The Met Office – defending the indefensible, as per usual

Just another sunny day according to the MET office[h/t to anne] The Met Office is very cross with me. Well you can hardly blame it given that I've just published a big piece explaining what a spectacular waste of taxpayers' money it is.

So now it has used some of the £200 million we pay it every year to get one of its in-house turd-polishers to publish a defiant blogpost defending its inglorious forecasting record, such as its non-existent "barbecue summer" and the terrible, snow-bound winter of 2010 which, as late as October that year, it was confidently predicting would be "unusually dry and mild."

The Met Office's pathetic defence? That its five day forecasts accurately predicted all the weather events I claimed it failed to predict – and here to prove it was a letter from an Assistant Chief Constable and a successful complaint to the Press Complaints Commission.

This is just the kind of weaselly obfuscation you'd expect from an organisation as politicised and compromised as the Met Office. Here it is, misleadingly defending itself against a criticism which was never actually made. No one is quibbling with the Met Office's five-day forecasts: indeed in the article I quoted the Global Warming Policy Foundation's Dr David Whitehouse praising their accuracy. Rather, the issue is with the Met Office's medium-range forecasts, which for years have persistently erred on the side of predicting non-existent warmth because they have been corrupted by exactly the same dodgy computer models which tell us that as CO2 rises so inexorably will "global warming." For more details, read my old blog post The Met Office: Lousier Than A Dead Octopus.

Next the Met Office seeks to defend the integrity of its recent press release – loyally regurgitated by the BBC's Roger Harrabin – which sought to imply that there has been something abnormal about the recent rain record. It listed the "Top 5 wettest years", four of which were from between 2000 and 2012. It claimed: "Looking at individual countries, 2012 was the wettest year on record for England, third wettest for Wales, 17^th wettest for Scotland and 40^thwettest for Northern Ireland." It quoted its house boffin, Prof Julia Slingo, saying: ""The trend towards more extreme rainfall events is one we are seeing around the world, in countries such as India and China, and now potentially here in the UK." And it sought to imply that this all had to do with global warming: "Increasing global temperatures may be another factor. A warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture and we have seen an increase of about 0.7 °C in global temperatures since pre-industrial times. From basic physics, this would equate to about a 4% increase in moisture in the atmosphere which means there is a greater potential for heavy rain."

Do you see what's going on here? You should do for it's about as subtle as a dead horse. What the Met Office is doing is deliberately talking up the meme which has become increasingly fashionable since global warming inconveniently halted in 1997: the idea that anthropogenic CO2 emissions have created something called "global weirding" or "extreme weather." It's a very useful theory for the climate alarmists because a) it distracts from the failure of their global warming theory and b) it means that whenever weather does anything remotely odd, anywhere in the world – which weather does, by nature, all the time – it can be cited in support of their alarmism.

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