Nearly one in three (29.2%) U.K. Met Office temperature measuring stations have an internationally-defined margin of error of up to 5°C. Another 48.7% of the total 380 stations could produce errors up to 2°C, meaning nearly eight out of ten stations (77.9%) are producing ‘junk’ or ‘near junk’ readings of surface air temperatures. Arguably, on no scientific basis should these figures be used for the Met Office’s constant promotion of the collectivist Net Zero project. Nevertheless, the state-funded operation frequently uses them to report and often catastrophise rises in temperature of as little as 0.01°C.
Under a freedom of information request, the Daily Sceptic has obtained a full list of the Met Office’s U.K. weather stations, along with an individual class rating defined by the World Meteorological Office. These CIMO ratings range from pristine class 1 and near pristine class 2, to an ‘anything goes’ or ‘junk’ class 5. The CIMO ratings penalise sites that are near any artificial heat sources such as buildings and concrete surfaces. According to the WMO, a class 5 site is one where nearby obstacles “create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”. Even the Met Office refers to sites next to buildings and vegetation as “undesirable”. It seems class 5 sites can be placed anywhere, and they come with a WMO warning of “additional estimated uncertainties added by siting up to 5°C”; class 4 notes “uncertainties” up to 2°C, while class 3 states 1°C. Only 13.7%, or 52 of the Met Office’s temperature and humidity stations come with no such ‘uncertainty’ warnings attached.
The above graph shows the percentage totals of each class. Class 1 and 2, identified in green, account for just 6.3% and 7.4% of the total respectively. Class 3 identified as orange comes in at 8.4%. The graph shows the huge majorities enjoyed by the darkening shades of red showing classes 4 and 5. It is possible that the margins of error identified for classes 3, 4 and 5 could be a minus amount – if for instance the measuring device was sited in a frost hollow – but the vast majority are certain to be pushed upwards by heat corruptions.
Last year, the investigative journalist Paul Homewood sought FOI information from the Met Office about the Welsh weather station Porthmadog, which often appears in ‘hottest of the day’ listings. He was informed that the site was listed as class 4 and “this is an acceptable rating for a temperature sensor”. Hence, continued the Met Office, “we will continue to quote from this site”. In short, observes Homewood, the Met Office is happy to use a class 4 site for climatological purposes, “even though that class is next to junk status”. It is bad enough that the Met Office is using this site, but it is even worse that they know about the issues but still plan to carry on doing so, Homewood continued. “How many other weather stations are of such poor quality?” he asked.
Now we know.
Using these figures with a precision to one hundredth of a degree centigrade, the Met Office declared that 2023 was the second hottest in the U.K., coming in just 0.06°C lower than the all-time record. Cue, of course, all the Thermogeddon headlines in mainstream media. In 2022, the Met Office said that five sites in the U.K. on July 19th went past 40°C, with a record of 40.3°C at RAF Coningsby. Kew Gardens is termed a class 2 site, although it is very close to one of the largest tropical glasshouses in the world. St James’s Park and Northolt airport are class 5 sites, Heathrow is class 4, while RAF Coningsby is class 3. At the time, the Met Office declared that the records set a “milestone in U.K. climate history”. A national record was also set on July 18th at Hawarden Airport in Wales (class 4) and on July 19th at Charterhall in Scotland (class 4).
Always alive to a popular headline catastrophising the weather, the Met Office declared a warmest St. Valentine’s night English record this year of 11.5°C at class 4-rated St. Mary’s airport on the Isles of Scilly. Earlier in the year, the Met Office declared the highest January temperature in Scotland at 19.6°C at Kinlochewe, a class 4 site. Interestingly the previous, much promoted, U.K. record was set on July 31th 2019 at the Cambridge Botanic Gardens, a class 5 site. Even more interesting is that in the Homewood FOI disclosures, the Met Office stated that class 5 data “will be flagged and not quoted in national records”.
The Met Office is between a rock and a hard place with these surface temperature measurements. Many of its long-standing stations have been encroached by urbanisation and corruptions seem to have become endemic across the entire system. In the past, this didn’t matter as much since margin of error allowances could be accepted along with less accurate local and national weather forecasting. Measuring surface temperatures across countries and then the planet is always going to be difficult, but a more accurate reading would be obtained by only using data from WMO classes 1 and 2. However, national and global temperatures have become politicised by the global warming scare and the proposed Net Zero solution. Alarmists often state that climate ‘tipping’ points will be reached with very small increases in temperature measured in tenths of a degree.
Using data from just classes 1 and 2 would likely crash the claimed rises in national and global temperatures. Something similar would likely occur if the Met Office moved the majority of its stations to more suitable spots. A number of scientists have tried to measure the urban heat bias in temperature records with estimates suggesting a general problem of warming corruption around the 20-30% mark. Last October, two scientists working out of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), produced a paper noting: “The bottom line is that an estimated 22% of the U.S. warming trend, 1895 to 2023, is due to localised UHI [urban heat island] effects.”
Under our FOI request, it can now be seen that the problems with corrupted U.K. weather stations are similar to those discovered in the United States by meteorologist Anthony Watts. In work compiled over a decade, Watts found that 96% of temperature stations used by the U.S. weather service NOAA were “corrupted” by the localised effects of urbanisation. Sites in close proximity to asphalt, machinery and other heat-producing or heat-accentuating objects, “violates NOAA’s own published standards, and strongly undermines the legitimacy and magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States”, he observed.
Both the U.K. and U.S. temperature datasets are important constituents of global totals compiled by a number of weather operations including the Met Office and NASA. The Met Office runs HadCRUT, where over the last 10 years two retrospective revisions have added about 30% extra warming to recent global temperatures. This had the effect of removing all traces of a pause around 2000-2014. Meanwhile, Professor Ole Humlum has noted that the GISS database run by NASA increased its surface air temperature between 1910 to 2000 from 0.47°C to 0.67°C, a boost of 49% over this period. “Frequent and large corrections in a database unavoidably signal a fundamental uncertainty about the correct values,” commented Humlum.
Pristine temperature data is available. In 2005, NOAA set up a 114 nationwide network of stations called the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). It was designed to remove all urban heat distortions, aiming for “superior accuracy and continuity in places that land use will not likely impact during the next five decades”.
The graph above shows nothing more than very minor, gentle warming since 2005, slight warming that might be expected in the small and continuing natural rebound from the depths of the pre-industrial Little Ice Age. A reliable source of global data is to be found in the UAH satellite record, which shows less overall warming since 1979 than the surface datasets. Both these datasets are rarely mentioned. In fact one of the compilers of the satellite data, along with the UAH paper on urban heat, is Dr. Roy Spencer. In 2022 he was kicked off Google AdSense for publishing “unreliable and harmful claims”. The move demonetised Dr. Spencer’s widely consulted monthly satellite temperature update page by removing all Google-supplied advertising. Google is on record as stating that it will ban all sites that are sceptical of “well established scientific consensus”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Well done Chris. You have proven yet again – Fraud. Fraud. Fraud. UHI completely disregarded by the discredited Met. Aligns with Climate Gate and the ridiculous Hockey Stick etc
There is no warming imo – many areas of the world are uncovered by stations, and many regions seem to be cooling. Overall it is likely a wash. Nothing unnatural is going on. And as you have written, there is no such thing as a global temperature.
Why the fraud? Money, power, more governmental control, with the totalitarian ideal of completely ‘owning’ and then getting rid of clean-burning, renewable, abiotic hydrocarbon energy. Climate fascism or saving the Earth, is an emotional plea for World Totalitarian governance (the NWO). Health and scamdemics is another avenue to the same.
When the record UK temp was announced I tracked down RAF Coningsby on Google earth. A weather station is obvious at 53 05 38 N. 0 10 22 W. It is close to the coordinates on the metoffice site.
if this is the weather station it is c. 10 meters from very large concrete and asphalt surfaces including an apron road. Asphalt is c, 20c above ambient on a warm sunny day. This would have raised the temp. Way above true.
another possible site of an automatic station is close at 53 05 37 N 00 10 04 W. It sits atop a 12m x 5m concrete pad and in close proximity to other large pads and the main runway which is 60 meters away.
i find it hard to believe any credible scientist would accept a high temperature reading from this site as representative and reliable.
That is a lot of bad data. I can remember the US map and was shocked how many were at airports
The problem is not that the weather stations are at airports. Airports need to know what’s happening in their immediate area. The problem is using data from a station designed to serve an airport’s needs and claiming it represents a wide area beyond.
Yes, we need weather stations at airports to keep the planes moving safely. No, they do not represent what’s happening in Farmer Giles’ field.
The most important things for an airport to know all of the time are atmospheric pressure, wind direction, and wind speed. If their local met station records these accurately – which in the case of wind speed tends to mean away from buildings, hills, fences, trees etc – that’s most of the job done. A met station situated on the open tarmaced area of an airport would give them the above information, but the absolute temperature readings would be almost meaningless
‘Penny (Endersby) became Chief Executive of the Met Office in December 2018. For most of her career she has delivered science and technology on behalf of the Ministry of Defence.
As Chief Executive, Penny leads the strategic direction of the Met Office and is:
She was appointed by Theresa May…….
She is an expert on ‘intelligent armours’
The government, any governments, are no good at running anything, least of all the weather.
Would someone, anyone, please get a grip…….
The acronym BAME makes me seethe with rage. Not only is part of the race grifting industry, but it lumps together people who often probably have very little in common. Black and Minority Ethnic. The “blacks” (whatever that means – I suppose people of ultimately sub-Saharan African origin – tiny region, all the same “race” except “race is apparently a social construct, I am getting a headache, presume this includes people from the Caribbean whose ancestors came from “Africa” – but not Arabs presumably – but “race” is definitely a social construct) are lumped in with “minority ethnic” – I think they mean brown people of various shades, except skin colour is meaningless, and does this include people from, for example, China? What a crock. I guess it started out as a “black” thing and then they tacked on everyone else, Indians, Pakistanis etc don’t get their own part of the acronym. Utterly pathetic. Just call it non-white, because that’s what it means, sorry Poles and Travellers you’re not important, we’re not sure about the Chinese but who cares about them anyway, and we’re not sure if Jews are white either, whatever a Jew is. How this abomination was ever proposed and is still being used is beyond me.
Yes, the whole “people of colour” hoax was invented to lump Orientals in with Africans and Indian Subcontinentals, which they themselves would never do, in order to unite 93% of humanity against the World’s Smallest Ethnic Group, Europeans, now comprising 7% of all the people on the planet. Part of the genocide plan.
“Intelligent” armours, you say.
Move her to the Post Office, I say, oh – wait a minute!
The problem is usually one of encroaching urbanisation causing heat islands, and yet, as Tony Heller points out, NASA etc have been adjusting the earlier records downwards.
Excellent work Chris! DS shines in its challenges to climate nonscience.
I look forward to the MSM latching onto this and revealing how the powers that be deliberately mislead us.
Can we rely on any official figures ? I have long since ceased to believe Covid figures (vaccine harms, deaths, illnesses, efficacy of interventions), immigration levels, outcomes of Government initiatives and the truth about any overseas interventions.
It is probably more accurate to start off from the premise that everything they say is a lie and wait for evidence that you are wrong, rather than take anything at face value (or should that be two-face value).
Remember their motto – I’m from the Government and I’m here to screw you.
Anyone who has been looking into this issue who does not depend on government money for research or who is not a brown envelope politician doing the dirty work for the Climate Industrial Complex knows that the temperature record of earth is a dog’s breakfast of manipulated data that has been fiddled about with more than a prostitutes knickers. But the important thing is that it has been fiddled about with for political purposes by government funded data adjusters. ——–A good friend of mine asked “But why would people say there is a climate crisis if there isn’t one? ———A very good question that I wish more people would ask instead of switching on their 6 O’Clock news to be misinformed and brainwashed by a bought and paid for media.
I was talking to someone about this fraud the other other day, and the only question she had was “Why? Why would they do that? It doesn’t make any sense”. “Control” I said. I explained that the climate hoax allows the elites to control every single aspect of our lives – behaviour, travel, purchases, food… the whole shebang. Again the same question “But why?”. I paused. It seemed difficult to articulate. Roughly what I said was that these people see us as parasites on their planet. A planet they own, and we must be controlled otherwise we will run rampant, destroy it and kill each other like savages. “So you think this is all because a small handful of egotistical w*nkers have got together and decided to bully us and steal our sweets” she said incredulously. “That’s exactly what I was trying to say” I replied.
Klaus Schwab was even more forthright when he just blatantly told us “The lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle classes…………..are too high”.———–Basically our standard of living is too high apparently and that has to be lowered somewhat, with climate as the very plausible excuse.
he called the lifestyles “unsustainable” actually.
Please would you post a link to this?
For some unknown reason Google can’t seem to find anything like it…
According to this or was Maurice Strong who said it
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00207233.2016.1185332
Ah yes —–Maurice Strong. —Sorry about that guys. But they all think the same stuff.
Brilliant Chris. Thanks for that. This is why we support the DS!
A day or so before the Coronation celebrations I walked in St James’s Park. There was a weather station within five meters of three large diesel generators. I doubt St James’s is a suitable place even at the best of times, with crouds and vegetation nearby, a large lake and a central London location but its readings when generators are nearby are useless except to those who want to fake the numbers.
The Met Office seems to be yet another tax payer funded organisation which has not seen fit to do its job properly, it has not kept its capabilities up to date and instead spends large amounts of political campaigns. You can be sure that if the political campaigns were undermined by weather stations UNDER reporting the temperature they would have been replaced long ago.
Compaired to the costs of their DEI and PR departments, a rolling programme of relocating and renewing weather stations would be easily funded.
What meteorological resource do the forces use these days; I hope not the Met, which was designed for that purpose.
Can someone pass this info on to Jim Dale, the so called meteorologist at GB news? He’s an utter knob who thinks that the world is currently on fire.
https://www.gbnews.com/news/welsh-farmers-protest-jim-dale-net-zero-doomed
Yes I saw that the other day and ofcourse Eammon Holmes and Isabel Webster know virtually nothing about this issue. Holmes is really just a tittle tattle gossip shop breakfast show presenter and he regularly lets Dale spout all manner of nonsense like “the world is on fire” with no questions asked. ——-Mark Steyn would have ripped the silly activist to shred, and Nana Akua gives him short shrift. But the best presenter I have seen challenge the buffoon is Hartley Brewer on Talk TV
Met office weather stations fall into two groups: synoptic which are used for forecasting and climate monitoring and non-synoptic which are there for special reasons e.g. someone needs to monitor the temperature at specific location in a city. Non-synoptic stations are not used for forecasting or climate monitoring. Are these figures just for synoptic or do they include non-synoptic (which may well be CIMO 4 or 5 because that is not relevant to them)?
and?
Fascinating article. It makes me wonder whether some of those UK temperature stations may have been quietly shut down, as was found in the US a few years back, but fake temperature readings were still being taken from them to bolster the Global Warming narrative.
With reference to USCRN – worth reading this. It actually shows a slightly higher warming trend than the full national record although it matches it extremely closely.
Warming is what happens in an Interglacial period. There have been quite a few similar warming periods in the last 2 thousand years alone, but apparently all of the natural stuff that caused those has suddenly ceased and only humans apparently now regulate the planets temperature. ——-The audacity of the climate industrial complex with their discredited hockey sticks etc is quite bare faced. —–PS Just because something warms does not mean humans warmed it, if indeed we have any warming at all since we can hardly trust the manipulated temperature data.
But climate scientists don’t assume all the natural stuff has stopped. They observe and measure the possible natural causes and they don’t account for current warming e.g. solar radiation is actually decreasing at the moment. Increased GHGs do account for it.
Please define your actual medical problem?
I have myeloma. So what?
Sorry, but I don’t see the relevance of anyone’s medical condition to the discussion. Where in the discussion here is a medical condition of anyone first mentioned please? And who first mentioned it?
Real Engineer introduced it. I have no idea why?
Well I find that unacceptable for an anonymous stranger to start discussing gratuitously the sensitive personal health information of another commenter when wholly irrelevant and particularly such a serious medical condition.
Presumably he knew this information from a comment you made somewhere else? How else could he [or she?] know that?
In your shoes I would be most distressed to have someone do that to me.
It doesn’t bother me. My myeloma did come up here once, I think on the topic of the NHS, but that was at least a year ago. On reflection I suspect it was a joke gone wrong. The idea being that I must have something wrong with me to make the comments I do.
Anyhow thanks for your concern.
There is something wrong with the attitudes of the person concerned. I had cause to come to that conclusion some time ago over several exchanges then.
This is one example and I will post others that I find after it:
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/10/11/the-ukhsas-evidence-for-covid-restrictions-is-a-complete-mess/#comment-908909
Another example of exchanges:
https://dailysceptic.org/2023/10/11/the-ukhsas-evidence-for-covid-restrictions-is-a-complete-mess/#comment-908915
Chris would you consider doing an article about chem trails. The met office is gagged and will not discuss what we see in the skies daily. Governments are beginning to admit weather manipulation, Geoengineering. GeoengineeringWatch.net is a good resource as is Judy CurryPhD blog, books and X. Judy is an American climatologist and former chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I worry about what is being sprayed in our atmosphere.
‘A reliable source of global data is to be found in (Prof Roy Spencer’s) UAH satellite record, which shows less overall warming since 1979 than the surface datasets.’
Dr Spencer is also responsible for the calculation (see his Global Warming Scepticism for Busy People) that natural thermal inputs to the Earth’s climate system, mainly from deep-ocean turnover, are not known to within an accuracy of 10 Watts per square meter of the Earth’s surface. Whereas all the slight warming we have seen since 1950 could be accounted for by warming of just 1 Watt per square meter, which a slight change in average cloud cover could easily produce.