The Met Office's new toy

About a week ago, I had written about England's Meteorological Office getting funding for £97m to build a new supercomputer.

Today, James Delingpole slams tham in this post at Breitbart:

The Met Office Doesn't Deserve a £97 Million Supercomputer. It Deserves to Be Scrapped
Earlier this week, the Met Office invited us to celebrate the fact that we had allowed to be siphoned from our pockets the £97 million it allegedly needed to build a new super-computer to "produce the most scientifically accurate short-term forecast that are scientifically possible."

Does the Met Office think we are mad, gullible, possessed of exceptionally poor memories, or what?

Just in case the answer is the latter, Christopher Booker has helpfully provided a few reminders as to why splashing out that sort of dosh to the Met Office is, as PJ O'Rourke might put it, like "giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys."

In 2004, it predicted that by 2014 the world would have warmed by 0.8C, and that four of the five years after 2009 would beat the 1998 record as the “hottest year ever”. In 2007, its computer predicted that this would be the “warmest year ever”, just before global temperatures temporarily plummeted by 0.7C, equal to their entire net rise in the 20th century. That summer in the UK, it told us, would be “drier than average”, just before some of the worst floods in living memory.

From 2008 to 2010 the models consistently predicted “warmer than average” winters and “hotter and drier summers”: three years when much of the northern hemisphere endured record winter cold and snow; while in the UK, as in that promised “barbecue summer” of 2009, we had summers wetter and cooler than usual. A particular triumph, in October 2010, was the prediction that our winter would be up to “2C warmer than average”, just before the coldest December since records began in 1659.

In November 2011, the computer forecast global temperatures rising over the next five years by up to 0.5C from their 1971-2000 average, a prediction so embarrassingly off-beam that, a year later, it was quietly removed from the Met Office website, replaced with one showing the flat-lining temperature trend as “likely to continue”. In 2012, it told us that spring would, yet again, be “drier than average”, just before the wettest April on record. Last November, the computer predicted that the winter months would be “drier than usual” – then came the wettest three winter months on record. And today, we can measure the success of that 2004 forecast that, by 2014, the world would have warmed by 0.8C – when temperatures have now not risen for 18 years, and not one has got near 1998’s record as the “hottest ever”.

The mighty Booker's reservations can be summed up in one phrase: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

More at the site - the 100+ comments are a fun read.

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on November 2, 2014 1:16 PM.

Interesting times in Tennessee - sinkholes and dams was the previous entry in this blog.

I don't want to be Vladimir Martynenko right now is the next entry in this blog.

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