Christopher Booker,Telegraph
If its implications were not so serious, it might have seemed hilarious that
the Met Office’s scentists last week staged a conference to discuss why, in
recent years, Britain’s weather has apparently gone off the rails. What they
meant, without admitting it, was: why have they got their forecasts so
spectacularly wrong in 12 years out of the past 13? Why in 2009 did they
predict a “barbecue summer” when the summer was a washout? Why, in 2010, did
they predict a “milder-than-average winter” just before we had one of the
coldest-ever Decembers? Why in 2012 did they forecast a “drier-than-average”
spring and early summer just before we enjoyed one of the wettest summers on
record?
The explanation, of course, is that the Met Office’s experts have been so
obsessed with global warming that their computers were programmed to predict
“hotter, drier summers” and “warmer, wetter winters” for decades to come.
Tellingly, they last week went out of their way to discount man-made global
warming as the cause of all this “climate disruption”, ascribing it instead
to various natural factors, from changes in solar radiation to shifts in
ocean currents: in other words, precisely the arguments less blinkered
scientists have been urging in vain for years. The significance of this
retreat from their former mindset is that the influence of our Met Office in
driving the man-made warming scare has been second to none, not least
through the prestige it has enjoyed with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change ever since it was launched in 1988 under the Met Office’s
then-director, Dr John Houghton,
Only two clear messages emerged from last week’s conference. The first was
that the Met Office experts seem, at last, to be admitting that they really
have no idea what is driving the changes in our weather. The other was their
call for more research funding to help them to find out.
But as the Met Office and its much-vaunted “super-computer” is already costing
us £200 million a year, I suppose that it is good to see them conceding
that, so far, we haven’t really had much value for our money.
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