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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