It was a tad on the warm side last year in the United Kingdom. There was, for instance, a new turbo-charged 60-second high temperature record declared on July 19th, halfway down the runway at the jet fighter base of RAF Coningsby. Climate journalists were in full Thermogeddon reporting mode. It is almost a shame to bring facts and statistics to the party, although the poopers might note that there has been no change in average U.K. temperatures for more than two decades, following the short rise during the 1980s and 90s. Furthermore, the 10°C average temperature last year was only a rounding error higher than 2014. No change in the decades-long average temperature is indicated by the fact that the current 10-year running average in the U.K. is still no higher than it was between 1998 and 2007 at 9.4°C.
The above graph was compiled by the climate journalist Paul Homewood for his annual U.K. weather report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). He further notes that annual temperatures last year were well within the bounds of natural variability, being 0.82°C above the 30-year average. By comparison, 2010 was 0.92°C below, whilst several other years have had bigger anomalies than 2022.
As we have seen in past Daily Sceptic articles, the key misunderstanding in much climate discourse is between weather events, often described as ‘extreme’, and climate trends. Overall global warming has been running out of steam for two decades. Homewood could have noted that the 2010s in the U.K. were actually cooler than the 2000s. But headlines and click-bait science papers designed to promote the collectivist Net Zero project dumb down on weather stories, even attempting to attribute individual events to long-term climatic changes. Perhaps this is not surprising, since many take their lead from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that holds the implausible view that all changes in the climate since 1900 have been caused by humans. This of course is the same IPCC that was set up in 1988 to look into the “scientific basis” of the risk of human-induced climate change.
In a separate note for the GWPF, the former BBC science editor Dr. David Whitehouse recently noted that most environmental journalists habitually report verbatim the ‘weather is climate‘ scam. “If financial organisations or Treasury officials played around with predictions like this they would almost certainly come in for a dose of criticism and further probing from proper journalists,” he observed. Giving a recent example, he noted an unquestioning attitude towards the World Meteorological Organisation that observed natural variability in any coming El Niño warming, but also said the rise would show “global warming is accelerating”.
In his excellent review, Homewood is using the Met Office’s own recordings. But again as we have seen, legitimate scientific questions can be asked about the accuracy of these temperature measurements. The Met Office frequently promotes temperature ‘records’ at airports like Coningsby, Heathrow and Northolt, but these areas are filled with concrete, tarmac, machinery and jet exhaust. It is difficult to think of a worst place to take readings designed to provide an accurate record of U.K. and global trends. Furthermore, the heat distortions caused by growing urbanisation have undoubtedly corrupted both local and global datasets. On a global level, the Met Office has retrospectively adding over 30% heating to the record over the last 20 years, while removing similar amounts of heating from the period 1850-1900 to produce a century long heating trend.
The key to last year’s warm year was the prevalence of sunny weather throughout the spring and summer. In fact, sunshine hours were the seventh highest for the period since records began in 1919. But Homewood reports that there is no evident long-term trend in sunshine hours that would suggest this is part of a pattern of climate change. The Central England record is the longest continuous temperature collection going back to 1660. Last summer tied in fourth place, while 1976 was warmer by 0.4°C. Higher average temperatures were also recorded in 1826 and 2018.
On the rainfall front, annual precipitation in England and Wales has been gradually trending upwards since the 1990s, “but the long-term average is lower than during the 1870s and similar to the 1920s”. Rainfall increased substantially in Scotland between the 1970s and 1990s, but there has been little long-term change since then. In Northern Ireland, there has been little change for almost 100 years. Storms have been named in the U.K. since 2015 and the increased media attention is said to have led to the misapprehension that they are becoming more common. In reality, reports Homewood, wind storm have been declining in both frequency and intensity since the 1990s. The graph below shows this trend.
The Met Office notes that the U.K. climate continues to change and weather is becoming more extreme. But Homewood provides hard facts that show the U.K. climate has changed very little and long-term trends are dwarfed by the natural variability of weather. There is no evidence that weather has become more extreme or will do so in the future.
In conclusion, Homewood states that the U.K. climate remains “absolutely benign”. The changes we have seen have been small and mostly thoroughly welcome. GWPF director Dr. Benny Peiser added that it was extraordinary that we are impoverishing our economy and households in a utopian attempt to achieve Net Zero at any cost. This at a time when the U.K.’s long-term climate trends “have remained relatively stable and pleasant”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Today’s Leaflet
Marianna Spring has just been ‘Verified’! She has been caught lying on her CV then had to admit it. Do you think that’s sufficient for the BBC to kick her out? Hypocrite! And calling herself a ”brilliant reporter” just confirms the arrogance at play here, that she presumed she’d get away with her lies.
”An article in The New European said that when she applied to the website’s editor-in-chief Natalia Antelava in 2018, Ms Spring claimed she had worked alongside BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford on covering the ‘perception of Russia’ during the 2018 football World Cup.
Her CV reportedly bragged: ‘June 2018: Reported on International News during the World Cup, specifically the perception of Russia, with BBC correspondent Sarah Rainsford.’
Ms Spring is said to have sent an email apologising for her ‘awful misjudgment’.
She is said to have written: ‘I’ve only bumped into Sarah whilst she’s working and chatted to her at various points, but nothing more. Everything else on my CV is entirely true.’
The young journalist added that she was a ‘brilliant reporter’ and in their emails also admitted there was ‘no excuse’.
She said her only explanation was her ‘desperation to report out in Moscow’ and thinking it would ‘wouldn’t be a big deal’, which she admitted was ‘naïve and stupid’.
In the email exchange published by The New European, Ms Antelava told her: ‘Telling me you are a brilliant reporter who exercises integrity and honesty when you have literally demonstrated the opposite was a terrible idea.’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12493713/BBCs-disinformation-correspondent-chief-fact-checker-Marianna-Spring-accused-lying-CV-falsely-claiming-worked-Beeb-journalist-applying-job-Moscow.html
LOL!….and she and the BBC have been working on their ‘perception of Russia’ ever since….none of it fair even or vaguely balanced….…..
…..Then again, I can’t think of any subject they do have any impartial balance on….maybe someone can think of one?
A truly “brilliant reporter” would conduct themselves with a large degree of modesty and refrain from singing their own praises preferring instead to await the accolades of others, when earned.
‘Only Sweden had the right Covid response.’
Probably not even Sweden.
The Head of this country’s Common Cold Unit, David Tyrrell, made it plain in his article ‘Lessons from the Common Cold Unit’, many years ago now, that the best treatment for a common cold coronavirus is simply to alleviate the symptoms and let the immune system do the rest.
Classic incompetent totalitarian socialism in this country spends a fortune of everyone else’s money on unlearning the lessons expensively learnt by spending a fortune of the previous generation’s money.
Vote for independent candidates.
I think South Dakota was a fair bit less interventionist than Sweden. The Governor thought about ordering stuff to be closed, then for some weird reason decided she ought to check if she had the power to do that, found she didn’t, asked the legislature for such powers, the legislature rejected her request by a huge majority, and as far as I know, nothing was mandated at State level.
Sweden stopped large public gatherings (I think over 50 people), and of course embraced the vaxx, and for a long time restricted entry to only vaxxed people, and I think closed senior schools for a short while.
“Nobody wants an electric car”
The production of the Ford Fiesta ended on 7th July this year, in a manner of speaking the Fiesta was the modern version of the Model T Ford, the people’s car that shifted our economy into a motor car driven economy. The end of the Ford Fiesta and the clear inability of Electric Cars to be the people’s car of the future does indicate that our motor car driven economy is coming to an end. It is not only the production, sale and servicing of cars that will decline but all the activities that require cars, leisure, sport, camping, caravanning and tourism will be knocked back. All the housing estates built on the idea of mass car ownership will be weird places if cars disappear.
Can our economy and our society withstand the end of the mass ownership of motor cars? If the World economy changes and the UK finds it harder to borrow will we be forced into an immiserated 4th World state? Trumpeting that we are now ‘Net-Zero’ will have a hollow ring when to have achieved that hallowed status we are also Zero in everything else.
Pursuing net zero, which is pointless and unachievable will turn this country into a Third World shit hole run on tribal lines.
Ive used Autoclaved concrete, or thermalite block all my working life fully knowing that it was only ever good enough for internal partitioning, was no good in damp conditions, and I personally, would never use it for load bearing of any kind! hell, you could easily make a dint in it with your knuckle! So why did/do architects not know this??
I always remember seeing a patient in A&E at Poole General Hospital in 1977. The guy was on a trolley, looking up of course, and inexplicably said, “I helped build this place. I told them they wouldn’t stay up.” I looked up, and sure enough a number of the fancy ceiling tiles were missing, revealing pipework and dirt above.
Later, when the rain was coming in the edges of the flush windows of one of the wards, another savvy patient pointed out that they wouldn’t have been built that way in the past, when keeping weather out was more important than cloning Corbusier. That building had a flat roof, too (apart from the doctor’s rooms they built on it because they forgot to include them in the spec!).
My wife also points out that the first school she taught in, in Gravesend, is one of those now falling down because of the poor concrete. To be honest I thought it had long-gone as the roof blew off in the hurricane of 1987, but perhaps it’s the rebuild that’s now falling down 30 or so years later: why build one school when you can pay to rebuild it every few decades?
Crikey, Poole is my local hospital! The latest wheeze is to close the A&E of course, which isn’t in any way overwhelmed so that should be fine – we can all toddle off to Bournemouth instead which they are making a bit bigger and it will all be great.
https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1810543/who-covid-19-new-coronavirus-winter-symptoms-vaccine
The scaremongers have missed a golden opportunity to scare the pants off the gullible.
The latest so-called scariant- pirola – should have been called pyrola, with connotations that those affected could spontaneously combust – shock, horror.
That could have been tied in nicely with the climate change claptrap and the rampant, engineered ‘wildfires’.
Oh, sack the lot of ‘em.They are failing miserably in their ongoing feeble attempts to propagate convid hysteria, apart from within the delusional crowd of convid hypochondriacs who believe all, or most, anything ‘the science’ spews out.
pirola – should have been called
pyrolapayola, with connotations… of paying to promote endless repeats of substandard creative works.Re the article ‘get a new Covid shot?’….I have to agree..I have never been able to find any good evidence or actual studies that show the flu vaccine works….…..and like the Covid vax, that it’s has made any difference to the numbers at the end point..death….
I was looking at something entirely different when I spotted this FOI which was interesting to me….
https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/influenzadeathsintheukbetween2012to2022
a short list of deaths from Influenza in England and Wales..ranging from 2012-2020
As you can see it’s not many deaths?….and I think the flu vax wasn’t introduced universally here until @2014…I’m assuming this is a list of people where only Influenza was on the death certificate…
So…I suppose my question is this…while I appreciate that influenza is possibly a factor in many more deaths…(.although I’d like to know, specifically, how they decide on that…I’m now thinking it gets slapped on there whatever, much like Convid)..
…How much good does (or can) a flu vax do if only a few people (in proportion) actually die of ‘only’ flu each year?…If it’s not a big ‘killer’ on its own, how can it make a ‘big’ difference as part of something else?
We are constantly told there are high flu deaths nearly every year ..some worse than others..but they don’t mean flu exactly do they?
Looking at the stats many thousands more die of pneumonia or pneumonia related illness each year..but that’s a different jab altogether isn’t it?
Colour me a bit confused…..and I’m happy to be corrected or hear what others think…!?
….maybe linked is this from Jikky about Azithromycin in December 2022
3 tablets.
That’s what they withheld from the elderly that were diagnosed with “COVID pneumonia” because they were told not to treat. It was bacterial pneumonia. They died.
If they hadn’t had the test they would have had the tablets.
#3tablets
…plus a new substack on a similar theme from Jessica Rose….
https://jessicar.substack.com/p/a-follow-up-on-pneumonia-story
Norman, Martin, Jonathan and Jessica point to a study by Lewnard et al that looked at the interaction between bacterial pneumonia and SARS-CoV-2 whereby they investigated whether vaccination against pneumonia reduced the risk of COVID-19. They found that it did and significantly so!
As the authors point out in their article above, why wouldn’t these products have been endorsed as measures against COVID-19 in that case? This study was published in May 2022. The pneumonia vaccines were already on the market right? FDA approved. Many types. Easy peasy. Offer peeps these products to reduce COVID-19 risk. Why not. You’re recommending RunDeathIsNear, I mean Remdesivir, so why not an FDA-approved product shown to reduce risk.
The last three years have convinced me that ‘flu is NOT a major killer. There might be a lot of deaths recorded as ‘flu but that’s just for easy record keeping. I cannot recall any funeral that I have attended in my lifetime where the cause of death was ‘flu. However, if the population is scared into believing that ‘flu is a mass killer more are likely to rock up for a jab aren’t they?
I think flu (or just as likely any other respiratory illness, which can’t be scaremongered about in the same way as there is no lucrative vaccine – yet) very often “kills” people who were on their way out anyway, so really it’s just old age. I’m not one for believing that life should be extended at all costs when the quality of that life is poor – having watched grandparents die slowly of other things presumably not as important as flu, a quick death from pneumonia would be preferable. For me it would be preferable to entering extreme old age in which I was unable to look after myself, take pleasure in life or recognise those around me, this would also apply to many in care homes which is why (and I know this is controversial) at that stage I would personally see something such as covid as a release. But we are conditioned now to believe that most methods of death are cruel and bad and should be avoided, haven’t worked out yet myself what is seen as acceptable other than going to bed and not waking up in the morning (unless that was caused by covid of course).
…I think you are right…I suspect it’s a scam, I can’t seem to find influenza deaths, on their own, for the last few years..they’re always mixed with pneumonia and other respiratory viruses…..which makes the numbers much higher!!??
I believe seasonal ‘flu jabs for over 65s in the UK were introduced in 2000. There was no change in annual age-standardised mortality trends until 2011 when the steady improvement seen since at least 1922 flattened out. If it hadn’t stabilised we’d be on course for zero deaths by 2047-50… A different sort of dystopian Net Zero.
It’s long been known that more people die in the winter months than in the summer months. ONS have long published a series of calculated Excess Winter Mortality based on comparing the average number of deaths in December to end-March (winter) with the average of the preceding August-November and the following April-July.
Note that 2020 had the bad grace to have many deaths in the April-July period which made the preceding December 2019-March 2020 period look particularly benign.
New covid scariant already proving a thoroughly useful income-generator. Of such concern, that the planned UK vax schedule for autumn 2023 has been brought forward by a few (three?) weeks. And, in recognition of the ‘extra work’ involved, those administering the dose – principally GP practices, I assume – will receive an extra £10 for each care home patient injected (£5 for other groups) and an *additional* bonus of £200 for each care home completed. Every cloud…
BTW, you’re going to have to tell me what inspired your username. It’s dead funny!
It’s a phrase used by the oysters, just before it dawns on them that they are about to be devoured by apparently well-meaning ‘friends’, in ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’: “some of us are out of breath/And all of us are fat”. Which only makes them more attractive as prey. Seemed appropriate for the current times.
Aahh, I remember the scene but not the details. Well thanks for clearing that up.
Bookmark, print and send to your MP
“Sweden during the PandemicPariah or Paragon?
The main difference between Sweden’s strategy and that of most other countries was that it mostly relied on voluntary adaptation rather than government force.”
https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/sweden-during-pandemic
Indeed, but who takes ANY notice of Jones, FFS?
“China is building new coal power so fast that ‘energy transition’ by the West is meaningless” – Even if the U.S. went completely off coal tomorrow, its coal-fired power stations would be more than replaced by China’s, writes David Blackmon in the Telegraph”.
China’s CO2 and particulate emissions continue dropping faster than any country’s. New build power plants are 2x efficient those they replace. China passed Peak Gasoline this year and all homes are now powered with renewables. How boring.