WHAT A SHOWER!

The more money the Met Office gets, the more ludicrously inaccurate is its doom-mongering on climate change

VERY surprisingly and somewhat boldly, on Wednesday morning radio 4 put out a programme by the Mail’s Quentin Letts which ran flatly counter to the BBC’s normal party line on one of its very favourite subjects, global warming.

Under the title What’s The Point Of The Met Office?, Mr Letts focused on the way it has long been known to share with the BBC that same obsession.

Indeed, the way this has in recent years tended to skew so much of its forecasting — remember that famous promise of a ‘barbecue summer’ in 2009 just when the rain was set to fall for weeks? — has made it something of a national joke.

One of the guests interviewed by Mr Letts was the veteran Tory politician and climate sceptic Peter Lill ey, who proceeded to poke fun about how Met Office officials would lobby for ‘ more money for bigger computers to be more precisely wrong in future’.

The programme went on to target a particularly scary prediction, first announced by the Met Office in 2007, that the world’s temperature was set to rise from 2004 to 2014 by 0.3C.

That may not sound a lot, but in climate terms it’s a hugely significant increase: in fact, nearly half as much again as had been recorded i n the preceding century.

The Met Office was so convinced of its research it produced a glossy brochure — with pictures of black clouds and people in face masks (for no apparent reason) — with the portentous title Informing Government Policy Into The Future.

Activists

Vicky Pope, the Met Office’s head of climate predictions said these were ‘very strong statements’ about what would happen in the next ten years.

‘And what happened?’ Mr Letts asked. ‘Zilch,’ said Mr Lilley. ‘Nothing. There was no global warming over the ensuing decade.’ And, indeed, when 2014 arrived, we could see that far from this forecast coming to pass, the temperature trend had not, in fact, risen since 1998.

After the programme was broadcast, the heresy of it having included such a dissenting voice as this, speaking in a manner the BBC would never normally dream of allowing on i ts airwaves, provoked the BBC’s own climate activists to rage in print and on Twitter.

Hilariously, the BBC’s former environment correspondent richard Black protested that Mr Letts’s show had breached the BBC’s editorial rules by being so biased — when Mr Black’s own reporting on climate change could scarcely have been more shameless in breaking those same rules for years on end.

We may recall Black’s prediction in 2011 that Arctic ice was vanishing so fast that by the end of this decade it would all be gone, when two years later its volume went back up by 33 per cent in a single bound.

Or how, in 2009, he seemed almost moved to tears as he wrote up a piece on the BBC’s website over the failure of a UN conference to produce the global ‘climate treaty’ he had been promoting for so long.

So was Mr Lilley unfair to the much- vaunted Met Office report? It’s worth having a cl oser l ook at t he other global warming predictions made by those wizard computer models — for their claim about the 0.3C temperature rise was just one of a raft of doommongering forecasts. CLAIM: At least three of the years after 2009 would be hotter than 1998. REALITY: Though the Met Office would eventually claim that two of those years, 2010 and 2014, were warmer than 1998, independent experts soon demonstrated how they could only make such claims by continually ‘adjusting’ their more recent figures upwards from those originally published.

This practice, which has been widely criticised, sees the Met Office revisiting published temperatures without justifying why it is scientifically appropriate.

The Met Office uses what are called ‘ surface temperatures’, measured by weather stations on land and sea. Those measured much more comprehensively by satellites still show that 1998 was easily the hottest year on record. Neither 2010 nor 2014 got anywhere near it. CLAIM: We could look forward to many more extreme heatwaves, like that which had killed ‘15,000 people’ across Europe in 2003, just before the Met Office study began. REALITY: We have yet to see any repetition of that 2003 heatwave, which even at the time other meteorologists said was nothing to do with global warming. It was a natural event caused by an unusual influx of hot air from the Sahara. CLAIM: We could expect many more ‘extreme weather events’, such as abnormal rainfall. REALITY: This simply hasn’t happened. Even though the Met Office did all it could to claim the rain that caused last year’s exceptional flooding, particularly in Somerset, was the worst ever recorded, its own records show that far more rain fell between November 1928 and January 1929. CLAIM: All that mass of ice in Greenland would some time in the future melt, meaning sea levels would rise by more than 20ft and engulf major cities. REALITY: A recent study of t emperatures r ecorded in Greenland reveals no sign of this happening any time soon. In fact, going way back to 1900, there has been no upward rise in the trend of Greenland’s temperatures at all.

Away f r om t he 2004-14 research, the Met Office gets its forecasts wrong with quite comical consistency.

In 2007, its computer predicted it would be the ‘hottest year ever’, just before global temperatures plummeted by 0.7 degrees. That summer in the UK, it told us, would be ‘ drier than average’, just before we experienced some of the worst floods.

Between 2008 and 2010, the computer models repeatedly pr e di ct e d ‘ warmer t han average’ winters and ‘ hotter and drier summers’ — three years when we had summers that were wetter and cooler than normal, including the ‘barbecue summer’ of 2009.

In October 2010, they predicted our winter would be up to ‘two degrees warmer than average’, just before snow blanketed us in the coldest December since records began in 1659.

In November 2011, the Met Office computer forecast global temperatures rising by 2017 by as much as a staggering 0.5 degrees, a prediction so embarrassingly off-beam that, a year later, it was removed from their website.

In March 2012, it predicted that spring would, yet again, be ‘drier than average’, just before the wettest April on record. In November 2013, the computer predicted Britain’s winter would be ‘drier than usual’ — just before three of the wettest months we have known.

Of course, the main reason the Met Office’s record has been so relentlessly dismal is that, as its 2004 report made clear, its computer models are programmed according to its conviction that the chief factor driving our climate is the steady rise in carbon dioxide.

Dismal

Certainly, CO2 levels have continued to rise.

But for 18 years, despite the Met Office’s increasingly desperate attempts to claim otherwise, those cussed temperatures have simply refused to rise in t andem, as t heir computer models predicted they should have done.

What makes this of far more than just academic interest is that the politicians who rule over us not only continue to believe what the Met Office tells them, but rely on it to justify our increasingly catastrophic energy policy.

remember that Met Office brochure, Informing Government Policy? That is precisely why we are committed to closing all the CO2-emitting coal and gas-fired power stations which supply two-thirds of all our electricity; and to spending billions on windmills and solar panels, which, when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun shine, will not keep our lights on.

This makes the performance of a Met Office for which we pay £220 million a year not just a joke, but a major scandal. And well done the BBC for allowing Quentin Letts, for once, to point this out.