The Meteorological Office was once a staid and rather old-fashioned organisation: an offshoot of the tradition-heavy Ministry of Defence (MoD), best known to the general public for providing Radio 4’s sacrosanct and idiosyncratic shipping forecast. But in recent years it has been recast as the ‘Met Office’, and under its chief executive John Hirst – now in the job for nearly two years – it is building a reputation as a key global analyst of climate change.

Last week, the Met Office captured headlines with a dramatic new set of climate predictions, taking into account the ‘feedback loops’ which may hasten change: if emissions are not curtailed, it warned, we could see a global four degree centigrade rise as early as the 2060s, with Africa heating by 10 degrees and the Arctic by a disastrous 15 degrees. Asked by the BBC for his reaction to the findings, Met Office scientist Dr Richard Betts was blunt: “Shock, frankly,” he replied.

This is not the typical language of science – but Hirst is unapologetic about the Met’s attention-grabbing campaign to raise awareness and understanding of climate change. “There’s a danger that some of the conversations about climate change have been held by scientists who are sometimes so cautious by nature that they put all the caveats in before making their main thesis, and that makes people back off and say: ‘It’s too complex’,” he says. “But actually there’s massive certainty about global warming. The evidence is overwhelming, irrefutable. It’s very, very clear that we’re running a massive experiment with the world, and we’ve got a big job: to ensure that these things are communicated well, and dispel the myths around the weaknesses and uncertainties of the science.”

As temperatures and rainfall rates change, Hirst explains, compound impacts and feedback loops come into play – so lost ice cover reduces the sunlight reflected back into space; thawing permafrost releases still more greenhouse gases; reduced rainfall reduces crops’ ability to withstand higher temperatures. The calculations required to factor in these variables are fiendishly complex, but essential if we are to understand the detailed implications of climate change.

High cost of cooling

“Going down the Tube in the hot summer of 2003 was awful,” says Hirst, “but by 2040-2060 that will be an average, then a cool summer: how you then get people moving around the capital is a big issue. Some electricity substations need to cool down at night, but they won’t be able to. Peak energy consumption will be in the summer for cooling, rather than the winter for warming. You need to go into detail in each area, and work out the implications.”

So have the senior ranks of the civil service grasped the scale of change needed in policy? “When I have conversations in government departments, I find some people who are immensely well-briefed, with a profound and substantial understanding of the issues, the science and the timescales,” Hirst replies. “But I find more who are uncertain or have a thin understanding of what’s going on. There’s a big investment needed in learning and understanding, because without that you can’t make the right decisions.”

The Met’s agenda is designed to shape debate rather than policy, Hirst adds: “We’re not trying to decide people’s actions. What we’ve got to try and do, though, is make sure that they understand what’s happening so they can make their own decisions.” To help develop that understanding, the Met Office Hadley Centre was established: a dedicated climate-change research centre.

Hadley hiatus

Unfortunately, in June the MoD axed its annual £4.3m Hadley Centre grant, arguing that it had to “prioritise success in current operations, such as Afghanistan”. Hirst has not yet been able to replace the funding; he is “confident but not sure” of plugging the cash gap. Asked why the MoD was funding climate change research, Hirst says that future climatic conditions will define both procurement needs and defence challenges. “It’s not strange for them to be interested; what’s strange is that some others are not,” he adds.

The obvious candidates – the energy & climate change and environment departments – are providing “considerable support” this year, Hirst reveals, while the Met is “developing a very good relationship with the Department for International Development” and the MoD is “concerned that there’s still a gap and is seeking to help”. So there is goodwill; there is not, however, enough money. “If somebody doesn’t step in, we’ve got a problem,” says Hirst. “That would be a shame, but I think we can convince them that they should do so.”

Departments’ reluctance to step in and fund the Met Office Hadley Centre may reflect what Hirst sees as the agency’s historic failure to shout about its achievements and capitalise on its assets. “We’re among the leading meteorological services in the world, and the only institution with weather and climate in the same house. The UK has in the Met Office a fantastic asset,” he says. “But the Met Office has under-punched its potential contribution to the UK and the world, partly because it doesn’t have all the skills of communication that it could, and partly because it’s sometimes been a little bit shy and self-critical. There are masses of areas in which the high-quality intelligence that we have is under-used.”

New markets

The agency, Hirst explains, provides forecasts to the media, emergency services, shipping, utilities companies, the military and the aviation industry, plus a huge range of public and private sector clients. But he believes that there’s huge potential for the Met Office to increase its income by further targeting and marketing its data and its analytical skills. “We’re building up our capabilities, so we’ll be able to progressively give more data away, but also add much more value at the top end so we can make greater returns,” he says.

Hirst cites insurance firms as an example. Currently they base weather-related risks – such as that of storm damage – on historical data; but extreme weather events are on the rise, throwing their pricing structure out. With accurate predictions of localised weather conditions and climate change impacts, he says, they can price more accurately – and they’ll pay for such data. “But we have to understand how they price and what the issues are, so we can help them interpret our data,” he adds.

The Met Office’s forecasting abilities – both on local weather, and on climate change – were much improved this year by the launch of its new supercomputer: a £33m IBM monster (see box, right). The launch attracted some unwelcome publicity when it emerged that the machine has an annual carbon footprint of more than 14,000 tonnes of CO2, but Hirst defends it as “one of the world’s 200 greenest computers”. Its contribution to addressing global warming is massive, he says: “If you take the amount of fuel that we help save for the world’s aviation industry by telling them when to take off and how to plan their routes so they catch the wind, the computer’s footprint is dwarfed.”

So the Met Office has the tools and expertise to greatly increase its revenue from weather and climate-change prediction services; the next struggle, it seems, is developing the skills in marketing and business analysis. Hirst agrees that a “big investment in conversations” will be required in order to understand the potential markets and develop the right services for them. His science-focused staff have some learning to do. “I have a conversation sometimes with some of my scientific colleagues,” recalls Hirst. “They say: ‘Why do we need branding and communications stuff?’ But it’s because if you don’t communicate what you do, people can’t take advantage of it.”

Barbecue blushes

John Hirst’s other big ambition for the Met Office is to improve the accuracy and value of its seasonal forecasts. These have not had a great press recently, with much mockery of its prediction that we were “odds on for a barbecue summer”. But Hirst isn’t giving much ground. “We said there was a 65 per cent chance of it being warmer than average, and a likelihood that it would be about average or slightly drier than average for precipitation,” he says. “June was spot-on. August was there or thereabouts. July was warm, but bloody wet”.

The forecast was thrown out by the movement of the “North Atlantic oscillation” – an area of low pressure that dragged rainfall 200 miles further south than expected. And while Hirst concedes that “we didn’t communicate July’s update as well as we’d communicated the initial forecast”, he argues that the “barbecue summer” phrase “gathered communications in the press into a narrower and more sensible band than we’ve had in the past”.

“Would we use the phrase again? Probably not,” he adds. “It’s a tricky communications thing and we’ve had a go. It backfired a bit, but we’ll keep looking for ways of communicating the sense of probability in the forecast, because I think that it’s important that people understand it.”

Although Hirst notes that seasonal forecasts are “a new and emerging area of science, and they’re pretty tricky”, he points out their enormous value in assisting forward planning: “We predicted the late onset of the monsoon in India; the rains that have caused mudslides in northern Brazil; the low number of hurricanes this year. These are life and limb issues.” The Met’s commercial clients already understand how to interpret probability-based forecasts, he adds, and the general public will learn to do so. “Our winter forecasts move the energy markets,” he says. “As they improve, seasonal forecasts will help people to plan better for all kinds of events.”

Financial forecast

So the Met Office provides services and information of enormous value; it is a top-flight hub of climate science; and there’s plenty of room for revenue growth. Small wonder that the Treasury has raised the prospect of selling it off. Asked about the idea, Hirst is distinctly unenthusiastic, but cautious in his opposition. Only Malta’s national meteorological service is privatised, he points out, “and we’re the only one that I know of that’s required – I think sensibly – to get a return on assets”. Any privatisation deal would “get into deep philosophical arguments about whether you should pay for particular services”; some aspects of weather forecasting, he argues, are an essential public service.

Hirst also questions the value of privatisation in improving services and raising profitability. “Financial investors say that there’s more money than good ideas, and more good ideas than good managers,” he says. “Some changes need to be made, but I don’t think that ownership is necessarily the driver of good management.” What’s more, a sale would not raise much for the Treasury “because 80 per cent of our revenue comes from services to government, and whoever bought it would want those revenue streams underpinned for a long time; so you’d be raising money only to give it back.”

Above all, though, Hirst insists that separating the Met Office’s climate and weather prediction functions, or its commercial and public service activities, would gravely weaken the organisation. “I would never want to see [those activities] split,” he says. “Whether the government wants to own this or not is for someone else to decide, but I wouldn’t break it up.”

The Met Office chief executive is clearly no fan of a flotation. “I don’t think there’s any conflict between being owned by the state, and delivering a fantastic service while making a decent return on behalf of the taxpayer,” he says, noting that the agency’s current annual £7m profit is probably enough to please the public, but not to excite massive private sector interest. “What’s possible, however, is that if you continue to build the business it increases in value, and maybe at some point in the future it could make a bigger contribution,” he concedes. “But there’s work to do before we get there.”

In the meantime, Hirst has his work cut out in encouraging his army of top-notch scientists to look for ways of turning the Met Office’s huge expertise and capabilities into commercial products. “There’s masses of benefit still to be delivered. We have some real development to do, and we’re working to reduce our bureaucracy, improve our efficiency and develop our commercial services,” he concludes. “The potential of this organisation is thoroughly under-used and under-exploited.”