The UK Met Office: “Oops!”
Meteorology is the engineering of climate science: while climate scientists try to understand the underlying processes that determine climate, meteorologists are expected to use that understanding to predict the short term variation in climate — what we call “weather”.
Like all engineering, meteorologists are judged on results: if you get the predictions wrong too often, or by too much, you’re not doing your job. So when the Meteorological Office in the UK predicted “another warm winter” for this year, and got instead the coldest snowiest winter in perhaps as much as a thousand years, it was a bit of a scandal, and difficult to explain.
A Met Office source leaked an explanation to Roger Harrabin at the Telegraph: there was a secret report to the government that had predicted the cold winter, so it wasn’t the Met Office’s fault if Government hadn’t done enough.
Which raises another couple of questions: why are they making different predictions in secret than they are to the public, and when and how did this secret report get transmitted and what exactly did it say?
Intrepid bloggers in the UK extracted information with Freedom of Information requests, including this sentence: ‘The Met Office seasonal outlook for the period November to January is showing no clear signals for the winter’. What they had instead was two models that disagreed — one predicted cold (but only mild cold) and the other predicted warm. The secret government report said “we dunno” and the public report chose the “warm” prediction.
I hope to write more about this later today, but in the mean time, it’s worth having a look at Anthony Watts’ blog, and the two UK blogs that broke the story, Autonomous Mind and Katabasis.
It’s worth noting that the city of London based its planning on a private meteorological firm that made predictions that rely heavily on observation of solar activity e.g. sunspots. That firm accurately predicted a very cold winter. As result, the city of London was much better prepared than other areas.
This is a prime example of the politicization of science. Now that politician routinely analogize scientist who question global warming to people who deny the holocaust, it is clearly worth any public scientist’s job to not make predictions based on the “certainty” of global warming.
Perhaps they could’ve just gone and asked any UK farmer. Idjits.
(Ahem) Thats educated idjits to you, Mr. Malone.
Thats icredentialed,/i not educated.
Roger Harrabin is the BBC’s “environment analyst”. He’s a committed Warmist, and uses the BBC’s resources to promote his beliefs. Worse, he uses his position at the BBC to get himself gigs at various environmental events. The BBC works hand in glove with the Met to promote the Warmist agenda and until recently had an official policy of denying air time to skeptics.
Background info is at Biased-BBC.
http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/2011/01/green-business.html
As a 30 year weatherman, allow me to say some words about models:
1. They are always perfect.
2. They are always wrong.
The models are based on mathematical constructs which are expected to represent the atmosphere in the present and in the future. The computerized processes are always perfect — the same inputs always create identical outputs. The models are always wrong because the inputs are always incomplete. Even if the model design can duplicate the atmosphere perfectly, there simply isn’t enough data to properly feed the model. Thus the output is always wrong — too hot/cold/fast/slow/wet/dry — than the reality at verification time. Where the meteorologist makes money is by judging which way the model is wrong today, and then adjusting the output. That’s the human skill in analysis and forecasting.
For all the hoo-rah about Climate Change/Global Warming/whatever, I have not seen some important definitions, and the examination of their consequences. Specifically:
1. Define Climate
Is Climate a Synoptic Scale thing (hundreds to thoudands of miles in diameter) or Mesoscale (dozens to hundreds of miles) thing? What time period constitutes the basis for defining a Climate type? Droughts can last several years, say, in the Southeastern US, but not Decades. How much variation is allowed (Standard Deviation), and over how long a period, before you redefine a Climate type? Do six warm, wet years let you reclassify Tundra to Temperate? 10? 30? 50? If the hurricane track dumps quadruple the annual rainfall on a desert area (think Baja) over several years, is that a “Climate Change?”
2. Given a definition of Climate, can we test the models on historical data? If a climate is based on a 15 year baseline, for example, we can easily use data starting in 1950 or so (1958 International Geophysical year, perhaps?) and run the model up to 2010 – 4 baselines – and see how well it matches the observed conditions.
If these people say the climate baseline needs hundreds of years to categorize, then I suggest that their climate models do not have the resolution to predict the next century. Indeed, if their error margin is larger than the changes they predict, I wonder why they are being considered as “accurate.”
Atomic, I did my PhD work in modeling and financed it working at a national simulation lab, which led me to identify the following scientific law: when carefully prepared, with full rigor, a good physical model, realistic rate constants, and the best numerical methods, a simulation model will tend to converge on the result most likely to assure continued funding.
Philosophically, I’m sympathetic to your aim.
That said, though, you’re falling into a sorites paradox: when you have something with an inherently vague definition, how can you define membership precisely? Weather is an instantaneous snapshot of the climate — climate is a time series of weather snapshots. If we could collect a perfect picture of the weather, at every point, at every instant, that would define the climate. Since we can’t, we necessarily have to make approximations, which means constructing a model, and we generally abuse the terminology and call the model the thing. As long as we carefully consider the difference when it’s important, the abuse of terminology does no harm.
But carefully considered, you have a couple of good points as well. First of all, one of the things we’ve learned as data has been carefully examined since Climategate Day 1, the selection of data to create the GISS and Hadley CRU data sets is less that transparent, and appears to pretty high probability to have been selected to magnify the warming signal. This doesn’t mean it’s necessarily wrong, but it does make it appear that the modelers assumptions crept into the model. (We know this happened with Mann’s original “hockey stick”: feed his method a noise signal, artificially constructed to have no information content at all, and out will come a hockey stick.)
But there is a second point: the model must continue to match physical reality if it’s to have any value. As you say, if we start the models with historical data, will they continue to match history? Since we know these models are sensitively dependent on initial conditions — what mathematicians mean when they say “chaotic” — we know they won’t match perfectly. As it stands, they don’t seem to match at all.
Thank you! And you reinforce my point exactly — the word Climate, as applied to Climate Change is very loosely defined. Thus you quickly run into Garbage in, garbage out claims and attempts at counter-arguments. Global Warming morphed into Climate Change, whereupon warm events constitute proof, and cold events constitute proof. One wonders what steady conditions would demonstrate, much the less whether there have ever been periods in history where the climate remained absolutely static!
Given the basics of say, the a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6ppen_climate_classification rel=nofollowKöppen climatic classification system/a, one should be able define some sort of edges between regions, and so have a tool to detect change. The Sahara was once a savanna grassland, or possibly temperate, but now obviously desert. That constitutes a Climate Change for me. On the other hand, the a href=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warming rel=nofollowMedieval Warm Period/a affected Europe for over 2 centuries, but was it enough to cause a Köppen reclassification for that time? I dont think so.
This brings us back to how long something must last before the Climate should be considered Changed. And that brings things back to having a structural definition to refer to instead of just saying warmer.
McCackie — Point taken. Long ago I learned that the 22 year sunspot cycle directly affects planetary cloudiness and so weather. Decadal droughts are certainly possible, interspersed with multi-year flood periods (by comparison, anyway) as the solar cycle moves on. In my Geography studies, one such event was described by Webb in his a href=http://books.google.com/books?id=lPEGVAL4UUoClpg=PP1dq=%22The%20Great%20Plains%22%20book%20geographypg=PP1#v=onepageq=%22The%20Great%20Plains%22%20book%20geographyf=false rel=nofollowbook/a, The Great Plains. As I recall, the late 1800s expansion of the United States frontier into the Great Plains coincided, fortuitously, with an 8 year or so moist period. The settlers got established when rainfall was good, then suffered then next decade of poor rains until the next cycle. So it goes. But it was not a climate change, just the norm for the region.
Weather, indeed, is not climate. But we still need a better definition if there is going to be reasonable debate on the issue.
I recall all the after-the-fact explanations as to why cold winters prove that global warming is real. You’d think if that was true, they wouldn’t care about the weather forecast for a gloomy island off the coast of France.
Warmists are acrobats:
June 4, 1999
Warm Winters Result From Greenhouse Effect, Columbia Scientists Find, Using NASA Model
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/1999/06/990604081638.htm
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v399/n6735/abs/399452a0.html
Now we have:
Nov. 17, 2010
Global Warming Could Cool Down Northern Temperatures in Winter
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101117114028.htm
http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2009JD013568
AGW can never be falsified!
Just a correction, Droughts do last a decade in Australia. We have a long cycle so that idiots (Greens) can work themselves into certainty, fellow traverelers can build Desal plants and then we have nationwide floods for a while.
What was the total amount, the estimate in the first year, how much money would have been blown. It was much more than ObamaCare and that was in the Trillions. Anybody have a guess based on some figures, how much would the criminals gotten away with?
ron, it was never about the money, or the climate. The ability to control (and ruin) economies and lives throughout the world, especially the US? Thats the real goal and payoff.
These people are among the enemies general of humanity, like pirates and slavers, and should be treated accordingly.
“The ability to control (and ruin) economies and lives throughout the world, especially the US? Thats the real goal and payoff.”
I’ve heard this theory touted many times in many places, and I’ve always wondered to what purpose they would want to do this. Okay, you’ve destroyed all the great Western countries, now what? You want to build your Socialist Utopia, but with what? People won’t/can’t build utopia at the point of a gun. No matter how hard you wish, hope, pray to Gaia, threaten, execute citizens, etc., the Land of Oz won’t arise from the ashes and rubble of a United States that has become Detroit writ large.
Curtis, that’s a hard question; I certainly don’t have an answer. I have noticed, however, that some of the most vocal people involved — Jim Hansen a prime example — have been involved in the environmental movement for a long time, from before “climate change” was the issue, and the solution always seems to be that Americans have to have less, make do with less, have fewer choices, and turn those choices over to an elite cadre who are Wise and therefore entitled to Rule. Almost invariably, it turns out that the Wise are the same people making the argument.
After some 40 years of this, I have begun to really suspect the that we’re reversing causation: it’s not “the climate crisis proves we need wise rulers like me” but instead “we should have wise rulers like me, and overpopulation/the coming ice age/anthropogenic global warming proves it.”
So we are faced with two possibilities.
1) The Met office fudged their numbers to show a warm winter and believed them, and after the fact lied to the Telegraph about a fictional super-secret its-going-to-be-cold report they supposedly sent to the Government.
2) The Met office fudged their numbers, but knew they were producing propaganda (i.e. lying to the public), and in a fit of secret honesty put together the real numbers into a secret report just for the Government.
So no matter how you slice it, a number of Met office personnel need to be out in the snow, looking for a new job, with zero creditability.
Georg, it’s probably unfair to say the Met Office fudged their numbers — and it was probably a little unfair to say they had two sets of books, as Glenn did: they have multiple weather models, and in this case they had to choose among two for their forecast. They published a forecast map from the one that said “it’ll be warm.” They bet and lost.
One might be suspicious that there were political aspects to the choice, but they would have had to make a choice anyway to produce a forecast — they’re really not free to say “we don’t know.”
But this is a place where the coverup is worse than the crime — the Met Office is clearly (follow the links people) trying to claim now that they had it right, it was the Government’s fault.
2 sets of books… good thing these guys dont handle the countries financial accounting; itd be like you couldnt trust how bad the debts deficits are or something.
Although i understand the analogy that meteorology is to climatology as engineering is to hard science/ physics, it is still not accurate. Physical science/ physics, chemistry – are hard sciences. You have laws that have been proven you have equations that work, you can experiment and observe and draw conclusions. You have none of that in climatology & meteorology, it is a soft science, one of the softest.
They have been wrong so much it is laughable to still call it science. I have done extensive modeling and statistical analysis, and I shake my head at the reams of misinformation, misapplication of science and the scientific method when it comes to climatology. They would do much better to admit that they are at about a 5% understanding level of the climate and their model applications and spend the next 40-50 years working on building more robust datasets and models (and recruiting statistical experts into their field) that actually work instead of proclaiming anything close to the “settled science” crap.
ou have none of that in climatology & meteorology, it is a soft science, one of the softest.
Oh, Bill, that’s just nonsense. Utter. Meteorology and atmospheric science is certainly a hard science, with hard measurements, heavy physics, and some areas that are very well understood and very well modeled. (And before you say “Aha, but it’s just a model, that’s not real science”, all science involves models. Any statement in science is a model of our understanding of a physical process as it’s best understood currently.)
The thing about the current state of atmospheric science or “climate science” is that there are real limits to what is known, or even knowable. Detecting any anthropogenic effects is right on the edge of what can be measured.
Charlie – I generally agree with you, but I have to disagree with you a tad about how hard a science climatology is. The main problem is that the earth’s weather is chaotic, and it’s hard to model chaos. (Economics has some of the same problems insofar as certain key variables turn out to be random walks; e.g., the stock market.) A secondary problem is the current bias in temperature measurements. As best as I can tell, there is a warmist bias in temperatures which happens in two ways in the US. The first is a reduction in the number of weather stations in colder and more rural parts of the US as well as encroaching urbanization on the remaining weather stations. The second way is a seemingly utter failure to account properly for urban heat island effects.
Absolute garbage.
No prediction was ever made to the public from the met office for this winter (either warmer or colder). Ive no doubt that there are secret forecasts and briefs to the government but Im sure that the government would rely more on short term forecasts and warnings than a 3 month winter forecast. You say; a met office source leaked the document to Roger Harrabin. Then quote your source and there name because in the media world quotes from a source or a celebrities friend is always garbage and made up when theres no name! Ignore garbage like this people!
Funny thing, Bob: if you followed the actual links you’d find that at the word “predicted” I linked an article showing the Met Office’s map showing a warm temperature prediction over the whole of the UK, and linked under the world “Telegraph” you’ll find the Telegraph’s article on the Harrabin report and Met office connection.
It’s good to know Tatler is attracting enough attention now that I’m getting illiterate right-thinking trolls.