How The UK Met Office Spectacularly Failed To Predict Record Warm Year Of 2023

It’s quite pathetic really how the UK Met Office are downplaying the fact that they predicted a much cooler 2023 than actually happened and how they are determined to avoid bumping into the elephant in the room, preferring instead to blame a developing El Nino in 2023 for the extreme rise in temperature starting in June - a phenomenon which has not been observed before and is not explicable in terms of the dynamics of ocean-atmosphere feedbacks during El Nino events, which peak in the tropical Pacific during Dec/Jan and result in a peak in global temperature in Feb or Mar of the following year.

The central estimate of the Met Office prediction for 2023 was 1.2C (above 1850-1900 baseline):

The actual observed global mean surface temperature anomaly for 2023, according to the Met Office Hadcrut 5 dataset, was 1.46+/-0.1C. Even the upper error bound on their estimate came nowhere near the actual temperature. They were out by 0.26C. This is a huge error and unprecedented in the past 22 years of Met Office annual predictions. Most of the time, the Met Office estimate has been pretty close to the actual observed mean annual global temperature anomaly. Only for 2000 and 2015 did they get it significantly wrong; in 2000 they overestimated global temperature by 0.13C, half of their underestimate for 2023 and in 2015 they underestimated by 0.12C*.

*Note: 2015 saw the continuing development of the 2014/16 super El Nino, and El Nino conditions were already present at the start of 2015, so there is some justification for 2015 being an abnormally warm year because of the El Nino which started developing in 2014. The same cannot be said for 2023. Indeed, 2022 was a La Nina year and the El Nino which developed in 2023 was nowhere near as powerful as the remarkable 2014/16 event. El Nino was thus expected to have only a small effect upon global temperature in 2023.

Adam Scaife admits as much when he says:

Professor Adam Scaife is a Principal Fellow and Head of Monthly to Decadal Prediction at the Met Office. He said: “It is striking that the temperature record for 2023 has broken the previous record set in 2016 by so much because the main effect of the current El Niño will come in 2024. Consistent with this, the Met Office’s 2024 temperature forecast shows this year has strong potential to be another record-breaking year.”

OK, so, you would expect then that the Met Office’s prediction for 2024 would be even warmer than 2023 because of the effects of the strong El Nino kicking in. But guess what? They’re only predicting 2024 to be as warm as 2023.

The Met Office global temperature for 2024 is forecast to be between 1.34 °C and 1.58 °C (with a central estimate of 1.46 °C) above the average for the pre-industrial period (1850-1900): the 11th year in succession that temperatures will have reached at least 1.0 °C above pre-industrial levels.

This is Mickey Mouse science; they’re making stuff up on the hoof. Phil Jones, of Climategate infamy, admits that 2023 was pretty unique:

Prof Philip Jones, Professorial Fellow at UEA’s Climatic Research Unit, said: “I've been working with the global temperature series since the early 1980s. There has never been a year like 2023 where the warmest ever June, warmest ever July through to the warmest ever December was recorded for 7 months in a row, from June to December, 2023.”

Extraordinary facts require extraordinary explanations, but the Met Office, in their ideologically driven zeal to emphasise man-made global warming always and to play down known natural variability, absurdly ignore the fact that ENSO variability could not have contributed significantly to the warmth in 2023 and instead insist that it did, but only in the latter part of the year, thus effectively failing to explain why 2023 was so warm, but cunningly giving the impression to the general reader that they have explained it! This is manipulative and dishonest.

On top of the long-term warming, a transition into El Niño conditions contributed to further elevated temperatures for the latter part of the year. El Niño is part of a pattern of climate variability in the tropical Pacific that imparts warmth to the global atmosphere, temporarily adding up to 0.2 °C to the temperature of an individual year. This stands in contrast to the reverse pattern of climate variability, La Niña, which suppressed global average temperatures in 2021 and 2022.

It’s time the Met Office were hauled over the coals for their deliberate misinformation and misdirection of the public re. the record warm year of 2023.