GWPF | 24 Aug 2015
BBC Denies Climate Sceptics Behind Decision To Ditch Met Office
The BBC has ended a partnership with the Met Office dating back more than 90 years by deciding not to renew its contract to provide weather forecasts. The last bulletin presented by the Met Office will be broadcast in October 2016, 94 years after the first, in November 1922. Bill Giles, who led the Met Office’s team of BBC forecasters from 1983 to 2000, was among those in shock at the decision. “It’s a hell of a shame. It’s the end of an era,” he said. –Nicholas Hellen, The Sunday Times, 24 August 2015
In recent years the Met Office has often felt less like a dispassionate provider of weather information and more like a lobbyist for the climate change agenda. It frequently seems more interested in pronouncing on the long-term climatology of rain forests and polar ice-caps than providing the best possible bread-and-butter local forecasts for its clients? Yes, it’s sad that the Met Office has effectively been sacked by the BBC after 93 years but it only has itself to blame. –Editorial, Daily Mail, 24 August 2015
1) BBC Pulls Plug On Met Office – The Sunday Times, 24 August 2015
2) BBC Denies Climate Sceptics Behind Decision To Ditch Met Office – The Independent on Sunday, 23 August 2015
3) Editorial: Met Office Feels Icy Blast Of Competition – Daily Mail, 24 August 2015
4) Quentin Letts: I’m Not Surprised The BBC Dumps Climate Change Obsessed Met Office – Daily Mail, 24 August 2015
5) Rollback: Britain Gearing Up To Slash Solar Subsidies – City A.M., 24 August 2015
6) Green Nimbys Vs Government: Battle Looms Over Britain’s Energy Future – The Times, 22 August 2015
A controversial BBC radio programme that questioned the scientific credentials of the Met Office is unlikely to have influenced the broadcaster’s decision to end its nearly 100-year relationship with Britain’s official weather service, it has been claimed. The BBC announcement came three weeks after a contentious Radio 4 programme, What’s the Point of…?, focused on the Met Office. The programme, presented by a Daily Mail columnist, questioned the accuracy of the long-term forecasts made by the Met Office in its scientific assessments of the risk posed by global warming and climate change. A BBC spokeswoman said: “There is absolutely no link between the programme and the situation we’re in now.” –Steve Connor, The Independent on Sunday, 23 August 2015
The Met Office may only have itself and some of its more swivel-eyed defenders to blame. With its hunger for news headlines, it occasionally went further than it should have done in predicting ‘barbecue summers’ and so forth. Sometimes you got the impression its forecasts were being written by the same hand that authored the Book of Genesis and its chapters about Noah’s flood. Gosh, they did love to whip up a storm about a few isobars. But if that is a shame in itself, it’s as nothing to the Met Office’s political lobbying, pushing a green, climate-change agenda with such force it stopped being seen as a dispassionate observer and started to look too much like a political player. –Quentin Letts, Daily Mail, 24 August 2015
Energy and Climate Change secretary Amber Rudd is gearing up to slash solar power subsidies as part of the government’s latest effort to cut costs for consumers. Last year, Britain installed more solar panels than any other country in Europe, with demand bolstered by generous payments of 43p per kilowatt hour, nine times the wholesale rate. It is widely expected that Rudd will go even further, cutting the current rate by as much as half this autumn. The government has already removed subsidies for other renewable energy initiatives, including the guaranteed level of subsidy for biomass conversions. –Lauren Fedor, City A.M., 24 August 2015
Local councils were on a collision course with the government last night as a battle loomed over the awarding of almost 160 new fracking licences. Councillors across England expressed fury at government plans to fast-track approval for dozens of new fracking projects in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and at threats to overrule councils if they drag their heels on planning decisions. Gina Dowding, a councillor on Lancashire county council, which rejected plans by the shale gas firm Cuadrilla to drill wells on the Fylde coast in June, said it was “extremely shocking” that the government felt it could override local democracy. –Robin Pagnamenta, The Times, 22 August 2015
1) BBC Pulls Plug On Met Office
The Sunday Times, 24 August 2015
Nicholas Hellen
The BBC has ended a partnership with the Met Office dating back more than 90 years by deciding not to renew its contract to provide weather forecasts.
The last bulletin presented by the Met Office will be broadcast in October 2016, 94 years after the first, in November 1922.
Bill Giles, who led the Met Office’s team of BBC forecasters from 1983 to 2000, was among those in shock at the decision. “It’s a hell of a shame. It’s the end of an era,” he said.
The loss of the contract, worth an estimated £3m a year, was confirmed by the Met Office, which said: “We’re disappointed to hear that we won’t be supplying weather presenters and graphics to the BBC in the future.”
Steve Noyes, its operations and customer services director, added: “Nobody knows Britain’s weather better and during our long relationship with the BBC we’ve revolutionised weather communication to make it an integral part of British daily life.”
The BBC will announce a replacement before the end of the year. It declined to discuss why it had decided to break with the Met Office. “Our viewers get the highest standard of weather service and that won’t change,” the corporation said.
“We are legally required to go through an open tender process . . . to make sure we secure both the best possible service and value for money for the licence-fee payer.”
2) BBC Denies Climate Sceptics Behind Decision To Ditch Met Office
The Independent on Sunday, 23 August 2015
Steve Connor
A controversial BBC radio programme that questioned the scientific credentials of the Met Office is unlikely to have influenced the broadcaster’s decision to end its nearly 100-year relationship with Britain’s official weather service, it has been claimed.
The BBC announced on Friday that it is no longer considering the Met Office in an open tender process for a new five-year contract to supply radio and TV weather reports to the broadcaster beginning in the autumn of 2016. The Met Office has supplied weather reports to the BBC since 1922.
The announcement came three weeks after a contentious Radio 4 programme, What’s the Point of…?, focused on the Met Office. The programme, presented by a Daily Mail columnist, questioned the accuracy of the long-term forecasts made by the Met Office in its scientific assessments of the risk posed by global warming and climate change.
Criticism has been levelled at the Met Office, particularly in recent years, over its cost‑effectiveness and its ability to always accurately predict the fickle British weather. Reports this month said staff at the Met Office had received bonuses totalling £20.8m over the past five years for correctly predicting the weather.
The fact the BBC broadcast a popular radio show which was highly critical of the organisation it had employed for 93 years raised eyebrows, especially as some reports alleged there were several factual errors in the show.
A spokeswoman for the Met Office said that there was unlikely to be any link between the ending of its BBC contract and the radio programme given that it was aired at the beginning of August, while the open tender process for the BBC weather forecasts has been ongoing for several months.
“I’d be surprised if a half-hour programme had any influence at all. We’re very disappointed but it’s just one of a number of commercial contracts we have,” she said.
The BBC said that it was legally bound to go through an open tender process to get the best service and value for money for television licence-fee payers. Several commercial weather services overseas are still vying for the contract, but the Met Office was told last week that its bid had failed, having successfully won the last open tender in 2010. […]
The Met Office’s Hadley Centre in Exeter carries out extensive computer modelling of climate change, which has been the target of vehement criticism by climate sceptics, some of whom featured prominently in the Radio 4 programme, which was widely criticised for its one-sided approach… A BBC spokeswoman said: “There is absolutely no link between the programme and the situation we’re in now.”
3) Editorial: Met Office Feels Icy Blast Of Competition
Daily Mail, 24 August 2015
If discussing the weather is Britain’s favourite obsession, complaining about the inaccuracies of the BBC forecast must come a very close second.
Failing to predict the 1987 hurricane when it was just a few hours away remains the Corporation’s greatest meteorological humiliation but licence-fee payers are misguided on a less dramatic basis almost every day – causing intense irritation for campers, sports fans and anyone planning a barbecue.
So after 93 years of taking its forecasts from the Met Office – at a reported cost of £30million a year – the BBC has decided to see if it can do better by putting the contract out to tender.
It’s been a difficult decision after such a long relationship but it’s undoubtedly the right one.
If the BBC feels it can get a better quality and value service elsewhere, it is duty-bound to try.
And this reverse could also be a blessing in disguise for the Met Office.
Putting a blast of competition through any monopoly exposes its shortcomings and leads eventually to a more dynamic, less complacent organisation.
In recent years the Met Office has often felt less like a dispassionate provider of weather information and more like a lobbyist for the climate change agenda.
It frequently seems more interested in pronouncing on the long-term climatology of rain forests and polar ice-caps than providing the best possible bread-and-butter local forecasts for its clients?
Yes, it’s sad that the Met Office has effectively been sacked by the BBC after 93 years but it only has itself to blame.
4) Quentin Letts: I’m Not Surprised The BBC Dumps Climate Change Obsessed Met Office
Daily Mail, 24 August 2015
Three weeks ago, the BBC broadcast my Radio 4 programme What Is The Point Of The Met Office?
Yesterday, after a relationship of 93 years, the Corporation stunningly dropped the Met Office as its official supplier of weather forecasts.
I cannot say I was wholly surprised. And yet, despite having some doubts about the modern Met Office, I would hate to be blamed for killing off a British institution whose forecasts long kept us safe and, at D-Day, helped us beat Adolf Hitler.
The Met Office may only have itself and some of its more swivel-eyed defenders to blame. With its hunger for news headlines, it occasionally went further than it should have done in predicting ‘barbecue summers’ and so forth.
Sometimes you got the impression its forecasts were being written by the same hand that authored the Book of Genesis and its chapters about Noah’s flood. Gosh, they did love to whip up a storm about a few isobars.
The same hyperbolic desire for attention saw the Met Office meekly agreeing to dumb down its presentation techniques and allow broadcasting editors and producers to turn the Met’s once dry forecasts into melodramatic, matey interludes fronted by autocuties.
The men and women telling us the weather long ago stopped being dispassionate boffins. Instead they grinned, cooed, empathised, screwing up their eyelashes when they told us it was going to rain and advising us to wear sun cream during heat waves.
Sheer meteorology of the forecasts was crushed by modish silliness, in an ill-guided quest for egalitarianism, a stupid horror of sober scientific delivery. It damaged both our society and the good reputation of the Met Office.
Has the Beeb become exasperated at the accuracy of those forecasts, such as the infamous time poor Michael Fish pooh-poohed the idea that southern England was about to be walloped by a hurricane in 1987? Surely not. (Fish’s boss, Bill Giles, subsequently took the blame.)
Give or take the odd washed-out village fete, the Met Office has been pretty good at short-term weather predictions. British weather is among the most idiosyncratic in the world. […]
But if that is a shame in itself, it’s as nothing to the Met Office’s political lobbying, pushing a green, climate-change agenda with such force it stopped being seen as a dispassionate observer and started to look too much like a political player.
Coming on top of the earlier drift to trendiness, how could we be sure the main driver here was raw science rather than a desire to be part of the Establishment consensus?
In the course of my Radio 4 programme I interviewed senior backbench MPs Graham Stringer (Lab) and Peter Lilley (Con), who felt the Met Office had in recent years become too partisan in its presentation of the facts regarding climate-change. Mr Lilley cited Met Office predictions ten years ago of serious climate change which has not occurred.
When I put this criticism to the Met Office and its charming spokesman Helen Chivers, it was not denied.
Simply for giving airtime to Messrs Stringer and Lilley, I was savaged by the Twittersphere. The e-lynch mob was led, amazingly, by the BBC’s climate-change correspondent, Roger Harrabin. How foolish he now looks, given that his own employer has ditched the Met Office.
Some of the internet reaction was foul. A contributor to a ‘comedy website’ called for me to be shot, twice (just to make sure I was dead). ‘End the man,’ wrote another contributor; this on a website supported by advertisements from mainstream companies such as Amazon.
The vehemence of that reaction against my little programme convinced me that the green lobby has become dangerously intolerant.
5) Rollback: Britain Gearing Up To Slash Solar Subsidies
City A.M., 24 August 2015
Lauren Fedor
Energy and Climate Change secretary Amber Rudd is gearing up to slash solar power subsidies as part of the government’s latest effort to cut costs for consumers.
Given the greater-than-expected rate of take-up, and concerns that the subsidies – which are paid for via energy bills – were putting undue pressure on household budgets, the government began slashing the subsidies, which currently stand at 12.9p per kilowatt hour.
But it is widely expected that Rudd will go even further, cutting the current rate by as much as half this autumn.
Earlier in the year, Rudd announced a consultation on the solar subsidy scheme, which is expected to close the first week of September.
When she opened the consultation, Rudd said: “Our support has driven down the cost of renewable energy significantly.”
“As costs continue to fall it becomes easier for parts of the renewables industry to survive without subsidies,” she added. “We’re taking action to protect consumers, whilst protecting existing investment.”
When contacted by City A.M. yesterday, an energy department spokesperson echoed Rudd’s earlier comments, saying: “We always look to get the best deal for consumers, so when forecasts showed that spending on renewable energy subsidy schemes was set to be higher than expected, we were determined to get a grip.”
The government has already removed subsidies for other renewable energy initiatives, including the guaranteed level of subsidy for biomass conversions. It is expected to reveal the results of a separate consultation, on feed-in tariffs, next month.
6) Green Nimbys Vs Government: Battle Looms Over Britain’s Energy Future
The Times, 22 August 2015
Robin Pagnamenta
Local councils were on a collision course with the government last night as a battle loomed over the awarding of almost 160 new fracking licences.
Councillors across England expressed fury at government plans to fast-track approval for dozens of new fracking projects in Lancashire and Yorkshire, and at threats to overrule councils if they drag their heels on planning decisions.
Gina Dowding, a councillor on Lancashire county council, which rejected plans by the shale gas firm Cuadrilla to drill wells on the Fylde coast in June, said it was “extremely shocking” that the government felt it could override local democracy.
“People who object to fracking are not going to roll over,” said Ms Dowding, who added that the council would continue to fight any application to frack in Lancashire. “Why else do we have local planning committees other than to give local people a voice?”
Darren Clifford, another councillor in Lancashire, which took a year to reject Cuadrilla’s application, accused the government of hypocrisy. “The government can’t talk of localism in one breath and then, when they don’t like the decision of local people, overrule it. It’s clearly not democratic. They should trust local people to make the right decision. Don’t pull the rug from under us,” he said. Mr Clifford said that Lancashire was struggling to meet a 16-week timeframe on complex fracking applications because of budget cuts of 62 per cent that have left it short-staffed. The county’s budget was cut by £178 million in 2014, the year Cuadrilla submitted its application to explore for shale gas.
“If you under-resource councils then of course they are going to be slow. You can’t get through these applications with an ever decreasing staff and budget,” he said.
A spokesman for the Department for Energy and Climate Change rejected the criticism. He said extra funds were available for councils if they were struggling to cope with applications for shale gas production.
