The Met Office has just published its annual State of the U.K. Climate Report. Like all the others, it warns that our climate is rapidly changing, weather is becoming more extreme and we must stop using fossil fuels. (Quite why they think they should be making political recommendations is a mystery.) The report itself is 121 pages long, and full of largely irrelevant waffle. Clearly the intention is to obfuscate and stop the public from finding out what is really going on.
This new report for 2023 says that we are experiencing a dramatic increase in the frequency of temperature extremes because hot days are now more frequent. Of course, many of these supposedly high temperatures are only recorded at the junk stations the Met Office has been setting up in recent years, where poor siting can add up to 5°C of artificial warming.
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I remember the 1976 weather, which was accompanied by water shortage in some parts of the country. They actually created a new ministerial job (Denis Howell MP got the job) to deal with it; evidently the weather changed quite markedly after it was set up. Not that there was a real cause and effect, but whenever you do something (“something must be done”), there is always an opportunity to claim the reward if it turns out well!
I recall ’76 well. I was stationed at RAF Brize Norton, (VC10s) and bought myself a six-month old white TR6 with 3k miles on the clock in late May. I parked it with the top down in the driveway of our OMQs (Officers’ Married Quarters) and never had to put the top back up until late August. I recall flying into Brize many times over the period as the fields surrounding the base went from green to straw coloured to light brown. It was a good time to be alive.
I, too, remember it well. I had completed my Combat Engineer training in Southwood Camp in Farnborough and was doing driver training at Chuch Crookham. I remember, strongly, the smell of Brut mixed with sweat because we couldn’t leave camp to go to the laundrette. We were confined to camp as stand-by firefighters. (Our training areas were going up in smoke.) The only swimming pool on camp turned a delightful milky pea green and had a very strange fragrance. We all went a little nuts, which is bound to happen when you confine young, very fit and active young men to a single location with no real outlet for their energy. Two pints max in the NAAFI and two films a week in the SKC which was made of wriggly tin and thus just like sitting in a self-basting roasting pot. The ‘games’ we played were borderline lunacy and some people got a little hurt. The smell of burning Brut because, with a can and a lighter, we had flamethrower fights. If you think Brut is an appaling smell normally then try it burnt.
Hot? It was like the sixth circle of Dante’s hell. Marvellous memories.
Good grief! None of that combat malarkey for us on ‘Shiny Tens’. Delivering troops and kit to varied destinations was our job. I didn’t realise at the time how lucky I was. It was my good fortune to go swanning around the globe in No1 uniform and staying in four or five star hotels, much to the chagrin of the Herc’ boys in their flying suits and makeshift accommodation. My log book tells me Cyprus, Ottowa, Gander in May, Masirah, Gander, Cyprus in June. European destinations in July. Hong Kong Kuala Lumpur Bahrain in August. Nearly 50 years on, I still have the odd ‘panic dream’ that I’m about to miss the crew bus for our next flight. Those were the days eh?
Like sacrifice a goat to the god of dodgy weather….
I remember it.———— Was at Uni and I remember Dancing Queen all the time on the juke box.
1976 was my last year of childhood, I left school in ’78 aged nearly 17. It was a wonderful summer. The park keepers were on strike and the grass was almost as tall as we were. We fished, played, cycled, swam and laughed all Summer.
Sadly, the following year we had somehow changed. I guess we knew we were due to leave school and had no idea what we wanted to do with our lives.
The next hottest is surely 1984 when two of my lads were born. I was working under a roof 70 feet up all Summer. It was so hot we were working 20 minutes, coming down, drinking water, going back up. Oh for the pop, ice cream and lazy days of 1976!
“Due to natural variability, not climate change.” The two are equivalent, if one accepts the definition of “climate” as it was – if it’s variable, it must change. Using the term “climate change” in the current sense looks like falling foul of a political tactic to adjust the meaning of something, especially to create an impression of human effect on something.
Something like ‘climate change is a feature of natural variability’ might be an alternative.
Good point.
This makes no sense. Climate change here obviously means antrophogenic climate change caused by humans burning stuff as that’s what the Met office publication is all about.
Actually caused by the burning desire to be seen as a saviour of the planet.
I think that – minus genuinely confused souls on the fringes – this Save the planet! is just the cover story for the heist.
But that’s really besides the point: The author wasn’t using climate change as general term when he juxtaposed that with natural variability but was referring to the Met Office climate change which is defined as not having natural causes¹.
¹ Strictly speaking, this is nonsense as well: Humans are perfectly natural and hence, their actions are also natural causes.
So, if the MET office HQ was to suddenly burn down (no loss of life as they were all working from home that day), this would lead to more or less “extreme weather/climate crisis”?
What if the Met Office suddenly burnt down but with no loss of human life despite they were all in as the Reptilians rather enjoyed the heat?
I always maintain that since climate is something that changes on all time scales from year to year, decade to decade and century to century, that it should just be called “Climate”. There is no need to call climate that changes all of the time “climate change”————“Climate Change” these days though is a term that has come to mean changes to climate allegedly caused by human activity. So that would be changes out with the normal changes that occur in climate.
—–Back in 1995 we had a summer of blue skies all the way from April to September, with hardly a cloud in the sky. (This is easily checked) I got so used to the blue skies that I was automatically putting on my shorts every morning. I guarantee you that if that summer was to have happened this year that the BBC, SKY News, The Guardian, The Independent, and Government, Just Stop Oil etc would be all over it claiming it was “Climate Change”, and a sign of things to come. When in fact 1995 was just a high in the statistics.in a climate that is highly variable.
I remember it because that was my last week of boarding school and we went to Centre Parks somewhere near Nottingham. Remember having a neck injury and sunbathing with pulsations throughout my head in the heat.
I was chatting to a colleague yesterday and in conversation I found out that he considers me a climate denier because of my stance. I challenged him and told him that in the 20 years I have followed this topic that I hadn’t notice any climate change.
So he rolled out the usual claptrap of “the majority of scientisits agree”‘
So I told him I was a scientist and didn’t agree.
His waspish response was “OK, what is the science” so I replied physics.
We dropped the topic.
He is an emeritus professor of ecology apparently specialising in urrban environments who has a reputation for walking away from a real argument.
At the end of August two years ago, the climate change story was still “It’ll never rain again!”, ironically published the day before an period of extremely wet weather started which lasted roughly until spring this year. Meanwhile, climate change has mutated into a dangerous new variant: The rain which was never supposed to happen because of climate change is now supposed to have happened because of climate change.
This is the tell-tale sign of a free running political agenda: Whatever happens, it’s always claimed that it proves that the guys with the chips on their shoulders were right all the time, even if what actually did happen was the direct opposite of what that had claimed would happen.
ATM, the weather app on my iPhone claims that it’s 23⁰C in Reading, with temperature predicted to reach 28⁰C later in the day (supposedly followed by a thunderstorm during the afternoon). As that’s all the Met Office types got, they’re obviously claiming that this is extreme heat due to climate change and a mortal danger to people. They’d also be claiming that if it was 20⁰C, eventually rising to 25⁰C, just as Thames Water lifted its hosepipe ban right in the middle of a very wet November and used images of happy people watering the lawns with hosepipes in the sun to market that. Reality doesn’t matter to these people.
Whatever happened to summer storms?
What I have started to do, and this has helped me psychologically (I remember a DS post last year said they’re trying to make us fear the summer and it’s true), is to automatically deduct 3-5 degrees off their heat prediction. So I watch the weather or see the app and think: junk status lies. If they say it’s going to be 30 I know really it’s about 25 or 27.
Thanks for reading the met office report so that we don’t have to.
Ah, the Met office, what a history…
Getting away with continually being proved wrong is a trait of the Met Office; a trait that, along with having no idea what the weather will be like next week but being able to predict it in 50 years time (yeah, right), pretty much defines the climate alarmist in general.
How have we the public been got to swallow their guff for so long? The answer is that a successful attack has been mounted on our sanity.
Glancing back over some vintage Met Office history…
In 2004 the Met office predicted global temperatures would rise by 0.3C over the following decade. (Park that for a moment.)
In 2007 the Met Office predicted the UK summer that year would be hotter and drier than usual. Global temperatures promptly dropped by 0.7 C, and the UK was afflicted by the worst summer floods in living memory.
In 2009, it predicted Britain that year would enjoy a ‘barbecue’ summer, just before one of the coldest and wettest British summers on record.
In the winter of 2013, the Somerset Levels were submerged for a month beneath the worst flooding in living memory. The Met Office had predicted that the winter that year would be unusually dry.
When 2014 arrived, the actual increase in global average temperatures since 2004 (recall the Met Office prediction of 0.3 C in 2004) turned out to be, you guessed it, nil.
I’m assuming you mean “This variability is WEATHER, not CLIMATE CHANGE”. Not “This variability is WEATHER, nor CLIMATE CHANGE”.
Why don’t they stick to snow next week in winter and heatwave next week in summer neither of which materialise by the way.
Global warming is how it started, and they only changed the name when it wasn’t !
The earliest I can recall was 1972 when we were told that by 1984 we would be in an Ice Age. Ironically the two hottest summers on record happened: 1976 and 1984. Along with it we had Global Warming which was taken up by an American politician who made millions out of it. That was eventually debunked and Climate Change became the catchphrase: impossible to debunk since the Climate does change all the time which is why we live on a Planet and not in a ball of gas.
A very thorough pdf Paul. Is it any surprise that so many are waking up to the scam ?
Paul, I value your factual criticism of the global warming narrative greatly. This article reminded me that I’ve tried (and thus far failed) to check rainfall statistics of the last several decades in Worcester, given the increased flooding there threatening the future of cricket at the county ground by the cathedral. Re Oxfordshire, you say that “Again we see that, although they have increased since 1961, heavy rainfall days have merely risen back to pre-1960 levels.” Can you point me to a source of similar data for Worcester, or Worcestershire? If the same holds true there, then it means the club can look for other causes of increased flooding in its search for effective mitigation, rather than throw its hands up and say “Sorry, we’ll have to move.” I’m happy to do some data crunching in Excel if I can get the right level of data to start with