After predicting a mild winter, the British weather service is profoundly embarrassed by the current deep freeze
Let’s hope Santa isn’t relying on weather forecasts from the U.K. Met Office. The British deep freeze of recent weeks (which has also immobilized much of continental Europe) is profoundly embarrassing for the official forecaster. Just two months ago it projected a milder than usual winter.
This debacle is more than merely embarrassing. The Met Office is front and centre in rationalizing the British government’s commitment to fight catastrophic man-made global warming with more and bigger bureaucracy, so its conspicuous errors raise yet more questions about that “settled” science.
When you’re making confident global projections for the year 2100, you can only be contradicted on the basis of alternative hypotheses, of which the vast majority of people have no comprehension. But pretty much anybody can look out of the window and tell the difference between light drizzle and a snowbank. Moreover, private forecasters strongly disagreed with the Met Office’s winter projections as soon as they were made (which should add fuel to calls for the organization’s privatization).
Yesterday, the British-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, one of the world’s leading advocates for climate objectivity, called on the U.K. government to set up an independent inquiry into the Met Office’s failures. It also wants an examination of the institution’s politicization, although that is hardly likely to come from the very government that is manipulating it. Still, bias can be expensive. Dr. Benny Peiser, the GWPF’s director, noted that the price tag on the country’s unpreparedness for this winter could reach $15-billion.
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Its not snow, its H20 molecules at rest. Only the AGW gods are laughing. Cheers.
The difference between Theory and Reality is that in Theory they are the same, in Reality they are not.
The moral of the story is, "Don't bet the farm on a scientific Theory because inevitably Reality will prove you wrong."
Are these the same scientists who only a few years ago predicted that children in the UK and Europe would not see snow in their lifetimes due to global warming? And now they are predicting more snow than usual as a result of global warming. Do these people have no self respect? I wonder who pays their salaries.
Wonder how they arrived at the price tag of fifteen billion pounds sterling for the unpreparedness? And at a time when the country's broke? Apparently they have to import salt to attend to the hazardous road conditions. The faux scientists should "in theory" be bearing some of that responsibility via salary cuts or layoffs. Who did that calculation. Somebody in gov't.
Peter Foster assigns a dollar figure to that cost. Probably U.S. funds. Not pounds sterling.
The weather wizards predicted last summer for Manitoba to be hot hot hot and dry dry dry. Well, as it turned out when we weren't wearing sweaters we were wearing life jackets. Now the ground is saturated, crops are still rotted and frozen on the fields, farmer's Christmas trees are looking a little bare of presents and they may be enjoying Christmas dinner at a food bank somewhere. In November we had more snow than all of last winter combined (an extension of the dry summer?) and predictions are if we get any more snow between now and spring the flood waters will be 2 ft higher than the so-called flood of the century in 1997. City hall is so concerned they are having flood meetings several times a week and spring is still months away. No chants of cap and trade in Manitoba folks.