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If you think it just couldn’t be possible for any weather outfit to perform as poorly as the UK’s Met Office in long-term outlooks (13 out of 14 wrong), think again. It appears the US national weather services are right on their heels when it comes to who can make the all-time least accurate outlooks.

And we’re supposed to believe these people when it comes to their climate forecasting?

At this week’s Weatherbell Saturday Summary here, Joe Bastardi puts up the results of how well the NOAA winter outlook issued last fall ended up doing.

Here’s what their outlook called for:

Note how they said the chances for normal temperatures were about even for much of the country and warm down south. Averaging it out: a moderately warmer than normal winter. Today we see that the Midwest is having one of its harshest winters in decades and that the Great Lakes are almost completely frozen over.

Here’s how the winter has been so far:

One couldn’t be more wrong even if he tried like hell to be so.

Here’s what Joe Bastardi’s Weatherbell envisioned before winter started:

Weatherbell’s outlook for winter 2013/14. Source: Weatherbell.

Weatherbell pretty much nailed it dead on.

Unfortunately, the outlook situation for this winter by the same US weather services is just as sorrowful for Europe. Last fall some German meteorologists, basing their outlooks on charts from the US weather services, were warning of strong chances that the winter would “be really cold“. But instead of a brutal cold winter, Europe is now ending up with one of its mildest ever. The opposite is what has actually happened.

I think taxpayers and citizens deserve much more than getting information that is constantly turning out to be consistently wrong – for both weather and climate outlooks. We’re getting sick of it. How about getting some competent people back into these organizations for once?

With private meteorologists, we at least have the option of firing them. But with the state weather offices, we have to put up with their screw ups and keep hearing that we’re just deniers whenever we lift a finger and that we ought to just keep quiet. And if that weren’t bad enough, at NASA GISS they are even altering and rewriting the temperature history in a twisted desperate effort to make their faulty forecasts appear correct!

To Joe’s credit, he says we ought to respect the people at the US weather services for their work.

But I don’t – not anymore. What for? I guy flipping a coin would do a far better job.