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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Henry chance says:
August 16, 2010 at 12:32 pm
Sell it on e-bay.
Hallliburton could buy it and hire the people. Send them to work in the oilfields of Iraq where it hits 125 degrees.
Put them to work in Afghanistan. They could talk to the drug gangs and Taliban in southeastern provinces (or would that be forbidden by the UN because it would be cruel and inhumane?) and in the central and northern provinces to help develop the estimated $1 trillion in mineral wealth. Either way the local tribes (and the rest of us) could use them for comic relief as they put their scientific expertise to work and show the corrupt government officials what real sleaze is.
Well, a certain New York base Major League Baseball team might be interested in expanding their market into the UK and the MET office would be perfect for that.
Think, after purchase, all the new owners would need is to add a letter S to the sign out front and to all the stationary. Then, Voila!!! The METS! : )
John
From the Guardian article Sweeping cuts to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ budget challenge coalition’s green credentials.
I like this bit from the ‘wringing of hands’ part of the article:
“Bat populations are clinging on to survival in isolated pockets, facing starvation due to the dwindling insect populations”
But they are thriving in the Palace of Westminster doncha know – oops – sorry it’s just the subspecies dingbats!
Doug
I like the building. With all that glass it would make a great indoor botanical garden; a *ahem* greenhouse, so to speak.
A new Chevy Volt dealership?
Soap opera: “As the World Burns”
J. Knight
Obama has a solution for everything – blame it on Bush.
I wonder if Al Gore would be interested in buying it?
>Try getting FOIA data from the MET when it’s privatized.
Or, indeed, when they are publicly funded.
all who are sacked will find a job in the green army planting trees thats where thay all belong
When I wrote to them asking who had authorised the spend, and use of the Met Office’s resources to produce the petition in support of the – I have to say it – charlatans – at the UEA after toing and froing they wrote to me and told me that they were run on a profit and loss basis, presumably inferring that they didn’t need their owners, i.e. the taxpayers, permission to spend money not associated with their raison d’etre.
In short they have a P&L (pigs might fly, but hey if it they think there’s a market for CAGW forecasting then let’s sell it) and are ready to be privatised, with maybe a short rump continuing the weather forecasting that originally made them world famous for good reasons being held in the MoD.
The Met Office also had a Control Data Corporation (CDC) Cyber 205 in the early 1980s. I think the Met Office had problems getting it to communicate with the Cray at ECMWF and there were other problems with the 205.
Their best piece of kit was the IBM 360/195 delivered in the early 1970s. Gene Amdahl worked on the IBM 360 architecture. Denis Healey was at the Defence Ministry then. In those days there seemed to be a bottomless pit of cash for high technology for departments in the Ministry of Defence – the Met Office being one beneficiary. Later they added a 370/158 that did much of the batch work.
Firstly, a friendly reminder t0 our cousins in the Virginian Colonies, (Oh how we were so foolish to let those go, & those in Bordeaux!!!!) “The Met” is short for the Metropolitan Police Force in London, UK! The Met Office is the weather (allegedly?) forecaster!
Secondly, I suspect this could be just a red herring. The story a few months ago was that the BBC was “seriously” considering reviewing its contract with the Met Office for the provision of weather forecasting services , again allegedly! Good story to fool the skeptics for a few moments, a quick bit of “slight of hand” & the contract was renewed! Situation normal, same people, same faces, same story, all green! Don’t be taken in just yet, I am not holding my breath. Having said that, if it was put up for sale (& who in the lord’s name would want to buy such a lame duck?) it really would signal a sea change in thinking on AGW/CC! Who has £235M/year & wants a £30M puter? One can clearly see the lame mentality of the Met Office’ PR machine, the arrogance with which they see the general ignorance of the populace, in that they can be fooled by claims of great accuracy from a super computer & their computer models means that the trillion calculations per second or whatever equals being right! It’s rather akin to penis envy of someone saying “hey, my new Porche 911 can do 0-60 in 3 seconds & a maximum speed of 150mph”, the same nut is still behind the wheel! No, I think this is one for the greens this time & we’re looking at a no-show! BTW, talking of shows, new line up on the BBC magazine show “the One Show” was good, they even had an environmental slot about Sea-Otters in Scotland, & didn’t mention Climate Change or Global Warming once, I think, I was doing the cooking at the time. Interestingly greenie/leftie Grauniad writer Lucie Siegle still turns up but she hasn’t done a AGW/CC bit for quite a while, did my three complaints really work?
Henry chance: August 16, 2010 at 12:32 pm
Hallliburton could buy it and hire the people. Send them to work in the oilfields of Iraq where it hits 125 degrees.
It’s only 124°F right now, but it hit 137°F a couple of times back in July. Most of the year, it’s a nice, comfortable 110 to 120°F.
John Whitman says:
August 16, 2010 at 5:28 pm
Don’t you think the poor Mets have enough problems already? Have a heart guy!
The MET is also The Metropolitan Museum of Art, or The Metropolitan Opera. But that’s going back to New York.
The WWF is the best organization to take over the Met. They already have two ex-employees in senior positions!
Robert Napier, Chairman of the Board of the Meteorological Office, was formerly at the World Wildlife Fund, which financed and procured many of the IPCC’s dodgy non-peer-reviewed “research papers”. He was also Director of The Climate Group until 2007.
Find his recent CV here http://www.englishpartnerships.co.uk/robertnapier.htm
Why should we be seeing this nexus of WWF, Meteorological Office, BBC and government pension funds and The Climate Group?
John Hirst, appointed as Chief Executive of the Meteorological Office in 2008, was ALSO head of the WWF before changing to “meteorology”.
Not all progress is productive. Let the MOD take them back and put them in uniform once again. Would certainly save a little on wages. And for 30 days each year, make them deploy and sleep on-board in the high Arctic, or in the field in –shall we say– Antarctica.
Could be for sale because things are much worse financially. See “UK Mired In £5 Trillion Of Debt” – Britain has sunk into a pit of debt which is five times deeper than previously feared, with the country now owing the equivalent of £200,000 per household. http://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/a-lot-worse-uk-mired-in-5-trillion-of-debt-skynews-962ef3b83ad1.html?x=0
Could be for sale because things are much worse financially. “UK Mired In £5 Trillion Of Debt” – Britain has sunk into a pit of debt which is five times deeper than previously feared, with the country now owing the equivalent of £200,000 per household.
hey, didn’t royal dutch shell build that for them?
oh wait, my mistake.
that was the hadley center.
I am not sure I like the idea of a government selling its weather service to a private entity. It sounds a little like an attempt to evade responsibility for mismanagement.
I wonder how people in the UK might respond to news that their national weather forecasting in future would be provided by a subsidiary of Greenpeace International.