You’re quite right John, there are no rules to say you can’t give a rough guide to your prediction. It’s an agreement that those who take part in this thread have come to on GW’s suggestion, for reasons I explained in my earlier post. That’s just how it works.
You’re also right that there are some experts who know more than you and I but we can’t just say that the experts can’t give clues and the rest of us can. It has to be equal for everyone. Nobody would want to copy my guesses either but I don’t give clues because I respect the way this thread works and I go with the flow. I also think that if one person does it, others might follow and then we might as well not have that agreement at all.
I know you like taking part in the CET competition and I enjoy your company because you make some good posts on here and you join in the fun. All I’m asking is that you consider holding back with your clues until after the prediction close date next month, like the rest of us do. It’s entirely up to you of course.
I'm not disputing anything here, but I have just thought of a question based on what you have said, and which I would like to ask.
If we take the hypothetical situation where this was the CET thread for the month of MMMM within the year YYYY, it has been established that until such time that the entries for that month's CET competition were submitted, no-one would be allowed to say in this thread that they thought that CET anomaly for that month would be roughly X.X°C above average as that would give too much away.
However, it is always possible that someone might have posted in a different thread on an earlier date (such as several months earlier) which could be the MO thread for that time for example, where they reckoned that the CET anomaly for the month of MMMM within the year of YYYY would be roughly X.X°C above average. If that was done on the basis of any sort of model output, that would be a perfectly appropriate thing to do since that doesn't go off-topic in any way for that particular thread.
At the time of that earlier MO thread post, it might not necessarily be known that there would later on, be a CET competition for that particular month. Yet, there would be nothing to stop anyone from looking back at that earlier MO thread post and using that as a possible clue for that particular month's competition. Based on that particular post on this thread creating an unfair advantage, you could therefore equally say this earlier MO thread post also created an unfair advantage for exactly the same reasons.
Should we therefore stop that from happening as well?
The north of Edinburgh, usually always missing out on snow events which occur not just within the rest of Scotland or the UK, but also within the rest of Edinburgh.