Obsessive talk of deniers at the Met Office
Sep 24, 2013
Bishop Hill in Climate: MetOffice, Sui generis

This is a guest post by Ken Bosomworth.

Obsessive talk of deniers by some at Met Office headquarters

An afternoon, which included plans to grab foreign met equipment, ends with a bang

It was a chilly November afternoon when I made my most recent visit to the UK Meteorological Office headquarters at Victory House, London.  (This description of my visit is, incidentally,  entirely true, and it is unlikely that any of the Met Office staff involved will deny it.) As on previous visits I accompanied my father who had worked there as a met officer, and had now received a couple of promotions.  On this particular occasion he was involved, I gathered, in an important and hush-hush plan relating to the future coordination of observations and forecasting of winds and temperatures in the extreme North of Europe, particularly Norway.

Not being qualified to participate in the planning myself, I remained with a group of a dozen (mostly female) met office employees, some of whom wore special clothes and were described by my father as waffs.  Apparently they were delegated to accompany me for the afternoon, and see that I didn't get into any troublesome exploits, while the senior staff had their  big meeting down the corridor.  (Aficionados of  British civil service trivia will already have recognized that the Met Office moved its headquarters from Victory House some time ago.  They may have deduced that the events I am describing took place a while back, and they would be correct.)

The afternoon drifted by pleasantly enough, with cups of tea and polite conversation.  Interestingly, climate change was never once discussed.  In due course, the chit-chat turned to the apparently-important subject of male companionship, both in qualitative and quantitative terms.  Most of this went entirely above my head, although I perceived the qualitative factors tended to relate to the appearance of the respective male acquaintances, while the quantitative factors revolved around money and deniers (and not necessarily in that order).  Having never heard the term “deniers” before, I had no notion what they were talking about.  I gathered, however, that the term seemed to pop up in concert with descriptions of hosiery gifts of nylon or silk.  The bigger the denier number, the more impressive the gift.  Americans, it seemed, could be expected to come up with more deniers than Brits, although there were heated arguments about the significance and consequences of this disparity.

It was dusk as my father and I headed out of Victory House, and into the packed Underground station nearby.  On the way down to the train, I asked my father about deniers and his reply made little or no sense to me.  (I am moderately sure that the word never came up in his meeting at Victory House, a meeting which I – much, much later – deduced to be about an activity code-named Operation Apostle and was about many things, but not about deniers.)  Stepping gingerly around the rows of cots in the underground station, I still recollect the  warm, fetid gust of humid air redolent with the smell of brake dust and unwashed humanity, as the packed underground train approached.  

What made the visit memorable, and caused it to stick in my mind, was not the talk of deniers or the cups of tea.  It was what was to come next:  just as we emerged into the open air at King's Cross station, there was the biggest explosion that I ever heard, and an idling locomotive could be seen to jump an inch or two from the tracks as the shock wave hit it.  It did not required an advanced education to understand the explosion was caused by a German bomb,  probably a V2 rocket.

The events I am describing had nothing to do with global warming, of course.  They took place in 1944, when I was 4-1/2 years old, and the kind young ladies at the Met Office included members of the Women's Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF), the distaff side of the British Royal Air Force.  (The wartime Met Office was, at that time, part of the RAF).   The operation being discussed at my father's meeting concerned the capture and later functioning of the meteorological station at Fornebu airfield in Oslo, Norway.

As it happened, and fortunately for all concerned, the “capture” of Fornebu's met instruments took place a few days after VE Day in May 1945, and involved no resistance on the part of the Germans.  In fact, my RAF Squadron Leader father was among the first of the Allied force to land at Fornebu, and received from his Luftwaffe counterpart the surrender of his weapons, along with the intact weather station.  And, at age 73, I don't know a whole lot more about deniers, as applied to nylon stockings, than I did in 1944.

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