Last week saw a dramatic illustration of how far parts of the mainstream media has departed from the scientific process in its aim to catastrophise the climate and push society to accept the global Net Zero collectivisation. “London seeing more days above 30°C, experts say”, ran a BBC headline, with a reported suggestion that London must adapt to the “new reality”. But it turns out that the ‘experts’ have used “airport data for consistency across worldwide cities, including City Airport in London”. It is difficult to think of a more unsuitable dataset to promote notions of “extreme heat”, other than perhaps to take measurements next to the door of a blast furnace.
Similar versions of the story appeared in numerous mainstream outlets including Sky and the Independent suggesting the material was subbed from a circulated release. It originated from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED,) a green activist think tank that collects funding from a wide variety of governmental and private sources. The analysis is said to be part of a larger project to look at how “climate change” is affecting the world’s most populated cities. Sky said the IIAD report was just one in a raft of warnings in the last year, “about the pressing need to adapt the country to climate change”. IIED researcher Tucker Landesman claimed it was clear that the “extreme heat is here to stay and London must adapt soon to remain liveable for everyone”.
Landesman is an urban studies graduate from the LSE and he appears big on woke woo-woo. ‘Connecting decarbonisation and social justice’ and ‘Towards queer-centred urban development’, are two of his recent publications. Tucker is said to be “particularly interested in intersectional approaches to urban poverty and inequality”. No doubt these are his areas of expertise, but in collating measurements next to the exhausts of multiple jet aircraft for the purpose of making predictions of Thermogeddon, he would appear to be operating outside his comfort zone. Given what scientists have discovered about the urban heat effect, and its dramatic short-term effect on temperature measurements, it is difficult to understand why the BBC is giving house room to this ‘new analysis’. Having to pass through airports that are noticeably hotter than surrounding areas in air-conditioned buildings is hardly front page news – unless, of course, there is some pseudoscientific agenda at work.
The use of data from unsuitable sites has bedevilled the recent collection of accurate temperature measurements in most meteorological operations around the world. Earlier this year, the Daily Sceptic revealed that nearly eight out of ten of the U.K. Met Office’s measuring sites had huge scientifically-designated ‘uncertainties’ that effectively disqualified them from providing accurate data. Despite such large potential corruptions, the Met Office was able to claim to a hundredth of a degree that last year in the U.K. was only 0.06°C cooler than the year before.
The World Meteorological Organisation rates weather sites from class 1 to 5 based on the amount of human-caused heat corruption that is likely to occur next to the measuring devise. Class 4 comes with ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C and these accounted for 48.7% of the Met Office’s 380 recording stations. Class 5 comes with ‘uncertainties’ of 5°C and these applied to 29.2% of the total, with many of the stations set down the runways at local airports. For instance, frequent reference is made to high readings at the class 5 military airport at Northolt.
The BBC report claims that “really extreme temperatures” have become more frequent with seven days above 35°C in the past three decades, five of which occurred within the last five years, statistics from 1994-2023 show. Statistics also show that passenger numbers at the enlarged City Airport tripled over that period, although numbers are still well down on the years before Covid.
According to the official Met Office figures, which as we have seen need taking with plenty of salt, there has been a small rise in the average summer maximum temperature since the mid 1990s. It is about 0.8°C, but the recent rise is only 1.2°C higher than the averaged maximums recorded in the less urban heat corrupted records from around 90 years ago. Given that the global temperature has been gently warming over the last 150 years as a recovery from the Little Ice Age, this is not surprising. What would have been considered a ‘nice’ summer in the mid 1930s is now, one degree centigrade later, promoted in politicised alarmist terms with weather maps painted in hellish reds and purples.
In 2022, an insight into the heat corruptions at airports was provided by two former NASA scientists working out of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Dr. Roy Spencer and Professor John Christy found massive human-caused heat distortions in the temperature record across the United States. Airports were found to be particularly prone to higher temperatures compared with those recorded in surrounding less urbanised areas.
The most dramatic finding occurred at Orlando airport where decadal warming since 1973 of 0.3°C is slashed to just 0.07°C after the data has been ‘de-urbanised’. The number of passengers has soared in recent years with over 50 million people passing through the ever-growing airport, the gateway to Mickey Mouse and the Magic Kingdom. Interestingly, the divergence between the two temperature datasets becomes more pronounced from the turn of the century.
Unsurprisingly, many of the Met Office’s heat ‘records’ have been recorded since the turn of the century. Almost all of them are from ‘junk’ class 5 and ‘near junk’ class 4 sites. Class 5 maximum temperature records, with their ‘uncertainties of 5°C, have been declared in Northern Ireland and three U.K. areas. The record in Central S was measured in St. James’s Park in London, site of one of the five 40°C plus recordings of July 19th, 2022. Class 4 record holders are even more numerous with the highest Scottish record set at Charterhall. Hawarden Airport is home to the highest Welsh recording. No less than five U.K. areas have records attributed to this class which comes with ’uncertainties’ of 2°C.
And, of course, who can forget the national joke record of 40.3°C declared on July 19th, 2022 at Coningsby – or more accurately, RAF Coningsby. Blink and you might have missed it since the 60-second record was caused by a 0.6°C spike either side of 3.12pm. As it happened, it appears that no less than three typhoon fighter jets were landing at or near that time.
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.
This is a very important reminder to everyone like myself who’d forgotten about the Debanking Scandal. I thought it was all over, but from this article, it’s still going on quietly in the background.
Likewise, we pulled out of PAYPAL when the news broke at the time, but this is a timely reminder and hopefully more people will abandon them. Likewise Give send go I think it was who froze the truckers accounts in Canada. I don’t use them anymore.
My wife and I immediately dropped Paypal when Toby Young was ‘debanked’ and we persuaded as many family and friends as possible to also leave Paypal. Whether it had any effect, I cannot be sure but I do know that it caused us no inconvenience by doing so.
Yes, I’ve dropped PayPal too.
Forget pandering to IRA murderers, if Sir Two-Tier needs to feed his lawfare fix, then bring in a law criminalising political de-banking and whip all the Right Dishonourable Labour Members to vote for it.
Would keep Attorney General Lord Hermeutic out of mischief doing something honourable for a change.
Don’t hold your breath.
I can’t imagine this shower of shite ever doing anything honourable, they don’t have the capability.
Wonder what would happen if everyone who is sickened by this contacted PayPal and demanded for them to disclose any information PayPal had on them? Easy to do, costs nothing and perfectly legal under the Freedom of Information Act. And I mean if hundreds of thousands contacted them, nay millions – all at the same time. And I’m sure you can do it even if you are a past customer. Think I’ll try to send them a letter forthwith. Was it this lot that debanked Farage too. No matter, it’s the thought that counts. Reform have rather a lot of members now, don’t they?
Used to use PayPal, have not used them since they suspended TY’s account.
Same here tof.
Nor I.
My PayPal account was lapsed, but not closed. So I went to the effort of reinstating my login just so I could delete my account and leave a snotty comment.
Closed mine, told them why too.
The state in most countries is an opponent of tge people. We are back in the days of totalitarian monarchs.
We should be glad that Reform is a party that works within the democratic system and it is led by a a man who is libertarian inclined.
If the elites succeed in retaining office within Uniparty I fear the next challenger will not be at all pleasant. The outcome of that would be to take us back to unexplained disappearances from the Tower.
We have all the money and the voting power. Never forget that.
But not the will of the majority to do anything with it sadly. We are but few.
I read somewhere that it takes about 20% of a country to turn the tide against despots. I’m sure we have that but the 20% aren’t stirred enough by these despots maybe?
They are. They just need to realise that they have the power. There is a sense of hopelessness but once again, we have the power, and the taxes they appropriate to fund their horror-show, is ultimately our money.
Stop Debanking Opinions
My personal fair use policy resulted in me banning PayPal (after 20 years of use, thousands of transactions) when it banned Lord Toby.
They’ll never see another penny of my cash.
Same here.
And what punishment did Paypal receive? Nothing I presume. They should have been forced to pay the account holders a fine equal to what sum they had in their account at the time.
At the time I made a donation to the Canadian truck driver protest. That was returned. Not sure if they were debanked or their dictator led government had a hand in it.
Does Elon Musk still Run PayPal ?
ESG——Agenda Driven Government and their “Stakeholders” in big business deciding commie style who can participate in society. —This must be STOPPED
PayPal ….. is not your Pal.
Pals don’t punish you for disagreeing with them; they don’t go out of their way to make your life difficult; they don’t seek to control your speech or your actions.
There’s nothing “friendly” about PayPunish.
I closed my account when they debanked Toby/The Daily Sceptic and I won’t be re-opening it.
It’s a DEMOCRACY! Because of this, you are entitled to your own opinions! And we are entitled to punish you for that with whatever means happen to be at our disposal!
The liberal progressive democracy in nutshell. It’s going to be hard to find a historic political system were people weren’t entitled to their own opinions provided they didn’t mind getting punished for that. Methods of punishment in the 2020s differ from those of the 1940s. But that’s just because our rulers believe their methods to be more effective, not because they’re nowadays more friendly disposed towards those of their subjects who ‘need’ to get punished.
Molly, if you’re reading this, thank you for the work UFT undertook during the pandemic, especially the Scottish team. They kept me sane during a horrific period when most around me were captivated by the BBC.