Press war : Meriel v IAH / DEFRA - who pays for the farmer's compensation ?

It is evident that Meriel briefed the press about the HPA concerns over Legionnaire's disease at HAI Room ISO10 - first surfacing with the Guradian... evidently wanting to take the heat off any liabilities - and consequent costs and compensation claims from the NFU, whose lawyers are already girding their loins to slap on someone "real soon now".

Now BBC2 Newsnight,tonight, quote DEFRA's own guidelines about not siting buildings holding Class 3/4 biohazards, where there is any danger of flooding (Flooding is when "water overflows it's natural confines"). IAH has part of the site (on which Meriel sits) adjacent to the stream that flows down to the site from the farm where the first cases erupted on July 29th which appears as a flood risk on the Environment Agency's Flood Map.

Curiously young Mr Hilary Benn has dropped public references to his pie in the sky £120 Mn super dooper IAH site , due ..er .. 2011 ..er 2012 - hardly an ideal site if it appears on the Environment Agency's Flood Map... more astute planning Gubment Planning at work ?

Not a peep publicly from DEFRA's Chief Scientist Dr Dalton or Geoff Rooker Lord Rooker who have jointly been so effective in cutting funding, resources, and staff at IAH over the last decade .. not to mention la Beckett.

Oddly the Hadley centre of the Meteorological Office - funds up 40% and a spanking brand new centre in Exeter crammed with Cray computers - failed to forecast the floods for Surrey - but will happily tell you the Earth's temperature in ten years time.

Little known fact. It was Mrs Thatcher on May 25th 1990 who opened the Hadley centre for Climate Change in Bracknell. She said ;

"Your Report (IPCC 1st report) confirms that greenhouse gases are increasing substantially as a result of Man's activities; that this will warm the Earth's surface, with serious consequences for us all, and that these consequences are capable of prediction. We want to predict them more accurately and that is why we are opening this Centre today."

"But the changes which we are talking about now will occur at a faster rate than anything our natural world has known in the past."

"We must also take action on carbon dioxide emission and that will mean significant adjustments to our economies: more efficient power stations, cars which use less fuel, better-insulated houses and better management of energy in general."

It will surpise many how forward thinking she was.."As the Panel's Report itself makes clear, we should have a better understanding of many of these things in ten or fifteen years time, say, by about the year 2005. " she was by education a scientist .. and quite evidently took a long view .. something lost on the Lord Rooker's of the Westminster world.


“The Hadley Centre has the highest concentration of absolutely outstanding people who do absolutely outstanding work, spanning the breadth of modelling, attribution, and data analysis, of anywhere in the world.”

Dr Susan Solomon, NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory, Co-chair IPCC AR4 WG1: The
Physical Science Basis

Thanks to Mrs T pic of her opening the Hadley centre in 1990 - meanwhile a well established International resource like Pirbright has been allowed to fall apart and could soon lose it's status as a World centre for agricultural research by the intellectual pygmies at DEFRA and it's ignorant Minister.