"Brian Blair" wrote in message
...
Just a follow on from the now rather dull cold winter forecast thing

Yesterday's (Glasgow) Herald's Motoring section lead article, a terrible
half page on winter motoring (Fog tips: Put on fog lights, don't tailgate
etc..):

"The weathermen have told us it's going to be a severe winter.." and then
"how they know this baffles me.."

He is referring to a misconstrued very general "forecast" given by
Metcheck but maybe if the Met Office had a decent spokesperson who could
actually be visible and counter media hype and speculation this would not
happen.

The average punter would have seen AB on GMTV and read the headlines but
did not see any MO response to the contrary.

When we don't have a severe winter (and some people will some wont) then
ironically it will be the MO who get the blame and not Metcheck (and the
reverse will naturally apply)


brian
aberfeldy
its nice up here today

Hi Brian,

Your argument can be turned around. Why should the MO have to get involved
with hype, created exclusively for someone's own interests (i.e. AB's
advertisement), when they should be spending time on what they do best,
creating forecasts, amongst other things, for the general public using
science ? If they did counter speculation from other companies then they are
further fuelling their advertisement campaign. It's not as if the MO have
turned a blind eye, several press releases have snide, comical expressions
of late. For example -
http://www.metoffice.com/corporate/p...r20041020.html (last
paragraph)

It does not help when we live in a myopic society, whose interests have
flung from severe winter speculation last week to why Prince Harry behaved
the way he did this week. People will forget AB's forecast if it turns out a
very mild winter, but they will praise him if it is a severe one. He's in a
win-win situation.

Joe