What ... that its beyond them
?
No I would like to have studied Meteorology at Uni ... but I struggled with understanding concepts in physics such as electricity etc so felt it wasn't for me. I did touch upon it in my degree and do remember flapping butterfly wings etc. And unlike some of the general public I can see how by being just slightly out with the figures can give a dramatically different outcome. It would be far easier to get the weather right if you lived elsewhere in the world - which makes living here interesting I guess.
If you remember flapping butterfly wings, you understand the essence of the weather forecasting problem. The very fact that the predictable is unpredictable, that random noise in the input data totally changes the output. This is chaos at work. This is not confined to physics, it springs up in every branch of our daily lives. It's why I cannot tell you whether the M25 is going to be totally snarled up tonight, or merely 'very busy'. A single vehicle might make the crucial difference. So it is with weather. I think the Met Office do a marvellous job, it's just that lay people expect more, expect input that the underlying statistics can't deliver. It's why lay people, having seen a tossed coin come up heads six times, expect the next toss to be tails. Things just
don't work that way!
And another thing: remember that the antagonists in this little spat are the GWPF, an organisation which sets out to rubbish every human-origin global warming theory in circulation, and to discredit every authority (that presumably includes the Met Office) which stands in the way of its agenda...
