The song you should hear whenever they speak

It has now reach the point for me that whenever I hear British officials, Eurocrats or climate catastrophists speak, alarming us with some new supposed crisis or other, all I can hear in my head is this song. I find it a great palliative and recommend its regular use:

The Mystic Met Office - the 'forecasts that are not forecasts'

Autonomous Mind has just published further information on the Met Office story, showing that in internal discussions, the Met Office's 'forecasts that were not forecasts' were nethertheless referred to numerous times as forecasts. As AM puts it, "The Met Office logic is that although it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck it is actually a horse."

There's lots of spin going on here, however there is no avoiding the fact that the 'forecast that was not a forecast' was used by the National Grid to determine their winter preparedness report, as I pointed out on Friday. They apparently didn't even have access to the now notorious "secret" report (the "secret" adjective originating from the BBC's Roger Harrabin).

The Mystic Met Office has now responded to the Register's inquiries on this issue, stating that it "has never suggested that we warned cabinet office of an 'exceptionally cold early winter'." - thus throwing Harrabin immediately under the bus.

Harrabin's response? Now that is another interesting story in and of itself. He claims: "This doesn't match a more conclusive forecast I gleaned from a Met Office contact in December" .

So what is this "more conclusive forecast" and who gave it to you Roger?

I note that he is also not paying attention when he says: 'I note a blog report (which I cannot yet verify) saying that a civil servant commented: "The Met Office seasonal outlook for the period November to January is showing no clear signals for the winter."'

Roger, that "comment" is clearly visible in the FOIA material I received, amongst the email traffic. It's more than just a "comment", it is the government outlining its official position, with which the Met Office appears to agree in its return email.

On that particular point Roger, it leaves a striking odd one out. You.

There's also another deception in play here. Harrabin goes on:

'A spokesman for the Cabinet Office told me they had passed the forecast to key stakeholders ("Government departments, local council as appropriate - we don't have a list").' [My emphasis]

Are we really to believe that the "key stakeholders" didn't include the National Grid? (Not that it would have helped much anyway).

You may be wondering why I highlighted that word. Here's another clue:

Both Autonomous Mind and the Register articles highlight a claim found in the Mail:

"Last night the Met Office confirmed it had passed on the advice, but a spokesman denied that withholding it from the public was motivated by embarrassment.

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

Whilst Roger Harrabin is definitely not off the hook - and neither, if the veracity of the Mail's source is to be believed - is the Mystic Met Office, there is another underlying cultural problem:

The use of 'spokespeople'. These are used so often that it now drifts into the background consciousness for most of us, most of the time. Yet it is an extremely insidious propagandistic technique. The use of an anonymous spokesperson gets the organisation, or person, they are representing off the hook. There is no chain of accountability and any statements they make can easily be dismissed in the future.

The fact that both the Met Office and the Cabinet office are deploying spokespeople on this issue concerns me. It means we're not going to get to the actual truth without some serious hard work and implies that someone definitely does have something to hide, even if it is just their own bumbling incompetence.

Whenever this occurs journalists should immediately insist on knowing the identity of the person providing the information. Of course they don't, because they want easy copy, and access to the source of that copy. So it's up to the rest of us to apply the pressure and ask, every single time, who? The reasons why this is such a pressing issue are described eloquently by Heather Brooke in her excellent new book, 'The Silent State':

"Official spokespeople are powerful because they speak for the powerful; anonymity means they can exercise that power without being held individually accountable for it....When a 'spokesman' makes an accusation or spreads a smear, what recourse is there for the target? Anonymising spokespeople suits some journalists because if every source is simply a 'spokesman' or 'official', then it's easy to make up any old quote to suit your story.....As long as secrecy and anonymity reign, public sector bureaucracies will bethe hiding places for the incompetent, lazy and corrupt"

And if that doesn't hammer the point home enough, try this summation from Brooke:

"...we cannot be an informed electorate without access to information and a right to hold officials to account. And if we're not an informed electorate then we cannot call ourselves a democracy." [Emphasis mine]

This use of selective anonymity also has the potential to inflict very real damage beyond just the nature of our democracy:

"...special advisers and spin doctors operate a principle of never admitting a fault. can't we be treated by our leaders as grown-ups? Spin is costly for taxpayers because small problems aren't acknowledged, they are spun into successes or stifled until they reach a magnitude of catastrophic proportion."

And we've just seen this principle in action with regard to the Met Office, the government and the BBC:

Due to yet another year of officially sanctioned lack of preparedness, chaos, suffering and likely unecessary deaths, have occurred. The game of pass the blame parcel will be no comfort to those identified by Anna Raccoon as on the receiving end - "Those pensioners found frozen solid in their front garden, the scenes of half starved refugees huddled against the cold at Heathrow airport, the two kilometre long lines of frozen travellers queuing round the block at St Pancreas Station, the double dip recession caused by the ‘extreme weather’"

All of which no one is willing to take responsibility for as the parties at risk of having to take it are hiding behind 'spokespeople' already. This looks like a tough battle ahead to pin down who is responsible, who is telling us the truth and who is lying.

And its a battle - yet another - only being fought in earnest by the 'fifth estate' of the blogosphere, with little assistance from the 'fourth estate' as they languish in the doldrums of increasing irrelevancy and distant relationship to the truth.

But fight it we will.

The Revealed Mystery of the Mystic Met Office

I have just received the Met Office's "secret report" and email correspondence with the Cabinet Office from a FOI request I made three weeks ago. The information they contain is quite significant and I hope others who have been working hard highlighting this issue such as Autonomous Mind and James Delingpole will find the following addition useful. God knows this is an extremely serious issue and the only people who appear to have been digging into it have been the bloggers (AM's investigation and analysis can be found here, here and here).

At the turn of the year we heard the revelation that, following an absolutely brutal start to the UK winter, the Met Office had allegedly warned the government in a "secret report" to expect such.

The Met Office also claimed that, in part because of the ridicule it had suffered for completely out of sync seasonal forecasts previously, it did not share this information with the public. It attempted to throw the government under the bus by claiming that the Cabinet Office had been informed, implying that it was central government's fault that the country was so unprepared and nothing to do with the Mystic Met Office's computer models with built in warmist bias that is perpetually out of touch with reality as a result.

It was Roger Harrabin, one of the BBC's chief climate alarmists, who originally claimed that the Met Office had issued this "secret warning". He said: "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.”

I find it utterly pathetic that such an allegedly august institution can hide behind the excuse of fear of ridicule. It would be funny, self-satirising material were it not for the fact that, as a result of their influence, many people have died and suffered. That's not to mention the hole made in our economy and damage to tourism and international standing. Visitors, and those observing from abroad, perceived the lack of preparedness, especially at the airports, as akin to third world levels of disorganisation. They were right.

This is an extremely serious issue and so far no one appears to have been held culpable, not least in part to the (as per usual) relative silence of the mass media.

I immediately sent Freedom of Information requests to both the Cabinet Office and the Met Office, asking for copies of this "secret report" and any related correspondence after initially reading the story.

The essence of the Met's "secret report" has already been revealed by Bishop Hill who was able to obtain a copy before me; revealing it in all its simplistic glory (and showing clearly that the Met Office has been completely dishonest on this issue). It was reported over at Watts Up With That, and was quickly neatly eviscerated by the commentators.

They have also been claiming that paying customers receive more extensive information than the public. The "public" information mostly consisted in this probability map, which claimed, to quote AM, an "80% probability of warmer than average temperatures for November, December and January for Scotland and a 60-80% probability of the same for Northern Ireland, Wales and most of England."

As you will see from the link below, the special information released to paying customers, which apparently constituted their "secret warning" of a harsh winter is a complete joke and comes across like something written by a child.

You can see for yourself that the Met Office actually predicts a slighty higher chance of a "cold" winter, rather than a "near average" or "mild" winter. This is based on a series of probabities out of 10. It boggles the mind that aside from the tiny amount of actual prediction in the report that this is the output of their energy-guzzling, multi-million pound supercomputer.

On the next page they quantify what these terms might mean, but even here they are completely out of sync with what we actually experienced - for "cold" it meant "typical lower and upper limits" of temperature ranging from -1.5 to 0.4 degrees Celsius.

Further, the email correspondence is enlightening between the Met Office and the government:

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" (!)

So, as if the "secret" prediction wasn't awful enough, any claim that the Met Office actually warned the government of an impending harsh winter, and by implication that the government therefore did not act responsibly is a 100% complete and utter lie.

However there is more to this story that really needs to be aired. Not only have local councils been complaining of the complete failure of the Met Office to warn them, but even more seriously, the National Grid of all organisations, was flying completely blind too. See the National Grid's Winter Outlook document. Skip to page 7. The Grid obviously never received the "secret report" (not that it would have been much use anyway). They had to get their information from - the website! The same website that promised the 60-80% likelihood of a warm winter and which the Met Office has told us plebs we should ignore.

Largely as a result of this, the predictions for maximum demand were out by nearly 1 GW on the closest match to a horrifying 4.7 Gigawatts on the worst (information from NETA):



Had we not been able to buy approximately 2GW of power from France across the channel interconnector and ramp up the domestic production there could have been a serious outage. In a few years, thanks to complete government intransigience on our future power supply, we won't be able to repeat the feat and of course there are no guarantees that the French will always be able to sell us that much energy when we need it. When the total demand goes up to close to 60GW, in still winter conditions, the 3000+ wind turbines installed provide an incredible 0.1% of our power needs. That lunatic Huhne seems to think our power issues will be solved by the costly build of another 10,000 turbines. So in similar conditions that "capacity" will provide approximately 0.4% of the power supply, just when we need it most. Outstanding, no?

By the way, Browned Off's comment to me is well worth a read. He corrected me on the relative positions of the government, EU and energy industry on this. It certainly seems plausible - the government is happy for the EU to take most of the blame for something that - at root - is its own fault. It fits perfectly into the singular principle that defines modern British politics - expediency.

Unfortunately the combination of this political expediency - at the expense of our national power supply - and the religious convictions of the warmist-infested Mystic Met office are going to result in many more deaths and suffering. There have already been needless deaths and suffering thanks to both.

These people have gone from being an annoyance to an active menace, and no one appears to be holding them to account.

Anyway, here are the files, including the email correspondence and the "report".