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Met Office Fraudcast
Never confuse ‘scientists forecasting’ with scientific forecasting. Most scientists don’t know the basic principles of scientific forecasting.
The UK Met Office have produced the ‘UK Climate Projections 2009’ (UKCP09) which purports to project ‘how the UK climate may change for the 30-year period from 2070–2099 at a resolution of 25 km’. The Met office are expecting us to believe that they have a good idea what the climate will be like within any 25km x 25km cell over the whole UK out to the end of the century. Note the word ‘project’ rather than ‘predict’ or ‘forecast’. Anyone can project anything, and by devising different models there will be different projections. In fact, a projection is essentially meaningless – one can draw a straight line through any trend and call it a ‘projection’. So long as we don’t consider a projection to be a prediction or a forecast, then it is just a bit of speculation (or fun) and no weight should ever be attached to it in terms of planning or risk assessment and mitigation.
But the Met Office and Defra are playing fast and loose with this and are treating the UKCP09 projections as predictions to be used for planning, risk assessment and mitigation by everyone. The Met Office says
It is vital governments, businesses, organisations and individuals understand the challenges ahead and prepare for them now…UK Climate Projections 2009 (UKCP09) is a climate analysis tool, funded by Defra, which features the most comprehensive climate projections ever produced. Projections are broken down to a regional level across the UK and are shown in probabilistic form — illustrating the potential range of changes and the level of confidence in each prediction.
Yes, you read it correctly, it does say prediction, and they are telling you within 95% confidence limits what is going to happen before it happens, over the next 90 years. We’ll show just how unlikely this is in another post shortly. Rather foolishly, the head of the Climate Programme at the Met Office, Dr Vicky Pope, had already assured us back in 2007 that now routinely on the Met Office’s computers
Much longer predictions are run, typically…predicting the next 100 to 1,000 years.
Predicting the next 1000 years? Fat chance!........
....In June 2008, Slingo was awarded the OBE, then in July 2008 she was appointed Chief Scientist of the Met Office. But all this has all gone to her head. Remember, just a few months ago her stated view and that of her colleagues was that the present state of climate models and computing power made it impossible to be able to give useful predictive information to policymakers, especially at the regional and local level. To do so required a veritable revolution, huge expense, and international co-operation. Now, less than a year on, she’s had a remarkable conversion to the smoke and mirrors of the climate change religion. Not only is it now possible to give predictions for policymakers to 25km resolution out to the end of the century, but her Met Office have done it – all in a few weeks, without a revolution, without the essential investment, without the additional intellectual firepower, without the improved models, and without the international co-operation. A veritable miracle indeed!
Thus the UKCP09 propaganda is wheeled out, and Slingo lauds it as follows:
Through UKCP09 the Met Office has provided the world’s most comprehensive regional climate projections with a unique assessment of the possible changes to our climate through the rest of this century.
For the first time businesses and authorities have the tools to help them make risk-based decisions to adapt to the challenges of our changing climate.
It’s a lie, of course.