(January 6, 2011) The UK’s weather office, the Met, provided the UK’s Cabinet with a secret forecast that was at odds with the one made public, according to The Global Warming Policy Foundation, a non-partisan think tank based in London.

The secret forecast, which in October warned of the extreme winter cold about to hit the UK, was then apparently withheld from local and road authorities, airports and water companies,

“Not only is the lack of Government preparedness a cause for concern, but we wonder whether there may be another reason for keeping the cold warning under wraps, a motive that the Met Office and the Cabinet Office may have shared: Not to undermine the then forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun,” the think tank notes in a press release.

“Throughout October and November, the Met Office repeatedly pushed and published their key message in the run-up to the UN climate summit – that 2010 would probably turn out to be the hottest year on record, culminating in these Cancun-timed media reports: Cancun climate change summit: 2010 was hottest year on record.”

Until these recent revelations came out, the knock against the Met Office was that it naively believed its own global warming models, which led it to consistently get the weather wrong. Now the Met has people wondering if its weather forecasts have simply become government propaganda.

LawrenceSolomon@nextcity.com
Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and the author of The Deniers.