How the Met Office and BBC Try to Fool Us All

As we all shiver in the autumnal weather during what is meant to be summer and some of us have even turned our central heating back on or continued using our winter duvets, there is one certainty – in a few weeks time, the good folk at Met Office and the BBC will tell us that we’ve just had the “warmest June on record”. After all, the Met Office and the BBC made the same claim about appalling April and miserable May. In fact, the weather has been so wet that there is a risk of a potato shortage later this year. So, what will be intriguing will be the mathematical contortions the Met Office and BBC will use to justify their preposterous nonsense:

Will they have the gall to say that June in the U.K. was the warmest on record even though everybody else knows it wasn’t?
Or will the Met Office and the BBC choose somewhere which had a bit of decent weather – perhaps Greece or Spain or India – to justify their climate catastrophism?
Or will they instead try to fob us off by claiming that, although June in the U.K. was a disaster weatherwise, global temperatures (if such a thing can even be measured) were at record levels?

If the Met Office and BBC can’t find any evidence for their ‘global boiling’ narrative, will they instead just choose somewhere where there have been a couple of floods or a typhoon and use that as proof that anthropogenic climate change is causing more extreme weather – even though there has been no increase in extreme weather and the number of deaths from extreme weather has fallen by over 90% over the last hundred years while the world’s population has tripled?

For decades the Met Office and its most enthusiastic cheerleader, the BBC, have been claiming that temperatures have been higher than normal. But what is ‘normal’? In line with World Meteorological Organisation guidelines, climate is measured against 30-year ‘averaging’ periods. Known as ‘climate normal’ periods, these act as a benchmark against which the observational records of weather and climate can be compared to place them into context and as a reference baseline to provide context for future climate projections. The 30-year periods begin on January 1st of a year ending with the digit 1. Up till 2020, the base period – what we’re told is ‘normal’ – was the period from 1961 to 1990. Hopefully some readers will remember that from 1960 to at least 1980 the Earth cooled so much that even the experts at the climate-catastrophist Guardian assured us that a new Ice Age was on the way:

The situation was so dire that the CIA even wrote a report for the U.S. President detailing how global cooling would lead to crop failures, food shortages, famines and possible wars as countries fought over food resources:

So, it’s hardy surprising that temperatures have been rising since the 1961-1990 30-year reference period, which included at least 20 years of bitterly cold weather. Thus all claims up till 1990 that the Earth was warming are more likely to be just variations in a natural cycle of cooling and warming rather than a global boiling climate catastrophe caused by human activities.

The latest 30-year period ended on December 31st 2020. The Met Office now uses 1991-2020 as the reference ‘normal’ for routine U.K. climate monitoring. However, the Met Office tells us that the unusually cold 1961-1990 reference “will be retained for the monitoring of longer-term climate change”.

Until the cold 1961 to 1990 reference period ended, the climate doomsters could be pretty confident that most days, weeks, months and years would be warmer than what the World Meteorological Organisation used as ‘normal’. But now we have a new, warmer reference period, 1991 to 2020, the climate catastrophists have a new trick. This is to claim that a certain place or day or month or whatever has been “the hottest since records began”. The year 1884 is the year the Met Office and the BBC use as their ‘when records began’ for the U.K. Now let’s think of what might have changed since 1884. In 1884 the U.K. population was around 30 million. Now it’s at least 70 million (nobody knows the real figure). More people means more buildings, more cars, more jet planes, more central heating, more everything except for tranquil cool places with peace and quiet.

As Chris Morrison has pointed out, England’s hottest ever days were recorded next to an RAF airbase where typhoon jets were taking off and landing and in a very sheltered botanical garden in Cambridge which was being turned into a furnace by the heat from air-conditioning from surrounding office buildings and laboratories.

One problem with these supposed temperature records is that they are always at just one site and are never replicated at any nearby measuring stations. The Met Office informs us that: “The Met Office maintains around 300 land synoptic weather observation sites together with 150 voluntary climate sites reporting daily, or in the case of synoptic sites hourly or minute values into the Met Office databases.” In my book There is No Climate Crisis I give the example of what was supposed to be Germany’s hottest day – on July 25th 2019 in a very sheltered dip in the land in a town called Lingen. Yet this reported ‘record temperature’ was not picked up by any nearby weather stations:

People who are not climate experts employed by the Met Office or the BBC might feel that to be a reliable measure of a temperature record, the record should be recorded at say 10% or even 20% of a country’s measuring stations rather than just at one where the alleged ‘record’ might be due to local circumstances – air-conditioning or a high level of jet activity or someone having a barbecue nearby – rather than caused by global boiling.

But there is a further problem with the record temperatures our rulers use to terrify us into obedience with their climate diktats. The Met Office informs us that: “The WMO Siting Classification for Surface Observing Stations on Land was formally introduced from 2014, enabling us to make broad comparisons of our weather and climate stations with those around the world.” A Class 1 assessment being the highest standard and Class 5 the lowest. Class 1 stations would be the most reliable and Classes 4 and 5 pretty worthless. Just to illustrate credibility of the measuring sites used by our Met Office, Heathrow Airport is considered a Class 3 site. Aircraft movements (the lower line on the chart below) at Heathrow have increased slightly over the last 30 years. But I assume these are limited by the fact that Heathrow only has two runways and is restricted in its hours of operation:

However the number of passengers and amount of freight at Heathrow (the upper two lines on the chart above) have increased massively, suggesting that many more larger aircraft are using the airport. So the Met Office and the BBC would have us believe that temperature measurements at Heathrow are reliable as a huge rise in larger jets at Heathrow has had absolutely no effect on the air temperature at the airport. Moreover, as Chris Morrison discovered via FOI, fewer than 10% of the U.K.’s monitoring stations are Class 1:

The huge majority are Class 4 or Class 5 – even more unreliable than Class 3 Heathrow. Anything below a Class 2 measuring station is likely to be affected by increased urbanisation, more traffic, more heat from buildings and so on. In short, they are more likely to give much higher temperature readings than they should due to the Urban Heat Island Effect.

So, next time the Met Office or the BBC or C4 News or any of the bought mainstream media gravely informs you that we are experiencing the hottest day or week or month or whatever ‘since records began’, you should probably take these claims with a Siberian salt mine of salt.

David Craig is the author of There is No Climate Crisis, available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon.