The Met Office is refusing to retract a claim made by a senior meteorologist on BBC Radio 5 Live that storms in the U.K. are becoming “more intense” due to climate change. This is despite admitting in Freedom of Information (FOI) documents that it had no evidence to back up the claim. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) noted the “false” claim seriously misled the public and demanded a retraction. The Daily Sceptic covered the story last Thursday and has since contacted the Met Office on three occasions seeking a response. “False information of this kind does much to induce climate anxiety in the population and I am sure you would agree such errors should be corrected by any reputable organisation,” it was noted. No reply was received – no retraction has been forthcoming.
The storm claim was made by Met Office spokesman Clare Nasir on January 22nd and led to an FOI request for an explanation by the investigative journalist Paul Homewood. The Met Office replied that it was unable to answer the request due to the fact that the information “is not held”. Interestingly, the Met Office’s own 2022 climate report noted that the last two decades have seen fewer occurrences of maximum wind speeds in the 40, 50, 60 knot bands than previous decades. The Daily Sceptic report went viral on social media with almost 3,000 retweets on X, while GWPF’s demand for retraction was covered by the Scottish Daily Express.
The lack of action by the state-funded Met Office is very interesting. Extreme weather is now the major go-to explanation for the opinion that humans largely control the climate, despite a general lack of scientific evidence. Backing away from this ‘settled’ narrative risks damaging a potent tool nudging populations across the world towards the collectivist Net Zero political project. Mainstream media usually take care to fudge their reporting of any direct link, using phrases such as ‘scientists say’ and sprinkling words ‘could’ and ‘might’ in the copy. The mistake Nasir made was to forget this basic requirement of broadcast fearmongering.
There appears to be an arrogance around the Met Office, an arrogance it shares with many other organisations and scientists promoting Net Zero. At the heart of this assumed superiority is the ludicrous claim that the science around human-caused climate change is ‘settled’. As a result of this, it seems many have lost the ability to debate their work with anyone taking an inquiring position. The scientific process has largely broken down in the climate science world. Secure in the knowledge that it will not be challenged, almost anything can be said on legacy media from a ‘consensus’ narrative point of view to promote the supra-national aims of Net Zero. On the legal front, this arrogance was in evidence in the summing up in the recent Mann v Steyn defamation trial in Washington D.C. The jury should award punitive damages to Michael Mann, inventor of the temperature ‘hockey stick’ graph, “so that in future no one will dare engage in climate denialism”, said Mann’s defending lawyer.
It is possible that if the Met Office is obliged to explain or retract what was after all just a routine scare broadcast on a tame state-reliant media outlet, it might be forced into more substantial scientific debate. How it abolished the global temperature pause from 2000-2014 by adding 30% extra warming on a retrospective basis to its HadCRUT5 record, and why it insists on promoting temperature records from busy U.K. airbases, are two subjects that spring immediately to mind.
Ineffable superiority was certainly on display when the Daily Sceptic recently reported that the Met Office was considered ditching the measurement of changes in temperature using data from the past 30 years in favour of a measurement compiled with 10 years’ past data and 10 years’ future modelled estimates. This was designed to promote a possible earlier breach of the political 1.5°C threshold. Lead author Professor Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office, tweeted a ‘rebuttal’ on X, noting we had taken three weeks to review the paper. “Or are they just very slow readers? I suppose our paper does use big words like ‘temperature’ so maybe they had to get grown-ups to help,” he added.
Why is the Met Office struggling to come up with any evidence to back up its claim that bad weather is caused by climate change? Because there is precious little of it. “People are going absolutely nuts these days about extreme weather,” writes the distinguished academic and science writer Roger Pielke Jr. “Every event, anywhere, is now readily associated with climate change and a portent of a climate out of control, apocalyptic even. I’ve long given up hope that the actual science of climate and extreme weather will be fairly reported or discussed in policy – nowadays, climate change is just too seductive and politically expedient,” he notes.
In its latest ‘Sixth Assessment Report‘, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that attempts to discern human involvement in severe storms outside natural variation remain of “low confidence”. In fact, it is unable to find human involvement in a wide range of weather-related events, not just in the past but out to the turn of this century.
Beyond natural variability, the IPCC, much to the disappointment of alarmists, has concluded there is little or no evidence that the following events (table above) are or will be affected by human-caused climate change: river floods, heavy rain and pluvial floods, landslides, drought (all types), fire ‘weather’, severe wind storms (Met Office please note), tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, heavy snowfall and ice storms, hail, snow avalanche, coastal flooding and erosion, and marine heatwaves.
Perhaps the Met Office doesn’t want to apologise for misleading the public over winter storms – it might put down an unwelcome marker for mea culpas becoming general across the entire media and climate front.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.