It has a gigantic supercomputer, 1,500 staff and a £170m-a-year budget. So why does the Met Office get it so wrong?

Daily Mail
"This is where the good faith and the impartiality of the scientists involved is so important, and why the Warmergate scandal was so damaging. Far from being impartial custodians of the truth, some scientists were shown to have feet of clay, guarding their own patch rather than the science. ....The Met Office seems to have forgotten what it was set up for - to predict weather day by day. Instead, it is devoting it energies to the fantasy that it can predict climate decades ahead when it cannot even tell you whether it is going to snow next week, or whether we might have a barbecue summer."
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Forecasters Warn Of A Freezing January
"Temperatures are not likely to get much above 0C across many areas of the country over the next 10 days - and in some parts may plunge to -15C.Many Britons woke up to a white Christmas as the country shivered through its coldest December in more than a decade.
Forecasters say we can now expect fresh snowfall, severe frosts and icy roads."
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Climategate: Michael Mann's very unhappy New Year
"As I said yesterday, one of our jobs this year is to wipe the complacent smiles off the smug faces of the lobbyists, “experts”, “scientists”, politicians and activists pushing AGW.

This is why I am so glad to report that Michael Mann – creator of the incredible Hockey Stick curve and one of the scientists most heavily implicated in the Climategate scandal – is about to get a very nasty shock. When he turns up to work on Monday, he’ll find that all 27 of his colleagues at the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University have received a rather tempting email inviting them to blow the whistle on anyone they know who may have been fraudulently misusing federal grant funds for climate research.

Under US law, regardless of whether or not a prosecution results, the whistleblower stands to make very large sums of money: it is based on a percentage of the total government funds which have been misused, in this case perhaps as much as $50 million. (Hat tip: John O’Sullivan of the wonderful new campaigning site www.climategate.com)"