Last month, the Daily Sceptic highlighted the practice at the U.K. Met Office of inventing temperature averages from over 100 non-existent measuring stations. Helpfully, the Met Office went so far as to supply coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary sites. Following massive interest across social media and frequent reposting of the Daily Sceptic article, the Met Office has amended its ludicrous claims. The move has not been announced in public, needless to say, since drawing attention to this would open a pandora’s box and run the risk of subjecting all the Met Office temperature claims to wider scrutiny. Instead, the Met Office has discreetly renamed its “U.K. climate averages” page as “Location-specific long-term averages”.
Significant modifications have been made to the new page, designed no doubt to quash suspicions that the Met Office has been making the figures up as it went along. The original suggestion that selecting a climate station can provide a 30-year average from 1991-2020 has been replaced with the explanation that the page “is designed to display locations that provide even geographical coverage of the U.K., but it is not reflective of every weather station that has existed or the current Met Office observation network”. Under the new page the locations are still referred to as “climate stations” but the details of where they are, exactly, have been omitted.
The cynical might note that the Met Office has solved its problem of inventing data from non-existing stations by suggesting that they now arise from “locations” which may or may not bear any relation to stations that once existed, or indeed exist today. If this is a reasonable interpretation of the matter, it might suggest that the affair is far from closed.
Again we are obliged to the diligent citizen journalist Ray Sanders for drawing our attention to the unannounced Met Office changes and providing a link to the previous averages page on the Wayback Machine. The sleuthing Sanders has been on the case for some time, having discovered that three named stations near where he lives, namely Dungeness, Folkestone and Dover, did not exist. The claimed co-ordinates for Dover placed the station in the water on the local beach as shown by the Google Earth photo below.
As a result, Sanders discovered from a freedom of information request that 103 of the 302 sites marked on the climate averages listing – over a third of the total – no longer existed. Subsequently, Sanders sought further information about the methodology used to supply data for both Folkestone and Dover. In reply, the Met Office said it was unable to supply details of the observing sites requested “as this is not recorded information”. It did however disclose that for non-existent stations “we use regression analysis to create a model of the relationship between each station and others in the network”. This generates an estimate for each month when the station is not operating. Each “estimate” is said to be based on data from six other stations, chosen because they are “well correlated” with the target station.
In the case of Dover, the nearest ‘station’ is seven miles away at non-existent Folkestone followed by Manston which is 15 miles distant. By “well correlated” perhaps the Met Office means they are in the same county of Kent. No matter, computer models are on hand to guide the way.
Ray Sanders had sent details of his findings to the new Labour science minister Peter Kyle MP and the recent Met Office changes may have been promoted by a discreet political push. At the time, Sanders asked: “How would any reasonable observer know that the data was not real and was simply ‘made up’ by a Government agency?” He called for an open declaration of likely inaccuracies of existing published data “to avoid other institutions and researchers using unreliable data and reaching erroneous conclusions”.
The Met Office also runs an historical data section where a number of sites with long records of temperature are identified. Lowestoft closed in 2010 and since then the figures have been estimated. The stations at Nairn Druim, Paisley and Newton Rigg have also closed but are still reporting estimated monthly data. “Why would any scientific organisation feel the need to publish what can only be described as fiction?” asks Sanders.
The original Braemar station in Aberdeenshire has recorded temperature data since Victorian times. Due to its interesting topography surrounded by high mountains, it recorded the U.K.’s coldest temperature of -27.2°C in both 1895 and 1982. In summer, the temperature can soar as the heat stays trapped. A new site, some distance from the original, was set up in 2005 and in common with Met Office procedure was labelled Braemar 2 to reflect both distance and climatological differences. In the historical data section of the Met’s website, Braemar 2 is shown supplying data back to 1959. “For reasons I find difficult to understand, the Met Office has chosen to highlight a spurious merging of two notably different data sets for an illogically defined period that fails to represent either site,” observes Sanders.
The recent changes made by the Met Office to its climate average pages shows that the state-funded operation is fully aware of the growing interest in its entire temperature recording business. This interest has grown because the Met Office is fully committed to using its data to promote the Net Zero political fantasy. But it is silent on the biggest concern that has been raised of late, namely the promotion of temperatures, accurate to one hundredth of a degree centigrade, obtained from a nationwide network where nearly eight out of 10 stations are so poorly sited they have internationally-recognised ‘uncertainties’ as high as 5°C.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Super accurate then?
“Location-specific long-term averages”
In other words “codswallop”
“We’re all doomed” by a week on Tuesday!
Resort to jargonese = attempts to baffle “the layman” = cover up = they have being telling porkies and been found out.
“Location-specific long-term averages” is in fact another Met Office outright lie so let’s tell it as it is.
This lying by the UK Met Office has world-wide implications for the entire evidence base for the carbon-caused Climate Change fantasy.
Justifying Why It is All a Big Lie
The averages are not “location-specific“. It is a lie and the Met Office is lying.
There is nothing “location-specific” about the averages. They are not averages of a temperatures of a specific location. And that also means they cannot be averages of temperature records which have never existed.
They are made up estimates based on non-existent temperature measurements which are non-existent because they were never ever made.
They are also not “long-term” averages. To be a long-term average means there were measurements made over the long-term so without those measurements the average cannot be “long-term”.
Met Office Lies Undermine all Climate Change Science Claims Worldwide
So anything published in any scientific journal or elsewhere which in any way relies on Met Office data is to be discounted in its entirety.
Anything the Met Office claims about supposed ‘Climate Change‘ must be dismissed as outright fantasy. Plus the work of others anywhere in the world which relies on the outputs of the lying Met Office must also be discounted.
Why? Most especially in the case of journal-published scientific claims it shows the authors have failed to check the reliability of the data they based their claims upon.
As the Met Office data has not been checked it means none of the other data from any other sources can be relied upon as it is suspect as not having been checked for reliability either.
And the big question is: as the Met Office lies outright over something as basic as this, how much else does the Met Office lie about? And as the UK Met Office is outright lying, how many other organisations worldwide are making up basic data to lie to maintain what is clearly a Carbon-Caused Climate Change fantasy [the 4Cs fantasy] based on lies.
The 4Cs Fantasy
This episode of proven lying shows the whole issue must be taken back to the start.
As the Met Office lies pour scorn over the 4Cs Fantasy, we must ask what is the evidence world-wide climates are changing?
If there is no good convincing evidence then the 4Cs Fantasy must be consigned to the waste-bin of history.
If climates are changing, what are the real, the true drivers of this? And are those drivers anything humans can do anything to change.
The UK Labour Government Hypocrisy over Climate Change
We know that there is nothing the UK can do regarding carbon dioxide emissions that will make any difference at all compared to the increasing outputs of other countries including China, India and the USA.
What is worse is it is not merely hypocrisy but economic political and social suicide.
We still buy products created with energy from carbon emitting sources. So we are all still contributing to carbon-dioxide emissions and on the same scale as we always have done.
The only difference is we don’t make the products here. And shipping them contributes to carbon-dioxide emissions just as their manufacture does.
If we are to reduce the UK to ‘net zero’ we have to stop importing goods made in countries using energy from carbon-dioxide emitting sources.
No amount of unsightly wind turbines will change that.
What does that mean? Welcome to the Stone Age, mass starvation, misery and deaths from winter low temperatures.
“the Met Office has discreetly renamed its “U.K. climate averages” page as “Location-specific long-term averages””
Have they quietly admitted that averaging temperatures across locations is nonsense?
They seem to have acknowledged that ‘location-specific’ weather does not represent ‘climate’.
Or even weather it seems.
I am at a loss to understand why the number of stations would be reduced snd why poorly sited ones are not moved.
The capital cost of such of a station cannot be large and running costs surely small if automatic recording and communication methods are used.
That’s an easy one. The data would not support the alarmists.
Beautifully put. Exactly, the truth would not support the alarmists.
Indeed, there you are, at a loss to understand. That’s because you are concerned with the stated aim of the enterprise. Which would be to provide accurate data, or summut. While what this indicates is that you are disadvantaged by an unwarranted focus on reality or objective truth, or in fact any objectivity. This is all so yesteryear, while now the organisation focuses on its part in the greater narrative, which is so much more important to the personal objectives of its transient leaders than any “reality stuff” you might think is important. They have careers to build. Have some empathy, why don’t you.
Setting out and defending / justifying ‘the story’
/sarc!
In the 1970s and 1980s I used to see in IT departments a small poster which read “We are so used to delivering so much with so little we will soon be expected to deliver everything with nothing”. I think it expressed the frustration of IT geeks that management would not buy them the latest kit every year.
Perhaps tax payers should have posters which read :We are so used to paying so much for so little from government that we will soon pay them everything and get nothing in return”. About right I think.
And all fed into a model whose underlying formulae can be tweaked as necessary to provide the “data” which supports any cause you like.
A perversion of empirical scientific observation.
I’m not advertising, but as it says here: https://temperature.co.uk/what-is-thermometer-accuracy/ “An accurate and frequently calibrated thermometer is still only as reliable as its user. If measurements are not taken carefully and correctly, the results will still not be accurate.”.
And now having moved to electronic devices there is the question of the rate of data recording. Is a reading that lasts for a second one that should be recorded given that no living thing would notice it. Is 5 minutes still too short a time interval? An hour?
This article fails to reproduce a key paragraph from the Met Office website:
“Where stations are currently closed in this dataset, well-correlated observations from other nearby stations are used to help inform latest long-term average figures in order to preserve the long-term usability of the data. Similar peer-reviewed scientific methods are used by meteorological organisations around the world to maintain the continuity of long-term datasets.”
It is certainly possible to estimate MONTHLY AVERAGE temperatures that would have been produced at stations that have closed, using data from nearby stations. If you plot the data from nearby stations you will find that they fluctuate in LOCK STEP, it is a simple algorithm to estimate any missing values, no “computer model” is involved.
Far from being critical of the approach of the Met Office we should congratulate it on avoiding “homogenisation”, the highly error prone method used by other countries, though this may be more luck than judgement.
Cobblers! SIMILAR is the word you should take notice of, the scientific observation of the atmosphere is not based on similar!
You obviously work for the met office and follow the agenda
That’s a really useful term you have there…LOCK STEP. In capitals, it’s so much more rigorous than lying statistics and clearly so scientific that further scepticism is unwarranted. Since all these thermometers change together in LOCK STEP why indeed should we bother with taking any actual readings, what a waste of time.
Here is an example of monthly average maximum temperatures from stations in Lincolnshire:
A few questions or comments.
1) There’s no key. Are there only two stations in Lincolnshire represented by the blue and pink lines?
2) The title says it’s ‘JULY AVERAGE Tmax TEMPERATURES’ but you describe it as ‘monthly average maximum temperatures’. Is it monthly temperatures averaged or just July temperatures?
3) The title says it is ‘shifted to a common average’. I don’t know what that means but it sounds like the data has been manipulated is some way other than averaging.
1) There are data for 4 stations (black, red, blue and mauve), they are so in LOCK-STEP that they obscure each other.
2) I should have said: monthly average maximum temperatures … for July.
3) Temperatures are a bit different on average at these 4 stations, the data has simply been offset in the plot to eliminate this difference, revealing the LOCK-STEP nature of monthly averages … and revealing how July temperatures have changed in Lincolnshire.
I’ve zoomed in on the chart image and can see the four colours you mention.
I’m still not sure what you mean.
Taking, for example, what appears to be the high peak for 2006 (without a vertical grid I’m not completely sure): blue=28.2, red=27.7, mauve=27.5, black=27.1 (approximately, within my ability to read the temperatures accurately from the chart). Does ‘shifted to a common average’ mean that these are not actually the average of the July Tmax readings for these stations and that some have been shifted up or down to emphasise the ‘lock-step’ nature of the rise and fall?
Though there are supposedly 4 stations, based on the article, are there actually 4 independently operating stations or is there just one that the other 3 lock step into?
You’re suggesting they did the calculations on paper? Of course it’s a computer model. It may be a simple one, I’ll admit, but it’s a computer model and not measurement. As for fluctuations being in ‘lock-step’; why not just take a single measurement somewhere and estimate the rest if the relationship between stations is so predictable?
Sorry, shouldn’t give them ideas.
Your claim is false. You need to define ‘nearby’ precisely. When temperatures to a precision of one hundredth of a degree centigrade are required and produced by a calculation, algorithm or model ( the terms are essentially the same ) the relationship between the theoretical/closed location and other locations is affected by a number of physical factors as well as insolation, windspeed and direction. The much vaunted Welsh temperature record at an airfield in July 2022 of 37.1 deg C was more than 6 degrees hotter than 2 ‘nearby’ stations
It is certainly possible to estimate MONTHLY AVERAGE temperatures that would have been produced at stations that have closed, using data from nearby stations. If you plot the data from nearby stations you will find that they fluctuate in LOCK STEP, it is a simple algorithm to estimate any missing values, no “computer model” is involved.
At best, it can be known that they fluctuated in lock step during a certain, arbitrary chosen historical period. This means neither that they did already fluctuate in lockstep before the observation period began nor that they would have continued to do so forever in future. Both may well be the case. But that’s not known. Just assumed.
This also lends itself to a reductio ad absurdum: If any one station can be replaced with an estimate based on nearby stations, all of these nearby stations can themselves be replaced with estimated based on stations nearby to them and so forth, until no more temperature measurement stations are left and all published numbers are estimates how temperature is assumed to change based on records from the time when temperature measurement stations still existed.
That reminds me of a sci-fi story in which the US election was decided by a single voter’s choice, based on his being chosen as the quintessentially average voter. Nothing in nature varies in lockstep, and real data is always surprising.
Question. Are the temperature measuring instruments from nearby stations and the instruments from the closed stations, all calibrated to the same standard reference instrument to make sure discrepancies in accuracy are all in LOCK STEP?
It is called Gridding where temperatures are created – made up or calculated – for areas where no recording station exists. Jo Nova has shown how bad some of this is in Australia which, along with their change to digital recording, failed to correlate with the old instruments. And then on top of this the homogenisation is still applied to give a temperature record which could kindly be described as complete bollocks.
Interested to know why the missing stations data has to be ‘estimated’ – why can’t they simply stop recording and miss that item out / reduce the total size, if it’s an average? I’d assume if they let the stations disappear then they don’t consider them of value in the first place? (Or perhaps land was built on etc?)
This is deliberate deception by a Government Agency to push the propaganda.
Who authorised it?
Also worth noting that it has been maintained through a few changes of government. So the deception is clearly “democracy independent” as well as “scientifically unsupported”.
George Soros?
The pseudo scientific fraud —-Yet some alarmist morons would have all the “deniers” jailed. We are now about to be hit on our electricity bills with paying for new Nuclear plants to reach net zero. —Now don’t get me wrong. Nuclear Energy is what we should have been building 20 years ago. But this government wants to do it to pretend to save the planet since Nuclear has zero emissions. They are not doing it to give us reliable energy. And ofcourse that will be another couple of hundred quid on our bill.——–The Met office helps justify all of this crap with its phony temperature data to help keep the climate scam fresh in our minds
Exactly – if we’d started 30-40 years back we’d now be electricity self sufficient largely, like France
A bit improvised but it sort-of fits the article.
In summary: none of the temperatures published are temperatures, just invented numbers.
You don’t need any of this crap just use your own eyes if you are wondering if the weather has gotten warmer or colder. Much of Europe has been experiencing very foggy conditions for the last few months. Much higher than average expenditure on heating. Stick to the basics and you can’t go wrong. If are spending more on heating this year than last year then it is unlikely that the problem lies with you.
Real world experiment. Show us the stations on a map and some skeptic reader can take shadow readings.
Its almost like we need a “ofmet” regulator to keep the met office honest. But if that happens, and noticing how ofcom sometimes behaves, we should also insist on an “ofofmet” to keep “ofmet” honest too.
Whoever is in charge at the Met office needs to be sacked, and all the spurious data deleted. This has as much connection to real science as a pubic toilet. Just WHO is behind all this nonsense? And you thought Covid was a scam, this is a bigger one!
Long ago I worked as an engineer for North Thames Gas Board. Our main temperature station was beside the gas holder in Fulham Gas works. We used this temperature to predict likely demand for gas over the whole region from Southend to Slough- this temperature had been collected daily I think since 1930s. However someone decided to move the station elsewhere on the gas works and effectively trashed the historical temperature data by moving it a couple of hundred yards in a different environment.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave when we first set out to deceive”
The Met office has turned into a rather grubby, farcical outfit. Sack the lot of them.