BBC is by definition a tool of the state as are its employees such as climate alarmist Roger Harrabin who as such cannot be taken seriously

2/2/11, "How the BBC's Roger Harrabin was ensnared by his own tangled web," UK Telegraph, James Delingpole

"A few weeks ago, you may remember, in a post called How The Doomed Met Office Tried To Spin Its Way Out Of Trouble, I reported on some extraordinary shenanigans involving the Met Office, the BBC, the BBC’s High Priest of Gaian Worship and Climate Alarmism Roger Harrabin and the Coalition government. It was one of those stories where you found yourself wishing: “Someone’s going to come really badly out of this. Please God, let it be all of them.”

To recap, the story went like this: Roger Harrabin wrote an article claiming that far from being more useless than a dead octopus the Met Office was just misunderstood and misrepresented.

“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.”

But then the Cabinet Office denied this (as obviously it would: if it really had been warned over the extreme weather, then its failure to prepare for it would looked less like a forgivable mistake based on the poor information available; and more like culpable incompetence).

This in turn raised a very intriguing question: someone, somewhere had got things very wrong – but who?

Well now, thanks to some inspired digging from bloggers Katabasis and Autonomous Mind we know the answer – and it’s not looking good for Roger Harrabin or the Met Office.

As Katabasis discovered as a result of an FOI request. (Gawd bless FOI….)

Someone at the Cabinet Office wrote to the Met Office to tell them what the official position would be: “The Met Office seasonal outlook for the period November to January is showing no clear signals for the winter”. The Met Office writes back – “That is fine.” – also note the first mail sent my the Met Office, these are their “initial thoughts” (!)

In other words the Met Office had not issued the warning Harrabin claimed it had. Even the Met Office now admitted this, in a statement to Andrew Orlowski at The Register.

“The Met Office has never suggested that we warned cabinet office of an ‘exceptionally cold early winter’. The forecasts said that there was ‘an increased risk for a cold and wintry start to the winter season’. The Met Office provided a forecast to the cabinet office that showed that there was an increased risk of an average or cold start to winter over an average or mild winter. This along with a verbal briefing and the text that highlighted a ‘increased risk of a cold start to the winter season’ all provided useful guidance to the cabinet office.”

As Autonomous Mind notes, what the Met Office appears to be doing here is hanging Harrabin out to dry. And the Met Office might have got away with this too, had Orlowski not noted a fascinating quote featured in the Daily Mail on 4th January in which a Met Office spokeswoman was quoted as saying:

We did brief the Cabinet Office in October on what we believed would be an exceptionally cold and long winter,’ she said.

As Autonomous Mind says, this won’t do at all:

It is said that your lies will find you out. The Met Office appears to be lurching from lie to lie. The left hand does not know what the left hand is doing, or there is a concerted effort to create enough confusion to turn people off the story in frustration.

The latest development is that Harrabin, apparently undeterred by the Met Office’s ungracious efforts at shafting him, has popped up with a guest post at Watts Up With That? trying to muddy the waters still further.

But the row only serves to emphasize the need for better information on the performance of weather forecasters over the long term.

No, the row does nothing of the sort. As Autonomous Mind and Ross McKitrick are among several WUWT readers to have noticed, this is yet more classic spin, evasion and disinformation from a past master of the art.

We already know exactly what the problem is: the Met Office’s forecasts are wildly out of kilter with those of professional, more accurate independent forecasters such as Piers Corbyn and Joe Bastardi. And the reason for this was explained by Christopher Booker in an article last year aptly titled The Green Hijack of the Met Office is crippling Britain.

The reason why the Met Office gets its forecasts so hopelessly wrong is that they are based on those same computer models on which the IPCC itself relies to predict the world’s climate in 100 years time. They are programmed on the assumption that, as CO2 rises, so temperatures must inexorably follow.

This is a national scandal and it’s one which – were he a responsible journalist rather than a shill for the AGW lobby – Roger Harrabin would be investigating rather than attempting cackhandedly to excuse. In his WUWT post, he includes this pleading little paragraph:

My real motive is to try to do a decent job telling people about things that are important and they probably didn’t already know. For instance I first led media coverage about the value of the Met Office seasonal forecast a number of years ago. (My other motive – for those of you who keep emailing me at weekends – is to have a life with my wife, kids and friends.)

After my experiences of these last ten days, you might think I’d have more sympathy with this “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” defence. Problem is, Harrabin has long since crossed the line from (supposedly impartial) BBC journalist into full-on environmental activist. No single person at the BBC – with the possible exception of the man in charge of its £8.2 billion “ethical” (ie heavily exposed to dead-end “green” investments pension fund Peter Dunscombe – has done more to foster the BBC’s climate of vicious intolerance towards sceptics.

The Met Office is a disgrace. For a senior BBC employee like Harrabin to abuse his position of trust by spinning on its behalf is even more of a disgrace.

Let’s leave the last word to Andrew Orlowski to explain why it matters:

Airports, energy providers, local authorities and health trusts were caught short by record cold weather extremes this year, for the third winter running – raising questions about the preparedness of the national infrastructure, and the quality of the meteorological advice these agencies receive. And it’s not an academic dispute: cold weather kills thousands of people each year, with UK citizens suffering one of the worst winter “excess” mortality rates in Europe. According to figures published by Office for National Statistics, there were 25,400 additional deaths in 2009/10 than in a comparable non-winter period.

Orlowski is right. This is not a game."

via Tom Nelson