"Brrr-ace yourselves! Britain to shiver in -20C in WEEKS as councils stockpile extra grit". So the Mail on Sunday warned us in October. Blizzards, snowdrifts, locusts with the faces of men and the teeth of lions: we would become, it cheerfully assured us, prey to every nightmare nature could devise.
Last week the story flipped. "December has sprung! Spring blooms arrive early and autumn blossom lingers... so what happened to our winter?" I scoured the text but could find no mention that the Mail had forecast the polar opposite.
This is the newspaper group which led the crowing about the barbecue summer that never was. In April 2009 the Meteorological Office announced that "summer temperatures across the UK are likely to be warmer than average and rainfall near or below average for the three months of summer". In the event, the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth. From its offices on Mt Ararat, the Daily Mail called down the wrath of God on the weathermen, who had been proven "hopelessly wrong" and were now "left red-faced".
There are plenty of red faces in the newspaper industry, but they are not the result of embarrassment: an emotion as rare in this business as summer snowflakes. Most of the papers that basted and grilled the Met Office for its barbecue summer forecast predicted a sleighbell winter. The Sun, for example, announced that "Britain will shiver through a 'Siberian December'". The Express foresaw "a big freeze", beginning at the end of October, which would be "as severe and sustained as last winter's" and bring "record low temperatures".
Ours was, as it turned out, the second warmest autumn on record, while temperatures in December were a little higher than average. So where did the Siberian forecasts come from? According to one of the journalists who ran this story, they originated with the secretary of state for transport. During the Conservative party conference, Philip Hammond allegedly told senior journalists that there would be a terrible winter, but that he and he alone would save us from nature's fury by ensuring the roads remained clear. I have tried to check this story with the transport department, the defence department (where Hammond now resides) and his constituency office. Despite repeated promises, my questions remain unanswered.
The newspapers then asked the Met Office to confirm Hammond's prediction. It refused. (In 2010 it had decided to stop issuing long-range forecasts.) So they turned to people who would.
They chose to rely on two alternative forecasting companies: Exacta Weather, and Positive Weather Solutions (PWS). PWS boasts that it "has made the front page of the Daily Express thirteen times; the Daily Telegraph seven times; and the Daily Mail and the Sun once". Between 26 September and 1 October, it says, it "was quoted every single day in the Daily Express". It told the papers that late October and November "are looking colder than average with freezing temperatures, severe frosts and the chance of snow". Exacta, on which the Mail relied for its predictions of icy doom, warned of a "severely cold and snowy winter". "It is likely that temperature and snowfall records will be broken".
Who are they, and what are their credentials? I have been trying to obtain answers from Exacta since 20 December, without success. Among other questions, I asked whether it is true that the company consists of one undergraduate student and a computer.
PWS was more forthcoming. It admitted that its forecasting record had not been independently audited, and agreed that this was a failing. It also admitted that it does not keep a record of its prior forecasts on its website, which means that the public has no means of assessing its hit rate. But it failed to provide the qualifications or identities of the "independent meteorologists" it uses.
Both companies seem to publish only positive results. Exacta, for example, tells us that it correctly forecast strong winds this winter. It forgot to add that it also forecast severe cold and snow.
Unlike the Met Office, the alternative forecasters are neither roasted nor frozen out when they get it wrong. In 2010, for example, the Daily Mail announced that "the country really is on course for a barbecue summer". This time, it told its readers, the prediction "comes from a forecaster with a somewhat better record on the subject than the poor old Met Office". This was PWS – which has no published record at all. PWS told the Mail that "there will be stifling temperatures, making it possibly the warmest UK summer on record". In fact it was an unremarkable summer, but there were no "red faces" at PWS. Nor has Philip Hammond been denounced as "hopelessly wrong".
There is a subtext at work. The Met Office, like the BBC, is the subject of intense tabloid hostility, because it refuses to accept the consensus in the rightwing press that man-made climate change is a myth. Perversely, it prefers to rely on data. The incompetence of the Met Office and the superior skills of other forecasters are now part of the litany of climate change denial. Weather forecasting, in the hands of the press, has become a political science.
• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot's website
Comments
2 January 2012 8:35PM
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2 January 2012 8:39PM
Fair comment - interesting the deniers may be setting up their own weather forecasting services as well as their own everything else. No doubt such forecasts will be "Fair And Balanced".
2 January 2012 8:40PM
Bit of a stretch? Then again I don't read the tabloids...
2 January 2012 8:42PM
Day by day weather is not supposed to be an indicator of climate change, at least that's what the so called 'climate scientists' have been telling us for the past 10 years or more.
I see there is no mention of the big increase in Sun Spot activity in the article and no mention of the fact that average temperature has not risen for the past ten years.
2 January 2012 8:45PM
PWC - Price Waterhouse Coopers, the well known accounting firm, comes clean at last!
This may well be true - but I presume it is also a typo for PWS the independent weather service. .
2 January 2012 8:47PM
When the media predicted snow in October I knew we were in for a mild winter. I still remember he Indi having a front page story back in 2007 (admittedly after the very hot summer of 2006 and then a weirdly dry spring) saying how the South of England was going to be like Southern France. It then proceeded to piss it down for the entire summer with wide spread flooding etc.
Last winter everyone was saying how mild it was going to be, hence the -12C temperatures and massive snow fall.
Basically the weather in the UK will be the opposite of what people predict if that prediction is done anymore than a week or so in advance.
AGW? Who knows.
2 January 2012 8:47PM
Well precisely: it is NOT an indicator of climate change. Weather is the noise, long-term climate trends are the signal. Yet local weather events get used by the press repeatedly as an attempt to refute manmade climate change.
But this article is about something slightly different: media attempts to discredit the Met Office.
2 January 2012 8:49PM
Aargh! Freudian slip. Thanks for pointing it out.
2 January 2012 8:49PM
Er yes, but the Met Office's job - very generously funded by the taxpayer - is to forecast the weather. That it has added climate change propagandising to this has made it a natural target for the unconvinced, but that is it's own fault.
The tabloids' job, on the other hand, is to add to the gaiety of the nation. Thus when the Met Office gets it wrong it is worth reporting, when the tabloids do it isn't. Talk about a straw man argument!
Incidentally, last year was the 11th warmest on record in global terms, with an average temperature the same as 1987. 1998 remains the hottest year since 1850, but it has beeen far hotter in the distant past. The trend for the last 13 years has been sideways / slightly down. Deny THAT, George.
2 January 2012 8:52PM
Perhaps The Mail et al have confused the role of meteorologist with that of the augur or haruspex. Given the forecaster's record I expect we could achieve a similar hit-rate by inspecting the steaming entrails of a gerbil or simply looking out of the window. In fact, last month I witnessed a bird flying backwards which led me to conclude that Scotland was being battered by gales.
More seriously, I wonder if the effects of climate change are not as yet resulting in extremes of heat and cold but in weather which has become unseasonably chaotic. I only have incontrovertible anecdotal evidence to go on but I seem to remember such odd phenomena as frost and sunburn from my childhood.
2 January 2012 8:54PM
Absolutely right, Mr Monbiot, but the other side does it too. How often has the media and, more importantntly, some climate scientist or other tagged global warming onto a hot weather story? I even remember the BBC once using the tsunami as a excuse for a global warming story!
2 January 2012 8:54PM
Exacta's web site describes it as a "voluntary weather service". Wassat?
The site has no 'about us' page and no indication of who its forecasters are - if indeed they are plural - or what their qualifications are. And on the front page there's a prominent ad for a supplier of rock salt, snow shovels, etc. No wonder they forecast a snowy winter! But perhaps they don't understand that rock salt is ineffective at -20C.
2 January 2012 8:54PM
Yes, if you start counting from 1998, you can maintain that the global temp has not risen since, because 1998 was the equal hottest year in the instrumental record. But if you start counting from 1997 or 1999, or any other year in the 20th Century, you'll see a strong warming trend. So why choose 1998 to begin your series? You wouldn't by any chance be cherry-picking, would you?
2 January 2012 8:54PM
After all these 20 odd years of Climate-change doom, can you avail us George of what, precisely, has actually gone catastrophically wrong as a proven consequence of 0.004% of earth's atmosphere being CO2?
Have ocean levels really been rising above the 150 year norm? Nope.
Have the oceans been warming recently - you know, inline with the significant increase of human-emitted CO2 that's causing all the fuss? Erm, the Argo bouys - all 3,000 of them, say not.
Ok, what about surface temperatures on the 30% of earth that isn't covered in water; rocketing temperatures then? Er, no again. Nothing for years, despite that increase in CO2.
Ok, then what about proof of the theory that CO2 drives temperatures, surely you have that? Hold on, it appears not, as report after report after report clearly and unambiguously shows temperatures rise, followed by CO2 increases later. You're theory of CO2 causing excess warming is flat-out upside-down on its arse wrong.
I could mention the lack of observed evidence to support positive feedbacks (which are crucial to your AGW alarmist stance) the rebound of Arctic ice, the 30-year satellite record Antarctic ice extent, the explosion of polar bear numbers or the clear corruption of the IPCC, and the acknowledged manipulation and 'adjustments' of climate data, but you know what, that's just going too far.
A knock-out is a knock-out is a knock-out.
AGW has failed. It is a busted, failed, exposed as fraudulent flush. And no, I'm not paid by Big Oil, I'm just using my own eyes to see what is so obvious, yet you George, will not.
Happy New Year, fella.
2 January 2012 8:55PM
I'm fascinated to know if anyone has analysed long term changes in weather variance. I wonder if this is increasing, and perhaps increasing more rapidly, than average temperature.
:-) In my mind this would be a 'logical' outcome – if you drive a non linear system harder, it starts to behave chaotically, quite often? Pop sci enough for some investigation, surely!
2 January 2012 8:55PM
You mean PWS. PWC is an independent auditing firm!
I have fond memories of the baking hot summer of 1976, in which I fell in love and, before the year was out, got married.
If I remember right snow was falling on Birmingham as late as May 1976.
2 January 2012 8:56PM
Oh dear the lengths some people will go to defend what are lets face it, no more than comics.
As for climate change you seem not to understand the basics but I suppose as a denialist that is to be expected.
2 January 2012 8:56PM
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2 January 2012 9:01PM
This is a fallacy why keep on perpetrating it, most forecasters if not all say the weather has nothing to do with climate change,the weather is a result of the climate which is being driven by increased human carbon emissions whether you like it or not.
2 January 2012 9:02PM
I'm sure you've missed out some discredited zombie myths from this catalogue, but I can't immediately think of any.
2 January 2012 9:02PM
Before stating that this winter has been very mild, can we wait until it's over?
Just saying...
2 January 2012 9:02PM
Not cherry picking at all. The trend for the last 13 years has been sideways / slightly down. That is a simple statement of fact. The point is equally simple: I don't think that anyone is arguing that the climate hasn't warmed since 1850 (or, as you rightly point out, almost any other year of the past 150 years or so) but whether it is STILL warming. And, on the evidence of the past 13 years, it isn't.
2 January 2012 9:04PM
I'm not missing a 3rd Siberian Winter, but my little part of South East Wales is under an Amber warning for both wind and rain for tomorrow so I really hope the Met's got that forecast wrong.
2 January 2012 9:04PM
But why 13 years? Why not 14 years? Or 12? Or 11? Or 20 or 30? Because 13 years ago begins (in the published record) in 1998. So yes, evidently cherry-picking.
2 January 2012 9:07PM
I've referred here to the forecasts for October, November and December. And yes, they are over. That's what all those fireworks and singing and stuff were about.
2 January 2012 9:07PM
I am no fan of the comics, Mr Thecrap, but don't think that inaccurate weather forecasting is the most important of their sins.
As for understanding the basics of climate change, it seems to me that the most basic element of any proposition for global warming is that the global climate should be warming. For well over a decade, it hasn't. It is you who is denialisting the facts.
2 January 2012 9:07PM
In my anecdotal experience the coldest part of the winter is usually the first week in February; it regularly snows on a relative's birthday of February 6. So it is, I suggest, a bit early to be calling this one.
2 January 2012 9:09PM
....The Met. Office has undoubtedly given excellent service to the country for the last 150years or so, but I do wonder why it has got itself involved in politics in the last few years. This is the cause of the criticism. Understandable,when taxpayers' money is wasted sending representatives to a pointless jamboree in the sunshine.
2 January 2012 9:10PM
GeorgeMonbiot acutal as you know the problem is not 13 years but that despite the constant increases in CO2 level the temps , or reality, have total failed to match the 'doom ' predict by the models are claimed to be so good from IPCC, CRU etc .
Now here is question for you , how many years have to go past, when temps fail to match the models given the levels of C02, before you will admit they simple got it wrong in the first place ?
2 January 2012 9:11PM
And the warmest La Nina year ever recorded.
2 January 2012 9:11PM
Very glad you picked up on PWS - especially their creepy 'Senior Weather Forecaster', Jonathan Powell, the man who is always quoted in the press: http://www.positiveweathersolutions.co.uk/The-Positive-Weather-Girls.php
2 January 2012 9:12PM
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/dec/20/uk-snow-global-warming
But never in an attempt, to support it - eh George.
2 January 2012 9:12PM
Amazing what lengths the tabloids will go to when it comes to supporting the conservative transport secretary's statements. Really gives a great impression of a free, well informed press with no agenda or political bias!
2 January 2012 9:13PM
As George says you are quoting ten years, without including the previous 100 years your analysis is meaningless.
2 January 2012 9:13PM
Why not 13 years?
If next year doesn't beat the record, it will be 14, the year after that 15. The point isn't the starting date, it's that the global climate hasn't warmed for a period of years. At the moment, that period is 13.
Again, all we "denialists" (I do love that word) accept that the climate has warmed. I know you think we're mad (it's mutual, by the way) but we are capable of reading a simple chart. Equally, we can see that it has stopped doing so. Now of course, this can change, and if it does we'll face a whole range of other questions, like what, if anything, we can or should do about it. For now, however, the trend is flat / slightly down. Isn't it?
2 January 2012 9:14PM
What temperature chart are you reading?
2 January 2012 9:14PM
The last decade was the warmest ever recorded, beating the record set by the previous decade which beat the record set by the decade before that.
2 January 2012 9:14PM
The article was called:
That snow outside is what global warming looks like
2 January 2012 9:15PM
You quite clearly are cherry picking. In fact if someone asks me for an example of someone cherry picking I'm going to link to your post.
2 January 2012 9:16PM
Or going down the up escalator, for those of us who prefer piccies.
2 January 2012 9:18PM
One day people will remember their year 7 geography classes and realise that there is a difference between the weather and the climate
2 January 2012 9:18PM
The point is that it has, and no amount of cherry-picking can undermine that.
2 January 2012 9:19PM
The point is that the Daily Mail and fellow travellers like to bash state enterprises for errors but is stunningly silent when their allies screw up, and the state gets it right.
The salient point is not one of climate change (as inexorable and undeniable as that is).
2 January 2012 9:20PM
I'm not a statistician, but I cant see how the annual temperature record from 1998 shows no warming trend, but the record from '97 or '99 shows strong warming...? Have you got a link you could post to illustrate this?
2 January 2012 9:22PM
I'm not sure if it is true that average global temperatures haven't risen in 13 years, but if it is true, I think it is perfectly reasonable and rational to ask for how long temperatures would have to be stable before revisiting the theory. 20 years without a rise? 50 years?
2 January 2012 9:23PM
Denial is the art of getting forecasts wrong in retrospect.
2 January 2012 9:23PM
Barpropper sorry the METs been getting in the neck for getting forecasts wrong for many years , search through any newspapers archives and you can find these stories stretching way back and certainly long before 'AGW doom ' became a green idol .
For example Michael Fish's infamous words "Earlier on today, apparently, a woman rang the BBC and said she heard there was a hurricane on the way... well, if you're watching, don't worry, there isn't!" that brought so much flack to him self and the MET were from 1987 . While the British general love to bitch about the weather and people tend to remember when people or organizations are wrong in the forecasts not right. There are in fact lots of good reason to consider Monboits , right wing newspaper conspiracy against the MET to be nonsense. Monboit's idea that the MET gets flacks just becasue of this is rubbish , its merely becasue he can't accept his views aren't universal that he needs to come with with some 'right wing conspiracy' to justify why the worlds not how he thinks it should be.
2 January 2012 9:24PM
The IPCC's failure to prove climate sensitivty to CO2? You know, the sensitivity that the IPCC appear to have over-estimated by a pretty high margin. Yep, you're right, I missed that out.
Btw, I note you're unable to refute. (OK, it's a recent post and there's plenty of other comments to respond to, but for a journalist of your influence and undoubted repute, your response was, erm, disappointing.)
I seek not to be deliberately obtuse, George, rather to find evidence to support the AGW theory. Down the years I have to say there's been precious little evidence of substance so far.
2 January 2012 9:26PM
Hello again Mr Thecrap.
Why is this so difficult?
The global temperature WAS going up. It peaked in 1998, and has gone sideways since. I'm simply stating a fact, not analysing anything.
2 January 2012 9:27PM
No, the trend is one of warming at about 0.2 degrees per decade.