Met Office axed by BBC – right wing board acts to supress key voice on climate change

They must think we are all stupid.

Not even four months into the new conservative administration and the BBC (whose board is appointed by David Cameron) has had the brainwave of terminating its 93 year old contract with the Met Office and looking to commercial firms from New Zealand and The Netherlands to replace them.

Its impossible to prove but the motivations strike The Haze as threefold:

(a) Revenge attack –  The Met Office is a key contributor to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

(b) Breaking the link with the BBC dilutes the authority (and the resources)  of the Met Office (and hobbles future work with the IPCC)

(c) It furthers the ideological fanaticism that neoliberals have for destroying the state and inviting global capital to take over.

Right wingers and climate change deniers have hated the expertise, scientific gravitas and independence of the Met Office for some time now.

The Met Office has been forced to defend itself from attacks in the right wing press:

‘The crazy climate change obsession that’s made the Met Office a menace – Daily Mail

It’s raining money! Met Office staff given £20.8m in bonuses over the past five years amid claims they have got better at weather forecasting – Daily Mail

World’s top climate scientists confess: Global Warming is just QUARTER what we thought – and computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong – (MET OFFICE’S COMPUTER ‘FUNDAMENTALLY FLAWED’ SAYS NEW ANALYSIS) – Daily Mail

Met Office predicts…a snoop on rivals – “The Met Office might be a much-maligned institution in the UK due to bungled forecasts about barbecue summers, which turned out cold and wet and mild winters when it was freezing, but it can always blame rival weather firms for the slips.”- Daily Express

Forecast failure: how the Met Office lost touch with reality “It is precisely the power of this technology in harnessing climate scientists’ assumptions about global warming that has scuppered the Met Office’s predictions — and made it a propagandist for global warming alarmism.” – The Spectator

https://twitter.com/climaterealists/status/630375459650408448 – “”Met Office reply to media criticism of its long term forecasting…but does anyone care?” – Climate Realists (climate change denial front group)

A quick trawl of the internet reveals a great deal of right wing hatred for the Met Office and its role in supplying data and research muscle for the IPCC.

This illuminating piece that slipped through the electric fence that surrounds the corporate media drew the battle lines clearly enough:

The boss of the Westcountry-based Met Office has told how “bruising” criticism of its support of climate change can knock the “self-confidence” of scientists.

John Hirst, chief executive of the Met Office, was giving evidence to MPs in Parliament as part of a probe into the public’s understanding of global warming.

The Exeter-based weather bureau boasts the Hadley Centre, one of the world’s leading research departments on long-term changes to climate.

But the organisation is often at the eye of the storm when sceptics take issue with the notion that climate change is man-made.

 Gary Streeter, Conservative MP for South West Devon, recently argued the Met Office’s failure to forecast Britain’s summer heatwave raised questions over predictions that humans are responsible for global warming.

The Met Office has never just laid down to be trampled on by the right wing press – it defends itself robustly from attacks by the climate denial movement.

No surprise then that the vulnerable BBC – as right wing and pro-establishment as any media portal in the world  – has abruptly decided that a foreign company might present better “value” for licence payers than a British institution we have spent nearly a century investing in.

The BBC will throw its hands up in the air and blame legal obligations for this decision – but the circumstances behind that state of affairs have been carefully engineered and the result never in doubt.

Neatly enough – the Daily Mail used the occasion of the downfall of The Met Office to launch an attack on the BBC for doing it! They are truly shameless.

Westminster, the corporate media and corporate funded climate denial lobby groups will celebrate silencing a scientific body and their warnings about climate change.  

Anyone with a shred of concern for the truth and the environment should get busy blocking this attack on science and a national institution at once.