Hmmm, I’ll bet they didn’t forecast this either. Might make a nice museum or art gallery though.
UK Government May Sell Off Met Office, Nature Reserves
John Vidal, Severin Carrell and Juliette Jowit, The Guardian, 13 August 2010
Some of the most beautiful areas of Britain could be sold off and wildlife and countryside protection measures cut to the bone to meet expected 40% cuts in the budget of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, it emerged.
Among the plans being considered by the government, which once declared itself “the greenest ever”, are selling off national nature reserves; privatising parts of the Forestry Commission; privatising the Met Office, one of the world’s leading research organisations on climate change; and withdrawing grants to British Waterways, which manages 2,200 miles of canals and rivers.
Natural England, the government’s principal nature conservation agency, has put forward 400 job cuts next year, and up to another 400 after that, potentially one third of its workforce.
There are also concerns that the Environment Agency, which looks after waterways, air and soil, will have to slash spending on pollution and waste controls and river protection after the environment secretary, Caroline Spelman, recently said she had made it “perfectly clear” that the government would maintain the level of spending on flood defences – which take up more than half the agency’s budget.
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@Dave Row
I really like your idea of a sitcom based in the Met Office. I wonder if Mosher could be signed up as a writer? The fortran prediction engines should enjoy leading roles, of course, emitting enigmatic punched cards every so often with +0.78C stamped on them.
I am sure that the entire Met Office staff could be smoothly transitioned to light comedy with little or no retraining. This would surely be a more productive use of their time.
I was thinking BP as well, then we could blame bad climate change forecasting on ‘Big Oil’!
I was wondering about that too.
No mention of their new 1 gigaflop, 1.2 MW, 12 kiloton CO2 spewing supercomputer.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/08/28/met-office-supercomputer-a-megawatt-here-a-megawatt-there-and-pretty-soon-were-talking-real-carbon-pollution/
Bung it up on ebay. Some silly sod will buy it.
And you get this (which has cost the aviation industry billions)
The British met office has Europe’s biggest computer.
It is housed in a 1 acre climate controlled hall.
It is a new (IBM) and requires 1.2 megabytes to run it.
It takes 8 weeks to boot up.
Can perform 1,000 billion calculations a second.
Has 15 million megabytes of memory.
Cost 30 million pounds,
and it predicted the volcanic ash clouds that shut down the European sky’s,
Perhaps the billions of pounds in law suits have something to do with this ?
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) was created by nulabour. With nulabour’s hatred (envy) of the countryside and the people who lived and worked there, and on the whole didn’t vote nulabour, it was known as the Department for the Elimination of Farming and Rural Activities.
“Cuts” in Whitehall speding budgets always result in additional government spending – a 10% cut in Defence always spells a 20% increase in Welfare budgets. Likewise on everything else…
Cuts?Only means more trace waste as the Civil Servants re-arrange the deck chairs on the sinking ship. Cut the subsidies to EAU/CRU, Greenpeace, Fiends of the Earth, slash the civil service on the grounds of gross incompetence and yes, sell off the Met Office. After all, they’ve sold everything else to Dubai, France or the Chinese.
ZT says:
August 16, 2010 at 12:49 pm
“@Dave Row
I really like your idea of a sitcom based in the Met Office. ”
Call it “Yes, Professor”.
Great building for The Met Office. One of the most energy innefficient in the northern hemisphere.
Even big oil couldn’t afford the energy bill.
It takes a hot location to forecast BBQ summers every year.
“At least the UK is trying to pay their bills.
Vastly better than the crew claiming to be running the US Government.”
Very true, Steven, and did you notice that the US deficit for last year($1.7 trillion) was more than the entire British national debt, if Trev’s statistics are accurate, and I have no reason to doubt them.
All I can say is, “we’re screwed”!
There is a Cray (?) supercomputer in there I think. Apart from the dodgy programs which add at least 2 units to everything it calculates, it must be worth a few pounds.
It’s been sucking power out of our grid for ages – I bet we don’t recoup our costs!
Closing that place down will save tons of CO2, the “warmistas” will be crying with joy!!
Paradoxically, it was the part privatisation of the Met Office which led them down the blind alley of climate change as a way of generating funds.
Personally, I’d keep weather forecasting in public hands, and privatise the climate “forecasting” lot (which is now the majority of it). When people know that they are really making predictions of warming in order to generate income, perhaps they’ll treat their forecasts with the disdain they deserve.
Cold Englishman – who would want to buy it? Many venture capitalists! Think about it, they can then start selling the cooking of the temperatures to the highest bidder! The UN or the evil oil companies! Instead of passivily accepting what the government doles out, they can seek some of the billions that is being spent on AGW – or sell the setting of the data to those dead set against it.
it is a sweet heart of a deal!
“Try getting FOIA data from the MET when it’s privatized.”
How it would it be different than now?
Sounds like an opportunity for the ‘Goracle’ and Co. to purchase and ensure perpetual misinformation from the Met
DirkH says:
August 16, 2010 at 1:13 pm
Call it “Yes, Professor”.
===========
I was thinking more along the line of, “The Orifice,” “The Last of Summer the Whine,” or “Faulty Towers.”
Bishop Hill had a post about DEFRA a couple of months ago. I had a look at their large budget for Unversities. Looking at the data I downloaded from there this was the situation last financial year (possibly the year before). Perhaps they should cut this first, as cynic I can’t think it goes on anything useful. £22.5m down the drain as we say, certainly £1.1m to UAE can’t be doing any good.
University Of Nottingham £3,272,398.07
University Of Edinburgh £2,748,241.66
Lancaster University £2,392,378.91
University Of Oxford £1,684,098.71
University Of Bristol £1,381,342.80
University Of Wales Aberystwyth £1,170,273.72
University Of East Anglia £1,105,668.94
University Of Surrey £935,000.00
University Of Reading £883,230.47
University Of Cambridge £882,529.75
Cranfield University £661,755.18
University Of Warwick £602,785.10
University Of Southampton £486,278.17
Bangor University £362,862.26
University Of Kent £356,694.81
University Of Liverpool £312,628.75
University Of Newcastle Upon Tyne £310,322.81
University Of Westminster £298,949.57
University Of Exeter £288,123.00
University Of York £264,356.11
Brunel University £255,505.98
University Of St Andrews £204,319.58
University Of Birmingham £197,250.25
University Of Glasgow £188,284.00
University Of Aberdeen £186,441.73
University Of Hertfordshire £151,496.50
The Open University £143,467.73
University Of Bath £121,315.49
University Of Wales Swansea £109,734.80
University College London £103,884.40
University Of Leicester £88,778.75
University Of Sussex £71,364.60
The Queens University Of Belfast £53,611.00
University Of Stirling £40,075.33
University Of Greenwich £31,048.81
Northumbria University £29,908.00
Loughborough University £27,010.00
University of Cape Town £23,817.41
Cardiff University £23,360.00
University Of Lancaster £17,268.54
Tsinghua University £17,250.00
Birkbeck College University Of London £10,704.40
Fred Lightfoot says:
August 16, 2010 at 1:03 pm
The British met office has Europe’s biggest computer.
=================================================
Sorta like giving a F-117 to a two year old, isn’t it.
They don’t have a clue what to do with it…………
It’ll probably be one of these fake privatisations where the government keeps a 51% ‘golden share’ and nothing really changes…
I’ll take it.
But they have to pay me.
If the MET were privatized, I wonder what the demand for Hockey Stick Charts and Apocalypse Maps is. Could they make a living?
Who knew that “Economic Change” would make “Climate Change” a “victim” ?
@Trev
“The UK has a £155 billion deficit to try to fill and a national debt heading towards £1.4 trillion.”
“It’s worse than we thought.” – actual UK liabilities run to almost £5 trillion:
http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/a-lot-worse-uk-mired-in-5-trillion-of-debt-skynews-962ef3b83ad1.html?x=0
I personally think it’s more likely to go higher than £5 trillion because the Kirkcaldy Clown’s creative book-keeping meant that other thing such as PFI (with wonderful innovations such as £11 billion of new hospital buildings actually costing the taxpayer £56 billion) and nuclear decommissioning were also not on the balance sheets.
*********
Sean Peake says:
August 16, 2010 at 1:36 pm
***********
How about “The Life and Times of Bristlecone Pine.”
The Met Office’s Cray vector processor went a few years ago and was replaced by a NEC machine. I used to work in the building that was formerly Cray’s offices in Bracknell. When Old Man Cray died in that car crash in 1996, the company went the way of so many firms run by autocrats and was ruined by the Men in Suits.
I find this business of their IBM taking 8 weeks to boot up a bit unlikely. They must be using a Dell as the console.
Anyway a lot of these “cuts” are part of Dave Cameron’s “Bonfire of the Quangoes” ( a Quango is a sort of outsourced government department Quasi-Autonomous Non Government Organisation ) and is probably a load of hype. The Waterways Agency was so heavily cut by the last govt. that there is probably too little left to make savings.