Who Needs Actual Data? Not The Met Office!
By Paul Homewood
Another Met Office scam!
1 in 3 chance of a new monthly rainfall record in at least one region each winter.
In the last few years several rainfall events have caused widespread flooding in the UK. In winter 2013/14 a succession of storms hit the UK leading to record rainfall and flooding in many regions including the south east. December 2015 was similar, and Storm Desmond hit the north-west causing widespread flooding and storm damage.
By their very nature extreme events are rare and a novel research method was needed to quantify the risk of extreme rainfall within the current climate.
Professor Adam Scaife, who leads this area of research at the Met Office said “The new Met Office supercomputer was used to simulate thousands of possible winters, some of them much more extreme than we’ve yet witnessed. This gave many more extreme events than have happened in the real world, helping us work out how severe things could get.”
Analysing these simulated events showed there is a 7% risk of record monthly rainfall in south east England in any given winter. When other regions of England and Wales are also considered this increases to a 34% chance.
Dr Vikki Thompson, lead author of the report, said “Our computer simulations provided one hundred times more data than is available from observed records. Our analysis showed that these events could happen at any time and it’s likely we will see record monthly rainfall in one of our UK regions in the next few years.”
I probably covered this at the time, but it includes this graphic, which Ben Pile’s video highlighted today:
Note this bit, which effectively means past data is irrelevant, and is replaced with made up “virtual observations”:
There is in fact ample data, with for instance the England & Wales series going back to 1766. If these trends were so obvious the Met Office would not have to concoct their own “data” to find them.
So why do they do it? Because the actual data does not support their claims of increasingly extreme weather.
Take the South East, which they use in their example. The actual data clearly shows that winter monthly rainfall is not becoming more extreme, making a nonsense of their claim that there is a 7% risk of record monthly rainfall in south east England in any given winter.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/maps-and-data/uk-and-regional-series
The wet winter of 2013/14 was the trigger for this pathetic exercise, but as we can seethe winter of 1913/14 was even wetter. But it is evident that all of the really wet months, other than 2013/14, occurred decades ago – the last with over 180mm being as long ago being December 1934.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
OMG! Simulations based on a physically implausible ‘steady state’ model based on some physically implausible 18th century mathematics will produce ‘physically implausible’ predictions. Now that is a fact!
Junk science writ large.
‘By their very nature extreme events are rare and a novel research method was needed to quantify the risk of extreme rainfall within the current climate.’
There is no such need to ‘quantify the risk.’
“You might get a flood in the next few years.”
Well, duh.
‘Professor Adam Scaife, who leads this area of research at the Met Office said “The new Met Office supercomputer was used to simulate thousands of possible winters, some of them much more extreme than we’ve yet witnessed. This gave many more extreme events than have happened in the real world, helping us work out how severe things could get.”’
You don’t need a ‘supercomputer’ to tell you, “You might get more floods.”
Duh.
‘Analysing these simulated events showed there is a 7% risk of record monthly rainfall in south east England in any given winter.’
Sorries. ‘Analysing simulated events’ may be the dumbest thing I ever read.
‘Dr Vikki Thompson, lead author of the report, said “Our computer simulations provided one hundred times more data than is available from observed records.’
Data? You must be joking.
‘Our analysis showed that these events could happen at any time and it’s likely we will see record monthly rainfall in one of our UK regions in the next few years.’
Your janitor could have told you this.
Return you supercomputer for a full refund.
…With its brand-spanking new SUPER COMPUTER. Which is only ever as good as the programs – sorry, simulations – written for it. I speak as a nerd who once (actually, twice, in two different languages) wrote an enormous pair of programs firstly to analyse the whole of the previous 12 seasons of the 92 teams then in the football league(!) And then use the analysis as input to another enormous program to forecast the Pools for the current season. I now realise why I only ever won once (notalot, as they say): I should have had a more powerful computer. I’m sure there was nothing wrong with the programs. 🤔
Brute force computing.
Expecting hardware solutions to software problems.
I wonder who suggested Microsoft to the government?
February 22, 2021
https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/microsoft-awarded-12-billion-uk-met-office-supercomputing-contract-atos-files-legal-challenge/
“Last year the Met Office announced it would spend £1.2 billion (US$1.56bn) on building the world’s most powerful supercomputer dedicated to weather and climate. The first phase is due to begin in 2022, with a second phase (2028) proposing to expand it a further threefold.
Atos IT Services UK Ltd is claiming the secretary of state for the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and the Meteorological Office breached procurement laws when choosing to award the contract to Microsoft in January. This is the first public mention of a company being awarded the Met Office supercomputing contract.”
So this new super-duper computer will help them be wrong more accurately!
Is it my memory or did they buy a new computer not so many years ago?
You can’t make it up. That’s their job. With your money. Never mind the data we have that says its NOT a problem, we can waste money and time creating models that cloam things can be much worse. Or not.
“The new Met Office supercomputer was used to simulate thousands of possible winters,”
How is it possible to simulate the unpredictable effects of the entirely natural equatorial Pacific ENSO? Or volcanic events? The jet streams?
GIGO is expensive.
‘as we can seethe’ yes indeed an exceptionally appropriate typo! This feels a bit like the dreaded ‘gain of function’ research and equally deadly potentially.
I think they are getting desperate to keep the climate change scam running. Hence all the made up “it is going to get a lot worse” scenarios. The Grantham trust have Frederika Otto with Attribution theory, Climate change makes bad weather events 96% more likely, which looks to me like Bayes theory, misused.
What somebody is ensuring is that every 2-3 days there’s a story about climate change and how it’s going to be horrible. I suspect that’s counter-productive – people tend to get bored of constant reminders. And yes, Attribution studies are Bayes misused and misrepresented. And the “96%” means what anyway? It’s used as if it means its 96% likely to happen but thats not what the work shows – it shows that a 1% chance becomes nearly a 2% chance.
Agreed, but its probably a .001% chance becomes a .002% chance.
So they found 3,500 ways the winter could happen. And that’s not comprehensive. So how many years are we using for “climate” and anomalies to that?
Infinite?
“It’s worse than we thought!”
Realize that even if they were absolutely correct, “there is a 7% risk of record monthly rainfall in south east England in any given winter,” it is absolutely useless. It isn’t actionable. No one would do anything differently with or without the announcement.
Let them accurately predict next week’s weather (either using Super Computer or Selwyn Froggatt’s pinecone and a piece of seaweed) and I might be 1% more impressed.
I recall a year that a company plowed all of 160 acres uphill from our farm and that spring we did have an unprecedented flood. After that, they plowed in strips alternating so that they never produced another flood.
Now, they build unprecedented wind and solar farms, uphill from where there WILL be worse future flooding. The energy taken out of the atmosphere by the windmills will also reduce the energy needed to hold water so more rain will likely fall to run downhill and cause floods.
Observe weather radar, you can pick out major roadways and metropolitan areas because the heat island effects do modify the weather patterns.
Computer output is computer output, Computer Output is Not Any Kind of Actual Data, the input can be changed to get any desired output, when used to frighten people, it is powerful because most do not understand that the output is whatever the programmers intended, they keep making changes until they get the scary results they want.
In a field above my village, which is prone to flooding, I was pleased to see the farmer ploughed across the hill which, I figured would slow down the run of water off the hill. even so, sadly, the homes at the bottom of the hill flooded – but that was more to do with the fact that the Council didn’t match the farmers’ efforts by ensuring the flood channel between the hill and the village was adequate to the job.
On hillsides, strips should be plowed with not plowed strips downhill or pasture or some other not plowed land with something growing that would slow the runoff and allow it to soak into the soil.
Well when one of these modellers stated 25 years ago that they were going to provide “virtual actuals” – observations obsolete, you knew that peak stupidity was some way in the future.
a 7% risk of record monthly rainfall in south east England in any given winter
Marvellous 🥱
“Marvellous.”
Indeed, it is a damp squib of a prediction.
For myself, as the moronic sports commentators say:
“I would have taken that score-line at the beginning of the game!”
I find it dizzying how quickly “Funded Science” has stalled a wing and entered into a death-spiral. The sooner it crashes and burns the better! Incidentally, modern pilots are not taught how to recover from spins, on the theory that these are now impossible. Modern academics are told never to think, on the theory that the ‘big men’ in the field will do the thinking for them.
” these events could happen at any time”
And I could win the lottery any time.
A 7% chance of record monthly rainfall in each year? That’s an 0.93 chance there not being a record. If we consider the probability of multiple successive years in which no new record is set, that’s the probability of no record in year X AND in year (X-1) and o one, which0.93 * 0.93 … etc.
It seems that at 10 years the probability of no year having set a new record falls below 50%, at 20 years it’s below 25%, at 32 years it’s just below 10%, at 64 years less than 1% (or 99 times out of 100 within 65 years there’d be a new record).
The end of the first para got mangled. Instead of “and o one”, read “and the probability can be calculated as 0.93 * 0.93 … etc.
Religion doesn’t rely on data.
A simple but brilliant comment
Sanctimony used to come from people who claimed to represent God.
Now, it comes from people who claim to represent the planet.
So, as HMG slavishly follow the ouija sciencey stuff generated by the mad office, can we fully expect a raft of new reservoirs to be constructed in the South to catch this predicted excess water? You know, for all of those Saharan summers predicted by the same druids when there won’t be any excess water sloshing about. Nope, thought not.
The BBC have just asked “Why No Named Winter Storms this year so far”
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64454569?xtor=ES-211-%5B58170_PANUK_DIV_05_NCA_ShellProfits_RET_DEF%5D-20230202-%5Bbbcnews_whynowinterstormsthisyearweather_newsuk%5D
Excerpt: ” How does climate change affect windstorms?
According to the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the link between climate change and extra-tropical
cyclones – the storms that normally affect northwest Europe – is currently unclear. They suggest that European windstorms have actually reduced in frequency over the last few decades.
However, it is widely accepted that when we do get storms, climate change is likely to make them more extreme with higher rainfall totals
and potentially greater impacts.” They just can’t help themselves predicting Armageddon it seems ……
As soon as you get to the ‘M’ word you can move on with the rest of your life as you know with 100% certainty that what follows will be complete bollocks.
Pure GIGO! Guesses in, garbage out.
‘Analysis’ is for REAL data. Output from model simulations based on wholly implausible inputs is NOT real data. Remember, Mann’s hockey stick can be created from random/noise data.