Sky at Night: Who best to take over from Patrick Moore

On May 2, 9:38*pm, Dr J R Stockton
wrote:
In uk.sci.astronomy message 87e6a637-6fc4-4502-983d-f4ef783694f4@h9g200
0yqe.googlegroups.com, Sat, 21 Apr 2012 12:08:28, James Harris
posted:

Patrick Moore is a bit of an institution but can't go on forever. I
wondered what other people think of who would be best to replace him
as lead presenter of The Sky at Night.

The job should become an /ex officio/ duty jointly of the Astronomer
Royal and the Astronomer Royal for Scotland, with power to delegate up
to half of the work to other British astronomers of high public status.

If it should please Her Majesty to appoint Astronomers Royal for Wales
and for Northern Ireland, then they too should join in on equitable
footings.

A slot should be reserved for the Royal Astronomer of Ireland, to be
ready should the post be revived.

And if elsewhere in the world there are other Astronomers Royal,
appertaining to the same or different Monarchs, then they should be
invited, if they will be in the UK at the time, to co-lead with a
British Astronomer Royal.


You are talking about more welfare queens Stockton ,theorists
masquerading as 'astronomers' with no concern for astronomy and
related terrestrial sciences.

The vicious strain of empiricism which these astronomer Royals
represent still has a stranglehold on science and it is so bad that
even the normally indifferent wider population are beginning to
complain.There is a huge imbalance between what people experience and
what the empirical modelers engaged in groupthink dictate to the
public to the point that national pride is beginning to override the
tendency to just let empirical modelers be.The Crown once came to the
aid of John Harrison against the empiricists as they were an authority
onto themselves and it may have to happen again as their models are
wrecking havoc not only with terrestrial sciences and astronomy but
with the ability of people to go about their normal business of
living .If there were genuine astronomers,none of the current mess
would have happened .

Met Office 3-month Outlook
Period: April – June 2012 Issue date: 23.03.12

SUMMARY – PRECIPITATION:
The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier than
average conditions for April-May-June as a whole, and also slightly
favours April being the driest of the 3 months. With this forecast,
the water resources situation in southern, eastern and central England
is likely to deteriorate further during the April-May-June period. The
probability that UK precipitation for April-May-June will fall into
the driest of our five categories is 20-25% whilst the probability
that it will fall into the wettest of our five categories is 10-15%
(the 197-2000 climatological probability for each of these categories
is 20%).

CONTEXT:
As a legacy of dry weather over many months water resources in much of
southern, eastern and central England remain at very low levels.Winter
rainfall in these areas has typically been about 70% of average,whilst
observations and current forecasts suggest that the final totals for
March will be below average here too. The Environment Agency advises
that, given the current state of soils and groundwater levels in
theseareas, drought impacts in the coming months are virtually
inevitable.







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