Blue on blue: warmist BBC slams alarmist Met Office

Quentin Letts has stuck an elegant suede bootee into the Met Office. And the Warmists aren’t happy.

UK Meteorological Office universally respected used by USA on its most sensitive missions. BBC broadcasts unfounded attacks. Right of reply?

— John Deben (@lorddeben) August 5, 2015

&

#BBC at it again giving wholly unjustified airtime to climate deniers on Radio4 right now. Egregious attack on the Met Office. Complain now

— Tom Burke (@tom_burke_47) August 5, 2015

And, from the BBC’s Alarmist-in-Chief Roger Harrabin:

https://twitter.com/RHarrabin/status/628849020774039552 

Their consternation is understandable given that Letts’s attack was launched not from his home at the Daily Mail but rather on his BBC Radio 4 series “What’s the Point Of…?”. Traditionally the BBC has always acted as the Met Office’s amen corner, not its critic. Both, after all, are bloated, publicly-funded institutions with both an ideological commitment to and a vested interest in promulgating the great global warming scare.

But this morning Letts was politely merciless as he ripped the Met Office – which costs the taxpayer around £200 million a year for doing something which private institutions often do better on a fraction of the budget.

His show quoted independent forecaster Piers Corbyn – brother of bearded Socialist contender for the Labour party leadership Jeremy – who said:

“They [the Met Office] spend hundreds of millions on supercomputers but even if you spent ten times that amount you would not improve their forecasting skill one jot. They’re ignoring external influences- solar activity and the modulation of solar effects on the moon…Rubbish in rubbish out.”

Conservative MP and Climate Change Committee member Peter Lilley wasn’t too flattering either:

“Their lobbyists tell us they need ever more money for ever bigger computers so they can be even more precisely wrong in the future.”

Lilley also noted how a glossy brochure produced by the Met Office in 2004 had predicted – with “90 per cent confidence” – a dramatic 0.3 degrees C rise in global temperatures by 2014 – only for reality to deliver a temperature rise of zero.

“The sad thing is they’ve become committed to a pseudo-scientific doctrine [catastrophic man-made global warming] and are unwilling to change it when the facts refute it.”

Nor was Lilley impressed by the Met Office’s excuse that the missing heat had somehow vanished into the oceans:

“The deep oceans swallowed my homework thesis.”

Fortunately, Labour MP Graham Stringer was on hand to provide a balancing left-wing voice to all this outrageous Tory bias. Well, sort of:

“They [the Met Office] are getting better at one- to five-day forecasts. But their [long-term] climate predictions are pretty random and very poor.”

Stringer noted that at the beginning of last year the Met Office had predicted that there would be “less precipitation than normal”. Instead “the whole country was flooded.”

Was all this, then, an argument that the Met Office was ripe for privatisation, Letts asked Peter Lilley.

Lilley: “I’m not sure that anyone would buy it.”

It’s at times like this that you’ve got to admit: that BBC licence fee is worth every penny…