Industry | 2009.08.08
The Met Office thinks August will be wet. Buy futures in sun cream now | Simon Jenkins
Like recent pandemic predictions, weather forecasting is best left to the private sector, to ball-gazers and seaweed
Tomorrow\'s weather will be unsettled with bright intervals and showers interspersed with more prolonged periods of rain. The weekend will continue unsettled with a 65% chance of showers and further rain on Saturday.
We listen uncomplaining to this drivel from one day to the next. We are British. Weather forecasting is like abstract art, any fool can do it once he has got the job.
This week our spirits broke. We had been told by what passes for a government that this would be a warm summer, indeed a "barbecue summer". In the event, we had a decent June but a lousy July and a worse August is predicted. This is from the same people who said that both 2007 and 2008 would be "warmer than average", when they were cooler and wetter. They also said that any repeat this summer of the devastating rains of those two years was "highly unlikely". A new computer was reported to have run an "ensemble forecast" 41 times. It is probably the same computer as does defence ministry procurement, NHS records and ID cards.
This is no laughing matter. Weather is serious money to some people. The American weather derivatives market, with its fancy hedge swaptions, straddles and "costless collars", was worth over $7bn before the credit crunch. Meanwhile, this year\'s forecasting fiasco has led to a 25% surge in last-minute holiday bookings abroad.
I once sympathised with the BBC forecaster Michael Fish after he was roasted for telling the nation that the hurricane of 1987 would miss land and veer off in the direction of the Bay of Biscay or somewhere harmless. We all make mistakes.
When I read Fish\'s defence of the "barbecue summer" in yesterday\'s Guardian, my sympathy lapsed. "Grossly unfair," he said of any criticism. People should not complain when forecasts go wrong, as if that were a logical inevitability. Anyway, he added, there was a bit of sun during Wimbledon and Glastonbury. "There is every chance" that the remainder of the summer could be fine and "contain really warm weather".
Curiously Fish added that the forecasts were really aimed at "commercial organisations", as if firms could be fobbed off with any rubbish. Besides, he said, the trouble lay with the media, "who misinterpret the forecasts", and the general public, who "take more notice of the forecasts than they have in the past". People should apparently "learn to take pot luck".
We hear much talk about those who study English needing to be taught science. In my view, it is those who study science who need to be taught English. What is the point of public predictions so smothered in caveats and qualifiers as to be drained of significance? The same scientists who lecture ministers on the exactitude of their calling – on the purity of "the science" – use qualifiers that any English student could see render nouns worthless.
Fish excuses his colleagues with weakening words such as chance, might, could, possibly, probably and even pot luck. Yet he is supposed to tell us what is going to happen. If these people cannot do so, and keep getting their predictions wrong, I see no point in paying them a salary.
I was always told that you cannot predict summer weather in Britain. My early holidays on Cardigan Bay were enlivened by my father given a running commentary on the titanic struggle between "a depression off Iceland" and "an anticyclone off the Azores", as if it were Arsenal v Chelsea.
Between this Scylla and Charybdis flows the Gulf Stream. As it collides with the complex profile of the British Isles, it generates the south-westerlies that pummel the coast all summer. The result is lost in chaos theory, vulnerable to a butterfly in Greenland or a leatherback in the Caribbean. Yet whenever criticised, the Met Office pleads for more staff, more research and a bigger computer. It is like burning pound notes in a gale.
The office now claims that it is "66% certain" that next winter will be warmer and wetter than last. The figure is an ominously precise advance on the 65% certainty of a warm summer. The information is useless without knowing the likelihood of the "66%" being correct. Since for three years the Met Office has been plain wrong, a shrewd hedge manager would put the likelihood at zero and bet 100% against it. Indeed, the best news of the week is that the Met Office thinks August will be wet. I should buy sun cream futures.
The purveyors of British weather forecasts are relentlessly upbeat in the long term and gloomy in the short, in other words they are probably political. There is rarely a weekend forecast that does not stress rain (or that curious synonym, showers) at the expense of sun, even if the rain falls, if at all, for a mere hour a day. Nor do forecasts favour coastal microclimates, which are mostly sunnier than inland and are where most holidaymakers go.
A pub in my Welsh coastal village used to print out the BBC weather forecast each Friday – invariably "rain in Wales" – and put it on a board so visitors could hurl darts at it. The Scottish village of Carrbridge once threatened to sue the Met Office for a continually inaccurate forecast of rain that was ruining its tourist industry.
Any gaze across the swamp of public information bears witness to the Arab saying that he who claims to know the future is a liar, even if proved right. The popular mathematician John Allen Paulos devoted most of his masterpiece – Innumeracy – not to algebra and geometry but to proportion and probability. Without understanding them, he said, we go mad.
Today\'s political scaremongers, whether dealing with disease, terrorism, paedophilia, health and safety or the weather, seek to deny what Paulos called "the irreducibly probabilistic nature of life". They have lost all sense of proportion. In reality, wrote Paulos, "giving due weight to the fortuitous … is a mark of maturity and balance".
The chance of a British soldier being a casualty in Helmand is in the order of one in 10, yet he is suffering to avert what is an infinitesimal risk, of a terrorism casualty on the streets of Britain. Millions of pounds of health spending are being diverted to swine flu, despite the chance of someone dying from it being far less than of the illnesses starved of funds as a result.
There may be some value in a weather forecast in the American midwest, where it is reliable. But in Britain such forecasting is pseudo-science, what Isaac Asimov dismissed as "a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold". Like recent pandemic predictions, it is best left to the private sector, to insurers, astrologers, ball-gazers and seaweed. If Fish and his ilk want to run the streets naked and burble about showers, let them, but not at my expense.
I have a Canadian stick outside my house that purports to predict the weather by turning up or down. I have learned its crafty ways. It moves, but only after the weather has already changed, thus telling me what I can see. It is cunning and beautiful. I love it.
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