Boris Johnson writes in the Telegraph on how the Met Office, which predicted a “mild winter” for England got it so, so wrong. An excerpt:
Actually, they did. Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.
Back in November, when the Met Office was still doing its “mild winter” schtick, Corbyn said it would be the coldest for 100 years. Indeed, it was back in May that he first predicted a snowy December, and he put his own money on a white Christmas about a month before the Met Office made any such forecast. He said that the Met Office would be wrong about last year’s mythical “barbecue summer”, and he was vindicated. He was closer to the truth about last winter, too.
He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people – notably in farming – are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.
He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.
He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy.
I have not a clue whether his methods are sound or not. But when so many of his forecasts seem to come true, and when he seems to be so consistently ahead of the Met Office, I feel I want to know more. Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.
Wait, so the earth’s climate is affected by the giant ball of heated gas at the center of our solar system? Who knew? The whole piece here.
Piers Corbin, Heretic! Apostate! You are Anathema!
This fella is in SO much trouble with the "Cardinals of the Climate Vatican." How dare one such as he challenge the established Orthodoxy revealed by their most sublime Emminences. And worse, he would appear to be leading others astray with his blasphmous beliefs! This the Earth will not Abide. Thus the Climate Gods have Decreed that The Inquisition must be unleashed before more such damage is done and further numbers of the Faithfull stray down the path to Perdition.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseI personally believe that this will come. With all this talk of Global Warming though.....who would believe this? Look at the statistics, the past 2 winters have been bitter cold, and just today, snow is falling in places such as Mexico. Mexico?! Yes. Chicago got hammered by an all out, record setting blizzard. The state of Texas has been below freezing for weeks at a time, and LA was 29 degrees at 8AM this morning. Hmm.....with all these facts bestowed upon us, I can only believe that Global Cooling is to blame. Can some one prove to me that an Ice Age is not coming? But whose to say that I or anyone for that matter can prove that it is coming? I guess we just need to look at facts and wait it out. I mean, if it stays cold or even colder, for the next decade, then we know that the Earth definitely is not warming up.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe article has 1 glaring error. The sun is NOT the biggest ball of gas in the solar system. The biggest ball of gas, by far, is Al Gore.
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