Friday 5 March 2010

MET Office admits its long-term forecasts are shit

Here.

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.


Finally, they're admitting it.

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

"Although we can identify general patterns of weather, the science does not exist to allow an exact forecast beyond five days, or to absolutely promise a certain type of weather.


But yet "the science is decided" when it comes to them telling us what the weather will be like in decades to come, or being condfident that we all need to feel guilty just for fucking existing, because we're killing the planet. Right.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I would suggest the difference between forecasting the weather and forecasting the climate is as follows.

Roll a dice, and you have one chance in 6 of being correct. That's a bit like the weather.

Roll a dice 6 million times and you can be pretty sure you will get 1 million 1's, 1 million 2's etc

One is a prediction based on uncertainty of a specific event. The other is averaging out uncertainties over a time period.

The two are not therefore directly comparable.


Charlie

Anonymous said...

Charlie, you'll confuse poor old Dave with that sort of comment.
Dave

banned said...

That would be the same Met Office that today was on Radio 4 assuring us that the threat from climate change was now even more certain than at the time of the IPCC 4th report thingey and that the chances of AGW being real and dangerous was 95%?

Another planet perhaps.