tomo,
Thanks for the link. Good to know that the Met Office is staying upsides with its peers around the world. Best practice.

The creed is that climate change contributes to all bad things, and since there have been a couple of stories of bad turbulence in the news, the tie-in is inevitable. I do like those graphs from the NTSB. You'd expect not only no trend, but no particular peaks in turbulence-related accidents. The first graph does have peaks, but they smooth out nicely in the second graph where it's per-flight-hour.

Mightn't be so bad if Vennells were to take five more with her, but maybe not if you're amongst them. Seems she didn't dampen that hankie in vain.

Those cartoons were well on point. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a clean pair of trousers in the offing.

That Ventusky model failure... why *do* they persist in this ridiculous modelling? I said here a while back that training one of these AI programs on historical meteorological data and the subsequent weather would seem quite likely to generate *good* forecasts. The real experiment has been run and the results recorded; the AI provides a decent ability to find the best match and/or (much more questionably) interpolate the outcomes.

.,
Wouldn't object to Google's ads if their search results were anywhere near as good as they were back in those good old days.

Thinking on those worthless academic papers tomo linked to at the weekend: in some odd thought process, one of Dad's stories from Rhodesia (in the '50s) came to mind. He had been visiting a village and was driving himself and his (native) staffer back to the office in Bulawayo. They picked up a hitchhiker. He was grateful and climbed into the car. A little later he said how he was looking forward to when the blacks took power because then they'd all have cars. Dad's offsider told the fellow what a foolish thought that was and where were all the cars to come from. The guy was a bit taken aback ... but that's what we were told.

A decade or two later, I suppose they found out the distance between what they were told and what would actually happen. As Orwell put it Ignorance is strength: not strength for you, but for the party.

Which brings us to modern academia. Today's utterly useless university education is doing a good job of propagating ignorance. They may be smart in their own specialities, but the big picture passes them by. Is it by design, or a happy by-product?

In later years Dad lamented the likely fate of his offsiders in Bulawayo and Salisbury. The ones with some sense were likely to be among the first casualties.

ah, the good old days.....

https://ibb.co/3mtNW3b

tomo,
Looks like Vennells needs a bit more practice at fake sincerity. As you say, whether the problems stemmed from stupidity or malice, the responsibility was clear and the buck stops with her. Consequences need to be a lot more severe than a wet hankie.

The academic garbage: for one thing it's a waste of public funds, more importantly, it's a waste of the academics' lives. Sure, the person using porcelain for interrogation is likely to have little enough to contribute, but I bet there are *some* smart people caught up in the univesities who could do something useful.

Your last link just gets me a "something went wrong". Appears to be Toby Young, but what "weather" thing was he pointing at?

I mentioned that fellow talking about the generous US immigration policies. He had another interesting factoid on offer: that if the entire UK were taken into the USA as a 51st state, it would rank 51st in terms of wealth per capita.

Initially I thought he was using mean values (GDP per capita, say), but consulting Wikipedia for median incomes by US state and for the UK bears out his claim. I think it's a more subtle form of lying with statistics where the median incomes are calculated among ordinary citizens, but America's considerable "slave" class isn't considered. Balance point would move down quite a bit if they were counted.

tomo,
Thanks for the explanation. this being the Daily Mail's report on it I take it.. They make a song and dance about misogyny, but the other stuff is far worse.

I sympathise with your prospects in the UK. They aren't much better here... we already have the most dismal federal cabinet in my lifetime, and we're bringing in a Bristol each year too. Heard a radio program recently extolling the generous immigration policies of the US... "they let in a million people a year, more than all the other western nations combined". Who was he kidding? Canada, UK, Australia is 1.5 million between them (though I suspect it's well over a million stream into the USA too).

Anyhow, while it looks a bit like the point in V for Vendetta where everything is boiling over, the US *may* pull back. Hope so, otherwise we'll find out how deep the abyss is.