“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…
Meanwhile in Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology was forecasting below average rainfall for those parts of the Murray Darling Basin that were dumped on early September, with the worst flooding in 15 years. Last summer (2009-2010) the forecast was for more dry, and overall we have been led to believe it wouldn’t ever rain again like it used to, thus the investment in desalination etcetera.
And because the mainstream media, at least most journalists, are partial to Anthropogenic Global Warming theory, they don’t hold the Bureau accountable for any of their expensive and wrong seasonal forecasts.
Back to the UK, according to Peter Foster: “[T]he price tag on the country’s unpreparedness for this winter could reach $15-billion.”
And in Australia, never mind even trying to even get an estimate on what unpreparedness for the floods might be costing, we can’t even get the relevant water managers to agree that topping up a deluge with releases from a dam only 20 percent full has consequences…
Oh. And from Peter Forster in parting: “…The suggestion that forecasting the climate is easier than forecasting the weather comes into the same category as acknowledging that governments couldn’t run a lemonade stand, but then believing that they can “manage” an economy.”
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.