An odd post for my first blog post, but one thing today got me so riled I set up this blog just to write about it.
It comes as no surprise to British people, or people who have ever met a British person, that we are a nation of people obsessed with the weather. It effects everything we do, and mostly (but not singularly) we get our information from one of the world's most highly regarded centres of meteorology. The Met Office.
At this point I should interject and highlight that in this topic, I am biased. My first degree was in Meteorology at the University of Reading, I had an interview at the Met Office in 2006 (shortlisted from 200 candidates, still my proudest achievement) where many of my Reading cohort are now working; I am an Associate Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, and my first memory is that of waking up one October morning when I was three, and seeing the destruction following the Great Storm of 1987. I am, quite simply, a weather nut. I love it. I look at clouds so much it's a miracle I've not been run over or crashed my car (although I have been known to pull the car over to look at a cloud formation). I check the forecast last thing at night, and first thing in the morning, to see how much the forecast changed over night, and if necessary rethink the day's outfit/shoes/coat combo. During rainy days, I am glued to the radar to check when would be best to make a run for it to the car (shameless plug for RainToday). On windy days, I guess how fast the wind and gust speed is and check how far off I am with the official Met Office observations (once I was spot on, it was a great day to be me).
So I like the weather, and I quite like the Met Office.
What got me riled up this morning?
This.
A piece by Rupert Darwall for The Spectator entitled "Forecast failure: How the Met Office lost touch with reality". I hope he gets a raise. I do. He's very good at what he does. He has created just the right sort of propaganda piece to get nay-sayers up and down the UK calling for a cut in spending. He uses just the right emotive words such as "deluge" when talking about a particularly wet period, and "alarmism", the key word for readers to think 'oh hello, I could jump on this bandwagon', and refers to the UN meetings such as Copenhagen, Durban and Doha as "United Nations annual end-is-nigh summit(s)". He scatters technical jargon throughout and uses just enough science for people to believe that he himself is an expert. He claims that the 'crisis-meeting' held in June was to discuss why their forecasts have been so wrong, and repeats claims made in The Sunday Times that the Met Office predicted a decade of wash out summers. Dave Britton, of the Met Office, wrote his own blog post about how the media have completely misrepresented the purpose of that meeting and how they hadn't predicted that at all. (Good to see the press pay attention when responses are made by the organisation in question rather than blindly reprinting other's opinions.)
But then he says - and this is where I really lost it - "global temperatures have been flat for 15 years". Depending on your scale if it was to the nearest degree, possibly. But Global observations of surface temperature show the 5yr mean is currently levelling off and declining, which is all part of the climate cycle, and temperatures have been going up and down for all of time. Looking longer term, we are still warmer than 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 100,000 years ago. Looking shorter term, Mr Darwall will see that temperatures are fluctuating at around 0.6degrees warmer than the 1951-1980 average.
I think Mr Darwell is confused between weather and climate, because he seems to imply that a climate projection is the same thing as a weather forecast, just really far in the future. (This reminds me of this video from Armstrong & Miller from 2010, well worth a watch.) It's unclear what he's complaining about. Is he complaining about how he got wet one day when they forecasted it to be dry - I think we can all say that's happened!; is he complaining that their climate models aren't good enough; is he complaining that they're given too much money; or is he complaining that the Met Office use their powers for evil instead of good?
My response is this: If the Met Office were able to spend more money and time on science and less money and time on PR people having to correct popular press, maybe they could actually get something done about improving those climate projections. For every misleading article and irate piece in the popular press, the scientists at the met office have to get more political, to ensure they can survive. If you don't want their Chief Scientist to be involved in politics, let them do the science.
It comes as no surprise to British people, or people who have ever met a British person, that we are a nation of people obsessed with the weather. It effects everything we do, and mostly (but not singularly) we get our information from one of the world's most highly regarded centres of meteorology. The Met Office.
At this point I should interject and highlight that in this topic, I am biased. My first degree was in Meteorology at the University of Reading, I had an interview at the Met Office in 2006 (shortlisted from 200 candidates, still my proudest achievement) where many of my Reading cohort are now working; I am an Associate Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, and my first memory is that of waking up one October morning when I was three, and seeing the destruction following the Great Storm of 1987. I am, quite simply, a weather nut. I love it. I look at clouds so much it's a miracle I've not been run over or crashed my car (although I have been known to pull the car over to look at a cloud formation). I check the forecast last thing at night, and first thing in the morning, to see how much the forecast changed over night, and if necessary rethink the day's outfit/shoes/coat combo. During rainy days, I am glued to the radar to check when would be best to make a run for it to the car (shameless plug for RainToday). On windy days, I guess how fast the wind and gust speed is and check how far off I am with the official Met Office observations (once I was spot on, it was a great day to be me).
So I like the weather, and I quite like the Met Office.
What got me riled up this morning?
This.
A piece by Rupert Darwall for The Spectator entitled "Forecast failure: How the Met Office lost touch with reality". I hope he gets a raise. I do. He's very good at what he does. He has created just the right sort of propaganda piece to get nay-sayers up and down the UK calling for a cut in spending. He uses just the right emotive words such as "deluge" when talking about a particularly wet period, and "alarmism", the key word for readers to think 'oh hello, I could jump on this bandwagon', and refers to the UN meetings such as Copenhagen, Durban and Doha as "United Nations annual end-is-nigh summit(s)". He scatters technical jargon throughout and uses just enough science for people to believe that he himself is an expert. He claims that the 'crisis-meeting' held in June was to discuss why their forecasts have been so wrong, and repeats claims made in The Sunday Times that the Met Office predicted a decade of wash out summers. Dave Britton, of the Met Office, wrote his own blog post about how the media have completely misrepresented the purpose of that meeting and how they hadn't predicted that at all. (Good to see the press pay attention when responses are made by the organisation in question rather than blindly reprinting other's opinions.)
But then he says - and this is where I really lost it - "global temperatures have been flat for 15 years". Depending on your scale if it was to the nearest degree, possibly. But Global observations of surface temperature show the 5yr mean is currently levelling off and declining, which is all part of the climate cycle, and temperatures have been going up and down for all of time. Looking longer term, we are still warmer than 30 years ago, 50 years ago, 100,000 years ago. Looking shorter term, Mr Darwall will see that temperatures are fluctuating at around 0.6degrees warmer than the 1951-1980 average.
I think Mr Darwell is confused between weather and climate, because he seems to imply that a climate projection is the same thing as a weather forecast, just really far in the future. (This reminds me of this video from Armstrong & Miller from 2010, well worth a watch.) It's unclear what he's complaining about. Is he complaining about how he got wet one day when they forecasted it to be dry - I think we can all say that's happened!; is he complaining that their climate models aren't good enough; is he complaining that they're given too much money; or is he complaining that the Met Office use their powers for evil instead of good?
My response is this: If the Met Office were able to spend more money and time on science and less money and time on PR people having to correct popular press, maybe they could actually get something done about improving those climate projections. For every misleading article and irate piece in the popular press, the scientists at the met office have to get more political, to ensure they can survive. If you don't want their Chief Scientist to be involved in politics, let them do the science.