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December 18, 2009
The perils of forecasting
A bit of warming doesn't seem a bad idea this morning.
The Met Office - which tells us what temperatures will be across the world at the end of the century - says it is too early to tell whether there will be a white Christmas - next week.
That sounds logical to me, in a way. I mean, if the UK Government is willing to pay you for futurology, why risk screwing up your reputation by predicting something that can be checked before next year's funding is agreed.
But, just maybe, some future government will save some of those taxpayers' billions by not buying quite so much long-term futurology.
Concerning next week's snow forecast, I was interested to see, on the Met Office website, that they are able to report all sorts of useful things such as temperature, wind and visibility at some of their observation stations. But this does not include the depth of snow actually present. It seems that climate change is a bit of a pain for them too.
1 comments:
That sounds logical to me, in a way. I mean, if the UK Government is willing to pay you for futurology, why risk screwing up your reputation by predicting something that can be checked before next year's funding is agreed.
But, just maybe, some future government will save some of those taxpayers' billions by not buying quite so much long-term futurology.
Concerning next week's snow forecast, I was interested to see, on the Met Office website, that they are able to report all sorts of useful things such as temperature, wind and visibility at some of their observation stations. But this does not include the depth of snow actually present. It seems that climate change is a bit of a pain for them too.
Best regards
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