Last month the average maximum temperature at Newton Rigg was 11.5°C, the lowest was 3°C, while 23mm of rain fell. Newton Rigg is near Penrith in Cumbria and in its historic database the UK Met Office claims it is an open site and is one of its 380 UK wide temperature measuring stations. This claim is also made in two Met Office lists of site class classification obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) requests in 2023 and 2024. All of which is rather strange. Newton Rigg closed in 2021 and all the data being published as climate averages are estimated, i.e., invented. The historic database contains 37 stations and seven of the total, no less than 19%, are closed or do not exist. Invented figures are also being supplied for Lowestoft, Cwmystwyth, Nairn Druim, Eastbourne, Oxford and Paisley.
The Met Office claims that monthly data are available for a selection of long-running historic stations and series typically range from 50 to more than 100 years in length. Sunshine data are noted to use a Kipp and Zonen sensor in some sites, while all the others have data recorded by a Campbell-Stokes recorder. All the others, the Met Office omitted to make clear, except those where the figures have been invented for the non-existent stations.
Of course as regular readers well know, the UK Met Office has form as long as its arm when it comes to making up temperature data. In a separate public database it was recently found that the state meteorologist was making up 30-year average temperatures from 103 non-existent stations. The Met Office referenced the station names and provided single location coordinates for the imaginary sites including one improbably based next to the water on Dover Beach. Massive social media publicity led to a rapid change, with individual coordinates being removed and the database being renamed to suggest the information came from a wider location.
A subsequent inept ‘fact check’ from Science Feedback largely written by the Met Office found it “misleading” to suggest that the data were “fabricated”. Rather they were estimated using “well-correlated neighbouring stations”. Alas for this explanation, it was subsequently revealed that the location of Norwich in this dataset uses supposedly well-correlated information from five stations that do not exist. The Met Office claims its estimates use a scientific method that is published in peer-reviewed literature.
Of course at this stage in our corresponding we must give our regular shout out to citizen super-sleuth Ray Sanders. Writing on Tallbloke’s Talkshop, Sanders is undertaking a forensic investigation of the Met Office’s weather data gathering operations. In his recent investigation into the Newton Rigg site he provides the following photographic evidence of its closure. First the site in April 2021, based in the grounds of a college campus. The measuring device is clearly visible in the near centre of the picture.
The same site in July 2022 confirms the closure, despite the Met Office still claiming on its historic database that the site is still open.
And here according to Sanders is the screen shot take from the current historic database that shows the Met Office is still claiming with an orange tag that Newton Rigg is open.
Sanders is withering in his concluding criticism:
The Met Office is operating in an extremely unscientific and even incompetent manner. Analysis of such incomplete and inaccurate, even invented numbers is a futile exercise. That such non-data are being statistically tortured to the Nth degree by alleged peer-review scientific processes is frankly a bad joke and completely unacceptable.
The Daily Sceptic had noted on a number of occasions that the Met Office has only itself to blame for a tidal wave of bad publicity that has arisen over its obviously defective weather measuring network. The network across the UK was never intended to provide the precision that is being claimed, but internal activists have weaponised the data to invoke climate panic in the interest of promoting the Net Zero fantasy. Despite nearly 80% of its weather stations being so badly placed they have internationally recognised ‘uncertainties’ between 2-5°C, political capital is made by claiming accuracy to within one hundredth of a degree centigrade.
Possibly the Met Office feels protected from criticism since both mainstream media and mainstream politics have avoided the story like the plague, fearful, of course, that it could open a pandora’s box on the temperature inputs that back the agreed Net Zero narrative. But the dam might be starting to burst with the Scottish Daily Express running a story last January noting that “most of Scotland’s Met Office stations can be wrong by two to five degrees”. The newspaper did its own FOI request and found that only three out of 95 local stations were rated at the highest pristine standard by the World Meteorological Organisation.
Needless to say, there are no holds barred on uncensored social media, a far more important communicating vehicle these days than fast-fading, narrative-driven legacy operations. Recently, the Met Office posted some of its own research on X that claimed the wildfires that broke out during a brief UK 2022 heatwave were made “at least six times” more likely due to human-caused climate change. Complete unprovable pseudoscience attribution twaddle, some would argue, and this view was seemingly shared in many of the 200 plus responses.
“Give it a rest”
“Utter ballcocks. It was human induced arson. You really are the stupidest scientists.”
“Was this ‘research’ carried out using fiddled figures produced by stations which don’t exist.”
“Is that real data. Or more stuff from imaginary weather stations?”
“It’s your job to forecast the weather, not to broadcast propaganda.”
Recently, the Eighth Fake News Awards went viral on social media. The professionally-produced film pulled no punches in awarding one of its unwelcome gongs to the Met Office for “literally making up 103 fake temperature sites reporting 30-year averages from those non-existent sites”. It was said to be a massive ongoing scheme to control the future by controlling the past. The award was said to be deserved due to the Met Office’s “most shameless attempt at lying to the public in a field overwhelmed with people shamelessly lying to the public”.
The Met Office has a real problem in attracting this level of vociferous criticism, justified or not, since it distracts from a great deal of admirable day-to-day scientific meteorology. But it shows what can happen to public trust when an increasingly controversial political agenda disrupts the usual workings of the scientific process.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Done. Although I suspect my deeply illiberal Liberal MP, will not bother to do anything about it. As long as she can continue to wear her flowery cloth mask and support the rollout of mRNA gene therapies to children. Yey.
I use to baulk at the sight of MP’s in masks. Now I think – marvellous, keep it up, it’s helping to shorten your life.
Highly recommended.
Done. My MP is an MD as well, Conservative, so I have occasionally written about Covid-related matters. I haven’t checked his website recently so don’t know what his current position is on Covid, censorship and related matters. I think he may be sympathetic, so this is probably worth sending.
Done although I’m stuck with an SNP MP who will vote as Sturgeon tells him. I emailed him a year or so ago about the lack of credible evidence on the efficacy of face masks and received a standard reply telling me how effective they are, no discussion, he was right and I was wrong!
Well, I am delighted to say I was wrong about my SNP MP, I received this reply from him today:
Dear Kathleen
Thank you for writing to me on the free speech amendment to the Financial Services and Markets Bill tabled by Sally-Ann Hart MP.
In September 2022, I wrote to the then Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Jacob Rees-Mogg, to urge him to investigate the actions of PayPal Europe against the Free Speech Union. I await a response from his department.
The SNP group at Westminster is opposed to this Bill in its entirety and in September 2022, tabled an amendment asking for it to be withdrawn altogether. There are multiple concerns we have, including the undemocratic transfer of power to the Treasury to decide on legislation. You can read a full critique of the Bill, by my colleague Peter Grant MP here: https://hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2022-09-07/debates/031C9811-9E3E-4EE5-AADA-AB9984934DFD/FinancialServicesAndMarketsBill
With particular regard to the above amendment, my colleagues in the SNP group at Westminster have yet to agree our response but you can be sure that we will act in the best interests of the public to oppose all of the damaging consequences of the Bill passing.
I hope you find this reassuring.
Kind regards
Allan
I tried to do this. However, this campaigning tool is unusable for me and an attempt to send the mail without ended up with my message getting eaten by the internet before it could be sent. As the person who would have received that is from Labour and used to be 100% everything-COVID the Labour party ever said, it would probably have been useless, anyway.
I had the same problem. It wouldn’t send. So I copy pasted the lot when I realised there was a problem and sent it via email instead. Pain in the butt!
Done. My Conservative MP is a Woke Socialist and sadly I’ve already told her I will never vote for her nor will I ever vote Conservative unless and until the covid response is repudiated and the stables cleaned (therefore never). So she doesn’t care what I think, and a while back I stopped receiving the automatic “we’ll reply in due course” responses which I used to get, leading me to believe my email address is on a blacklist.
I write to Swayne sometimes, have written to Chope to thank him for the vaccine damage vote.
I hadn’t heard of Sall-Ann Hart so I looked her up on Wokiepedia, which features this prominently near the top of the page on her: “Following comments she made and content she shared on social media, Hart was investigated by the Conservative Party over allegations of antisemitism and Islamophobia.”. Right wing people are too busy working and living to have the time and energy to dredge up weak smears against anyone politically to the right, and police all of the pages with such smears – discuss.
Done.
I think that Simon Elmer (in James D’s excellent podcast with him) said that such things are being enforced by corporations. BTW, according to my husband, SE’s The Road to Fascism is excellent and a very important book to read.
Done. Conservative MP so there’s a chance, but I’m losing faith in the entire shower at Westminster. They seem happy to hand the reigns of political power to anyone other than themselves, whether it be the EU or corporate America.
Done. Since my MP is no longer a member of the government he may actually get around to reading it.
Luckily Toby our Government (sic) couldn’t run a p*** up in a brewery and our police force resemble the Keystone Cops. Nobody listens to these cretins any more.
Done. Second email today to the piece of CON Lobby Fodder called Chris Loder.
I doubt it will do any good, but it makes me feel better. It appears he was “too busy” to attend the recent “debate” on the Covid “Vaccine” Injured ….. along with roughly 640 other MPs.
Do we know that the “Chinese social credit system” is even a thing? They do have a system for restricting travel and certain other things for people with unpaid debts, and unlike the US no-fly list it’s not a secret list. Some interesting discussion here: https://austrianchina.substack.com/p/china-dystopia-psyop on a substack that, roughly, contends that China could not have grown as fast as it did if it was the authoritarian hellhole that it’s portrayed as in the West.
Also there is a problem with the proposed amendment referring to “purely political grounds”, in that the kinds of issues that PayPal is banning people for are not even considered political by the woke, they are considered moral or correct or scientific.
In 2004 I closed my Barclays Bank account because they withdrew banking facilities for the BNP. I wasn’t even a member of the BNP but it was clear to me that if the BNP could be cut off from banking facilities it could be UKIP next of which I was a member.
To put the added part of the letter I couldn’t send here again:
For so-called democracy to work, it is crucial that political power is only exercised through the proper democratic means. Someone who happens to work for Paypal must not be allowed to wield (or rather, abuse) the commerical power of his employer to amplify his own voice to the detriment of less fortunate others. He’s not some special human being who deserves a more prominent spot in the public debate but just another voter who’s neither above nor below all the others.
That the woke brigade constantly tries to interlope with the rights of others by (ab-)using whichever means at their disposal seem suitable for that marks them as fundamentally antidemocratic: They’re convinced that they are the ones who are justly more equal than the others. But they aren’t.
[Last paragraph added for this text]
Well I did it, as I reported earlier (below) and received this reply from my MP:
Thank you for contacting me about free speech and PayPal.
I was incredibly concerned to learn of PayPal’s recent decision to shut down certain accounts citing its “Acceptable Use Policy”. It is deeply worrying that a company can so quickly, and without warning, withdraw financial services from users likely reliant on continued funding. I will be sure to press upon my Ministerial colleagues the importance of delivering a regulatory regime that strikes the right balance between tackling illegal activity taking place online and not granting companies excessive power to act as censors.
I am grateful to you for taking the time to contact me.
Best wishes
Andrew
RT HON DR ANDREW MURRISON MP
Good man.
I still haven’t seen mention of Eventbrite’s wokery in banning one of their customers and returning tickets sold. Toby still uses Eventbrite for FSU events.
Eventbrite ‘silencing women’ by pulling ticket sales for gender-critical event (telegraph.co.uk)
Done. Unfortunately my MP is Debbie Abrahams and she is about as much use as a chocolate teapot.