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Mother Nature still defies the Met Office

What makes the Met Office forecast seasons of unusual warmth while the
weather obstinately provides record-breaking cold, asks Christopher
Booker

By Christopher Booker
Published: 6:49PM GMT 16 Jan 2010

Barely a month after last predicting, on November 28, that Britain
would enjoy "a milder than average winter", the Met Office last week
came in for yet another mighty pasting, for failing to forecast the
renewed snowfalls and freezing temperatures which brought traffic to a
halt again in much of the country. In some northern towns, roadways
were so icy that people had to crawl across them on hands and knees.

Two independent forecasters who did foresee the return of Arctic
weather, and are predicting that there will be more, are Britain's
Piers Corbyn (who relies on solar activity for much of his prediction)
and the US meteorologist Joe Bastardi of AccuWeather, who largely
bases his forecasts on movements of air and ocean currents. Unlike the
UK Met Office, of which both are highly critical, neither has been
blinded by imagining that rising levels of carbon dioxide play a key
part in shaping the weather.

Mr Bastardi, who was predicting months ago that both Europe and
America were in for an abnormally cold winter (while the Met Office
was about to get it hopelessly wrong for the third summer and winter
in a row), is now predicting that this year's cold weather, with
renewed snowfalls, will last at least until March. Last month,
according to Rutgers University in the US, saw the second greatest
extent of snow cover in the northern hemisphere since records began in
1966. Meanwhile the state of Florida experienced sub-zero temperatures
for the longest period in 100 years. (For more details see Anthony
Watts's Watts Up With That blog.)

Mr Bastardi is also wondrously scornful about that recent prediction
of the UK Met Office's very expensive computer models that 2010 will
be "the warmest year on record". Those poor guys, he says, are relying
on an El Niño event in the Pacific which is simply not happening as
they hoped.

Meanwhile, it is reported from Belgium that 90 per cent of the market
in carbon trading, designed to stop global warming, may be fraudulent,
as criminals cash in on a massive VAT scam which Brussels estimates
could cost EU member states five billion euros. This is accompanied by
further revelations about how James Hansen's GISS temperature record,
one of four that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
relies on for its predictions over the next 100 years, was caught out
in 2007 having "adjusted" its data to show temperatures rising faster
and further than the evidence justified. You couldn't, as they say,
make it up.