From Peter Anthony Troy.
PAULA Thelwell (JEP, 6 August) is quite right to pick up on the discomfiture of the UK’s Met Office, caught out over its April forecast that we were in for a ‘sizzling hot barbecue summer’.

An analysis of the root cause of the UK Met Office’s ineptitude reveals the fact that it relies for its medium-term forecasting on the same multi-million pound computer it uses to produce data used by the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change to predict global warming.

In this respect, the IPCC’s computer models have proved just as wrong in predicting global temperatures as the Met Office has been in forecasting those mild winters and heat wave summers.

Back in 1990, the UK government authorised lavish funding for the Met Office, to set up its Hadley Centre in Exeter, as a world-class centre for research into climate change. It was linked to the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, to create a record of global temperatures based on surface weather stations across the world.

The results supported the theory that the cause of global warming is man-made CO2. As time passed, the Hadley Centre continued to play a central part in the running of the IPCC, selecting many of the contributors to its reports that were the main driver of the global warming alarm.

In recent years, however, the whole theory has come under increasing suspicion because, as CO2 levels continue to rise, temperatures have failed to follow suit as the IPCC’s computer models predicted they should.

Part of the reason why the Met Office has made such a mess of its forecasts is that they are based on the same models which failed to predict the declining trend in world temperatures since 2001.

The public’s reaction is curious. While it is obvious that the actual weather is not as forecast, it is an obvious fact that the predictions of global warming, based upon very dodgy data, remain accepted as being accurate and unquestionable.

Paula Thelwell, being fond of literary comparisons, may well concede all of this to be all very much like Alice in Wonderland, since the scare of global warming is as accurate as the forecast of this year’s barbecue summer.