Bishop Hill Letts accuse
Aug 7, 2015 BBC Climate: Sceptics For such a trifling programme, Quentin Letts' What's the Point of the Met Office is really making waves. Booker reviews it over at the Mail and there's some interesting coverage by Damian Thompson at the Spectator.
Yesterday [Harrabin] went into overdrive. ‘Accusation’, he declared, as he linked to Black’s attack on Letts. The sceptics got ‘their’ programme when the BBC allowed Quentin Letts to raise an eyebrow at the Met Office’s alarmist and utterly false claim that thermometers would shoot up between 2004 and 2014.
Don’t get me wrong: Roger Harrabin is a highly respected science writer. He doesn’t set out to deceive his readers. But, as Letts might put it, What’s the Point of a supposedly impartial ‘environment analyst’ who – apparently – takes offence at his bosses allowing another journalist to offer views different to his own?
Thompson's allegation is based on Harrabin's tweets yesterday - the one saying that sceptics had now "had their programme" and the one entitled "Accusation", which linked to Richard Black's article declaring that the BBC had breached its guidelines by letting sceptics on air.
In fact I'm not sure that Thompson doesn't go too far here. I'm not sure Harrabin "exploded" or that he "trashed" Quentin Letts, or indeed that he implied that Letts was "a tool of the sceptics". Of the two Harrabin tweets yesterday, the first - the suggestion that due balance had now been achieved - was certainly prime evidence that he is so in hock to the greens that he has lost all sense of his duty to inform the public. Linking to Black, in a way he rarely links to anyone on the sceptical side of the debate, was confirmation of this.
I'm just not sure it amounted to an attack on Letts.
Reader Comments (58)
GC
"the BBC, who rely on the public for financial support"
Even they have noticed that it's dwindling, but whether they make the connection between that and their own behaviour is debatable. The forthcoming charter renewal may concentrate a few minds in W1A, but probably not the right ones.
jamesp, sadly correct. Those most at fault, will be the quickest to point the finger at everyone else. They may even get away with it, because by then, it will be too late
The Metoffice have issued a pathetically feeble blog piece in their defence.
http://blog.metoffice.gov.uk/2015/08/07/met-office-in-the-media-7-august-2015/
Not only can they not bring themselves to utter the name of the irascible cad authoring the unidentified article (presumably Booker) or the vile organ in which the unspeakable offence took place (Mail), neither can they bear to provide the actual link to their own apocalyptic 2004 brochure through presumed embarrassment. It is here
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/b/1/informing.pdf
Which is as overt a piece of political policy lobbying as it gets, from a body claiming to provide science not policy advocacy.
A very belated thank you, Alex Cull (Aug 7, 2015 at 11:23 AM). That you can do that never ceases to amaze me, with both your patience and your typing skill.
Did Helen Chivers really say “…hundreds of years ahead…”, with regard to forecasting? If so, why? Why the desire, let alone the need, to forecast hundreds of years into the future? What conceivable benefit could there be for this prodigious attempt? More to the point, how much is this (ultimately wasted) effort costing us?
"......... hundreds of years ahead "
This will help our great grandchildren plan the birthdays of their great grandchildren, around the best barbecue weather. Should you risk severe flooding and lightning strikes from June to August, or plan for sunburn, with occasional blizzards from November to March?
During the other months, anything will remain possible, as it always has in the UK.
Pharos -
Thanks for the link to the Met Office response. I was surprised that they didn't use a graphic to make their comparison to their "first groundbreaking decadal forecast in 2007". I have rectified their omission by superposing observations (now using HadCRUT4 vs. the original HadCRUT2v) on figure 4 of Smith et al. (2007).
The result is here. Note that observations fall within the 10-90% band at the end of the decade, but barely.
HaroldW
Thanks. As I've queried on unthreaded, I think comments must be blocked on that Metoffice blog - I've tried unsuccessfully, and there's only a couple both dated 7th altogether. They must be very embarrassed...
Comments are now up on the MetO blog, about 25. I think they are held up over the weekend, as there's nobody in the office to moderate. They seem to allow everything through - one comment accuses them of lying.
There's 1 from me, some from Barry and Paul Homewood. I can't see any from pharos - maybe he has a different name there.