Are The Bbc/met Office Pro-mild/pro-agw?

[Mondy]

Let's debate this sensibly.

Considering this is the TV/Media area, and I'll wager many folks are too afraid to post in the relevant environment/science threads with their own thoughts, perhaps we can ask the above topic/question herein?

[damianslaw]

They tend to attribute all extreme weather events on global warming it seems rather than just 'natural conditions' which does irritate me somewhat.

Some reports for instance the rapid ice melt in the polar regions may well be justified in this context, however, they have a tendancy to 'hype' up heatwaves during the summer as indicative of global warming, when quite often such 'heatwaves' are nothing unusual, likewise storms and flooding, this has especially been the case in recent years, whenever some part of Britain recieves a flash flood with lots of heavy rain during the summer, they always then seem to say Britain can expect to see more frequent incidences of such weather events as global warming takes hold..

Flash floods and thunderstorms have always occured, they are no more severe now than in history past.

I'll give them credit... recent years have failed to deliver much in the way of protracted cold weather, so inevitably they have had little to talk about cold weather wise exception being the European severe cold in 2006 and china cold in 2008. Must say though this winter was very refreshing media wise, with the relatively cold wintry weather, the words global warming were hardly mentioned, the reason because they simply couldn't use the term to justify the weather..it was simply 'nature', they like to pigeon hole things into groups all the time, but nature doesn't work like that and they don't often like it when it doesn't do what they expect it too in terms of global warming.

[Terminal Moraine]

I think there are three distinct questions here. Firstly, although the Met' Office supply forecasts for the BBC, the two are not one and the same.

Regarding global warming, with the majority of scientific opinion firmly behind a gradual increase in global temperature, and with the majority of that opinion considering that human activity is a significant contributory factor, it is hardly likely that either the BBC or the Met' Office will take an opposing stance.

In the case of the BBC, they will be fed information from the Met' Office or other scientific bodies and will then distil that information into a format they feel will be assimilable by the general public. This will undoubtedly lead to very simplistic questions being asked such as ' is every extreme weather event which occurs linked in some way to global warming?'

Quite often the question will be posed in a one minute slot as part of a news programme where there is insufficient time to do anything other than take the shallowest overview of the situation causing the extreme event, therefore if the phrase 'global warming' is used, a link is forged in the minds of the relatively uninformed public whether it was intentional or not, even if the link between the event and global warming is revoked in the last few words of the piece.

Equally the Met' Office are unlikely to fly in the face of current scientific thinking and take an anti-global warming stance. On the other hand they are far less likely to make spurious links between individual extreme weather events and global warming; in fact, as far as I can remember, the nearest they come to making such links is to warn that certain events, such as the 2007 floods, can be expected to occur more frequently in the future due to global warming rather than link the individual event with warming.

With regard to being pro-mild it's more a case of forecasters being instructed to look for 'positives' in the forecast whereever possible. Mild, having a general public perception as positive, is therefore emphasised as a good thing whereas a Siberian blast would not be as the general perception of it would be negative.

Watch or listen to any weather forecast and you will find the 'positives' being emphasised. A day of frequent heavy showers will always have the proviso of 'some warm sunshine between the showers'. An overcast drizzly day in Autumn or Winter will have' at least it will be mild', a wet night with gales will have' at least it will keep the frost at bay' .

Of course there are a few occasions when the positives turn into negatives such as in the droughts of 1976 or 1995 when, after weeks of hot weather with virtually no rain, any sign of rainfall was greeted with uncharacteristic enthusiasm; an enthusiasim which rapidly returned to service as normal once the heat had faded from the collective memory.

[Guest Shetland Coastie]

TM is right to make the distinction between the BBC & The Met. The two are not the same and each has a different agenda. I dont think the Met would ever deliberately take a biased view. I don't think I could say the same for the BBC however, who have often been accused of bias in one form or another.

Im not convinced in this instance that its bias. I think what the BBC sometimes does is it falls into the trap of going along with what is the soup-of-the-day 'received wisdom.' Often there are things that become accepted as 'common knowledge' or 'known fact' when in fact the case for whaetver it is has not been fully established or indeed 'proven.' Many ordinary people do this, its how 'urban myths' come into being, but one expects better from a public service broadcaster.

[Thundery wintry showers]

I've often accused the BBC of being pro-AGW myself, mainly because it has often tended to present the pro-AGW side of the story a lot more strongly than the "anti"-side, and trample down "anti"-points in a rather dismissive way. But on the other hand I think the BBC has shown an improvement over the past year on this issue- all of its most recent articles have struck me as being quite well-balanced.

I passionately dislike the tendency of forecasters to be instructed to cater for the weather type preferences of the percieved majority (as I've often mentioned in earlier posts). People's opinions on weather types tend to vary depending on what they're doing at the time, and tend to be far more divergent than the media makes out that they are. It basically serves to try to educate us as to what weather types we should and shouldn't like, and also serves to mislead people whose views differ from what the forecaster presents. For example, if a person hates dull wet weather but doesn't mind sunshine and showers, and sees a negatively-spun forecast for sunshine and showers, the person may misinterpret it as a forecast for dull wet weather.

My proposed solution is simple: go back to the days when BBC forecasts were presented "as is" without significant spin. The Met Office to their credit still present largely "unspun" forecasts, but I'm not sure if they'll keep this up for much longer, as the trend is certainly towards the BBC's current stance.

Both the BBC and MetO, in my view, are guilty of trying to sound as if the scientists are a lot more certain about AGW than they really are, so as to avoid sounding uncertain and thus creating doubt in people's minds. After all, there is a general consensus that AGW is probably a serious thing. The flaw in this is that if people can see past it, they will feel they're being lied to, which will in turn undermine confidence in what people do and don't say about AGW- and there is considerable evidence that this is already happening. Apart from that the MetO's coverage of climate change is very good, but the BBC's perhaps less so.