Weather forecasting

Indulge me for the efforts involved in writing these frequent Dispatches and let me do what British people like myself do best and talk about the weather. In Britain, at the end of television weather bulletins thousands of people pay a lot of money calling a premium rate telephone number which is displayed on the screen just to hear again in greater detail that which they have just seen on television.

Predictions about what the weather is going to be like are very often wrong- great storms and wondrous sunshine are often missed. These difficulties arise despite the sophistication of the super-computers used to crunch past weather data, the wisdom of years of forecasting and sophisticated mapping and modeling technologies. It is of course inherently and inevitably problematic to try and extrapolate the future simply from the past when the future is not what it used to be.

Indeed, "... a study of weather forecast accuracy by Dr John Thornes of Birmingham University, ... reveals that some Met Office forecasts are accurate less than half the time... Dr Thomas found that, during the summer, the official Met forecast can often be beaten simply by assuming that today will be the same as yesterday. He also discovered , despite investment in computer and satellite technology, Met Office forecasts of rain have in fact become less reliable over the last 10 years- falling from an 80 per cent accuracy rate in the mid-Eighties to around 65 per cent now. Worse still, Met Office forecasts of rain at a specific time and place are, according to Dr Thornes, no better than tossing a coin. He said: "It is very difficult to predict the weather, and the Met Office do as good a job as anyone." (Robert Matthews, WEATHER FORECASTS WRONG ‘HALF THE TIME’, Independent On Sunday, 8DEC96).

The fact that there is no such thing as a representative sample, and more widely, the difficulties in forecasting have been seen when trying to work out the effects on the environment of depleting resources and increasing pollution. If some optimistic environmentalists, if such a species exists, had been right, we would be out of food, oil and maybe even ozone by now. (See BECKERMAN, SMALL IS STUPID: BLOWING THE WHISTLE ON THE GREENS, DUCKWORTH, 1995).

Quite simply, the further ahead one tries to predict, the harder it becomes. If you know where a cloud is now, you can be pretty certain that its not going to suddenly embark on a roller coaster ride in the sky. But it is much more difficult to say where that cloud will be, and more so, whether or not it will have evaporated into thin air, in a week’s time.

But say the experts on the weather, the meteorologists, the weather is a very complex system which is very difficult to understand and even harder to predict. At least, they cry, we are more often right than wrong. Yes, how true they are.

But just as there are millions of clouds and billions of rain drops, free markets are more complicated still. The world economy consists of billions of people and trillions of transactions. And yet governments insist upon trying to forecast and more so influence and indeed control the course of economic events. Government failures tend these days to be more widespread and damaging than market failures.

At least with the weather we get to enjoy the weather readers such as Ulrika Jonsson. This is much more appealing than most (all) of the finance ministers. But whereas the consequences of predicting the weather incorrectly can cause the occasional accident, intervention by government in the economy has wide repercussions, causing booms in growth and busts when the economy is tightened. Macro-economics is just too wide to comprehend.

We have to face up to our inability to predict the weather- and the economy. That is not to say that we give up trying, just that we need to realize that the complexity arises primarily from the interworking of massive numbers of events, most all of which are beyond our grasp.

That is why we need parasols which double up as umbrellas- even though the benefit from not getting wet is nearly always far outweighed by the wrestling with the wind blowing our umbrella and the fact that many individuals will insist upon carrying a golfing umbrella which could shelter an entire family.

Whether we can get the weather together, or never, depends upon whether the weather behaves. And whether our politicians do.

Author: Simon Buckingham

What do you think?

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