BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk: Stockholm

Just had a couple of weeks in Stockholm, courtesy of Thorsten Mauritsen at MISU. who we had previously visited in Hamburg. Lots of science will be forthcoming but we are too busy doing it to write about it for now

For the moment, I will just note that Thorsten is Danish, previously working in Germany but now in Sweden, we had discussions with his British and French group members, the Head of Department is Spanish. Discussions in the canteen seemed to be mostly English in a variety of accents (including the Dutch student who had considered coming to the UK but who had been dissuaded by the obvious reason), mixed with a range of unidentifiable Scandinavian languages – presumably mostly, if not all, Swedish. Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn would be horrified to hear of such an outrageous situation and I’m relieved that they are doing their level best to ensure that no Brits will risk encountering such a terrible situation again.

(Actually, to be honest I am relieved that their level best is so pitiful that we aren’t actually going to leave the EU. But I’m still disgusted that they are so scared at the thought of people living, working and studying in different countries that they are completely fixated on the idea of preventing us from doing so.)

Haga parkrun was close to our hotel, and by strange quirk of fate on Sunday morning I ran a route which quite closely approximates a lap of the upcoming Stockholm marathon. I hadn't even known there was a marathon. Some were out practising for the famous Stockholm ski marathon too.

Stockholm has a lot of islands, and as a result, there’s a lot of coastline and water.

On our last night we had dinner in a Michelin-starred restaurant which was an interesting experience. However this photo below is just the little castle on the top of Kastellholmen which may be used as some sort of conference centre I think.

Arbitration

My reader is probably waiting with bated breath for my views on the forthcoming election. In the blue corner, Teresa “strong and stable” May (or should that be “u-turn when you want to”). In the red, Jeremy “don't mention the brother” Corbyn. In the ignored corner, Nutter and Failing and a few others.

Of course, it's all about brexit, so there hasn't been any sort of meaningful debate about this. Both tories and labour are rushing headlong for the most catastrophic outcome they can possibly engineer, and there isn't a fag-paper of difference between them on anything substantive. Corbyn promises better employment protection and May less red tape but these are not really issues of how and why we leave the EU, rather what we do afterwards. The Labour vision may be marginally more attractive but that's basically a question of what colour deck-chairs you prefer on the “Titanic Success”.

It's important to realise, there is no such thing as  a “good brexit”. The only reasonable brexit would be something functionally indistinguishable from the status quo, which both sides have ruled out. The choice is between a bad brexit, a worse brexit and a catastrophic brexit, with all the smart money on the latter. All competent experts have repeatedly pointed out the huge problems that brexit will bring, including but not limited to our European flights (there's no agreement for anything post 2019 and timetables will have to be designed well in advance of that), the operation of our nuclear industry (including such details as medical isotopes), the huge customs problem at Dover/Calais for which the infrastructure does not exist and simply cannot be built in time, the Northern Irish border which will likely spark off unification violence, the harm to our financial industry, the fact that we aren't even normal WTO members in our own right and negotiating that will take agreement from the other 162, the 759 separate agreements with 168 countries that need to be renegotiated in the remaining 661 days etc. The whole thing is idiotic nonsense and the failure of most of our politicians to say as much in plain terms is a gross dereliction of their duty.

In my opinion, the most likely outcome by some way remains a year or so of increasingly acrimonious negotiations or rather arguments, followed by a collapse of the process and long period of recrimination. This national humiliation will come at great cost of course, not just economically but also politically, culturally and socially, as we are already starting to see. Lots of people are starting to bleat about the entirely predictable consequences. I'm intensely relaxed about the poor farmers, since just about every field round here had a “Vote Leave” placard this time last year. They of all people should realise that they will reap what they have sown!

And all for what? Even though it was all about “taking back control”, no-one is prepared to make any promises about immigration anyway. For while the EU was always the convenient excuse for the large-scale immigration that govts of all stripes have encouraged over recent years, it was never actually anything more than that. They could have reduced immigration substantially had they wanted to, but they saw the obvious economic benefits of it and rather than arguing honestly in favour, passed the buck on to the EU. That is no longer possible, so we get vague ambitions which are quite clearly meant as nothing more than a dog-whistle to UKIP voters who are presumably thought to be too stupid to realise that there isn't a plan to actually do anything.

I've been enjoying the way the Tory campaign has been falling apart. “Strong and stable” has been laughed out of existence, it doesn't seem such a clever idea now to base the campaign on May's personality when it is obviously so brittle and unpleasant. Amusingly, the local election leaflet which eventually plopped through the letter box just a couple of days ago features May more centrally than the candidate himself, which should lose him some votes but I'm sure won't affect the result. As for the central conceit of May being the only person capable of negotiating brexit, if anyone seriously thinks she'll actually be PM on the day we leave the EU, I feel a wager coming on.

The only mainstream party with anything approaching a sane policy on brexit is the LibDems, so I'll be supporting them. Or rather, I would be, but they have agreed a local pact with the Greens in a neighbouring constituency (Harrogate and Knaresborough) that they won't stand here and the greens won't stand there. Think they've got the better of that bargain as H&K is at least a possible LibDem seat though not one of their top targets. So I'll be voting Green instead, the candidate seems to have made a very good impression locally (though we missed the local hustings, being in Hamburg at the time). The Greens have a very similar policy to the LibDems anyway and it wouldn't matter who stood here, the local “pig in a blue rosette” is guaranteed to be re-elected even though he was a staunch remainer this time last year.

Cast ne'er a clout till May's out

I mentioned some time ago that Piers Corbyn had been up to his old tricks with an apocalyptic prediction of doom for the coldest May ever in the UK, right in time for our recent trip there.

May is long since out, and it's time to get clouting. May turned out to be slightly warmer than average. I wonder who actually pays for his "forecasts"?

PMIP at Crewe

We've been back well over a week, so the trip report is well overdue.

The main excuse for our recent lengthy UK trip was the PMIP meeting in Crewe. Although we had originally planned to combine this with the EGU in Vienna two weeks earlier, this didn't happen for a number of reasons. I should probably call the meeting PMIP3, as this is the third iteration of the project, but really the scientific content covered a lot of PMIP2-related work (including ours) and some stuff that isn't really PMIP at all, at least in the strict sense of modelling one of the handful of specific eras with community-defined boundary conditions. To be honest, although there was plenty of generally interesting stuff, there wasn't a great deal that struck me as particularly exciting or noteworthy at least in the context of my own area of research. I liked Sandy Harrison's presentation which summarised her huge effort (with others) in generating model(er)-friendly sets of paleodata which can be used to test climate models. I also had a lot of good conversations regarding my poster, which will lead to further analyses and hopefully improvements of the paper which is mostly written. I'll blog about that at a later date. The posters were up all week and located in the coffee area, so it was easier to have good discussions than is often the case. So it was a very useful week for me.

The contrast with Gavin's workshop in Hawaii was surprisingly large - the latter was much more focussed on actually using the past for informing on the future (eg validating/constraining model predictions) whereas PMIP has many more people who pay lip-service to this goal, while they really just look at the past because it is interesting science. I'm not meaning to be too critical of their approach, it's an entirely reasonable thing for an academic to do, so long as not all of them do it! There were also some general concerns expressed at the lack of "climate prediction people" at the workshop, but it seems to me that the links between PMIP and CMIP are continuing to strengthen gradually, and since this is the first time that PMIP simulations have been officially included in the CMIP experiments, it's hardly surprising that the communities are still somewhat disjoint. On the other hand, it was disappointing that there was no-one at all from the Hadley Centre, who seem to have basically given up paleoclimate modelling, just as the rest of the world is getting properly interested in it. GISS was another notable absentee - I'm guessing in this case it was just due to overcommitment or clashes, as several of them have generally been very active. Other than that, there was a good attendance, especially (and unsurprisingly) from the UK. So while we could have made a longer work trip out of it, our decision to not trip around the country to visit different institutes seemed pretty well vindicated. Plus, flying into Manchester made it easy to avoid Heathrow Airport which is never a bad idea.

The venue was great. PMIP has a history of somewhat exotic locations (previously Kyoto and before that Estes Park in the Rockies), and for this meeting we had originally been threatened with a Scottish castle in February (it seemed to me that everyone who had actually been to Scotland in February objected vociferously to this absurd proposition, but we were a small minority and outvoted). Fortunately, it proved impossible to find such a site, and Crewe Hall in May made for an excellent alternative. Until quite recently an elaborate stately home, it is now a modern hotel with excellent conference facilities. We spent most of our time in the modern bit, with the conference dinner and ceilidh in the old bit. Quite by chance, most of the organisers and their friends were also staying in the historic rooms too :-) Next time looks like it will be in Belgium, courtesy of Michel Crucifix. He promises it will not be in Louvain-la-Neuve.

Along with the work, we had holidays in Lancashire and Scotland, which were great (as you may have guessed from the pictures), but could have been just a little warmer. Not that the weather was anything like the record-breaking cold temperatures that Corbyn predicted, so no doubt he is busy hunting for cherries to pick out of the wreckage of his forecast, or re-painting his bullseye somewhere in the vicinity of the data.

Now we're back in Japan with the small matter of 5 papers to finish before 31st July...

Barbecue summer - the sequel!

Oh, I suppose I shouldn't poke fun. Having got their fingers burnt last year - or perhaps I should say, having had their parade thoroughly rained on - the UK Met Office is declining to offer public forecasts, but is still doing "experimental" research on seasonal prediction and has obviously given a nod and a wink to the author of this Times article.

Of course we all know how the last "barbecue summer" turned out:

“Well, let’s put it this way. I’ve put my barbecue in the shed,” Dave says. “I don’t want it to get any rustier.”

I'm going to be in the UK for a chunk of the summer, so I hope they have got it right this time.

I am reminded that earlier this year, the BBC put out its weather contract to tender. Rumour has it that the esteemed Piers Corbyn, in a change of focus from his current work in volcano and earthquake prediction (no I'm not joking on that bit), is putting in a strong bid.

Posts of the year

Seems like the meme du jour is to not bother blogging anything new but just to repost something the readers have already seen. So without further ado, I make no claim to these being the "best", but they are probably the ones I most enjoyed writing. My list goes up to 13 of course. Hope you enjoy reading them as you pretend to get back to work on Monday morning :-)

Corbynwatch 2008: The Verdict. I see there a brief reference to a 2009 forecast, and the provisional figures suggest that Corbyn got that wrong too - it looks likely to be the 5th warmest year on record.

Hansen's El Nino forecast reprised. Hansen gets it right, Pielke gets it wrong. Same old same old.

Out of court settlement in Pinder v Fox? After a long struggle, Russ gets his just desserts (perhaps).

Reduced sickness in commuter cyclists. On your bike, cagers.

Ignobel research on disease transmission. Japanese schoolchildren weaponise the swine 'flu.

Shorter UK Climate Projections. Does what it says on the tin.

Spend for the planet! Japanomics at its best.

More on that ENSO nonsense. This story has some way still to run...

Uniform prior: dead at last! Better late than never.

Bankers "have learned lessons". The bonkers bail-out. What a wunch they are...

Successful writer/call girl/blogger outed...as a scientist.

UKMO agrees with me. Looks like they might get a long-term prediction right at last :-)

The last word.

By popular demand...

My reader seems to think it's time I said something about our friend Piers:

(pic from my hit counter).

The context is obviously the embarassing bust of the UKMO forecast for a hot summer. My sympathy for them is in rather short supply, given the ridiculous way in which they have over-hyped the "danger" posed by the possibility of some tolerably pleasant weather over recent years. As I said at the time, even if it did turn out warm, the impact on human health was hardly going to come close to their hyperbolic suggestions (yeah yeah, you can try to pretend it's all the fault of the press if you like, but I don't see anyone trying to correct them).

I can't blame Corbyn for crowing about it, not that I actually think his opinion is worth anything. However, it does highlight the difficulty that numerical models have with handling the subtle shifts in weather patterns that can have a strong influence on the UK's climate. Coming hot on the heels of some thoughtful (and thoughtless :-) ) criticism of the recent UKCP predictions I suspect there may be some rather long faces in Exeter...

Earthquake prediction

In case anyone was wondering whether there was anything to that supposed "prediction" of the recent Italian earthquake, Piers Corbyn's advocacy of the cause should settle the matter...

"The tragic Earthquake death toll in L'Aquila Italy is due to criminal arrogance of authorities who ignored the well-founded warnings of an earthquake-scientist; and this isn't the first time that authorities and governments have ignored well-founded serious warnings based on sound science* " said Piers Corbyn astrophysicist

(blah blah blah repeat ad nauseam)

Although I have no particular expertise, I do suspect there may be something to at least some of the various "precursor" theories. However, the obvious point, as many bloggers have mentioned, is that a "warning" that is vague enough to be a week (or more) wrong and in the wrong place to boot is completely useless, even if such predictions occasionally provide enough of a coincidence to be superficially attractive. I'm not at all surprised to see Piers's enthusiasm for it, as it closely mirrors his own modus operandi.

Corbyn again

The August data are in, and once again it is 2 out of 2 for Piers! The daily max temperature was 1.2C below average, covered by his range of 0.3 - 1.3C colder than average, and rainfall at 165% was also inside his range of 125%-175%.

So he's up to 8 out of 14, which means the p-value is still below 5%, but it is heading in the right direction. There is no sign of the September forecast yet. The August one only appeared on the 8th, by which time it was already well set to be very a wet month with cold days, but of course he claims that this forecast was really made some time previously...

Another good month for Corbyn

July was a good month for Corbyn's monthly forecast - the rainfall of 167% was in his predicted range of 160-250%, and the mean daily max (anomaly) of -0.8C was also in his range of -1 to -0.2 (data here). The various specifics were largely wrong but I can't go cherry-picking what to evaluate after the event. [I did initially say I would use mean, not max, temp but that was before being pointed to the max data on Philip Eden's broken site.]

So now he is up to 6 correct forecasts out of 12 so far this year (temp and precip for 6 months, June being curiously absent). That still represents a p-value of less than 2% based on his claimed 80% accuracy. That is, if his forecasts really had a long-run probability of 80% of validating, then the probability of getting 6 or fewer correct out of 12 is under 2%. On the other hand, it is better than chance, given that his ranges generally cover less than 50% of a reasonable climatological range. (That doesn't mean much, given that he only publishes the forecast a day or two into the month. The very heavy rain at the start of July was easily predicted by everyone at that point. Also, there is the question as to why June's forecast was not released...but there is little point in speculating on that point.)

Corbyn on July

For some reason I never saw a copy of Piers Corbyn's June forecast, so I can't evaluate that. He did breathlessly announce on the 26th (Thursday): Our long range forecast for deluges and floods between 29th June and 2nd July still stands - so Glastonbury and Wimbledon watch out! However the only report I saw about Glastonbury at that time said it was pretty dry, even sunny by Sunday, and the drizzle at Wimbledon on the 2nd certainly wasn't enough to save Andy Murray. With typical chutzpah, he is still claiming he got this right - can anyone point to any "exceptional torrential downpours" in this interval? (I'm aware of some fairly heavy rain on the 27th, I even got to enjoy it as I was in Sheffield at the time.)

Anyway, on with July. It's going to be extremely wet ("probably one of the three wettest Julys on record") with a rainfall of 160-250% of the average over England and Wales. Just to be difficult, his temperature prediction is for the daily max rather than mean as previously. This is predicted to be 0.2-1C below mean, and he also says that the mins will probably not be below normal. I reckon I can therefore reasonably assign a range of about -0.5C to +0.2C for the means (for comparison with data). If the mean is outside this range, then it is hard to see the max being in Corbyn's prediction. I think this is probably generous to him, but will be happy to hear alternative suggestions.

As well as the UK weather, he has thrown in some typhoon predictions for free. Apparently there's a 60% chance of Japan taking a hit in the first half of the month or so. No sign of them so far and it has been particularly cold here this year, although I don't know what the sea surface temperature is looking like in the formation zone.

I've been away, BTW, for those who were wondering if I'd given up entirely.

Corbyn's May forecast

After last month's success, I'm relieved to say that things are back to normal for May, so my hat is safe from the frying pan. Remember, Corbyn forecast a cool month (0.5 to 1C below normal) with average rainfall (90-115%). Well, it turned out rather warm at 13.6C (here and here), which is more than 2C above the normal for May (about 2 standard deviations), and the rain was also clearly above his range (currently 128% at Philip Eden's site, although there is one more day to update there, which cannot bring it into the forecast range now updated to 124% for the full month). The temperature looks like it should be among the 10 warmest on record (and it could possibly be the warmest May for 160 years), although we will have to wait for the official figures to be sure.

So now Corbyn is down to a 40% success rate for the year so far (4 hits from 10 forecasts). Even if he gets every remaining month for the rest of the year perfect for temperature and rainfall, he cannot climb back up to his claimed 80% success rate.

Woohoo! Corbyn nails it!

Well, he got it right one month in a row. Honestly, I'm impressed. I'll be even more impressed if he gets it right for the next few months, though. For the record, April was close to average temperature and just above average rainfall, both comfortably within his predicted ranges. So now his score is up to 4 out of 8 for the year, which is still not close to his claimed 80% success rate, but slightly better than it was last month. Since it is late on a Friday night, I'll leave the binomial probability thing as an exercise for my readers :-)

Corbyn thinks that May should be about average for rain (90-115% of normal) but rather chilly, at 0.5 - 1C below average for the month. There aren't any exciting weather events forecast (you can't go far wrong with "variable: some showers" in May).

Corbyn's April forecast

Looks like the fun is set to continue for a little while longer, cos I've got Corbyn's April forecast. He thinks that April will be cool and rainy. This month he has unhelpfully split the Central England Temperature region into no fewer than three sections, so I'll make an estimate of the average: the SE chunk is predicted to be from -0.5 to +0.5C, the western chunk is -1 to 0C and a northern wedge is -0.8 to 0.2C - all values compared to the 1961-90 mean which is 7.89C for the CET series. So I'll take the overall average of that to be -0.75 to +0.25C and anything in that range (7.14 - 8.14C) will be a win for him. Rainfall is a little simpler, his forecast is 110-140% for the west and 95-130% for the east and north, so I'll allow 100-135% to count as a win.

As for notable events, the Grand National (5th) will be warm and dry, and the London Marathon (13th) will be positively warm or even hot. The Met Office disagrees on both counts (well they suggest the LM may be OK-ish), but what do they know?

March Corbynwatch

A quick update on the March results: Corbyn gets a fail on the temperature (he predicted colder than normal, it was warmer according to here and here - note that "normal" in his terms is the 1961-90 mean, which was 5.67C) but a success on the rain - he said upwards of 130% of normal, and Philip Eden says we had 135% (I'm simplifying Corbyn's forecast here a bit, since I don't have precise regional data). As before, I'm ignoring the sunshine on the basis that this is essentially the converse of the rainfall forecast: for the record, he was actually wrong.

So a second successive 50% result means that the scores on the doors have "improved" to 2 out of 6 for the first 3 months of the year. However, despite the higher overall success rate, the failure of his method is actually marginally more clear-cut now, since the gap between the actual success rate and the claimed 80% forecast accuracy is more apparent:

Successes (out of 6)	6 or 5	4 or 3	2 or less
Probability	66%	33%	2%

(Yes there's a rounding error there, all three values are actually a little lower than quoted.)

I hope someone will supply April's forecast. If he gets the next 7 months spot-on (temp and precip) he'll be up to the 80% rate that he claims, and I will eat my hat, video the event and post it on Youtube.

Corbyn on March

I've got hold of Piers Corbyn's forecast for March. He predicts that it will be cold, very wet and slightly cloudier than average. According to Philip Eden, he's wrong on all counts at the moment.

The (in?)famous Wheeler paper specifically focussed on gales, and there was of course a severe storm a few days ago across much of the UK. So it's interesting to see what Piers predicted for that interval:

Cold with fog and frost. Some wintry showers. Wind: light/mod.

The Calcutta Cup match was supposed to be "Prob dry. 10% risk of shower."

Oh well, there's always next week to look forward to, for which he forecasts.

18-21 Mar (85%) Very wet & windy, thunder and local floods. Gales.

Whither Weatheraction?

Looks like the fun is over for now, as Corbyn has stopped publishing his forecasts. Perhaps he thought his run of failures was getting a bit embarrassing. But it could just be a temporary hiccough, so I'll keep an eye out for new developments. Of course I could get the forecasts by buying them, but I'd rather drill a hole in my head than actually pay for that nonsense - and perhaps more importantly, if I actually entered into a contract then I might have to respect confidentiality clauses which would negate the whole point of the exercise.

I did find my copy of Dennis Wheeler's paper and may post on it later. But for now, you will have to put up with some poetry:

Whether the Weatheraction forecast be wrong,
Or whether the Weatheraction forecast be right,
We must weather the real weather,
Whatever the weather,
Whether Piers Corbyn predicted it or not.

February Corbynwatch

Feb was supposed to be warm and wet. As I said earlier, a CET temperature in the range of 4.5-5.5C would fit the bill - and this time it seems like he got it right! This page actually gives a value of 5.51C but it seems to be biased a little high, so I'm happy to count that as a win for him. The rain forecast didn't turn out quote so well though:

Corbyn	Rain: 160%	Sun 60%
Reality	Rain: 60%	Sun: 160%

(% of normal values)

But I'll only count that as a single failure since rain and sun are obviously negatively correlated (rain and temp is not so clear: Jan was warm and wet, Feb was warm and dry).

Looking just at these monthly means for Jan and Feb (temp and rain), Piers scores 1 out of 4 - Feb temp is the only one he got right. His claimed probabilities for these forecasts were between 75% and 85%. Using a typical value of 80% for simplicity, the probability of different outcomes can be calculated as:

Win-Loss	4-0	3-1	2-2	1-3	0-4
Probability	41%	41%	15%	2.5%	0.2%

(yes, I've learnt how to put tables in to Blogger without messing up the spacing).

So either he's been extremely unlucky...or his claimed probabilities are wrong. The lesson here is that at a predicted 80% probability, even with only a modest sample you have to get a fair number majority right, not just the occasional lucky hit. With more months, it will get increasingly implausible that his failures can be put down to bad luck. I haven't even bothered with the string of storm forecasts that have failed so far.

March's forecast hasn't appeared yet.

Corbyn on February

Well I promised a post on his Feb forecast, so I suppose I ought to do something about it. Sorry for the delay, which was caused by an intrusion of real life. Even though there is nothing quite so exciting to discuss, I can't retrospectively change my mind without running the risk of being accused of the same cherry-picking that Corbyn excels at, so here goes...

In summary, Feb is supposed to be mild and generally wet. The predicted temperature anomaly of +0.7-1.7C (over the central England region) is using 1961-1990 as the baseline, which has a mean of 3.8C, so anything from 4.5-5.5C would do. Up to now it's averaged about 5.8C and the forecast is for more mild weather. I don't think I'm sticking my neck out too far in saying that there is a strong probability the month will end up warmer than his forecast. On precip he is predicting anything from 120% to 200% - mild winter weather is generally wet, but it's looking extremely dry so far so there is some catching up to do.

On the details, of course there are lots of random weather predictions that have not/will not come to pass. Remember the "severe gales" on the 7th? Nope, me neither. There are supposed to be some more happening right now, and they will return on the 21st, with the current ones "notably stormy with damaging winds espec 14th-16th in West" and the latter "High tides on new moon around 21 with heavy seas from sev gales threaten sea defences in W & S/W". We will see. I assume at least the forecast of a high tide is sound, as I used to work at the institute that generates them :-) The Scotland-France rugby match at the start of the month was "likely off" due to frost and snow, but unfortunately the French didn't read that - maybe the Scots did, cos they didn't seem to turn up for the match! His best effort so far is probably the snow at the start of the month - but he explicitly forecast Friday 1st to be dry, with the snow arriving over the weekend. Sadly for those who were trying to beat the arrival of the bad weather, it caught them on the Friday afternoon, within hours of him releasing his forecast. I wonder whether he will claim this as a hit or not.

Overall, it doesn't look good for him.

Corbynwatch: The Verdict

So, January is over, and it's time to see how Piers Corbyn did. Remember, he predicted that it would be bitterly cold, in fact one of the coldest 6 years in the last 100, with an average temperature of no more than 0.8C.

The numbers are in...and the average temperature was a whisker over 7C according to the pseudo-CET web page. P Lewis says the real value is 6.7C,which would make it 5th warmest in the last 100 years, or 8th warmest in the last 350 years. Now it's important to note that I'm not claiming that this has any strong consequences for our understanding of global warming - it's just one month in one region, and in fact most of the 7 warmer Januaries were a long time ago. What it does bear on is the validity of Corbyn's "Solar weather technique" for prediction. This forecast was just about as spectacular a failure as it is possible to have. It certainly wasn't a near miss, in fact it wasn't even a bad miss. Had he been shooting for the goal at Wembley, he'd have ballooned it over the cross-bar...at Hamden Park. The 5.9C error (and note that 0.8C was the upper limit of his forecast, he said "close to freezing - 0.8C at best") is about as big as the difference between January and late April / early May. It wasn't just the temperature he got wrong, either - precipitation was not "well below normal" but actually extremely heavy, with many areas flooded.

He even revised his forecast in the middle of the month, claiming to have discovered a "data procedure error" - stirring his tea-leaves in the wrong direction, perhaps? - but even so, he blue-inked: "the forecast for some very cold weather in the later part of the month remains". Perhaps he meant to write "remains wrong". In fact the 2nd half must have averaged about 8C, since the running mean was just below 6C at that time.

But no doubt when he next makes some silly "prediction", the same journalists will lap it up and report it uncritically again. And if he keeps on predicting 5% events, then every so often one will come true, at which point he will be able to dine out on it for months...

He has just made his February forecast for the UK public. Once I've extracted the quantitative features from his vague verbiage, I'll report on that too.