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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Suggest you read Isobel Hardman”s “Why Do We Get the Wrong Politicians”
After Brexit and a landslide victory the Conservatives had a huge mandate. They then squandered it by doing the total opposite of that which they claimed they would do. It was a massive betrayal and political suicide. Hence, the Conservatives are now in the political wilderness.
With the advent of Reform I believe they are now irrelevant. Never forgive, never forget.
Reform are only 2 inches to the right of Labour these days. Sir Ego Nigel isn’t going to do much of the things that people really want, and would vote for. Labour will win again in 2029 because there is no serious alternative to centre left Marxism. And the centre now originates in the far leftisphere. So being to the right of that paradigm is still socialism.
I’ve read that there has been a change of emphasis from Farage and maybe some specific differences with Lowe regarding deportation of illegals and their families, but I was not aware Reform had officially changed any of their policies as stated in their manifesto. That said, can any of them be trusted to stick by those policies?
Farage appears to have softened his views on immigration.
I think there is only a discussion to be had on legal migration, and seasonal visa’s.
Why is there even a discussion on illegal immigration, criminal or otherwise, the big clue is in the first word!
If so-called Asylum Seekers are entering UK from France, why is not France processing their Asylum application? This is a rhetorical question obviously!
What specifically did he say?
My starting point for legal migration would be to stop it now, completely. I am open to arguments but there has been so much those arguments would need to be compelling for me to change my mind.
The situation with Rupert Lowe is not a good look, it has the air of a fit up!
Time will tell, and maybe he is all they claim he is, but the timing seems a little suspect, and the whole thing could be deeply damaging for the parties prospects, especially if its all just baseless accusations.
If Lowe and Habib form another right of centre party, then that could split the “right” vote further and damage Reforms chances.
I agree
I actually think a party that campaigned on honesty, integrity, truth, transparency and accountability would have zero chance of getting elected.
People can’t handle the truth, or not enough to be meaningful.
We don’t actually want politicians that tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, warts and all, we (the electorate – not we here) want people who will soothe us with pleasant sounding platitudes and give us free stuff.
Who wants to see children drown in overcrowded dinghies in the Channel, who wants to harm the planet, or see entire species go extinct, or thousands of seabirds dying horribly in an oil slick? Optics matter.
I am sure there is an element of truth in what you say. Despite that, Trump won, and so did Milei. So it’s not impossible for someone proposing real change to get elected. Harder in Europe though, with the party systems we have.
I have high hopes for Trump and the whole MAGA movement.
So far, so good on most topics – he’s still not great on vaccines and Operation Warp Speed.
However:
I know its early days, and activist judges are doing all they can to delay, proper prosecutions take time, but many people are already getting restless and doubt is setting in!
He has been better than version 1.0.
Of course he has limited scope because of the structure of the government at both federal and state level.
Agreed, they will fight him all the way, with everything they have, for some it is very much existential.
Because most people in the Conservative party are actually socialists. They believe in big government, regulation, a centrally planned economy.
They didn’t even believe in Brexit really. They called a referendum not to win an exit but to cement staying in the EU. And campaigned for staying.
As the author says, “let’s park ourselves an inch to the right of Labor and move ever further left with them as they head towards the Greens”
Except I challenge anyone to describe to me what that inch of a difference is.
Spot on. I presume the six million who voted for them at the last election, despite all the betrayal, are either also basically socialists (though they would deny that) or they are utterly and astonishingly deluded.
And it would be measured in centimetres. (Even millimetres would be more acceptable.)
We had no Brexit, we had Brexit In Name Only – BINO.
Because we had BINO, what we did do was done badly and the Left and Remainers can point and say look how wrong we were the Leave, best we get back in ASAP, and that argument is gaining momentum. This was hardly by chance!
Bravo!
It seems that every western society, except the US at the moment, is being dragged leftward despite there being some conservatives in power or about to gain power.
I expect this is because of their permanent government (civil services) being infested with playtime Marxists and Islamists. See the UK Home Office where there are 800 Muhammadans working against our people’s interests and for the Ummah.
The Islamo-communist bloc is our problem. And note that you cannot write Islamo-left or Islamo anything in the Daily Telegraph comments. I’ve tried and it blocks your post. We already have speech control by a so called right wing paper.
Remigration! Now.
The reason right wing prime ministers do nothing is because they receive their instructions from the Deep State just as left wing prime ministers do. It’s very simple.
I submit that one reason why Britain we didn’t like the Starmer government’s first few months was because it was the first time we’ve had a government policy of any kind for decades. We don’t like the policies, they are failing and being rowed back on, but at least they believed in something, unlike any government since Thatcher. Blair’s only policy was to reinforce leftism everywhere. As for the sad collection of Eton/Oxford schmoozers we’ve had since then – policy free, directionless, debt-obsessed, spineless, and ultimately useless, all of them – and they were around before the globalists?
Firstly, democracy needs to be improved to the extent that politicians are held accountable to their pre-election pledges. Look at Germany’s next Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, for example: pre-election he promises not to touch Germany’s constitutional limit on government spending; post-election he squirms and swivels and uses every trick in the book to plunge the country into massive debt.
If a politician reneges on his pre-election promises he should be removed from office, it is that simple.
Secondly, it can be no coincidence that all Western politicians, with the exception of Trump (who is not a career politician), execute essentially the same programmes: net zero, immigration, war, pandemics, and so on. There are obviously very, very ‘big’ personalities dictating programmes in the background. As Andrew Bridgen reported (https://expose-news.com/2025/01/20/andrew-bridgen-crimes-against-humanity/):
Bridgen initially felt that it seemed unlikely that the government was involved in a conspiracy due to the perceived incompetence of leaders like David Cameron, George Osborne, Theresa May and Boris Johnson. However, Bridgen said, it has become apparent that these leaders are likely puppets in a larger conspiracy.
He mentioned the video that is going viral of Dominic Cummings exposing the fact that all Cabinet meetings are scripted. The people responsible for creating these scripts and their agendas are unknown.
What Cummins said regarding scripted meetings is “absolutely true” Bridgen said. He often met immense resistance and pushback when trying to discuss certain topics with ministers that they didn’t want to talk about, such as HS2 or that Gulf War syndrome was caused by vaccines.
Who are these people dictating their policies to our politicians?
Those on the Right need to understand that Blair broke the ‘Crown In Parliament’, by outsourcing decision making to QUANGOs, allowing the government to plead plausible deniability: we can’t start fraccing, because the Climate Change Committee won’t allow it, as well as Carney’s Bank of England. And so we drift, directionless. David Starkey, Matthew Goodwin, and many others can see that, without fundamental change, to return to pre-Blair, everything will remain the same.
Unless a party has a detailed manifesto, including these changes, winning a General Election will be pointless, as the House of Lords will veto EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING.
And Farage is stopping this manifesto from ever being assembled. It needs many people, with a variety of specializations, from STEM, Medicine, Business, (even Football Clubs), Supply Chain Management, Finance, Manufacturing, Mining, and a will to enforce our laws, not foreign laws. Without that the political effort will be wasted, as well as another five years.
And Nigel has let the cat out of the bag, in the first two minutes:
https://youtu.be/HnZ7jsuK7ws