Why we should sue the Met Office

Could a class action be heading the way of Britain's weather forecasters?

In May 2010, the Met Office said we should brace ourselves for a series of hot, dry summers we would roast, they said, just as we did in 1976. There would be droughts and hosepipe bans.This wasn't an isolated warning. Last week, however, meteorologists at a Met Office conference on climate change announced that this wasn't the case after all apparently a warmer North Atlantic means Britain is now likely to have wet summers for the next five, or even ten years.

That's quite a volte-face, even to those of us who never believe a word the Met Office says. Think of all those poor, hard-working people in the Home Counties who've built swimming pools in the anticipation of long, warm summer days, says Boris Johnson in The Daily Telegraph "perhaps the greatest triumph of hope over experience in the history of British domestic architecture".

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