How we laughed when the Met Office declared a UK temperature record of 40.3°C at 3.12pm on July 19th 2022, halfway down the runway at RAF Coningsby at a time when it later transpired three typhoon jets were coming into land. Mirth was unconfined when the ‘record’ that stood for 60 seconds as the temperature briefly spiked by 0.6°C was later declared by the Met Office to be a “milestone in UK climate history”. Now it appears that another nearby and busy RAF station in Lincolnshire is getting in on the ‘joke’ record business. It appears that RAF Waddington also declared a record high on the same day of 40.3°C and this has been entered into the archive run by the Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA). This is despite the Met Office itself calling the Waddington reading ‘suspect’ due to an application of weedkiller. Quite why this should disqualify a temperature recording four feet from the ground when jet exhaust does not is unclear, and the excuse has a touch of the ‘dog ate my homework’ about it.
Weedkiller or not, the 40.3°C recording at Waddington has found its way into the Met Office Midas Open dataset. This is said to be one of CEDA’s most popular datasets, containing historical meteorological observations back from the present to the 18th century. Popular with future scientists no doubt who will be able to point to two 40.3°C records, happy to disregard any airport heat corruptions and the even more severe warmth that seems to emanate from an application of paraquat.

Shout out again to citizen super-sleuth Ray Sanders who is undertaking a forensic review of the Met Office’s UK temperature stations (existent and non-existent) along with an examination of the operation’s published readings and data. He recently queried the archived Waddington recording and was told that “at the time” the data point was suspect due to the weedkiller treatment. He notes that the Met Office is clearly in a quandary since it has claimed the reading is suspect but the numbers passed into the archive can only have come from it. Any doubts about Coningsby can be hand-waved away with “‘peer-reviewed scientific’ data proving that such a high temperature was also ‘recorded’ elsewhere”, suggests Sanders.
The Met Office clearly owes the public and the scientific community a full explanation. Mistakes may be made with routine numbers, “but how likely with the alleged all-time UK high?” asks Sanders.
Regular readers will recall that Ray Sanders was behind the recent discovery that the Met Office had been inventing temperature averages at 103 non-existent sites. The Met Office even went so far as to supply coordinates, elevations and purposes of the imaginary sites. Following massive interest across social media and frequent reposting of a Daily Sceptic article, the Met Office discretely renamed its database as ‘location specific’ and removed station coordinates. A subsequent ‘fact check’ from Science Feedback that appeared to have been largely written by the Met Office claimed that average data from some stations was not “fabricated” but estimated using “well-correlated related neighbouring stations”. This is said to be a scientific method that is published in peer-reviewed literature. At the time, the Daily Sceptic highlighted the case of Cawood in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a pristine class 1 site with no unnatural heat corruptions and a record of excellent readings going back to 1959. Insert Cawood into the Met Office’s renamed ‘location specific’ database and no record of 30-year temperatures is available. Instead there is a reference to four other estimated stations that no longer exist, and a fifth that is 27 miles away and at a higher elevation.
Sanders has now come up with an even worse example of these imaginary readings. Just when you thought things could not get worse, he investigates the location of Norwich. This is an area closely associated with some of the Met Office’s work, with connections to the University of East Anglia and past TV recordings from a local weather centre. There have been numerous temperature recordings in Norwich since 1873, but none are supplied under ‘location specific’ Norwich. Instead the long-term average temperature for the cell area is provided from five closed stations inventing data, despite nearby open sites. Sanders is not inclined to be charitable, noting: “The facts are quite simple, the vast majority of all the Met Office’s supposedly Climate Average data is covertly concocted by a system only accepted by a tiny cabal of anonymous peer reviewers operating a witches brew of contrived data that is a closely guarded secret.”
Temperature measurements play a vital role in promoting the politicised Net Zero fantasy, so it is no accident that green activists in state-run weather operations such as the Met Office have weaponised the data. But the collecting systems were never designed to offer the precision claimed down to one hundredth of a degree centigrade. Almost the entire Met Office temperature network is blasted by unnatural heat, while rough estimates of data are widespread throughout the system. Under the World Meteorological Organisation classification system, almost 80% of the Met Offices sites are in junk classes 4 and 5 with ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C and 5°C respectively.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claims that humans have caused most global warming over the last 100 years but the UN body cannot know this and it is actually unprovable. All of these anthropogenic scares that lead to mass science ignorance and psychosis are the product of computer models attempting to measure a chaotic and non-linear atmosphere. Many of the important influences on weather and long-term climate such as water vapour and clouds are little understood. It is impossible to measure the contribution of a greenhouse gas such as carbon dioxide to any current warming (or cooling) and estimates for a doubled atmospheric amount vary widely from almost nothing in a ‘saturated’ environment to 10°C and over. An unreliable temperature record from both national and frequently upward-adjusted global datasets do little to improve what are just speculative forecasts. In the world of climate computer modelling, making small changes to data going in can lead to large changes in the forecasts going out.
But in the world of ‘settled’ climate science, possibly the most corrupted branch of science the world has ever seen – it’s Garbage in, Gospel out.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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