Doubts are rising about the recent U.K. record high temperature, measured by the runway at RAF Coningsby on the afternoon of July 19th. Over six minutes, the temperature jumped suddenly by 1.3°C to 40.3°C at 15.12 (3.12pm), and was 0.6°C lower just a minute later. In just two minutes from 15.10 the rise was 0.6°C. The record was set during a mini-heatwave last summer, and has rarely been out of the headlines promoting climate ‘breakdown’ and the need for a Net Zero solution ever since.
Air temperatures can rise over short periods if weather conditions change – for instance, if the sun appears quickly from behind a large cloud, or the wind direction moves. But July 19th in Coningsby, Lincolnshire, was more or less cloudless around 3pm (see below), and the wind direction from the south-west was constant. Another explanation might be sought in the movement of two squadrons of Typhoon fighter jets at the large base that employs up to 3,000 people. The thermometer at Coningsby, the RAF’s primary Typhoon station, as with all airports, is placed next to the runway to provide vital operational information. In the absence of credible meteorological explanations for such a large spike, aeroplane movement must be suspected as the most obvious cause.
According to the plane spotters guide website Thunder & Lightnings, on a good day at Coningsby, “it can be wall-to-wall action” with never more than half an hour or so quiet. Modern fighter aircraft are extremely powerful machines. Spotters note fence panels blown away by the after-burners, while photographers are warned that “heat haze” can spoil pictures. When the jets are taking off or taxiing, they are pumping considerable amounts of hot gas into the surrounding atmosphere.
This is not the first time that concerns have been raised about Met Office claims of a temperature record at an airport. In 2015, it claimed a U.K. July record temperature of 36.7°C. Soon after, a number of journalists including Paul Homewood and the late Christopher Booker from the Sunday Telegraph raised doubts about some of the circumstances surrounding the record at Heathrow airport. It was noted that the temperature jumped by 0.9°C in two minutes.
Homewood remarked at the time:
No engineer would trust such a spike in any other field, and would throw it out unless he had firm evidence that it was correct. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the reading at the Met Office station at Heathrow is either incorrect, or has been artificially inflated by local, non-climatic factors.
The Met Office responded to the concerns by floating the possibility that breaks in cloud cover were the main cause. Dr. Mark McCarthy from the Met Office told the green activist site Carbon Brief that solar radiation is “the most plausible and sufficient explanation” for the peak in temperatures. It would seem that another “plausible” explanation is required for Coningsby, since, as noted, clouds were absent.
Whatever the reason for the sudden spike at Coningsby to produce the now official U.K. temperature record, there can be no doubt that temperature data taken by busy airport runways are of use only to ground crew and pilots. They are far too corrupted to be used for plotting local or global trends in temperature, and are being used as a political tool to influence progress on the command-and-control Net Zero project.
But as we have seen, airport temperature data are widely used in all the major global datasets. In 2010, Professor Ross McKitrick discovered that about half of all land surface temperature measurements were taken near or adjacent to airport runways. The U.S. meteorologist Anthony Watts has worked for over a decade looking at U.S. weather stations. His recent report noted that 96% of the weather stations used by the U.S. weather service NOAA were “corrupted” by the localised effects of urbanisation. Watts found that a “slight warming trend” when data were compared with “unperturbed” stations, was “approximately half the claimed rate of increase promoted by many in the climate science community”.
Others are more brutal in their conclusions. Emeritus Professors William Happer and Richard Lindzen recently told the U.S. Government that over the last several decades, “NASA and NOAA have been fabricating temperature data to argue that rising CO2 levels have led to the hottest year on record”. These false and manipulated data were said to be an “egregious violation of scientific method”.
Over the last few weeks we have had the first fruits of ground-breaking urban heat research by atmospheric scientists Dr. Roy Spencer and Professor John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Their work attempts to remove the effect of urban heat from surface temperature datasets. Looking first at the United States, they found 50% less warming over the last 50 years across the eastern U.S.
As the graph above suggests, some of the greatest urbanisation impacts on warming were found at airports.
The Met Office supplied the Daily Sceptic with the detailed temperature record for Coningsby and the satellite photo that shows no significant cloud over Lincolnshire at 3pm on July 19th. It also confirmed the wind was from the south-west throughout the day. The Met Office is welcome to reply to this article and address the issues raised, including the continued use of airport measurements in its own datasets.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
As with everything, same in Australia.
Throughout my long medical career, raw data has always be sacrosanct.
I’d never heard of “homogenised” data.
But then again, truth is whatever the hell the loony left say it is, and we’ll censor you if you disagree.
Jo Nova is one of the leading lights in the dissenters’ camp down here.
https://joannenova.com.au/2022/11/the-australian-climate-is-fine-but-the-state-of-the-csiro-and-the-bom-is-a-crisis/
Yep they refuse to publish the raw data, when every schoolchild learning about science understands and has drummed in “show your workings out.”
If you wanted an honest reading of the ambient temperature you wouldn’t get it next to an airport any more than you would next to a blast furnace.
Only a senseless person would do that. Or someone who wants a high reading.
It has been the case that thermometers in a Stevenson boxes may have been in a field at one time, but that the area was built up over time and as we know, in towns it is warmer than out of towns, which is why birds like nesting on roofs in towns. So a lot of the warming can be attributed to what is called the Urban Heat Island effect, then ofcourse the data manipulators all funded by government set about trying to adjust for that effect and other anomalies. So we are left not with raw temperature data, but with heavily adjusted data.
‘… heavily adjusted data…’ which just happens always to show ever increasing temperatures. Amazing.
The temperature record of earth is about as reliable as a space suit riddled with holes and has been adjusted more times than a lady of the nights undergarments. We have only had thermometers in wealthy western countries, not all over the world, and none in the oceans that make up 70% of the planet. Anyone who thinks a bunch of bureaucrats can regulate the earth’s temperature as if it was something that could be checked by sticking a thermometer under the planet’s armpit is asking for all the impoverishment coming their way. We are being seriously misled and misinformed by “official science” rather than “science”
Or, to summarise your post – we are being lied to.
It’s perfectly possible that climate zealots believe in their own stories. A lot of people are really stupid, especially wrt to stuff which scares thems because it’s beyond their control (like the weahter — there’s a reason why the first and most powerful human gods where weather gods).
UK Met Office = UK Climate Disinformation Central.
The unreliability of the surface temperature record because of siting of weather stations, changes in local conditions over time, station drop out, replacement of instruments AND regular fiddling with the data to show the past getting cooler so the alleged temperature increase graduent gets steeper despite actually getting less, is well known – well known to those who do not rely on Governments and their stooges in the media.
“an extended period of hot weather relative to the expected conditions of the area at that time of year”. As soon as a couple of days of extreme heat was classified as a “heatwave” my spidey sense BS detector warned me I might be being punked. But even those brief extremes were questionable? Figures!
Let’s be honest, it was bloody hot, and to dismiss it as entirely normal (in our lifetimes) is also being dishonest. Do I believe that humans are controlling the climate? No, I do not. Do humans have some impact on the climate? We must have, but I believe it to be trivial. What are my beliefs based upon? Mainly, just good old fashioned common sense – the same intuition that told me mass vaccination was complete f*in lunacy.
The whole climate thing is quite clearly, for anyone with a functional frontal lobe, just one of the tools being used to implement a far bigger agenda i.e the great reset
Let’s really be honest: We had a pretty warm day and a somewhat hot day in a five week period of no rain lasting from the last week of July to the end of August. Nothing even remotely as bad as the summer of 2018 the climate whisperers keep trying to rematerialize by headlines about hot summers which really aren’t.
Meanwhile, in Ischia, there has been record rainfall on a small area triggering an avalanche of media attributions to climate change. Note to Mark Lowen, the BBC and other “news reporters”: when it rains for six hours on a European village in winter it’s called “local weather” not “global climate”.
We know it’s all B-llsh1t !!…
Excellent article.
I’ve long had a question about ‘mean global temperature’. How do you measure mean temperature on such a large body as the earth?
Simples, you put a ginormous thermometer under its armpit!
It’s akin to measuring the height of every man, woman and child on the planet and then taking an average – i.e. nonsense. Lumping the temperature taken at the equator with that taken at the poles is rubbish – a mean is only meaningful when the population is similar. What would be the standard deviation on the mean global temperature, I wonder?
An average is only sensible when the measured quantities refer to the same thing.
Quelle surprise. Being a former professional pilot I’ve been saying this for years but people don’t listen. Any mass of concrete or tarmac will have a ‘heat island’ effect. Then jet engine exhaust is over-laid and you get 40 deg C. Anyone can observe the phenomenon for themselves. Check your motor car temperature read out once it has settled on the move. When you enter a motorway or main dual carriageway you will observe a rise of up to 3 deg C which will then fall again once off the motorway and back on country roads. Yet still the alarmists persist.
I think this may have the potential to cut through with many people. I myself haven’t followed the news on this closely but am aware of two recent records being set at airports. My instinct is to reduce this to probability. Have there been any intervening records set elsewhere and how many possible measuring points are there and how many of these are close to runways? Come up with a probability figure and you’ve got a great point to put to global warming believers.
I just found this on an ITV News website
Temperatures in Lincolnshire have hit 40.3C – the highest figure ever recorded in the UK.
The milestone mark was registered at RAF Coningsby at 3pm on Tuesday, 19 July.
It exceeds the 40.2C figure recorded at Heathrow Airport earlier.
At that stage, the Met Office tweeted: “For the first time ever, 40 Celsius has provisionally been exceeded in the UK. London Heathrow reported a temperature of 40.2C at 12.50pm today.
I screenshotted this, most of the other reports omit to mention that the Coningsby reading is from an airfield. I look forward to showing it to global warming believers and asking ‘doesn’ t it seem strange that both records were set at airfields? Is there something about airfields which might make them extra hot? ‘
Much as I agree about the worries about Coningsby, I am afraid that the following document
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/binaries/content/assets/metofficegovuk/pdf/weather/learn-about/uk-past-events/interesting/2022/2022_03_july_heatwave_v1.pdf shows that 40 degrees was reached at several (6 by my count), so it seems unlikely they were all affected by jet aircraft.