Some of the poorest and most vulnerable members of society are losing out on millions of pounds worth of cold weather payments in England and Wales due to official reliance on data from corrupted Met Office temperature measuring stations. In 2022-23, cold weather payments of £130 million were made to around five million households, but it’s possible that the annual figures would be much higher if more accurate local temperatures measurements had been used.
Cold weather payments are automatically paid to those on a number of means-tested benefits and triggered by seven days of average temperatures below 0oC. (A different system is used in Scotland.) Temperature measurements are taken from 63 Met Office stations in England and Wales but over half of these sites have internationally recognised ‘uncertainties’ of between 2°C and 5°C. Payments in the rural areas around Sheffield depend on readings from a City-based site where the station is rated Class 5 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) with a 5°C margin of error. The site, which is by the A57, is blanketed with urban heat corruption and will record much higher temperatures than those found in the surrounding Peak District.
Estimates of urban heat corruption vary, with the EU weather service Copernicus suggesting it can lead to temperature measurements “up to 10oC higher than in rural areas”. A recent science paper written by 37 scientists from 18 countries found that urban heat accounted for around 40% of the recorded warming since 1850. In startling and detailed research, they found that a rural/urban blend of temperatures showed a long-term warming trend of 0.89°C per century, while a rural-only collection produced a rise of just 0.55°C per century.
The WMO, in which the Met Office plays a significant role, rates temperature stations in five classes. Classes 1 and 2 are judged pristine and come with no uncertainties. Class 3 has a +/- margin of error of 1°C, while junk class 4 has +/- 2°C and super junk class 5 is set at +/- 5°C. As Paul Homewood points out, these negative and positive errors don’t tend to cancel each other out, as they do in other fields due to their random nature. “With temperature recording,” he says, “poor siting nearly always adds to underlying temperatures.”
The Met Office scores very badly on the rating front, with the Daily Sceptic discovering through a recent freedom of information request that nearly eight out of 10 of its stations are in classes 4 and 5. In addition, the Met Office runs its own internal classification. But this seems more forgiving of nearby heat corruptions, with only 27 out of 380 sites said to be “unsatisfactory”.
Cold weather payments, not to be confused with the winter fuel allowance paid to pensioners which the new Labour government has done away with, give £25 for a period of cold weather to those deemed financially or physically vulnerable. Extra consideration is given to families with children under five. During 2022-23, a number of areas made three payments from November to March. But luck of the draw seems to play a part in these disbursements. Four of the weather stations used to record low temperatures across England and Wales are so bad that even the Met Office thinks they’re ‘unsatisfactory’. These include Hawarden Airport, home of Wales’s national temperature ‘record’, Little Rissington, Redesdale and Pembrey Sands.
The payment system works by allocating postcodes from the surrounding areas to specific sites. Heathrow Airport has the largest number of postcodes attached and seems to extend over most of London. Heathrow is a Class 3 site with 1°C uncertainty, but this is regarded as generous by many since it is one of the busiest airports in the world. Not a great deal of frost is likely to settle on most nights of the year with temperatures boosted by the release of warmth collected during the day by miles of concrete and tarmac. In common with most cities, night time temperatures at airports are likely to be higher than surrounding uncorrupted areas. Copernicus notes, for instance, that cities such as London and Paris, “regularly” record temperatures of around 4°C higher than rural surroundings.
It is likely, indeed almost certain, that temperature recordings in cities and airports will reduce the number of seven day 0°C average temperatures periods over wider areas. If so, many of the poorest and most vulnerable in rural locations are missing out on this financial help.
We are obliged to citizen journalist Ray Sanders for drawing our attention to this wholly avoidable scandal. Commenting on the high number of triggering sites found in areas known to be affected by urban heat, he noted: “The Met Office must know of this issue, they surely cannot be that naïve or just maybe they never gave it a thought – just drew some lines on a map. Whatever, the responsibility must lie with them as they are supposed to be the experts in the field and the DWP [Department of Work and Pensions] simply refers to them for advice.”
As we have seen in many past articles, the Met Office is at the forefront of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. But it might be argued that the acquisition of supercomputers and the use of climate modelling have been at the expense of investment in a robust network of stations that can provide an accurate measurement of the natural air temperature. The basics – the day job one might say – have not been given the care they require. The network is littered with unsuitable sites such as airports, solar farms, car parks and electricity sub-stations. Even worse, little thought seems to have been taken when it comes to the placements of new sites, which are often in class 4 and 5 locations. Garbage in means garbage out, regardless of how politically convenient it is for narrative-driven mainstream activists. Producing readings that supposedly measure temperatures down to one hundredth of a degree centigrade, as the Met Offices does with this flawed data, is little more than a scientific joke.
To date, the obvious problems surrounding the Met Office’s temperature measuring abilities have been ignored. To discuss the matter risks opening a pandora’s box since it would subject data that backs Net Zero to greater scrutiny. It will be interesting to see if this position holds following suggestions that its figures could be depriving poor and vulnerable members of society from collecting much needed cold weather payments.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Looks like the climate change hoax is paying off (for the government) in ways they didn’t think of?
Thank goodness we have a Labour government in power to sort this nonsense out –
A party specifically formed to assist the poorest and most vulnerable in society, and one which couldn’t possibly be hi-jacked by mass impoverishing and ultimately killing pseudo-scientific ideologies such as Marxism and Environmentalism / Net Zero…
Oh.
On the other side of the coin, the Treasury might be interested in avoiding payment? Maybe the Chancellor is concerned about Met office accuracy as well!
Based on the clear fact that Net Zero will have no effect whatsoever on the climate, and ignoring the complete idiocy of the idea that one could anyway control the climate by varying the single parameter CO2, akin to turning the heating control of an oven, there should be attempts made to calculate the immense cost to society of the Net Zero undertaking – perhaps as the subject of a PhD or two.
As a cost/benefit analysis, whereby the benefit is zero unless you are a wind turbine manufacturer, just listing all the costs involved in the multinational Net Zero project would require an immense amount of work. Replacement of cheap energy sources (coal, gas, oil), discontinuation of nuclear energy, new building requirements, ‘green’ energy sources, destruction of forest and arable land, CO2 taxes, road traffic restrictions, car manufacturing, COP attendance, and so on, right down to the nitty gritty of things like cold weather benefits.
A lot of work but it would be very interesting to see how many trillions could have been spent on worthwhile improvements to society.
“Accurate temperature”—An interesting concept. But when temperature has been politicised for the last 40 years, and while temperature data has been manipulated and fiddled about with for political purposes, it remains only a “concept”
In this particular case the accuracy of the data is unimportant, since not many people live outdoors.
Its a double whammy for the elderly, urban heating only reveals itself when wind speeds are very low (usually at night), which is also when the risk of blackouts is highest.
But, anything that reduces taxpayers money being spent by the nanny state is surely a good thing, so bring on more urban heat corruption of temperature data.
I nearly peed myself laughing the other day watching the entertaining Susan Calman travelling around Devon. One of the places she visited was the Met Office in Exeter, where she was shown their sophisticated measuring devices. In the lee of a glass and metal office building were all of the Stevenson Screens you would expect but stuffed into the ground was a stick with a thermometer stuck to it to record ambient temperature. Even more hilarious was a thermometer of the type a chef would stuff into a piece of meat in the oven, lying on a concrete drain cover supposedly recording the temperature of air above concrete and tarmac. Oh the joys of seeing such advanced meteorology.
‘Cold weather payments, not to be confused with the winter fuel allowance paid to pensioners which the new Labour government has done away with,’
The Labour government has done away with the winter fuel allowance for most pensioners but not for all, not for the ‘poorest pensioners’, not for pensioners who receive Pension Credit.
It is very hard to devise a system that is fair to everyone. The Sheffield thermometer is representative for most people living in the urban heat island city, a few outside in rural valleys may be impacted as you say. I don’t know how the MO currently calculates the database for government, a fairer system could use model-based virtual observations down to a few km grid spacing.
…a fairer system could use model-based virtual observations…
No. Just, no.
Supplying a reason for that: The only way to assess the accuracy of such modellled temperatures is to compare them with the actual temperatures. But if these were known, modelling wouldn’t be needed.
The problem of induction – a perfect data set of observations is impossible in time and space, so there will always be a margin of error somewhere in the pipe line. If we improve the network, and had a network of thermometers every km, it would be very expensive. So modelling is far cheaper.
It is difficult. It could be minus ten outside but if it is dry cold it is very different from wet cold. It isn’t beyond human device to take this into account except it is according to their measurement-based Ahrimanic mindset. Then it is impossible. The dissipation of the water vapour from the Hunga Tonga eruption is going to take 5-7 years. And this assumes that there will be no more major underwater eruptions. You are going to have to get used to a much more inhospitable climate where it is almost impossible to grow food and this is in many places in the world. Your health is going to suffer greatly There are certain grim realities that are too ghastly to consider but you have to do so.