In Climate: The Movie, William Happer, the former physics professor at Princeton, describes the Central England Temperature (CET) record as a “world treasure” since it provides continuous recordings from 1659 – over 350 years. It shows a rise just over 1°C from the depths of the Little Ice Age to the present day. These days, the CET is under the control of the politicised Met Office, keen to catastrophise weather and climate in the interest of promoting Net Zero. Recent revisions have retrospectively cooled the near past and boosted readings from the last 20 years. In addition, the Daily Sceptic can reveal that two of the three measuring stations currently used to add to this scientific treasure are taken from near-junk class 4 sites that come with official ‘uncertainties’ of up to 2°C.
Class 4 site Pershore College was added in 2006 and joined Stonyhurst, also class 4. The other site Rothamsted is a pristine class 1 site and is deemed to provide an accurate reading of the surrounding air temperature away from natural and artificial heat corruptions. Classification and ‘uncertainties’ by class are set by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO). Quite why the Met Office can’t find three class 1 sites in the whole central England area is a bit of a mystery, although a clue might be provided by the recent freedom of information request the Daily Sceptic made to the organisation. We discovered that nearly eight out of 10 Met Office measuring stations across the United Kingdom were sited in near-junk class 4 and junk class 5. The latter class comes with WMO prescribed ‘uncertainties’ up to 5°C. Class 1 sites number just 24 and make up only 6.3% of the total.
At the very least, given the scientific importance of the CET, the Met Office could at least move the stations to more suitable nearby locations away from the disqualifying heat corruptions.
But if adding near-junk figures to the collection is not bad enough, the investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.

As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.
But explanations from the Met Office are thin on the ground. It continues to promote a 60 second spike to 40.3°C at RAF Coningsby at 3.12pm on July 19 in 2022 as a U.K. temperature record, despite the known presence of three typhoon jets attempting to land around the same time. The record has become a national joke, even more so after the Daily Sceptic revealed that Coningsby is a class 3 site with an ‘uncertainty’ of 1°C. All that can be said is that at least Coningsby replaced the previous class 5 record set at Cambridge Botanic Gardens in 2019.
Last month, the Daily Sceptic analysed all the heat records declared by the Met Office since 2000 and found that all bar two should be disqualified. Many of them had been set in junk class 5 and most of the rest were in class 4. Using its highly compromised data with massive ‘uncertainties’ rife throughout the database, the Met Office publicises precision down to one hundredth of a degree, declaring, for instance, that last year was only 0.06°C cooler than the ‘record’ year of 2022. Paul Homewood suggests that if the Met Office wants to continue using its existing station measurements, it should show a warning that the margin of error is so great, “that they have no statistical significance at all”.
The Met Office refuses to return all calls from the Daily Sceptic. We would be more than happy to report any explanations it might have, and discuss its work, if required, in public. Alas, to date, communication has been brief and, frankly, a bit childish. Last December, we reported on a Met Office proposal to ditch a 30-year temperature trend in favour of a Net Zero-supporting merger of 10 years’ past data with 10 years’ future model predictions. Thus, it would be easier to spot when the 1.5°C threshold was crossed, it was argued. Noting that we had taken three weeks to report the plan, Professor Richard Betts, lead author and head of climate impacts, tweeted: “I suppose our paper does use big words like ‘temperature’ so maybe they had to get a grown-up to help”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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This might annoy some people – actually I am bored rigid with the climate change story. No offence to Chris Morrison who does sterling and vital work but the government propoganda is pathetic and an insult to anyone who can think for themselves.
“Global boiling?” Yeah right.
1.5°c rise in average Global temperatures? Planet Earth is not a domestic oven. The hubris in this statement is off the scale.
The clocks are altering because of global warming
. Yes of course they are – F O.
Burning coal is bad for the planet and CO2 is going to kill us. Of course. And I was born yesterday.
We have to stop farming in order to save the planet and leaving the land to run wild is the best way to do this. Erm…what’s for breakfast?
Nothing emanating from officialdom regarding climate contains an ounce of sense which means anybody espousing this nonsense is in a nutshell a traitor.
Thanks again to Chris Morrison for all his excellent work
I agree hp, but unfortunately these idiocies are propped up by the media and believed by those who lead us, giving rise to policies that are virtually identical everywhere and cost us real money.
This needs to come crashing down loudly and publicly but I fear we’ll continue to see tiny tactical retreats rather than a full on rout.
I am interested to see the new Labour Governments first “tactical retreat” once they are living in the real world after the next election, rather than the Through the Looking Glass world they currently live in. It won’t be so much a “tactical retreat” as a full scale surrender to REALITY.
“They are not responding”….Will DS be getting the GBN & Russell Brand treatment. That would be convenient for them.
Dear Hux —-Yes I can understand why many are bored sh.tless wiht this issue. But as regards our prosperity, health, well being and life expectancy nothing is more important. ———-So stick at it. —-Chris Morrison is sticking at it like a dog with a bone and so am I.
Off – T
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/a-rorkes-drift-to-the-left/
A little bit of fun from TCW – Fishy at Rorke’s Drift.
Hux ————You said you were bored with this issue of climate, but that is a great spot .you just posted. ————Obvioulsy “Conservative Woman” is keeping you well informed and on the ball. I hope to my bit as well to stop you getting bored stiff because this issue is NOT going away.
I know the climate scam is not going away varmint but I suppose I am bored with it because it really is a bigger scam than the C1984 and I saw through that very early on.
SLEIGHT OF HAND FROM Claire Coutinho
“Campaign group Net Zero Watch warned Claire Coutinho against removing renewables subsidies from electricity bills. It was revealed yesterday that the Energy Secretary is looking at plans to move the levies onto gas bills or general taxation.
But Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford has warned that she can only temporarily hide the true cost of renewable energy:
“It’s a sleight of hand. She is simply trying to hide the subsidies while simultaneously insisting that wind power is the cheapest. It’s yet more socialist market-rigging of a kind that the Callaghan government would have recognised.”
Courtesy of Bryan Harris at TCW.
But don’t the political class keep telling us “Renewables are now cheaper than coal”? ———————-The wind is free after all. ——-Not according my energy bills over the last 15 years it isn’t. If renewables are now cheaper why are my bills trebling?
I have an idea, lets just dump all the subsidies and let each source operate on a capatilist model rather than a loony socialist one. Effect, electricity prices halve and gas is unaffected. Simple enough?
https://expose-news.com/2024/04/02/climate-alarmists-are-warned-that-banks-wont-play/
Well according to this article the Bankers – spelt with a B – are not too keen on all this green eco-washing malarkey.
Another hat tip Mr Harris at TCW.
Money, a proxy for reality, talks. It is the World bank refusing to fund hydrocarbon fuel projects, but ‘real’ banks will protect their business models, with the businesses they fund needing to be ‘real’, producing an actual return, not fake / subsidy based ones.
Globally, NASA/GISS have been doing temperature “adjustments” of historical data for over two decades. The situation ten years ago, though not entirely clear, was broadly one of cooling the historical past (around 1900) and warming the present. This introduces a warming of about one Celsius degree per century. A snapshot taken around the time of the Climategate scandal some fifteen years ago showed an unclear global picture. This is partly because data is scant and fragmented in many areas of the world, notably Africa. However, the US and some other countries (including Australia, New Zealand, Japan, China and the UK) had nearly continuous records. The “adjustments” (including a process known as “homegenisation” and another known as “kriging”) was included in order to achieve some impression of global coverage over more than a century. There were also attempts to make allowances (or exploit uncertainty) for Urban Heat Islands, poor siting (for climate purposes at least) of weather stations, movement of weather stations from countryside to airports, and numerous competing “models”. The whole thing turned into a mess, and at times it was unclear whether some of the figures were raw data or adjusted/homogenized data, or simply invented from a model tuned to over-project heating.
Here[1] is a sample of some of the chaotic “adjustments” around 2008. (Dale Enterprise, Luling TX, Dublin Airport, Godthab Nuuk, and Kathmandu were particularly interesting!) Eventually the Australian Board of Meteorology and the New Zealand equivalent had to admit there were no surviving reliable temperature records. I believe it got worse after 2010.
Texas and Australia were the main targets of interest.
[1] https://suffolkboy.wordpress.com/dublin-airport-homogenization-of-giss-weather-data/
It is a sad time when science on many issues has just become another government department.
Dear Mr Morrison ——–Climate Change is real and happening now. We only have 12 years 3 months 14 days 3 hours and 7 minutes left to save the planet. Just as Jack Hawkins screamed in Zulu “YOU ARE ALL GOING TO DIE”. So too we are all going to perish because there is a bit more Carbon Dioxide than there was a hundred years ago even though when levels were 20 times higher in the past nothing died. Infact life thrived like never before. ——-Tell anyone who says “it is the hottest on record” to go chuck their record in the trash because it isn’t worth anything. It has been fiddled about with more times than a prostitutes knickers. ——-The crisis is a manufactured one for political purposes and the only reason they are getting away with this crap is because people think it is all about “science”. —–They think scientists are much cleverer than them and they should know what they are talking about. Yes they do, but— Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune, and guess what Climate Change Science is all funded by government. ——The used car salesman knows way more about cars than me but I don’t always buy a car from him. ——Why not? Because I use my own judgement. Just as on this issue—–I don’t get fooled by communists masquerading as scientists, and in any case there isn’t that much science going on. It is all modelling. —–Models are not science and not evidence of anything whatsoever.——SCAM
Phew I went my dinger there. ——-Sorry Chris.
Mentioning Zulu got me thinking of the soundtrack. They played that soundtrack in an episode of Top Gear once somewhere in Africa I think. Then I came across this, not the original!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVW5rjA5O7U
Well done to Chris Morrison for featuring the shocking “junk temperature” measurements exposed by “Climate: The Movie”.
Thinking about the very cool spring with endless rain here in the UK, the very snowy spring in the Northeast US, and the amazing photos on the “Electroverse” website, I found the article below. Please scroll down it to find Figures 1 & 2, which show clearly what the Gulf Stream is going to do in the Grand Solar Minimum which has already begun.
Prof. Nils-Axel Mörner: “The Approaching Grand Solar Minimum and Little Ice Age Conditions” – Electroverse
And some nice photos of the volcanoes that erupted during 2023:
2023: The Year in Volcanic Activity – The Atlantic
The most recent Electroverse website is here:
Electroverse – Page 2 of 32 – Documenting Earth Changes During The Next Grand Solar Minimum
Interesting that “Professor” Richard Betts, lead author and head of climate impacts is proud of using difficult sciency words like “Temperature”.
Will he need assistane to grasp concepts like “mendacious, virtue-signalling charlatan, I wonder?
He certainly needs help with the word “reality”.
I wonder if he can find his arse with both hands, he’ll need to if he’s going to remove my steel toe-capped boot.
18 comments —————-Is that all we can muster on an issue which will decide the standard of living we all have over the coming years. ——-If there was an article of a 2 pence reduction in National Insurance it would probably get more attention than this. Worrying about little things like a penny of this tax and tuppence of another tax is not going to affect any aspect of your life as long as the elephant in the room called NET ZERO is collectively costing us TRILLIONS. ——-This is not just an article about dubious temperature records. It is about the excuse of temperature rises being used to inflict an eco socialist political agenda on us.
I guess a lot of us are just overwhelmed by how utterly corrupted and nonsensical Western civilisation has become and how the British people are either apathetic or lost the ability to think about anything rationally and too frightened to accept the truth. Net Zero is just one aspect of what they (the elites and their acolites) are doing to destroy us (we the people). It’s bonkers and we should all know that. Ditto for modern medicine and the NHS.
The MET Office is used to the likes of the BBC, which laps up all the climate nonsense and ramps up the propaganda.
Of course it doesn’t want to “engage” with an organisation like the Daily Sceptic which is questioning the bollocks it produces.
“two of the three measuring stations currently used to add to this scientific treasure are taken from near-junk class 4 sites that come with official ‘uncertainties’ of up to 2°C” and yet my ‘net zero sold’ MP says “As a mathematician by training, I value the importance of accurate data. I would however strongly caution against placing too much importance on the Met Office’s temperature measurement stations in assessing the reality of climate change. I believe climate change is an undeniable scientific fact.”. What!!! So, blow the inaccuracies of the observed data, belief *IS* the science, so just believe. This is the utter stupidity we have to contend with in Parliament!
Good article. I was reminded that I looked at those v2 HadCET temperature updates, and the ‘one dimensional’ adjustments (i.e. just looking over time) are only half the story. There is also a seasonal bias, as you can be seen on the heatmap of these adjustments: https://x.com/AlexStarling77/status/1775467222497956070
Recent summers have been made hotter, and winters from the latter half of the 20th century have been made colder.
This is, of course, perfect if you want to create the illusion of a steep hockeystick increase.
PS. Spreadsheet available if anyone would like the underlying data.