Free When Science Goes Wrong by Simon Levay Page A

been sceptical of the idea that a storm was on the way, in spite of the models that indicated that it was. ‘He stressed to me that he was worried that we were perhaps overdoing things [in our forecasts],’ McCallum said. On Thursday, Morris got involved in discussions with the forecasting team. ‘I have no idea how much pressure he put on the senior forecaster, but I certainly think there were discussions taking place,’ said McCallum. This seemed to be a broad hint that Morris urged the senior forecaster to opt for a milder forecast than he might otherwise have done, but I haven’t been able to confirm this story from other sources.
    In any event, the forecast that went out to the media on Thursday morning was a compromise between the results of the two models. It described the depression as likely to move up the Channel and across southeast England, with very high winds in the Channel and windy, but not exceptionally violent, conditions in the south-eastern counties. It also spoke of the likelihood of considerable rain.
    It was on the basis of this guidance that Michael Fish issued his infamous ‘no hurricane’ forecast. Although many sources, including the Met Office’s own website, describe Fish’s forecast as having been delivered on Thursday evening, it was actually given at 1.25pm as part of the BBC’s lunchtime television news. This lunchtime broadcast was not very widely watched. Thus, when Fish told me that he was ‘not even on duty at the time’, he presumably meant that he didn’t give the more popular evening forecast – it was his boss, Bill Giles, who handled that one. Still, it was the crucial two sentences from Fish’s broadcast, endlessly replayed during the days and weeks after the storm, that became emblematic for the Met Office’s failure to properly predict the storm.
    I was curious to know whether Fish regarded his job as requiring him to help develop weather forecasts, or whether it was more a matter of presenting forecasts generated at Bracknell. He was emphatic that his role included actual forecasting, and that all the BBC weather presenters were trained Met Office scientists. Knowing where I was calling from, he couldn’t resist a dig at his US counterparts. ‘The situation in America is pretty appalling,’ he said. ‘The weather should not be entertainment; it’s a life and death kind of thing.’ Bill Giles made the same point: the BBC presenters were independent forecasters, he said. He, too, bemoaned the trend, especially evident in the United States, toward weather forecasts as entertainment. ‘Television wants nubile young ladies,’ he said, ‘and meteorology likes fat old grey men with experience.’
    Fish’s and Giles’s disparagement of the US television forecasters may not be entirely fair. A good number of American weather presenters, probably including some of the nubile ones, have undergraduate or advanced degrees in meteorology or related disciplines, according to the American Meteorological Society. Fish himself learned his trade while serving tea to the weather forecasters at Gatwick Airport, starting in 1962. He doesn’t have any college degree, although in a 2004 interview posted on the website of London’s City University he was quoted as saying that he earned a degree in physics at that institution in 1968.*
    Still, the BBC Weather Centre has always had the reputation of being a scientific organisation, not just a group of presenters parroting forecasts prepared at Met Office headquarters.
    Given that Fish mentioned the entertainment issue, it may be appropriate to say a word about his physical appearance at the time of his famous broadcast. A staple of TV forecasting since 1974, Fish was a balding, moustachioed 43-year-old, who liked to wear thick, dark-rimmed glasses and wool sweaters under tartan jackets. He sported a collection of ties with fish motifs and (if the Sunday Herald is to be believed) his underwear was also personalised, this time with