Cutting the Carbon Footprint

The British Met Office has Europe’s biggest computer.
It is housed in a 1 acre climate controlled hall.
It is a new (IBM) and requires 1.2 megabytes to run it.
It takes 8 weeks to boot up.
Can perform 1,000 billion calculations a second.
Has 15 million megabytes of memory.
Cost 30 million pounds,
and it predicted the volcanic ash clouds that shut down the European skies.

The airline industry are preparing to sue the pants off the Met Office following the non-existent ash clouds that grounded all aircraft across Europe earlier this year.

Bournemouth tourism chiefs were very unhappy last year when the Met Office supercomputer predicted storms on a Bank Holiday
From The Independent, May 29th 2009:
"Although the Met Office correctly predicted that last Saturday and Sunday would be perfect beach weather for the South Coast, they wrongly envisaged thundery showers for the bank holiday Monday.
Instead, Bournemouth's long sandy beach was bathed in sunshine and the mercury hit 2C (???), making it the hottest day of the year so far. Tourism chiefs believe Bournemouth missed out on 25,000 extra visitors who would have all spent an average of £41 for the day. "

All that concrete and glass. All that electricity needed to keep in cool in summer and warm in winter. All those staff relocation costs when they moved from Reading to Exeter.
The Met Office are one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Global Warming (AGW)
They can't predict the weather more than five days in advance, and yet they forecast with confidence what the weather will be like in fifty years' time.
Can they be trusted?
This year they published a report that purports to show that "global warming evidence is unmistakable"
Read about it here
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/7914611/Met-Office-report-global-warming-evidence-is-unmistakable.html
"The State of the Climate report shows “unequivocally that the world is warming and has been for more than three decades”.
And despite the cold winter in Europe and north east America, this year is set to be the hottest on record.
The annual report was compiled by the Met Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Both the NOAA and Nasa have stated that the first six months of this year were the hottest on record, while the Met Office believes it is the second hottest start to the year after 1998.
Dr Peter Stott, Head of Climate Monitoring and Attribution at the Met Office, said “variability” in different regions, such as the cold winter in Britain, does not mean the rest of the world is not warming. "

Sound pretty bad doesn't it? But check out what other climateologists have to say. I suggest you read this

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/08/rebuttal-to-noaas-state-of-the-climate-sales-brochure/

The problem is the reliance on the Supercomputer. The data is "smoothed" before it is input. That is to say the figures are rounded up or down. Which is a big mistake. We are dealing with tiny increments of temperature and the figures are "smoothed", that is, the tiny variations of temperature are either added or taken away. Not very scientific is it?

Yes I know, weather isn't climate. But many people don't. They actually trust the Met Office. You know, they plan their work around the forecast. They plan their holidays, their days out, what they are going to wear that day.

Yesterday we read about a man in a tiny Yorkshire village who is so fed up with the poor quality of the BBC/Met Office forecasting that he has installed a weather station on his roof. So far he can only predict the next day's weather, but that's good enough for the local farmers who turn to him rather than the BBC for their forecast.

The government are considering putting the Met Office up for sale.
Honestly, who'd buy it?
There is a way to cut our carbon footprint at a stroke.
Shut the place down.