Why Are The Met Office Spinning So Desperately?
By Paul Homewood
In recent days, the UK Met Office have been accused of misleading the public, and not giving the public the full facts regarding the CET series.
They have since responded to an article in the Mail on Sunday, which highlighted the latest HADCRUT figures showing that temperatures had not gone up since 1997. Their reply was so full of half truths, misrepresentations and evasions, that one has to ask why they were not prepared to acknowledge the simple facts.
Could it be something to with the fact that, during the financial year 2010/11, they received £18.7 million in funding from the UK government and the EU specifically for climate research. (This, in other words, is totally separate to the funding they receive for normal meteorological services).
Most of the above amount, £17.5 million, was provided to the Hadley Centre, which is an integral part of the Met Office.
The Centre has several major aims:
- To understand physical, chemical and biological processes within the climate system and develop state-of-the-art climate models which represent them
- To use climate models to simulate global and regional climate variability and change over the last 100 years and to predict changes over the next 100 years
- To monitor global and national climate variability and change
- To attribute recent changes in climate to specific factors
- To understand, with the aim of predicting, the natural inter-annual to decadal variability of climate
The Met Office employs over 1500 staff, with approximately 200 working in its climate research unit. Most of its funding comes from contracts with the DEFRA, other United Kingdom Government departments and the EU.
There is an awful lot of money and a whole load of jobs at the Met which hang on the entire climate change issue.
The bulk of climate research funding is predicated on the basis that climate change is a serious problem.
Would they put this at risk by telling the truth? Silly question really.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Reblogged this on Climate Ponderings.
You have to avoid making the same mistake that most warmists do – attributing greed where genuine concern is the root emotion.
Since AGW isn’t the only global threat I’m interested in, I see a similar set of individuals attached to those issues. The people tend to be anxious, caring souls with a certain amount of impracticality. They see little but their potential problem and it dominates their lives. Their credibility becomes wrapped up in their catastrophe and eventually they can’t see past the worst case scenarios to see that new data has changed the situation so much it requires a completely fresh approach. If the World moves on from their crisis they panic, partly because their life’s work is being ignored and partly because nothing is being done to mitigate the issue. The kicker is that those problems have very genuine elements to them.
They tend to forget that life is a tightrope walk between catastrophes that amazingly often succeeds rather than pitching mankind into doom. Which is not to say that one day we might not hit the disaster jackpot, but if we live our lives preparing for the end, we might as well end it all now.
The MET Office’s raison d’être is climate. It’s more fulfilling than mere weather which is fickle and too hard to become an expert on. Climate offers them the chance to be wizards who predict the future and (with the advent of AGW) saviours of the World. How seductive is that? How hard would it be to admit ‘actually it’s impossible to predict climate, we’re just glorified weather forecasters of dubious reliability and anyway CO2 isn’t as bad as we thought’?
Some of the original alarm basis still exists. CO2 should have some impact on temperature; we are still emitting a lot of CO2 and there is little sign of slowdown; nature is already under stress from mankind and interfering with the climate won’t help matters. There is still cause for concern. They are well within their remit to continue to bang the AGW drum but I’m not sure that they can bring themselves to present a balanced picture.
The IPCC should be replaced with a truly unbiased arbiter of the science and a new stream of funding needs to be aimed at proving CO2 innocent (as possible). Most of those who are embedded deep in AGW fear territory aren’t mentally equipped to separate the threat from the reality and are not suited to such a task.
It’s not so much greed as fear. Fear of losing your job, fear of having to admit you are wrong.
There will be an element of that but at the moment they’re not admitting to themselves that they might be wrong. They’re not even consoling themselves with the low end of their CO2 sensitivity predictions. They’ve got their fingers in their ears and are muttering ‘climate change is real, climate change IS real’.
Nature, far from being “under stress” from our CO2 emissions, is breathing a huge sigh of relief. “At last, a way to recycle all that sequestered plant food!” We’re all part of Gaia’s Master Plan, doncha know?
“The Centre has several major aims:
To attribute recent changes in climate to specific factors”
To “attribute”?
Right; “attribute” trivial beneficial changes to an imaginary disaster-forcing cause. Lots of somebodies should be ashamed.