Calculating your carbon footprint - a load of bollocks

[Terry Fields]

This paper is published by the American Physics Society. There are 41 references for you look up, if you wish, at the end of the paper, and more mentioned in the text. No Wikipedia here.

the start, it says this:

----- (G)LOBALLY-AVERAGED land and sea surface absolute temperature TS has not risen since 1998 (Hadley Center; US National Climatic Data Center; University of Alabama at Huntsville; etc.). For almost seven years, TS may even have fallen (Figure 1). There may be no new peak until 2015 (Keenlysideet al., 2008).

-----

So, planetary temperatures may be falling, and may have been doing so for some years, according to a number of researchers, including the Met Office's own Hadley Centre. No mention of warming at all. And these are not figures measured from some arbitary 'baseline'; they are absolute figures.

Worse, it goes on to say this:

----- The models heavily relied upon by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had not projected this multidecadal stasis in ?global warming?; nor (until trained ex post facto) the fall in TS from 1940-1975; nor 50 years? cooling in Antarctica (Doran et al.,

2002) and the Arctic (Soon, 2005); nor the absence of ocean warming since 2003 (Lyman et al., 2006; Gouretski&Koltermann, 2007); nor the onset, duration, or intensity of the Madden-Julian intraseasonal oscillation, the Quasi-Biennial Oscillation in the tropical stratosphere, El Nino/La Nina oscillations, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, or the Pacific Decadal Oscillation that has recently transited from its warming to its cooling phase (oceanic oscillations which, on their own, may account for all of the observed warmings and coolings over the past half-century: Tsoniset al., 2007); nor the magnitude nor duration of multi-century events such as the Mediaeval Warm Period or the Little Ice Age; nor the cessation since 2000 of the previously-observed growth in atmospheric methane concentration (IPCC, 2007); nor the active 2004 hurricane season; nor the inactive subsequent seasons; nor the UK flooding of 2007 (the Met Office had forecast a summer of prolonged droughts only six weeks previously); nor the solar Grand Maximum of the past 70 years, during which the Sun was more active, for longer, than at almost any similar period in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Solankiet al., 2005); nor the consequent surface ?global warming? on Mars, Jupiter, Neptune?s largest moon, and even distant Pluto; nor the eerily- continuing 2006 solar minimum; nor the consequent, precipitate decline of ~0.8 °C in TS from January 2007 to May 2008 that has canceled out almost all of the observed warming of the 20th century.

-----

Note that statement: "nor the consequent, precipitate decline of ~0.8 °C in TS from January 2007 to May 2008 that has canceled out almost all of the observed warming of the 20th century."

That's surely worth a headline....the whole of the 20th Century 'global warming' just about gone in a year. The expensive models failed to predict that, along with just about every other variation.

Figure 1 is a graph, which cannot be reproduced here, but the notes accompanying it say this:

----- Since the phase-transition in mean global surface temperature late in

2001, a pronounced downtrend has set in. In the cold winter of 2007/8, record sea-ice extents were observed at both Poles. The January-to-January fall in temperature from 2007-2008 was the greatest since global records began in 1880. Data sources: Hadley Center monthly combined land and sea surface temperature anomalies; University of Alabama at Huntsville Microwave Sounding Unit monthly lower-troposphere anomalies;

-----

What was that? "In the cold winter of 2007/8, record sea-ice extents were observed at both Poles". And the figures are from that pesky Hadley Centre again.

Oh....so the planet's cooling, and sea-ice has broken records...not for melting, either.

And even better, or worse, according to one's view, is this: "January-to-January fall in temperature from 2007-2008 was the greatest since global records began in 1880. Data sources: Hadley Center". Oh!

There then follows a long destruction of the IPCC assumptions, which I will leave you to read in slow time., but if you wish to skip the description of IPCC mendacity, go to Figure 7, entitled "Fluctuating CO2 but stable temperature for 600m years"

Average Planet Temperatures have varied between 12 degC for an ice-age and 22 degC for - a picture of a planet in flames springs to mind here, where did that come from?

But "global surface temperatures was ~22 °C, even when carbon dioxide concentration peaked at 7000 ppmv, almost 20 times today?s near-record-low concentration." Another headline?

But look at this:

----- Figure 7 indicates that in the Cambrian era, when CO2 concentration was ~25 times that which prevailed in the IPCC?s reference year of

1750, the temperature was some 8.5 °C higher than it was in 1750. Yet the IPCC?s current central estimate is that a mere doubling of CO2 concentration compared with 1750 would increase temperature by almost 40% of the increase that is thought to have arisen in geological times from a 20-fold increase in CO2 concentration (IPCC, 2007).

-----

Oh!

----- The IPCC overstates the radiative forcing caused by increased CO2 concentration at least threefold because the models upon which it relies have been programmed fundamentally to misunderstand the difference between tropical and extra-tropical climates, and to apply global averages that lead to error.

------

Oh!

And finally the killer paragraph:

----- Such solecisms throughout the IPCC?s assessment reports (including the insertion, after the scientists had completed their final draft, of a table in which four decimal points had been right-shifted so as to multiply tenfold the observed contribution of ice-sheets and glaciers to sea-level rise), combined with a heavy reliance upon computer models unskilled even in short-term projection, with initial values of key variables unmeasurable and unknown, with advancement of multiple, untestable, non-Popper-falsifiable theories, with a quantitative assignment of unduly high statistical confidence levels to non-quantitative statements that are ineluctably subject to very large uncertainties, and, above all, with the now-prolonged failure of TS to rise as predicted (Figures 1, 2), raise questions about the reliability and hence policy-relevance of the IPCC?s central projections.

-----

Note: "...including the insertion, after the scientists had completed their final draft, of a table in which four decimal points had been right-shifted so as to multiply tenfold the observed contribution of ice-sheets and glaciers to sea-level rise."

Post-facto decimal-point shifting, in the direction that someone wanted it to go in?

I look forward to your receiving comments on the data in the paper, of which the above is a small but significant sub-set.

You might also like to read this paper:

the section entitled "Can Computer models Predict Future Climate"

[Roger]

The message from Terry Fields contains these words:

I can read a graph quite adequately thank you so if you think I can't that is a reflection on your poor skills, not mine.

Another red herring. You have a bee in your bonnet about the use of the period 1960 - 1980 as a baseline. I merely pointed out that the base line in this graph is lower.

Careful Terry. It looks as though the wheels are really coming off your argument. You can't even get the period you question right anymore and your argument has changed from picking a unnaturally cool period to magnify any warming to saying that changing the baseline changes whether it is cooling or warming during any period. Pure bullshit. Whether or not the planet has been cooling for some years now (your words) depends entirely on temperatures during that period and has nothing at all to do with whatever base line is picked for the graph.

I see you have chosen not to answer the simple question I had posed as to how the scientists involved could have chosen to use a base line 1980

- 2000 before the year 2000.

Scientists may be used to handling data but you are obviously not.

Reading from the page 25 graph the approximate values for 1998 to 2004 are:

1998 0.84 1999 0.81 2000 0.61 2001 0.72 2002 0.81 2003 0.80 2004 0.75

Over the same period the moving average goes from 0.68 to 0.75 on an approximate straight line with the maximum deviation being that sore thumb, 1998.

The figures for later years are no doubt available somewhere but not the crystal ball to predict the rolling average.

Now from those figures you can if you like work out the standard deviation and from that the 95% confidence limits for 2005. I can't be bothered but I suggest that if you go down that route it will be so wide that any prediction would be meaningless.

You could of course be a bit more sophisticated and adjust for El Nino/La Nina events but whatever you do you will not get a reliable trend out of anything less than several years. I could be wrong but as the graph currently ends at 2004 the Met Office seem to be using 5 years for their moving average.

[David Hansen]

On Thu, 18 Sep 2008 23:48:34 +0100 someone who may be geoff wrote this:-

That is one of the antis' tricks. It allows them to waste your time. I think it is best to rebut them occasionally, with links to more information which those with an open mind can follow and decide for themselves.

[dennis]

I bet they still waste money on modeling GW though. Despite

"The climate is "a complex, non-linear, chaotic object" that defies long-run prediction of its future states (IPCC, 2001), unless the initial state of its millions of variables is known to a precision that is in practice unattainable, as Lorenz (1963; and see Giorgi, 2005) concluded in the celebrated paper that founded chaos theory -"

Now why do I not trust GW models? In fact why do they give the same answers when it should be impossible for them to do so? The fact that they do agree indicates that they are being fiddled to make them agree. They do appear to be fraudulent or at least the reports on what they show do.

[Roger]

The message from Terry Fields contains these words:

Don't be silly. That is the sort of logic used by the proponents of intelligent design.

You can't prove the absence of anything without searching absolutely everywhere. After all if whatever you want to find is not in the likely places then you would have to take in all the unlikely places as well starting one presumes in Noah's Ark on Mount Ararat. Oh sorry even that won't do being less than 8000 years old.

Why don't you stop digging Terry. Every time you come back your argument gets more and more preposterous.

[Terry Fields]

Thanks for the ad hominem. I'm astonished that you can't grasp that choosing the baseline is crucial to the GW proponents, and that it's manipulation to other date ranges changes the picture totally.

Frankly, your previous posting ducks and weaves all over the place, and it isn't worth answering. Why, for example, introduce standard deviations, when no-one has done so up to now? Are you trying to cover an uncomfortable personal relationship to data? Only an ignoramus would ever say "there is too much variability".

[dennis]

Well so far *you* haven't posted any links to any useful data so I think you fit your own description quite well.

All you quote is Sun reader press releases and no substance at all.

When someone does post some real data you either ignore it or misinterpret it.

As for Geoff it has nothing to do with anti he just has a personal grudge for some reason.

[Roger]

The message from Terry Fields contains these words:

snip

I don't have the time to read that at the moment but I do have time to repeat what I have said before. Anyone who takes an extreme anomaly like

1998 as a baseline is a charletan.

The Met Office show the trend is rising up to 2004.

The anti wing don't like the IPCC but is any of the above even true, let alone relevant to the charge that the IPCC has got it all wrong.

Has it really? Oh goody so more snow for winter mountaineering at last. Pity I am now too old to really take advantage of it.

I don't have time to try and track that down on the Met Office site so I will stick my neck out and say it appears that this report seems to have got that the wrong way round. Surely the record extent of sea ice was at a minimum, not a maximum. Given arctic summer ice limits for 2007 and

2008 I can't see how the winter ice limit could be anywhere near a record maximum.

No time to check that but the previous biggest drop seems to have been from 1998 to 1999 and over the subsequent 4 years the temperature climbed back to close to the 1998 maximum.

snip

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:52:04 +0100 someone who may be "dennis@home" wrote this:-

"'Consensus is collusion'"

"Objection: More and more, climate models share all the same assumptions -- so of course they all agree! And every year, fewer scientists dare speak out against the findings of the IPCC, thanks to the pressure to conform.

"Answer: The growing confluence of model results and the increasingly similar physical representations of the climate system from model to model may well look like sharing code or tweaking 'til things look alike. But it is also perfectly consistent with better and better understanding of the underlying problem, an understanding that is shared via scientific journals and research. This understanding is coming fast as we gather more and more historical and current data, all of which provides more testing material for model refinement.

"Viewing the increasing agreement among climate models and climate scientists as collusion instead of consensus is a rather conspiratorial take on the normal course of scientific investigation. I suppose that fewer and fewer scientists disagreeing with the status quo is indeed consistent with some kind of widespread and insidious suppression of ideas, but you know, it is also consistent with having the right answer."

[Roger]

The message from Terry Fields contains these words:

Ok take that page 25 graph. Shift the base line so zero is now where 0.2 was. Does it make any real difference to the situation, of course not. Rising temperatures demonstrate warming, not baselines.

Oh yes and calling your stupidity bullshit, apart from being true, is very mild compared with the way you have sought to disparage my integrity at every turn.

I would venture to suggest that only an ignoramus would even attempt to dismiss standard deviations as of no consequence when discussing variability.

So stop digging Terry. Otherwise that fundamentalist hole you are in might collapse on you and you will be buried for good, in killfiles if nowhere else.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Oh for the days when there were no shelves that customers could get to: you went to a counter, and stated your problem, and the man behind who actually knew what he was selling went and got it from a stre-room.

I bought a ladder standoff tis week. It came fully assembled, wrapped in bubble wrap and packing tape. Not a hint of a manufacturer, not a hint of cardboard or vac forming..great!

[The Natural Philosopher]

There is plenty of money for things that are fundamentally necessary.

Nuclear power stations are cheaper than windmills and solar panels, watt for watt.

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 09:28:05 +0100 someone who may be "dennis@home" wrote this:-

Yawn. Some people may be taken in by this misrepresentation of what I have quoted, but most will not.

Anyone who wishes may look at the credentials of those behind . The Meteorological Office and Royal Society have their faults, but their web sites are rather more advanced than a "Sun reader press release". I make no comment on Sun readers, but I don't recall quoting a press release in this thread.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That is my take as well.Yes, it was a record year, yes the ice was less than it had ever been known to be.

That one sentence tells you that this is a complete snow (sic!) job, prepared by someone with the linguistic skills of a laywer, and the ethics of a weasel.

Right here, the winter of 2008 was the warmest I have ever known.

In he end, the fact that there was hardly a single overnight frost last winter, wheres in my childhood frosts - and all day frosts at that - were commonplace, tends to replace any mealy mouthed bullshit.

That report is political FUD.

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:32:25 +0100 someone who may be Terry Fields wrote this:-

it is not a (peer-reviewed) scientific paper but is rather a forum posting. There is nothing wrong with making forum postings, they are a way of putting across one's ideas to others, but one should check a posting carefully before relying on it.

Note also what it says at the top of the article, which is referred to below, as well as what it says at the bottom, "The Forum on Physics and Society is a place for discussion and disagreement on scientific and policy matters. Our newsletter publishes a combination of non-peer-reviewed technical articles, policy analyses, and opinion. All articles and editorials published in the newsletter solely represent the views of their authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Forum Executive Committee."

Having said that, let's see what Gristmill has to say on this "paper".

"The American Physical Society denies the so-called consensus"

"Objection: The American Physical Society with tens of thousands of member scientists no longer believes that the science of global warming is conclusive. So what about that so called consensus?

"Answer: The APS has not reversed its position on climate change:

" Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

" The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

"This statement was reaffirmed on July 22, 2008 in response to a controversy prompted by the publication of an article by amateur climate skeptic Christopher Monckton. That article was published in the APS Forum on Physics and Society Newsletter, not a scientific journal, and is not peer reviewed science, nor is Monckton a scientist. The material Monckton presented has been thoroughly refuted by many working climatologists and the apparent embarrassment of the APS over how this happened has prompted them to preface that article with the following disclaimer:

" The following article has not undergone any scientific peer review, since that is not normal procedure for American Physical Society newsletters. The American Physical Society reaffirms the following position on climate change, adopted by its governing body, the APS Council, on November 18, 2007: 'Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate'.

"So, what about that consensus? Far from a skeptical institution, the American Physical Society is well in agreement with the IPCC consensus statement and their statement agrees with all the other endorsements from all the other major scientific institutions and national science academies from around the world. The consensus of scientific opinion on anthropogenic global warming is alive and well."

For more robustly expressed views on this "paper" see

"Physicists forced to reaffirm that human-caused global warming is 'incontrovertible'

"The Drudge headline blared 'Group Repping 50,000 Physicists Opens Global Warming Debate?' The link was to a story 'Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate.' Since it was a denier website, I ignored it. Then I got forwarded an e-mail from one of the top journalists in the country titled 'This may be important' with the same opening paragraph as the denier article:

" The American Physical Society, an organization representing nearly 50,000 physicists, has reversed its stance on climate change and is now proclaiming that many of its members disbelieve in human-induced global warming. The APS is also sponsoring public debate on the validity of global warming science. The leadership of the society had previously called the evidence for global warming 'incontrovertible.'

"Now you can be just as sure that any denier talk point is wrong without studying it in detail as you can be sure that a perpetual motion machine is not, in fact, perpetual without studying it in detail. But as a former American Physical Society Congressional science fellow, I feel obliged to point out that the obvious way to figure out what the American Physical Society believes is to go to their website,

and see what they say:" [snip]

and

"The country?s largest organization of physicists is working fast to restore its good name, which was damaged by one ignorant editor of a non-peer-reviewed newsletter. That editor, Jeff Marque, published a previously-debunked analysis by failed conservative politician and non-scientist Lord Monckton.

"The Council of the American Physical Society quickly responded to the uproar over this disinformation by adding a new disclaimer to the Monckton article:" [snip]

"There is no need to waste any further time here debunking Monckton?s 'sleight-of-hand to fool the unwary,' as RealClimate put it. As the APS makes clear, just because somebody uses a lot of numbers and formulas, that doesn?t make their analysis either scientific or credible.

and

"Should you be interested in learning more about TVMOB [The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley], go to the Science & Public Policy Institute website where he is Chief Policy Adviser. You will learn he has astonishing scientific credentials such as a 'Nobel prize pin,' because he commented on the IPCC Fourth assessment report. This has 'earned him the status of Nobel Peace Laureate. His Nobel prize pin, made of gold recovered from a physics experiment, was presented to him by the Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, New York.' Also 'his limpid analysis of the climate-feedback factor was published on the famous climate blog of Roger Pielke, Sr.' I kid you not.

"Monty Python is alive and well. Oh, and TVMOB knows how to use the words 'primo' and 'secundo' and 'tertio.' Some of us can only dream of such scientific achievements.

"Finally, if his writing has made you a fan of TVMOB, you can go to 'HouseOfNames.com' and purchase products labeled with the Monckton family crest, including mouse pads."

[David Hansen]

On Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:32:25 +0100 someone who may be Terry Fields wrote this:-

"The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley just can?t catch a break. Not only does TVMOB have to deal with well-deserved mockery for his un-peer-reviewed paper. He also has to deal with factual debunking from real climate scientists, in this case, the scientists at RealClimate. Here is a taste:" [snip]

"That is how to diss-a-peer."

What is snipped is the majority of the article at

which in full is

"We are a little late to the party, but it is worth adding a few words now that our favourite amateur contrarian is at it again. As many already know, the Forum on Physics and Society (an un-peer-reviewed newsletter published by the otherwise quite sensible American Physical Society), rather surprisingly published a new paper by Monckton that tries again to show using rigorous arithmetic that IPCC is all wrong and that climate sensitivity is negligible. His latest sally, like his previous attempt, is full of the usual obfuscating sleight of hand, but to save people the time in working it out themselves, here are a few highlights.

"As Deltoid quickly noticed the most egregious error is a completely arbitrary reduction (by 66%) of the radiative forcing due to CO2. He amusingly justifies this with reference to tropical troposphere temperatures - neglecting of course that temperatures change in response to forcing and are not the forcing itself. And of course, he ignores the evidence that the temperature changes are in fact rather uncertain, and may well be much more in accord with the models than he thinks.

"But back to his main error: Forcing due to CO2 can be calculated very accurately using line-by-line radiative transfer codes (see Myhre et al 2001; Collins et al 2006). It is normally done for a few standard atmospheric profiles and those results weighted to produce a global mean estimate of 3.7 W/m2 - given the variations in atmospheric composition (clouds, water vapour etc.) uncertainties are about 10% (or 0.4 W/m2) (the spatial pattern can be seen here). There is no way that it is appropriate to arbitrarily divide it by three.

"There is a good analogy to gas mileage. The gallon of gasoline is equivalent to the forcing, the miles you can go on a gallon is the response (i.e. temperature), and thus the miles per gallon is analogous to the climate sensitivity. Thinking that forcing should be changed because of your perception of the temperature change is equivalent to deciding after the fact that you only put in third of a gallon because you ran out of gas earlier than you expected. The appropriate response would be to think about the miles per gallon - but you'd need to be sure that you measured the miles travelled accurately (a very big issue for the tropical troposphere).

"But Monckton is not satisfied with just a factor of three reduction in sensitivity. So he makes another dodgy claim. Note that Monckton starts off using the IPCC definition of climate sensitivity as the forcing associated with a concentration of 2xCO2 - this is the classical 'Charney Sensitivity' and does not include feedbacks associated with carbon cycle, vegetation or ice-sheet change. Think of it this way - if humans raise CO2 levels to 560 ppm from 280 ppm through our emissions, and then as the climate warms the carbon cycle starts adding even more CO2 to the atmosphere, then the final CO2 will be higher and the temperature will end up higher than standard sensitivity would predict, but you are no longer dealing with the sensitivity to 2xCO2. Thus the classical climate sensitivity does not include any carbon cycle feedback term. But Monckton puts one in anyway.

"You might ask why he would do this. Why add another positive feedback to the mix when he is aiming to minimise the climate sensitivity? The answer lies in the backwards calculations he makes to derive the feedbacks. At this point, I was going to do a full analysis of that particular calculation - but I was scooped. So instead of repeating the work, I'll refer you there. The short answer is that by increasing the feedbacks incorrectly, he makes the 'no-feedback' temperature smaller (since he is deriving it from the reported climate sensitivities divided by the feedbacks). This reverses the causality since the 'no-feedback' value is actually independent of the feedbacks, and is much better constrained.

"There are many more errors in his piece - for instance he accuses the IPCC of not defining radiative forcing in the Summary for Policy Makers and not fixing this despite requests. Umm? except that the definition is on the bottom of page 2. He bizarrely compares the net anthropogenic forcing to date with the value due to CO2 alone and then extrapolates that difference to come up with a meaningless 'total anthropogenic forcings Del F_2xCO2?. His derivations and discussions of the no-feedback sensitivity and feedbacks is extremely opaque (a much better description is given on the first couple of pages of Hansen et al, 1984)). His discussion of the forcings in that paper are wrong (it's 4.0 W/m2 for 2xCO2 (p135), not 4.8 W/m2), and the no-feedback temperature change is 1.2 (Hansen et al, 1988, p9360), giving k=0.30 C/(W/m2) (not his incorrect 0.260 C/(W/m2) value). Etc? Needless to say, the multiple errors completely undermine the conclusions regarding climate sensitivity.

"Generally speaking, these are the kinds of issues that get spotted by peer-reviewers: are the citations correctly interpreted? is the mathematics correct? is the reasoning sound? do the conclusions follow? etc. In this case, there really wouldn't have been much left, and so it is fair to conclude that Monckton's piece only saw the light of day because it wasn't peer-reviewed, not because it was. Claims that the suggested edits from the editor of the newsletter constitute 'peer-review' are belied by the editor's obvious unfamiliarity with the key concepts of forcing and feedback

- and the multitude of basic errors still remaining. The even more egregious claims that this paper provides 'Mathematical proof that there is no 'climate crisis' ' or is 'a major, peer-reviewed paper in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 10,000-strong American Physical Society' are just bunk (though amusing in their chutzpah).

"The rational for the FPS publication of this note was to 'open up the debate' on climate change. The obvious ineptitude of this contribution underlines quite effectively how little debate there is on the fundamentals if this is the best counter-argument that can be offered."

[Frank Erskine]

[dennis]

8<

That's the trouble with the GW debate, everyone talks about specific events that prove their case when its the average of the system that matters.

Even when graphs are printed people look at the peaks and say "its rising" they don't integrate the graph over time to get the correct answers. I guess its just poor education leading to people not being able to use statistics correctly.

[Terry Fields]

Check?

The guys quotes sourced data, with no mainpulation. Roger wanted data and he got it in spades.

It's known in the trade as CMA.

I note that none of the data quoted has been challenged.

Or the shifting of decimal points in the 'correct' direction, after the scientists had drafted it.

Thanks for taking the trouble to post the above, but it has no greater credence than a character assassination - a sure sign of insecurity by those undertaking it.

[dennis]

Read the articles.. you can't predict it whatever the model. So the fact the models agree implies there is something wrong to get the same result. The results should vary widely but they don't.

Look at weather forecasts as they have the same problem with predicting in advance.

In fact the met office do lots of runs with different starting data to see how much the predictions diversify or converge for each forecast. Some days it always diversifies and they know the forecast is cr@p. They get around this they are constantly updating the starting conditions, something the climate modelers can't/won't do.

Now go and produce some more cr@p quotes rather than actually thinking about it like you always do.