From the blog autonomous mind, a cold ill wind blows from Britain. At least this time, FOI requests weren’t quashed like they were with CRU. Below are excerpts. The photocopy of the email from the FOI request is telling.
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autonomous mind writes:
A look at the information makes clear there is nowhere left for the Met Office to hide. The Met Office has been caught ‘cold’ lying about its winter forecast in a disgraceful attempt to salvage its reputation. Its claim that it forecast the cold start to the winter lays in tatters thanks to an exchange of emails between the department and the Cabinet Office.
As a result the Met Office is completely discredited. Also utterly discredited is the BBC environment analyst Roger Harrabin, who on the Met Office’s behalf used a column in the Radio Times (later carried in the Telegraph and the Daily Mail) to state that:
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.
Harrabin went on to say in his piece that:
Why didn’t the Met Office tell us that Greenland was about to swap weather with Godalming? The truth is it [The Met Office] did suspect we were in for an exceptionally cold early winter, and told the Cabinet Office so in October. But we weren’t let in on the secret. “The reason? The Met Office no longer publishes its seasonal forecasts because of the ridicule it suffered for predicting a barbecue summer in 2009 – the summer that campers floated around in their tents.
The email exchange in the screenshot below proves this is a lie. The Cabinet Office civil servant (bottom message) confirms the weather outlook supplied by the Met Office earlier that day is what the government will use in its ‘Forward Look’. The Met Office employee (top message) agrees with it.
(note- I rotated the original photocopy image to make it more readable)
The all important sentence is the first. ‘The Met Office seasonal outlook for the period November to January is showing no clear signals for the winter’. The Met Office knew this was the case when it sent Harrabin scurrying off to spin its lie that the Met Office ‘did suspect we were in for an exceptionally cold early winter, and told the Cabinet Office so in October‘. The briefing to the Cabinet Office contains no such warning – and vindicates the parliamentary answer given by Francis Maude when questioned about the forecast the government received from the Met Office.
What is worse is that the Met Office knew this, yet with its claim tried to place responsibility for the lack of prepareness for an extremely cold start to the winter on government inaction. Harrabin added to this by saying he had put in a FOI to the government (referenced in this post) to discover what they were told, the insinuation being it was the government that had something to hide. This is very dangerous ground that leans towards the possibility of the Met Office and a BBC reporter engaging in a joint effort to undermine the government’s credibility.
This leads us to ask a serious question that must be answered: How is it possible that Roger Harrabin could claim the Met Office line he was retailing was the ‘truth’ with such certainty?
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Read the entire report at autonomous mind and also at Katabasis and give them traffic and props for seeing this through. In case anyone is wondering, the address in the document links here:
Organisation: Cabinet Office
Address: 3rd Floor, Kirkland House, 22 Whitehall
Town: London
County: Inner London Borough
Region: Greater London
Country: England
Post Code: SW1A 2WH
Tel: 0207 276 6226
Fax: 0207 276 6271
For those new to the issue, some background here:
MetOffGate – the questions begin
Also, if you did not note it in the article link, this PDF of the FOI request is instructive.
h/t to Indur Goklany
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UPDATE: In comments, we have this –
Steve McIntyre says:
I’ve met Roger Harrabin and am completely confident that he behaved with total integrity in this matter. I am sure that he was misled by his sources.
That may very well be true, but it leaves Mr. Harrabin in the uncomfortable position of defending sources or defending himself. I’ve sent him a private communication offering WUWT with no caveats should he wish to use it a sa platform to explain his side of the story. – Anthony
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The ineptitude displayed by all concerned is telling.
Granted that the MSM and the Met office are a bunch of charlatans.
Why on earth is the government so inept that someone has to tell them that it is winter? Absolutely stupefying!
Anything is possible says:
“…The $64,000 question for me is :
Is the Met Office merely incompetent, or is there a more sinister explanation?…”
That’s an important question. I would state it this way: Are they incompetent or are they crooks?
But neither incompetence nor crookedness is a good qualification for any office. Either way they should get the boot.
Met Office prediction for tonight … dark
Jit said
” (Network Rail say ) One of its most vulnerable stretches of track is on the south Devon coast between Dawlish and Teignmouth where storms have often seen waves break over the line. Network Rail says the sea level at this point has risen 30cm since 1840 and is projected to rise by a further 70cm by 2050 and 1.45m by 2100. “
My house actually overlooks this line and I have written about it before. Brunel got the wrong alignment as he believed the predominant wind here were westerlies, in which case the line is well protected. However there are also frequent bouts of easterlies which cause those of us along this coast consoderable problems as it greatly increases the height of the swell.
There are lithographs from the 1850’s showing waves breaking over the railway in the same places as today.
To this day Brunels sea wall and harbour survive and there is no perceptible change in the sea level (despite Devon sinking marginally) from that day to this.
tonyb
Harrabin’s column ought to have been headed “An inconvenient Lie” or “yeh but no but yeh but no but maybe”
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No34.pdf
Oct 17th 2010
Standard Warmist Meteorology has
nowhere to go – Report on BBC weather Project meeting at Royal Society
The Scene
=======
An impressive room in Britain’s Royal Society off The Mall. Roger Harrabin, BBC’s chief environment correspondent in the chair surrounded by representatives of “All the Royals”, as he put it, either on the presentation line up or ‘at hand’ – the Royal Meteorological Society, The Royal Statistical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society; along with experts (statistics) from Leeds University, Philip Eden of BBC5 weather, Tim Palmer of European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (& RMS), the Met Office (seasonal forecasting division) and a range of other BBC professionals, weather people and public and Michael Fish! – numbering 50 or so in all.
The Purpose: to discuss the BBC’s ‘Weather (Test) Project.
The discussion led by Roget Harrabin proceeded as if the purpose was to compare short-range forecasts of Met office and competitors and raised many ‘difficulties’. A number of people said that BBC forecasts were confused in presentation and that although ‘forecast skill’ might be something to measure, forecast usefulness is what the public and business really need.
……………..
Piers pointed out that his own WeatherAction forecast for the winter 2009/10 had been presented last October 28th in summary form in Imperial College in front of Roger Harrabin and others of the BBC who had said they would publicise it; but the BBC had not done this and instead promoted the Met offices ‘Global-Warmist’ ‘seasonal’ forecast for a mild winter which had failed absolutely as had the Met Office seasonal forecasts for the 3 previous summers & winter 08/09.
The consequence, said Piers, was that his warning that the UK would run out of road salt was ignored by Govt, Local Authorities and Emergency services and as a result there were unnecessary road accidents and deaths. “We have to do better than this” he said to the audience – who listened carefully.
@ur momisugly Steve McIntyre
Your red ‘slip’ is showing
Just what evidence do you have to support your statement.
I once met Harold Shipman, he seemed like a nice gentleman, fortunately I wasn’t seeking medical treatment at the time.
Harrabin has weasley word form on this.
http://www.weatheraction.com/docs/WANews10No33.pdf
Oct 4th 2010
What will this winter be like?
“Let’s get Real, for our long range forecasts compared with the Met Office over the last 5 extreme seasons the score is 5 to nil; and for the short public track record of PWS – ie the summer just gone – the score is 1 to nil.
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BBC put hype, spin and ideology before public safety, scientific integrity and saving lives
—-
“The BBC (Roger Harrabin) was publicly given key aspects of our winter forecast at our conference in Imperial College on Oct 28th 2009 (Video – ref 5 & 4) but BBC warned no-one and after the winter the BBC ignored our general and detailed success, instead quoting an American much less-detailed forecast for a cold European winter.
Steve McIntyre says:
January 29, 2011 at 12:22 am
I’ve met Roger Harrabin and am completely confident that he behaved with total integrity in this matter. I am sure that he was misled by his sources.
———————
Steve has spent time in England. For the benefit of those who have not, this polite circumlocution may be crudely but not inaccurately translated as:
Harrabin is not a knave, but has been taken for a fool.
Roger Harrabin may have integrity, but which cause is he lending that integrity to? He was the author of the scurrilous BBC piece written days before Cancun, which was clearly designed to influence policy makers.
Met Office says 2010 ‘among hottest on record’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-11841368
He wrote:
He seems to be quite happy to act as a mouthpiece for the Met Office, without any attempt at independent investigation. I find it hard to believe that he is so naive that he doesn’t get what the Met Office is up to.
So the ‘winter season’ will ‘start’ when it get ‘cold and wintry’, and the ‘winter season’ will ‘end’ when it turns ‘mild’, provided always that the mild event is ‘beyond this assessment’ (i.e. February onwards).
Tell me something I don’t already know.
Doublethink – 1984 George Orwell
Main article: Doublethink
The keyword here is blackwhite. Like so many Newspeak words, this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink. Doublethink is basically the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
– Part II, Chapter IX — The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Doublethink
MarkR,
Dr Leon Festinger made a study of that mental derangement. He called Orwell’s doublethink “cognitive dissonance.”
Wouldn’t it be cheaper for the Met Office to simply get a copy of the Farmer’s Almanac?
The sad fact of the matter is, as long as they get their paychecks, they don’t care what anyone says–and no one is going to take their paychecks away.
Vince Causey says:
January 29, 2011 at 6:30 am
John Finn,
“On one occasion, in an interview with Al Gore, he challenged Gore about some of the assertions made in An Inconvenient Truth.”
So, he’s not as completely off the wall as Al Gore and challenged some of the ludicrous claims made. What does that make him – some kind of balanced sceptic? The fact is, Harrabin was happy to run with the met office brief, even to the point of hanging the government. There are only two possibilites – he was duped because he didn’t bother to research the claim, in which speaks of prejudice, or he did see the email and decided to lie. Journalists like that – dishonest or incompetent and biased – are no use to the public they serve
Let’s put it this way. If, for example, Steve, Anthony, Roy Spencer or Richard Lindzen made an inaccurate statement which appeared to counter the AGW argument – how many readers of this blog would be prepared to bring it to the public’s attention in a one-to-one interview. As an AGW advocate, Harrabin deserves credit for raising what must have been a difficult issue for him personally.
I’ve read a lot of nonsense which has gone unchallenged simply because it’s been written by ‘our side’.
Am I missing something? Is there not a missing E-mail, as in the actual first one from the Met office, with the actual forecast. Aside from that has anyone heard of a return to very low temperatures this coming February, and as such gritters have been told to restock. It could be hearsay, but I have been talking to a local councillor, and was offered that info.
Steve, Anthony, Roy Spencer or Richard Lindzen are not journalists. Harrabin is a journalist from a large worldwide broadcaster who has a duty to check facts, statements and other bit of information. He could have asked to see a copy of the cold weather warning given to the government.
John Finn says:
January 29, 2011 at 11:25 am
By the way I used to work for the information at the BBC headquarters and I know a little about how careful they are about taking things on face value.
Caveats could have saved him here. He could have said:
Correction:
By the way I used to work for the information service at….
bbc has a policy not to report news without confirmation by a second reliable source. besides, harrabin should not have reported met office hearsay, unless he was posting the forecast in question.
harrabin did neither.
having worked at BBC for two years, the idea anyone there has “integrity” is laughable.
p.s. i certainly wouldn’t consider anyone had “integrity” unless i knew them for years and observed a pattern to indicate this was so and, even then, i might be proved wrong.
John Finn,
“I’ve read a lot of nonsense which has gone unchallenged simply because it’s been written by ‘our side’.”
There is some truth in what you say. That goes to the heart of cognitive biases. However, this is not a simple case of a flawed paper by a sceptical scientist. If this journalist knew beforehand that there was no such warning, but went ahead and fabricated a warning in order to accuse the government of failing to act, this is a very serious matter. I cannot see any way out – he is either a liar or grossly negligent. This is certainly not the same as a blogger over egging a flawed paper from their favourite scientist. To make this comparison is the beginnings of yet another whitewashing exercise, further undermining the credibility of climate science. I can’t see how that would be in anyones interest. I would hope that some AGW supporters would at least draw the line in the sand and say, this journalist has some explaining to do.
frank verismo says:
January 28, 2011 at 10:48 pm
@RockyRoad:
This is what happens when a cult replaces science. The faster the MET and BBC are discredited the better.
Funny you should mention those two in the same sentence. Further to my previous post:
Head of the BBC’s pension fund: Peter Dunscombe
Head of the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change: (wait for it . . . . ) Peter Dunscombe!
Does anyone else detect a pattern here?
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Yes, I do. It’s called manipulating the market.
The usual failure honestly and competently to estimate and report the error range of the estimate.
This is not science, it is blatant political P.R. – both dishonest and incompetent. Only a Government agency can survive such exposure and discrediting.
At this point I’m not too keen on the British government doing something about this. I am only hoping the public is made aware of this story. Because I am keen that the court of public opinion will reach critical mass over global warming.
Speaking of cold, Minneapolis is on the verge of setting an interesting record: the whole month of January without going above freezing. Given the forecast to return to subzero temperatures by Monday, the record looks like it is going to be achieved.