cooling period over the Pacific.

But from this year solar activity will begin to pick up again and the El Nino phenomenon will cause storms and heatwaves.

The research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies the US Naval Research Laboratory.

It adds to existing data from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that predicted temperatures will rise because of an increase in greenhouse gases trapping heat in the atmosphere.

Because greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere, temperatures are set to increase over the next few years because the world is producing more carbon dioxide.

The new study adds the effect of El Nino, which is entering a new warm phase and of the impact of the solar cycle.

Gareth Jones, a climate research scientist at the Met Office, said the effect of global warming is unlikely to be masked by shorter term weather patterns in the future.

He said that 50 per cent of the 10 years after 2011 will be warmer than 1998. After that any year cooler than 1998 will be considered unusual.

“The amount of warming we expect from human impacts is so huge that any natural phenomenon in the future is unlikely to counteract it in the long term,” he said.

UK Media(including the BBC) turns on Met Office July 30, 2009

UK Media(including the BBC) turns on Met Office

The Met Office should be sued
Times Online, July 29, 2009

With its prediction of a blazing summer, it has helped to trash the travel industry abroad

Met Office cools summer forecast
BBC, July 29, 2009

You will need a brolly on holiday in the UK in August – the Met Office is issuing a revised forecast for more unsettled weather well into the month.
It is a far cry from the “barbecue summer” it predicted back in April.
The news will raise questions about the Met Office’s ability to make reliable seasonal forecasts.

As millions of Britons holiday at home after that promise of a ‘barbecue summer’, how did the Met Office get it so wrong?
Daily Mail, July 30, 2009

It was in April that the Met Office proclaimed the chances were ‘odds-on for a barbecue summer’. Rather like Michael Fish in October 1987, after he mockingly dismissed claims that a hurricane was on its way, the aptly-renamed ‘Wet Office’ was forced to confess its shortcomings yesterday.

Rain Set To Upset UK’s ‘Barbecue Summer’
Sky News, July 29, 2009

It is a far cry from the prediction of a “barbecue summer” made in April and the revision raises doubts about the Met Office’s ability to make long-range forecasts.

Not only do the UK Met Office predictions fail, but they refuse to disclose Station Data.

UK Met Office Climate Prediction Model?

UK Met Office Refuses to Disclose Station Data Once Again July 24, 2009

UK Met Office Refuses to Disclose Station Data Once Again

It must be humiliating for the UK Met Office to have to protect Phil Jones and CRU. Even a seasoned bureaucrat must have winced in order to write the following:

Some of the information was provided to Professor Jones on the strict understanding by the data providers that this station data must not be publicly released and it cannot be determined which countries or stations data were given in confidence as records were not kept.

Here is the complete text of the UK Met Office’s most recent refusal of their station data.

Our Ref: 22-06-2009-131902-003 23 July 2009
Dear Mr McIntyre

Request for Information – Information not Held and Refusal to Disclose Information
Your correspondence dated 9 June 2009 has been considered to be a request for information in accordance with the Environmental Information Regulations 2004. The Ministry of Defence is permitted to withhold information where exceptions are considered justifiable.

You asked “You stated that CRUTEM3 data that you held was the value added data. Pursuant to the Environmental Information Regulations Act 2004, please provide me with this data in the digital form, together with any documents that you hold describing the procedures under which the data has been quality controlled and where deemed appropriate, adjusted to account for apparent non-climatic influences”.

Your request has been assessed and this letter is to inform you that the Met Office does hold some information covered by the request. We do not hold documents describing the procedures under which the data has been quality controlled or adjusted to account for apparent non-climatic influences.

The information held by the Met Office is withheld in accordance with the following exceptions pursuant to the Environmental Information Regulations Act 2004:
• Section 12 (5) (a) Information likely to prejudice relations between the United Kingdom and any International organisation;
• Section 12 (5) (e) Confidentiality of commercial or industrial information where such confidentiality is provided by law to protect a legitimate economic interest.
• Section 12 (5) (f) (i) (iii) The supplier was not under legal obligation to supply the information and has not consented to its disclosure.

As the above exceptions are qualified exceptions, a public interest test was undertaken by the Met Office to consider whether there are overriding reasons why disclosure of this information would not be in the public interest. The Met Office has duly considered these reasons in conjunction with the public interest in disclosing the requested information, in particular the benefits of assisting the public having information on environmental information, whereby they would hope to influence decisions from a position of knowledge rather than speculation.
Access to environmental information is particularly important as environmental issues affect
the whole population.

Read the rest here

Met Office Summer Forecast Drowning Again? June 10, 2009

Met Office Summer Forecast Drowning Again?

Watts Up With That, June 8, 2009
By Steven Goddard

31 August 2007
Summer 2007 – a wet season
This summer looks set to have been the wettest since UK rainfall records began in 1914, Met Office figures revealed today This summer looks set to have been the wettest since UK rainfall records began in 1914, Met Office figures revealed today . .

Wet summer could end with a bang
29 August 2008
Forecasters at the Met Office are predicting that that final day of the summer could end with heavy rain and thunderstorms affecting some parts of the country this weekend … … Within the UK some local rainfall records have been broken, especially across parts of Northern Ireland and Scotland where flooding severely affected road and rail transport. Provisional rainfall figures show that Northern Ireland had its wettest August since 1914 .

Do you want summer?
Issued: 0900hrs Friday 5th June 2009
Duty forecaster: Simon Keeling & Captain Bob
If you’re requiring rain you’ll be in luck, if you’re wishing for summer, then perhaps don’t hold your breath!