Met Office on the hot seat. From the GWPF:
Liverpool Echo, 10 January 2011 by Ian Hernon
A LIVERPOOL MP is set to head a Parliamentary probe into this winter’s transport “fiasco.” Riverside’s Louise Ellman, as chairman of the Transport Select committee, has received official requests to launch a wide-ranging inquiry into why snowfalls up to the Christmas/New Year break crippled the rail and road system. If given the go-ahead it will focus on the coalition government’s alleged failure to respond to Met Office warnings of severe weather.
That led to weeks of turmoil with trains cancelled, motorways shut and thousands of travellers stranded in appalling weather.
Mrs Ellman has circulated complaints to committee members from all major parties and they will decide whether they merit a full-blown investigation.
She said: “The committee has not yet decided on an inquiry but it is certainly being considered.”
The demand for an inquiry was led by the all-party think tank, Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), which slammed the failures of both the Government and local authorities to prepare the transport system for the third severe winter in a row.
They said: “Lessons have to be learnt well in advance of the start of next winter so that we are much better prepared.”
The Met Office stated that it warned the Cabinet Office – in charge of emergency planning – in late October that the onset of winter would be “exceptionally cold.”
But their extreme weather warning was kept under wraps by ministers. The Cabinet Office has refused to reveal which, if any, local transport authorities, airports and utility companies were alerted.
GWPF director Benny Peiser said: “Not only is the lack of Government preparedness a cause for concern, but we wonder whether there may have been a reason – that ministers did not want to undermine preparations for the UN climate change conference in Cancun.” In a letter to Mrs Ellman, he said: “This year’s winter fiasco has severely damaged the British economy and our international reputation as a result of ill-preparedness.”
Ewan McCallum, chief metrologist at the Met Office, said an “amber” warning had been sent out as part of forward planning.
Liverpool Echo, 10 January 2011
See also: GWPF Letter to the House of Commons Transport Select Committee
The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 6 January 2011
London, 6 January: The Global Warming Policy Foundation has called on the House of Commons Transport Select Committee to set up a parliamentary inquiry into the winter advice the Government received by the Met Office and the renewed failure of both the Government and local authorities to prepare the UK transport system for the third severe winter in a row.
In a letter to the Chair of the Transport Committee, Louise Ellman, MP, the GWPF stresses that “Lessons have to be learned well in advance of the start of next year’s winter so that we are much better prepared if it is severe again.”
Full letter to Louise Ellman, MP
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Americans are not designed to be socially engineered like Europeans are. Americans were designed to be free and independant.
Mr. Harrabin may win a Pulitzer for his expose’ of the Met Office shenanigans. Hee hee.
Yet another institution investigating itself? Don’t hold hold your breath waiting for results.
Will Mr. Harrabin be added to the Black-List now????
Michael. An Englishman’s home used to be his castle. Not so these days. An Englishman’s castle is now surrounded by red-tape. Red, as in the EUSSR.
Why is this news? An inquiry is not constituted to discover new information, only to put existing information into a more palatable format. Surely if there’s one thing we all learned from the various CRU enquiries, it’s that bureaucracy closes ranks to protect its own.
“the House of Commons Transport Select Committee” should pay a few pounds and get its weather predictions from Piers Corbyn.
Michael says:
January 10, 2011 at 9:19 am
Americans are not designed to be socially engineered like Europeans are. Americans were designed to be free and independant.
@ur momisugly Michael: Quite right my friend, and ditto the British. Mainland Europe, sadly, is another matter.
The House of Commons and thegubment need to face a hearing explaining why they didn’t cut off funding the fiasco years ago. The Met Office is a troll on our planet.
This gem from ICECAP:
“Then we have the recent claim by the Met Office’s chief scientist, Professor Julia Slingo OBE, in an interview with Nature, that if her organisation’s forecasts have shortcomings, they could be remedied by giving it another 20 million pounds a year for better computers. As she put it, “We keep saying we need four times the computing power.” ”
You can’t make this stuff up: Prof Slingo is appropriately named! With “four times the computing power” they can produce more of the same, four times faster! Lord, help us!
Well, I’ve a radical proposal. Prepare as if each winter will bring cold, wet, inclement weather. Then one is never caught unprepared. I know, this is some wild, unprecedented thinking I’m putting out, but the upswing would be that regardless of what the Met or anyone else stated, one would be as prepared as reasonably could be expected. Also, one wouldn’t have a need for inquiries, cover-ups, rationalizations, distortions of truth etc…
Just a thought, but reliance upon a weather forecasting station with a dismal history seems a bit silly to me.
@Michael says:
January 10, 2011 at 9:19 am
Yeah free to the extreme of anarchist ? I think social responsibility must be communal. Each person their own moral social agent turned America into a “Corporation Democracy”, me thinks you are confusing “free and independent” with subservience to the Corporation.
There would be absolutely no reason for the MET Office to keep the cold winter forecast, if there is ever was one, under wraps and secret with the government except as an effort to make the Cancun Conference more successful. This in itself is totally dishonest.
Blaming who they can for not reacting to the “secret” forecast should not take away from the fact that it was secret and that the secret ploy was part of a fraud/political agenda designed to hurt the people in many other ways beyond cold.
The MET Office failed the people.
More realistically, however, would be the greater likelihood that the MET Office used their useless, expensive computer to predict a warm winter, in the wrong-as-usual habit. And now they are trying to pretend that they are more accurate than history tells us. Either that or they finally have started channeling Piers Corbyn.
Either way they fail, directly as forecasters, or indirectly as politically driven prevaricators.
And its primary finding?
Global Warming alarmism and fascism prevented any managers or councillors from investing in new or additional snow-clearing equipment. If they had done so, they would have been laughed out of their job.
So the real perpetrators of this chaos were the Met Office and its primary cheerleaders, the BBC, the Grauniad and the Independent. I would suggests fines for all of these organisations, running into the hundreds of millions of pounds each – to teach them for meddling in politics and making Heathrow a laughing stock of the world.
And this is quite serious for the UK, because businesses will just not come to Britain if they think the transport infrastructure is going to fail them.
.
Cue another HMG committee whitewash in the style of the Phil Jones debacle. If only it could be otherwise.
Weird, I always thought it was the millions of cctv units that spelled UK like East Germany, now I know it is the complete and utter disregard of the health and life of the british citizens that spells UK correctly as East Germany aka EG.
Michael says:
January 10, 2011 at 9:19 am
Americans are not designed to be socially engineered like Europeans are. Americans were designed to be free and independant.
=========================================================
Socialism was a huge step up for most European countries.
For America, socialism is a huge step backwards……………
There is no-one left in the UK able to carry out an independent inquiry into anything.
Politicians, Judges, heads of scientific institutions etc. are all infected by PC and the prevailing paradigm.
We live in interesting, and frustrating, times.
‘Lessons will be learnt..’
I am SO sick of hearing that after every self-inflicted fiasco in the UK….
Michael (comment No 1), you yanks may be free and independent, but PLEEASE learn when to use ‘as’, and when ‘like’.
Never active. Always reactive.
More seriously, when (long ago) I was working, and attended a great 3 day course on finance I was told that in the UK any professional advise was actionable if shown to be wrong. That was so even if someone picked up a report on the local landfill site, and acted on F Blogg’s recommendation and lost money or whatever. So the Met Office can be sued by all those who have suffered from the effects of their poor advice – car owners from damage caused by lack of salt, Ulster people whose water board spent September looking at the effects of global warming, elderly poeple breaking hips of unsalted pavements etc etc etc.
TFN Johnson,
You should pick battles that you can possibly win. Correcting American blog grammar isn’t one of them.
You’re not the only one bothered by the results of government education. See here.
[Warning! Bad language alert. Do not click if you’re allergic to the f-word!]
Smokey says:
January 10, 2011 at 11:09 am
TFN Johnson,
“You should pick battles that you can possibly win. Correcting American blog grammar isn’t one of them.
You’re not the only one bothered by thie results of government education…..”
=======================================================
Smoke, that page is awesome!
[Minor typo fixed. -mod.]
The MET office, a wholly owned subsidiary of the ‘British Tax Payer Plc.’, refused to divulge its findings of severe weather in early winter to its owners, the British Tax Payer.
Profits before people at its best.
Jmac.