When I was at school I seriously thought about joining the Met Office. So, I must admit I have some empathy with the old school weather forecasters who used to run the Met Office who may suffer as a result of the loss of the BBC contract.
But unfortunately, even if I had joined, like so many others with a science background, I would have been sidelined by the new breed of arrogant computer geeks with their £100million (public paid) computers and their (failed) models, marketing consultants and accountants.
Because, in a real sense the Met Office I wanted to join died years ago. Their obsession with global warming was not so much the cause of their decline, but just a symptom of its demise.
Of course, I am delighted that the climate extremists in the BBC will no longer have the succour of the climate extremists that now infest the Met Office. And unless I am extremely mistaken, who ever takes over will have a far more sensible view resulting in a massive undermining of the climate extremists at the BBC. So all in all a huge boost for common sense on climate.
But that does not take away the fact that many people in the Met Office never went along with the climate extremists and the loss of this contract will also hit them. But whilst I have sympathy, unfortunately, they brought in on themselves, because did they speak up? No!!
Let’s put it another way I don’t think there’s another group in Britain who is more keen to to support good British science than climate sceptics. And that means good weather forecasting and forecasters
But what did the climate extremists in the BBC and Met Office do? Did they work with the scientists and engineers who might have supported them or did they totally piss us off with their antics? They lost the support of the one group who would usually have stood up to support the Met Office in its hour of need.
Are police investigations on the way?
But one other thought crosses my mind. Now the BBC are divorced from the Met Office, should (as I would hope) there be criminal investigations into the Met Office, then this will now not contaminate the BBC.
So do the “powers that be” know something we don’t about this?
Addendum:
I notice “He doesn’t do physics” also heard the news (but quicker as I bet he still listens to the BBC). However, the first comment backs up what I was saying about sceptics being the natural supporters of the Met Office:
It is essentially a military organisation originally designed to provide political and economic elites with the information needed to help extend the imperial reach of Western capital. I couldn’t care less what happens to it.
Sad to say but the parting of ways is just a financial decision.
And just as no one could possible rig the global temperature to prove they needed a $100million new computer, so how on earth could an entirely neutral and impartial financial decision be rigged?
And think about it purely in financial terms – does the UK government want to subsidise an expensive & useless top-heavy civil service mentality, private sector pay organisation for ever, or would it prefer to remove its link with the BBC and then sell it off?
I find day to day forecasts acceptably accurate and the presentations for the most part easily understood.
Long term (i.e. week ahead ) forecasts are frequently inaccurate due to the inability to predict movement of weather fronts. This of course applies to other broadcasters not just the BBC.
As for climate change predictions, these seldom feature in day to day weather forecasts and when referenced by the BBC or any other channel are worthy only of contempt because we know they are based on belief and very dodgy expensive computer programmes rather than observed science.
Slightly O/T, but on the subject of expensive snouts in troughs, I saw this on the Scotland section of the BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-34035120 (“Rethink needed over Scottish carbon targets, study says”). I have to pity you in Scotland, where there seems to be a Government plan to commit national suicide.
Almost more worrying is what happens when you dig into the article. The report was published by the Task Force on Low Carbon Infrastructure (whoever they are) and apparently compiled by the Green Alliance think tank. A quick look at the Green Alliance website shows that it has received support from (inter alia) the City of London and DEFRA (so the taxpayer is paying an organisation to lobby for more funds from the taxpayer) and its NGO partners include the usual suspects, such as Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth etc. There are 17 snouts in their management, policy and development troughs alone.
From their website I picked up a link to the “Circular Economy Task Force”, which in turn led me to Zero Waste Scotland (funded by the Scottish Government). Their website and quick searches online for the other activities of their directors etc opens up a Pandora’s box of taxpayer-funded troughs. PAS, RTPI Scotland…On and on it goes.
And this was 10 minutes idle curiosity scratching the surface. Just how many of these pressure groups and quangos, funded in whole or in part, by the taxpayer, are there? We’ll never restore sanity to our public debate, nor restore the public finances to order, until this whole gravy train is brought to a juddering halt.
After the survey revealed that sceptics were overwhelmingly scientists and engineers from the private sector, I realised that overwhelmingly those pushing global warming were from the public sector (e.g. BBC/ABC Met Office, University staff, Government civil servants).
So, there is a very strong correlation between public-sector funding and belief in the global warming propaganda.
Therefore, any commercial company will be less supportive of the global warming scam than the pseudo public sector Met Office. And since the BBC “luvvies” are scientific ignorants, who (used to) rely on the “experts” in their weather forecasting service, the effect of replacing the Met Office will be to silence the “luvvies” in the BBC. Because these luvvies will no longer be able to cite a lunch time conversation with a Met Office climate extremist to justify broadcasting their even more extreme global warming propaganda on the BBC.
Ten years ago I would have voted for independence because it would have forced the Scottish public to acknowledge that the failure of the Scottish economy was to a large degree caused by the kind of stupid politicians we vote in.
Then I realised that by the time the Scottish public realised they had to vote for sensible politicians, the economy would have collapsed, and all my own children would have left Scotland, meaning that we would suffer all the hardships with no prospect of benefiting from independence in the long term.
And the more I see of the SNP, the more convinced I am that I made the right decision.
I think the link between public sector workers and alarmism is due to who pays. Public sector workers are used to being over cautious because if their employer (the government) deems it important to act on something they will have to expand the budget to pay for it. They do that by taxing us more or reducing what we get. We don’t usually have a say in it. We can’t go to another supplier in a lot of cases. Even if we could, the publicly funded organisation has such a monopoly that the alternatives are very expensive and it mostly wouldn’t free us from the tax anyway.
Thus when threatened with reduced funds the BBC doesn’t reduce salaries or has less goodies, it just makes less programmes and shows more repeats. Alarmingly for them, the BBC is discovering that the public do have competition albeit an unsatisfactory lot.
Businesses on the other hand have to balance between profits, competition and customers. Employees come fairly low on the priority and even legislation can be interpreted.
Then along comes AGW. Publicly funded bodies see it as a money no object situation. Well, no. The rest of us recognise that money is always important and that’s not greed talking. Money is everything from food to education to health. If you’ve spent it on problem A, it’s not available for problem B. It’s not even available for a better solution to problem A. I think one of the reasons engineers were so quick to be sceptical about CAGW was that we could see solving it being a bottomless money pit.
I’m hoping some of these institutions are getting wakeup call over the value of money right now.