Met Office Computer Saving Millions Of Lives!
By Paul Homewood
When the UK Met Office unveiled their new £33 million supercomputer four years ago, Steve Foreman, their Chief Technology Officer in charge of the project, attempted to justify it by saying
“It will help save millions of lives by predicting severe weather and global climate change”.
Millions? A quick search of the official International Disaster Database, maintained by the World Health Organisation, shows the number of deaths from severe weather events in 2012:-
| Disaster Type | No of Deaths |
| Storm | 3102 |
| Flood | 4452 |
| Extreme Temperature | 1758 |
| TOTAL | 9312 |
Even much better warning systems could only hope to save a small proportion of these lives, so where does Foreman get his millions from, particularly since just four years later the Met need a new supercomputer.
Why are such deluded people put in charge of large amounts of taxpayer money?
Update
Just to clarify, Foreman’s statement is quoted in the Exeter Express & Echo.
The original Mail story contained a similar statement, but was not attributed.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Looking at the Daily Mail Article, I can’t see where it attributes that statement to Steve Foreman. What it does say now is:
“The Met Office says the machine will improve day-to-day forecasting but will still not guarantee accuracy.
But it will help save millions of lives by predicting long-term patterns in global warming and forecasting extreme weather events such as typhoons and hurricanes.”
It goes on to attribute some quotes to Steve Foreman but not the words you quoted and the current wording is also slightly different to what you quoted.
I wonder if this has been changed since the original article was posted.
Of course, whoever made it, the claim is based on future predictions of “extreme weather events”, and presumably a dramatic increase in those events. Of course, even if such events do increase, we will never know how many lives would have been lost if the computer hadn’t forecasted them.
I found the quote in the Exeter Express & Echo.
[I was actually looking for evidence of who made the comment in the Mail article, or if the paper got carried away. I found the Exeter article while googling!)
http://www.thisisexeter.co.uk/Met-Office-s-new-30m-supercomputer-help-save-lives-worldwide/story-11802280-detail/story.html#axzz2f3uQNxzV
Thanks, so he must have said it.
I particularly like the following quote in that paper:
“The computer has been switched on but will take two months to fully boot up.”
I thought my computer took a long time to boot up!
Meanwhile, in the UK alone, thousands of extra deaths occur directly as a result of erroneous info fed by the MO to politicians for the latter to determine energy policy based upon that incorrect data.
There were an estimated 24,000 excess winter deaths in England and Wales in 2011/12 – an 8 per cent reduction compared with the previous winter.
Seems WHO don’t count winter as extreme temperatures so what do they define as extreme?
Actually, they probably define mild weather, i.e. above average temperatures, as “extreme”, in the weird and wonderful world of “climate change”, as do DEFRA:
http://ukclimateprojections.defra.gov.uk/23146
So on this perverted logic, a lower number of deaths in winter, due to above average temperatures, would be a serious problem.