We all know they are caught up in the warming meme, but the Met Office in the UK is now trying to spin the idea that they had truly forecasted a cold and snowy winter, but they just didn’t tell anyone. The rationale? We skeptics here (and elsewhere) are a bunch of meanies for making fun of the BBQ summer that never happened, so we’ll keep it to ourselves.
The spin you are about to witness is Maytag quality spin. It is shameless, stupid, and beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Both James Delingpole and Autonomous Mind take the Met Office out for a spin cycle that ends up in a full stop. The propaganda is shameless, the smell odious, and the public relations disaster is even worse than before. They apparently just don’t know when to stop talking.
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From Autonomous Mind:
This is a potentially huge story with a nasty smell of conspiracy about it. There appears to be a concerted effort to whitewash serious failings at the Met Office, with the assistance of a senior climate change propagandist at the BBC who is fully bought in to the Met Office’s warmist agenda.
The Telegraph reports today that: ‘The Met Office knew that Britain was facing an early and exceptionally cold winter but failed to warn the public, hampering preparations for some of the coldest weather on record.’ The article goes on to say:
In October the forecaster privately warned the Government – with whom it has a contract – that Britain was likely to face an extremely cold winter.
It kept the prediction secret, however, after facing severe criticism over the accuracy of its long-term forecasts.
October? That is the same month that this temperature probability map was published – for public consumption:
There is absolutely no logical or rational basis for the Met Office publishing the probability map above, yet ‘secretly’ telling the government a completely different story. The Met Office not only published the map, it had meterologists speaking publicly about the map and setting an expectation of a very high probability of warmer than average winter, as I will explain…
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The stench of deceit surrounding the Met Office, it’s disgraceful self serving effort to mislead the public and apparent attempt by a publicly funded BBC journalist to distort the facts is overpowering. There now needs to be an independent inquiry into this whole matter. A Freedom of Information request is being submitted to ask for this secret October forecast.
Read the whole post here at: Autonomous Mind
From James Delingpole at the Telegraph:
So apparently the Met Office isn’t useless after all. Just cruelly misunderstood.
It seems that the reason it didn’t provide an accurate forecast of this winter was not because it didn’t know bad weather was coming. It was because we were all so horrid last time it made a boo boo over the infamous “barbecue summer” that it decided it wouldn’t make its forecasts public any more.
Which means the real victim of this sorry story is not us (for having been misled about the extremity of cold we could expect this winter) but the poor old, much-put-upon, much-maligned, but basically splendid and well worth the £170 million it costs us every year Met Office.
Hurrah, Hurrah and Thrice Hurrah for those magnificent men (and women: let’s not forget the great Julia Slingo) at the Met Office!
Hmm. Is anyone else as unpersuaded as I am by this extravagantly implausible piece of spin? There’s a big clue in the identity of the fellow from whom it originated: Roger Harrabin. Yes, Roger Harrabin as in the BBC’s High Priest of Gaian Worship and Climate Alarmism.
Read the whole post by James Delingpole at the Telegraph.
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Surely the good people of the UK have to be sick of this by now?
If you are, here’s my advice: picket the Met Office.
Borrow the tactics shown by the greens at Ratcliffe and Kingsnorth and show the burea-weasels what it’s like to feel the brunt of public scorn. A few protestors with a banner outside the Met Office (shown below) would be all it takes to make the news.
Demand accountability, not GIGO spin.
hindcasting – hindpredicting
Go with what you’re good at……………..
Closethe Met down, and offer Joe Bastardi £1m p.a. to provide the UK’s seasonal forecasts..
The British taxpayer saves £169m a year, and gets some quality long-term forecasting.
Winner, winner, chicken dinner!
Someone needs to submit a Freedom Of Information request for all communications with government entities this past fall which indicate long range forecasts covering this winter. Revealed emails and other documents must have original time stamps. This can be followed up with FOI requests of the target agencies to confirm that such communication was actually received.
If (really big IF) other agencies were told this would likely be a frigid winter then where was there obligation to inform the public that the Met Office was perpetrating a public hoax?
What they ‘meant’ is this:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MetOff.htm
So the MET, which is still paid by the government to make predictions, secretly warned the government that it would be a cold winter.
The government ignored it, and did not stock up on fuel, sand, salt, etc…
and thousands of people died in the cold
It’s one thing to fudge a prediction, it’s another thing for the government to know and not prepare, and cause thousands of people to die.
(don’t they realize that their lie is even worse)
You couldn’t make this stuff up and anyway there’s actually no need to as they’re so good at it. Brilliant.
The whole AGW edifice teeters on the edge of oblivion and they’re daft enough to try to spin their way out. Bye bye career, bby bye expense account, bye bye personal credibility, it was nice while it lasted………….
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
– Joseph Goebbels
Send them to Siberia. As countries become communistic, they charge people with crimes that make false forecasts.
Basically, the Met Office gets paid out of the public purse whether (weather?) they get it right or not, so there’s not a lot of motivation to get it right in the first place. However, the Coalition government here in the UK is having to make all manner of financial cuts (VAT – a tax on most everything apart from essentials like food – just went up from 17 1/2 to 20% today and there’s talk of public sector workers losing their jobs by the thousands) so HOPEFULLY they might start looking at the value for money they’re getting from these people. If the Met Office had to make their money by selling their forecasts I think things would be a little different.
£170 million to the Met Office to practice CYA. It sounds to me like they are admitting that they gave a secret forecast to the government and put out the opposite forecast to the public as a propaganda piece to appease Warmers. No matter what happened, they could claim they were right. I will do the same thing for just 1% of the £170 million.
Perhaps they have already issued a secret report to the government determining that global warming is an exaggeration so they can save face down the road.
I only wish that the standards required of the private sector by government regulators and bodies applied to them also. Just think of the outcry if this was done by, say a food or drug company.
What is still so amazing and very demonstrative of AGW as religion, is that every time some news comes in that global warming is not as bad as we thought – think, UK winter – this is treated as bad rather than good news. Astonishing.
I’m watching Newsnight, BBC2, a discussion about homeopathy being banned for animals but OK for humans, including malaria and other serious diseases.
The cognitive dissonance (ignorance) displayed by these people and their unfortunate
customers is mirrored by our illiterate or lazy friends who continue to ‘believe’ in CAGW.
Substitute belief in ‘dilution’ to nothing with the infallibility of supercomputers programmed by parameterisations and other guesses to solve non- linear equations
and we arrive at Met Office predictions and their attempts to justify incompetence.
Joe B. and Piers C. for me every time.
We live in strange times.
I favour the idea the Met Office is so compartmented and incompetent that conflicting assessments were issued via different channels. But maybe there are some real professionals there who aren’t allowed to speak to the public but get to advise the military say, and via them the Cabinet Office (but not at the political level: there is some humdrum work via the Cabinet Office, “officials” committees and such, or was when I was there many years ago…)
Still SNAFU tho’
The Meth Office.
Why shouldn’t they expect to get away with this? They know good and well that the Government won’t do anything and any investigation (assuming that one was started) will just be another exercise in whitewashing.
I’m saying nothing:
http://www.webcommentary.com/php/ShowArticle.php?id=websterb&date=110103
Wow…..doesn’t their mission statement say something about providing information with the intent of safegarding life and property.
This story IS huge. UK residents…….please stand up and scream.
I have watched the steady decline of what used to be a glorious scientific establishment of which the UK was rightly proud turn into a sorry excuse for a weather forecasting service with absolutely no compunction for outright self-centred propaganda if not outright political lies regarding the climate.
For years I have been trying to warn people that completely at odds with their own fraudulent propaganda on their ability to forecast the climate the UK met office are completely useless at global temperature forecasting.
They even had the audacity to say they were doing well, when their error was only 0.06C/year …. which just happens to be the same as the warming trend by which (almost) each and every forecast has been wrong.
Talk about putting monkeys in a room to create Shakespeare, what we have in the Met Office is Monkeys trying to toss coins to predict whether global temperature get warmer or cooler … and they get it wrong something like 9 out of ten times.
As one long-serving forecaster said to me: “they are run by accountants and marketers and the science/scientists have been booted out!”
If they knew a cold winter was coming up, why did they go along with the spin about 2010 being the hottest year, in the run up to Cancun?
Lies, lies and more lies.
They want a new sooper dooper computer, but if the same brainwashed individuals provide the programming, why do they expect an improved output? Insanity!
Iam a UK Resident
Curiouser and curiouser!
Maybe there is a transcript or a video of the meeting at which the decision to withhold was made. That would make a mighty fine exercise in deciphering mental gymnastics.
Maybe it would even reveal who to . . . — ?. . . have Josh make a cartoon of.
Sadly, no, no, try again. Tragically the UK MET Office is part of the Ministry of Defeat, err, oops, Defence.
So no FOI requests allowed, to find the, err, Spin, oops again, Truth. In effect the c**ts can say anything they want, but I am sure there are people, with more connections than me, trying to find out which government departments/bodies the MET Office relayed this information to. I bid the searchers good luck in their quest.
So what’s so wrong with the Met Office? It’s not like any part of or anything associated with the UK government is doing anything to make the UK relevant again.
Heck, the monarchy is doing a better job of that. Look at the expected tourism for Prince William’s wedding! Even Prince Charles does his part keeping the UK in the news. Met office, the Royal Climate Change Correcting Commandos, the UK government overall… not that much.
Straight from the Met Office web site describing “what we do”:
•Warn people of extreme weather to mitigate its impacts — contributing to the protection of life, property and infrastructure.
latitude said on January 4, 2011 at 2:43 pm:
Hindcovering?
😉
Carry On