Britain's Met Office Predicted a Mild Winter Ever -- For the Third Time In a Row

Christopher Booker reports in the Telegraph that "the serial inaccuracy" of the Met Office climate forecasts in Great Britain is no longer just a joke, but a national scandal.  He goes on to say:

The reason the Met Office so persistently gets its seasonal forecasts wrong is that it has been hi-jacked from the role for which we pay it nearly £200 million a year, to become one of the world's major propaganda engines for the belief in man-made global warming. Over the past three years, it has become a laughing stock for forecasts which are invariably wrong in the same direction.

The year 2007, it predicted, would be "the warmest ever" – just before global tempratures plunged by more than the entire net warming of the 20th century, Three years running it predicted warmer than average winters – as large parts of the northern hemisphere endured record cold and snowfalls. Last year's "barbecue summer" was the third time running that predictions of a summer drier and warmer than average prefaced weeks of rain and cold. Last week the Met Office was again predicting that 2010 will be the "warmest year" on record, while Europe and the US look to be facing further weeks of intense cold.

What is not generally realised is that the UK Met Office has been, since 1990, at the very centre of the campaign to convince the world that it faces catastrophe through global warming. (Its website now proclaims it to be "the Met Office for Weather and Climate Change".) Its then-director, Dr John Houghton, was the single most influential figure in setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the chief driver of climate alarmism. Its Hadley Centre for Climate Change, along with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), was put in charge of the most prestigious of the four official global temperature records. In line with IPCC theory, its computers were programmed to predict that, as CO2 levels rose, temperatures would inevitably follow. From 1990 to 2007, the Department of the Environment gave the Met Office no less than £146 million for its "climate predictions programme".

But in the past three years, with the Met Office chaired by Robert Napier, a former global warming activist and previously head of WWF UK, its pretensions have been exposed as never before. The "Climategate" leak of documents from the CRU, along with further revelations from Russian scientists, have shown the CRU/Met Office alliance systematically manipulating temperature data, past and present, to show the world growing warmer than the evidence justified. And those same computers used to predict temperatures 100 years ahead for the IPCC have also been used to produce those weather forecasts that prove so consistently wrong.

It will be equally instructive to take note of the weather of the last several years in the U.S. and worldwide. The climate models so highly touted by the UN IPCC AR4 report of 2007 and the catastrophic man-made global warming alarmists have not been predicting the climate of the period since 2001 well at all. The outcome of the predictions is always warmer than the actuality, even when the actual raw temperature measurements have been manipulated to make them look warmer than they really are. If the climate models are not good for any particular year and not good for any particular decade, then why should we have much confidence in them for 50 to 100 year predictions? It seems clear we would be foolish to expect much of them in light of the fact that there are clearly climate factors which the models do not have a grasp on. The climate prediction models of the Met, Hadley Centre, and the CRU of the University of East Anglia are clearly clueless. I would suggest this is because they are biased to predict an excessive effect due to CO2 emissions and because they do not yet understand the natural forces on the climate.