The UK Met orifice...a man called Wayne Mapp...and the Pacific sea level...

...ever vigilant reader Butch (right) spotted this reference to a UK enthusiast (John Graham-Cumming) whose amateur sleuthing led to this glorious headline in the London Times... How I made the Met Office admit its climate-change data was wrong...

...Since my training is in mathematics and computing I thought it best to write self-checking code: I’m unfamiliar with the science of climate change and so having my program perform internal checks for consistency was vital to making sure I didn’t make a mistake.
To my surprise the program complained about average temperatures in Australia and New Zealand. At first I assumed I’d made a mistake in the code and used a pocket calculator to double check the calculations. The result was unequivocal: something was wrong with the average temperature data in Oceania. And I also stumbled upon other small errors in calculations. About a week after I’d told the Met Office about these problems I received a response confirming that I was correct: a problem in the process of updating Met Office records had caused the wrong average temperatures to be reported...more here...

In the grand scheme of things - small potatoes, but for the UK Met. office another awful humiliation. After making absurdly confident and dramatically wrong predictions of BBQ summers and mild winters Met. office workers must be a shamefaced lot. "Well, what do you do for a crust then ? "I uhh, uhh work in the uhh Met. Office..."

...and with a deep H/T to PKH and WhaleOil...are you ready to read of obfuscation, disingenuity and Parliamentary chicanery here in NZ ? This exchange, written in Hansard is a series of straightforward and evaded Parliamentary questions re NIWA (our Met. office) to Mr Wayne Mapp, our Minister of Research, Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy. Read it and weep...

...and when the global warming alarmist hysteria was at its height, and the science was all settled, I posted about the ARGOS project; a worldwide network of buoys recording salinity, ocean temperature and sea levels. ARGOS and ongoing experiments, such as the CLOUD experiment at CERN, will answer many questions, provide comprehensive data and fill in some important gaps in climate science. With ARGOS data just in we learn that... (H/T The Hockey Schtick):

... The full 6 year dataset from January 31, 2004 to January 31, 2010 of the ARGO global network of 3198 free drifting ocean floats with GPS...is now available. Using the Pacific Marine Atlas program to plot data from the entire network shows a downtrend in Sea Height over the past six years (January 31, 2004 - January 31, 2010) using data from the entire network...The trendline shows the rate of global sea level decrease to be -.1mm/year or-10mm/century...more here...

This is already being labelled Oceangate, and could well be the last gate to shut the IPCC down. Read more here...This, I hope, is real science coming in, not just alarmist predictions from a poorly set up spreadsheet (ever been crazy enough - I have - to make an investment based on one ? ) and it is providing data that is killing alarmism. Such data hammers nail after nail into the climatastrophe coffin...Won't the worried people of greensleaze, and Prince Charles, Bono and the WWF and all the occupants of Tuvalu be so pleased !

...and with that I'm signing off. Posting will be intermittent and maybe even non-existent for 3 1/2 weeks, as I experience northern hemisphere (UK) global warming first hand. I'll be making full use of night clubs, bars, cosy rooms, internet cafes and getting to net access whenever and wherever I can, all the time keeping warm, dry and very well hydrated. Your comments (including details of crap investments made after consulting crappier spreadsheets) are as always, most welcome. Salut !

Weather forecasters have always been the butt of jokes...

...particularly in the UK, where foul weather is the national preoccupation...

The UK Met Office famously forecast this past winter to be milder than average...
25 September 2008 ...The Met Office forecast for the coming winter suggests it is, once again, likely to be milder than average.
Seasonal forecasts from the Met Office are used by many agencies across government, private and third sectors to help their long-term planning.

The meteorological winter is over, and the official results are in :

The UK had its coldest winter for 13 years, bucking a recent trend of mild temperatures, the Met Office has said.
The average mean temperature across December, January and February was 3.1C - the lowest since the winter beginning in 1995, which averaged 2.5C...

...from "milder than average" to "the coldest winter in 13 years" is not just a slight blunder for a quasi-scientific body, on whom many individuals, businesses and institutions depend. Forgive the cynicism, but it seems that Met office personnel may just have made a guess, or let their ideology about global warming interfere with their objectivity, or perhaps just closed their eyes when they threw the dart...
Where are all the satirical TV shows of the past when they're needed ?

...and this, from another sceptic, William Happer Professor of Physics, Princeton University in a testimony to the US senate..."...Many of the frightening scenarios about global warming come from large computer calculations, "general circulation models," that try to mimic the behavior of the earth's climate as more CO2 is added to the atmosphere. It is true that climate models use increasingly capable and increasingly expensive computers. But their predictions have not been very good. For example, none of them predicted the lack of warming that we have experienced during the past ten years. All the models assume the water feedback is positive, while satellite observations suggest that the feedback is zero or negative..." more here...