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Sunday 18 March 2012

Predicting or wishing?

According to Climate Edinburgh  the following is a compasion of the Met Office's forecast of global annual temperature increases compared with the actual. Can you spot a pattern? Yes, in 12 of the 13 years/periods the forecast was higher than the actual.

 Year   Forecast  Actual
1999  ...0.38    ...0.26
2000  ...0.41    ...0.24
2001  ...0.47    ...0.40
2002  ...0.47    ...0.46
2003  ...0.55    ...0.46
2004  ...0.50    ...0.43
2005  ...0.51    ...0.47
2006  ...0.45    ...0.43
2007  ...0.54    ...0.40
2008  ...0.37    ...0.31
2009  ...>0.40  . .0.44
2010  ...0.58    ...0.50
2011  ...0.44   ....0.36 (Jan-Oct)


Even the BBC's Paul Hudson has spotted this problem and admits:
'In all these years, the discrepancy between observed temperatures and the forecast are within the stated margin of error.

But all the errors are on the warm side, with none of the forecasts that have been issued in the last 12 years ending up too cold.

And, in my opinion, that makes the error significant.'
Too much trust is placed in computer models that make predictions based on their programming, checking the logic of the programming is a whole other matter.

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