It’s becoming increasingly clear, thanks to a series of posts from Autonomous Mind, The Register and Katabasis, that the Met Office is not only seriously incompetent but also full of viperous spin doctor “spokesmen”, whose sole aim is to dissemble and obfuscate. The facts are emerging piece by piece through persistent FoI requests. Thanks to these latest FoI revelations, it now seems that our £100m-plus-a- year Met Office weather service did not see the severe cold of December coming, unlike numerous lesser-funded services who actually are in the business of forecasting rather than politics. Not only that, when it saw its mistake, it then set out to create a massive smokescreen to suggest that it did actually see it coming, but could not communicate the message publicly because –bizarrely – people could not really be trusted to understand and deal properly with such information. It defies belief and common sense that the Met Office should act in this way, but that it what happened. It’s confirmation, perhaps, that the Met Office’s main purpose is no longer forecasting – which it patently can’t do competently – but spreading climate propaganda.
One of its chosen messengers to spread this mis/disinformation was, of course, the ever-faithful Roger Harrabin of the BBC. It’s underlined his role yet again as warmist lapdog-in-chief. Mr Harrabin reported emphatically in early January that the Met Office told him that they had briefed the government in October about the coming cold snap, but had kept it secret because of the possible consequences. He – being a very highly paid BBC senior journalist – must have had some inkling of the furore that this would unleash because the unavoidable conclusion of his story was that one way or another, someone was spreading porkies or disinformation. Mr Harrabin seemed to imply at that stage that he thought it was the government.
What has now emerged from the excellent blog work by AM and Katabasis is that the Met Office forecast about December was at best wrong and more likely useless unscientific gibberish.
So why was Mr Harrabin taken in? Over the past couple of days, he has been trying desperately to explain, here and here. The impact on me of his posts has been to create even more confusion. He seems on the one hand to be insisting that, despite the evidence that the Met’s October forecast was at best unsure about December’s weather, someone (unnamed and mysterious, the Deep Throat of the Met Office) did tell him that the secret forecast about severe cold had been delivered to the government in October. On the other hand, he’s deploying the “move-along there, nothing-to-see” argument by drawing attention to a half-baked experiment he claims will make forecasting better. And thirdly, he’s saying that anyway, even if the Met Office had delivered the October forecast, there would not have been enough certainty in it for local authorities to take decisive action by buying more salt or snowploughs. As Autonomous Mind notes, never mind the facts, Watch the Birdie!
Where does all this leave the truth? At best, very seriously compromised. The politicians at the Met Office (for that is what they are) have woven a very, very intricate web that has at its heart quantum physics-style precepts, such as the creation of a new category of non-forecast forecasts. And I await new developments in Mr Harrabin’s textbook presentation in the art of journalistic contortionism with interest. This is fast developing into one of the blogsphere’s most exhilarating moments. The ride’s not over yet.
