Official bias

The last few days has witnessed much consideration on the blogs of whether the Met Office is institutionally biased in favour of warmism.

How about this for a quote as regards UK winters:

"The famously cold winter of 1962/63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more, compared with approximately every 100 to 200 years before 1850."

That was Peter Stott, a Met Office Scientist on 25th February 2009.  Although we have a bit to go before this winter's temperatures are available (Dec, Jan, Feb), Peter Stott's comment is looking a bit thin.

I recall a comparison of Met Office/CRU predictions for global temperatures against the outcomes.  I have dug back to the post on the Air Vent and compared the predictions since 1998 against the outcomes as contained in this entry on the Met office website.  The comparison seems to show that the Met Office/CRU global surface temperature prediction overshot the actual result in ten out of eleven years. Here are the figures shown as the temperature anomaly above the 1961-90 average:

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…………(0.52 Jan - Oct)

It looks from those figures that the Met Office has over predicted the temperature by 0.07degrees centigrade  on average each year.  They undershot only once in 11 years.  That will almost certainly be once in twelve years at the end of this month.

So why the persistent over shoot when you might expect less of a pattern.  I suggest the answer is warmist bias in the models and the mindset.