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
I still think that without the original e-mail from Met office to government the premise is flawed. What it may have said can only be hinted at by what is said on that return e-mail to the Met office, and there are no quotation marks. It could have been a straight copy and paste lift of course, and there is a difference in text size between the body of the e-mail and the sender’s responses.
Allan,
“It is very unlikely that the MSM will pick up on the excellent detective work of Katabasis and the only people who will be aware of this are people who read the blogs of Libertarian leaning bloggers and sceptic sites such as this one.”
Sadly true. However, at least when you discuss this with people and ask if they knew that the story about the met office supposedly having warned the government of a severe winter in 2010/11 was untrue. You can tell them about the actual email sent to the cabinet office which contained nothing of the kind. They may be shocked that not only is there actual proof that the BBC and the met office fabricated a falsehood against the government, but hardly any of the media has reported on this. So what else is it they think they know that ain’t necessarily so.
Andy Mayhew says:
January 29, 2011 at 4:49 am:
“So the media/blogosphere get caught out yet again.
They lied to us when they made up the false story about the MetO predicting a mild winter and they lied to us when they implied that the MetO had warned the government about the severe start we had to winter.
The only people coming out of this well are the MetO who have told the truth all along!”
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And Nixon never bugged telephones and the moon landing was filmed in a studio in Arizona. Cuckoo!
Here’s a little gem from La France.
Bilan global de l’année 2010
Avec une température annuelle inférieure de 0,3 °C à la moyenne de référence 1971-2000, l’année 2010 se positionne en France métropolitaine comme la plus fraîche de ces deux dernières décennies, avec 1996. Pour trouver une année plus froide, il faut remonter en 1987 avec une température moyenne inférieure de 0,5 °C à la normale*. Ces températures basses ont d’ailleurs concerné l’ensemble de l’Europe du Nord. Le diagnostic est toutefois très différent à l’échelle planétaire puisque la température moyenne globale de l’année 2010, terres et océans compris, s’annonce comme l’une des plus chaudes des 130 dernières années.
Coldest year in France since 1987. These low temperatures concerned the rest of Northern Europe. The diagnosis is very different at the planetary scale when the average global temperature was announced as the warmest in the last 130 years. That means that the UK was below the norm, northern europe and france below the norm, australia below the norm but the world searingly hot.
Jon says:
January 30, 2011 at 3:59 am
Could the attempt to ridicule the government about weather (and, by extension, climate) have anything to do with the PM being a Conservative?
No, NO, NO Jon, Cameron is a liberal in every sense of the word. He is as far as is possible from being a true blue.
A question just begging to be researched is whether anyone made much money from the unexpected demand for fuel or carbon credits. I know I’m stating the obvious here, but nobody else has.
Maybe it helps to back just a bit. this little item from the Daily Mail October 12th 2010, and where did this seemingly accurate forecast come from? You can juggle the dates a bit, but it was made a long time before 25th October. Then again February this year is also mentioned as being “bitterly cold” something about which I was making earlier enquiries, that’s how I found this,
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1318765/Camden-Council-hands-2-000-spades-telling-residents-dig-snows.html
Several days now and, outside of the Telegraph’s blogs, not a single mention of this in the UK’s mainstream press.
I would have thought this might be interesting to the UK media – but evidently not.
My favorite bit is, “Rainfall amounts are less certain,” which follows:
… “no clear signals” … “less certain” … “roughly equal signals” …. “some indications”
Ah, these entertaining battles between armies of CYA artists! Each trying to get at the others’ butts, while protecting their own … quite a spectacle! To sodomize, or be sodomized, that is the question ….
😉
Please leave the Met Office alone you guys , we Brits know exactly how to take their long range forecasts , its in a simple code – if they say its going to be wet it will be dry , if its going to be cold it will be mild , etc etc . If they are made to change then we will not know what to think !!