Pressure is likely to grow in the coming days for the U.K. Met Office to make a full public statement about the state of its nationwide temperature measuring stations. This follows sensational revelations in last Friday’s Daily Sceptic that nearly eight out of ten sites had huge scientifically-designated ‘uncertainties’ that essentially disqualified them from providing the accurate data required to promote the collectivist Net Zero agenda. Our report went viral on social media with over 1,300 retweets on X, and it was reposted on a number of sites. The investigative journalist Paul Homewood has covered the Met Office’s temperature claims for many years, and in the light of the new disclosures he noted that if it wanted to continue to use its existing station measurements, it should show a warning that the margin of error is so great “that they have no statistical significance at all”.
Specifically, nearly one in three (29.2%) Met Office sites are rated by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) as CIMO Class 5, and this comes with a warning of “estimated uncertainties added by siting of 5°C”. Class 5 can be termed a ‘junk’ rating since the WMO gives no guidance on where it can be located. The next to junk Class 4 comes with uncertainties of 2°C, while Class 3 has a 1°C warning. From information disclosed under a Freedom of Information request, the Daily Sceptic compiled the graph below that shows Class 4 accounted for 48.7% of the Met Office’s 380 recording stations. Only 13.7%, or 52 stations are free of ‘uncertainties’ warnings.
Net Zero promotion requires reasonably precise measurements of both local and global temperatures and these are simply not available. In the run-up to last year’s COP28 meeting, the BBC ran an explanatory article on the significance of the 1.5°C threshold, a rise of the Earth’s temperature based on the ending of the Little Ice Age. “Every tenth of a degree of warming matters, but as you get warmer each increment matters more”, said Myles Allen, Professor of Geosystem Science at the University of Oxford, and a co-ordinating author of the IPCC’s special report on 1.5°C in 2018. It is difficult to see how precision down to 0.1°C can be achieved by consulting current Met Office data, let alone the ability to claim to two decimal points, as the Met Office did, that last year in the U.K. was only 0.06°C cooler than the all-time annual record.
Comments on social media following the Daily Sceptic publication were often damning. On Homewood’s site, ‘YorksChris’ observed, “wow, this is horrendous… some of the locations of the so-called professional stations simply amaze me!”, while ‘magasox’ commented that this was huge, adding, “sceptics should shout it from the rooftops at every opportunity”. Heads, he felt, should roll, “but of course they won’t”. On the Daily Sceptic blog, ‘For a fist full of roubles’ looked forward to mainstream media latching on to this, “and revealing how the powers that be deliberately mislead us”. On the U.S.-based Watts Up With That? site over 300 posts greeted the news, with ‘UK-Weather-Lass’ stating: “It’s about time there was a public inquiry into how rotten and unfit for purpose the Met Office is, and why it is allowed to continue to be so.”
The problems with the Met Office data are mainly caused by increasing urbanisation which has encroached on the space around stations and corrupted measurements with artificial heat. Similar problems have been identified around the world leading to ever-increasing doubts about the accuracy of frequently quoted ‘global’ temperatures. Scientists estimate that heat corruption is likely to be responsible for up to 30% of warming claimed by the meteorological databases. The Met Office adds its figures to global compilations but the increasingly politicised state-funded operation also uses its data to declare almost constant temperature ‘records’. The Daily Sceptic has investigated the heat records declared since 2000 and found that all bar two should be disqualified. Many of them have been set in ‘junk’ Class 5 and most of the rest in Class 4.
Class 5 records include the highest daily maximum temperature in Northern Ireland, declared in 2021 at Castlederg. The highest January monthly temperature was set this year at Achfary and this Class 5 site also holds the record set in December 2019. Three U.K. area records were also set at Class 5 sites including England NW, East Anglia and England SE and Central S. The latter record was provided by St. James’s Park, which was one of five sites that was said to top 40°C on July 19th, 2022. This particular event was lauded at the time by the Met Office as a “milestone in climate history”. Another one of the 40°C sites, Northolt airport, is also Class 5.
According to the WMO, a Class 5 site is one where nearby obstacles “create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”. According to a previous FOI request from Paul Homewood, the Met Office noted that Class 5 data, “will be flagged and not quoted in national records”. This does not appear to happen. On July 25th, 2019, the site at the Cambridge Botanic Gardens was credited with a new U.K. temperature record of 38.7°C. The Cambridge Botanic Gardens is a Class 5 site, and it still holds the July record for the region of East Anglia. All these records should be removed, or at least flagged with the large uncertainties set down by the WMO.
Ditto ‘near junk’ Class 4, where the crowd of record holders is higher. Class 4 sites include Charterhall where the highest Scottish temperature was set in 2022, and Hawarden Airport, home to the highest Welsh recording. A monthly U.K. record for August was set in 2003 at Faversham, while no less than five U.K. areas have records attributed to this class that comes with a WMO ‘uncertainty’ of 2°C. The all-time British record was set on July 19th, 2022 at a Class 3 site, which comes with WMO uncertainty of 1°C. Set halfway down the runway at RAF Coningsby, the record stood for just 60 seconds at 3:12pm, and was preceded by a rise and fall of 0.6°C either side of the event. A previous FOI from the Daily Sceptic disclosed that three typhoon fighter jets were landing on the runway at or around the time the record was set. All of these records should also be ditched as well, or given appropriate warnings.
So far as can be seen, no Met Office heat record has been set since 2000 at pristine Class 1 sites, which might not surprise given there are only 24 of them. Only two – the highest U.K. February temperature at 21.2°C and November at 22.4°C – have been set at near pristine Class 2 locations.
Most propagandising for Net Zero revolves around higher temperatures, and without this ammunition the project will quickly wither. It explains why these so-called ‘records’ are rarely out of the mainstream media headlines. The high temperature readings are weaponised at the national level, but local media is also targeted. This can be shown by considering the photograph below from Google Earth.
This is the site of the Sheffield temperature station. On July 19th, 2022, the local Star newspaper reported that the city had smashed the temperature record with over 39°C for the first time. According to the Met Office, the newspaper reported, the record reached 39.4°C on July 18th. The red marker shows where the Sheffield readings are taken, hard by a busy road with a large bus lane, surrounded by either city buildings or heavy vegetation, and located at or near what appears to be a concrete park. It might not surprise to learn that Sheffield is a Class 5 site.
The Met Office’s Chief Scientist and leading Net Zero promoter Professor Stephen Belcher states that “in a climate unaffected by human influence, climate modelling shows that it is virtually impossible for temperatures in the U.K. to reach 40°C”. It is not thought he was referring to the influence of typhoon jets or the 95 bus.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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‘in a climate unaffected by human influence, climate modelling shows that it is virtually impossible for temperatures in the U.K. to reach 40C°’
Errr….climate modelling is the very definition of ‘human influence’
Hence ‘Man-made’ global warming.
“mainly caused by increasing urbanisation”
So ‘Climate Change” is really due in large part to immigration and not the climate changing – .
Thanks Tony Blair – you started it in 1997 and the Tories have continued it for the past 14 years.
The two problems are just one.
Yippee. We can dump net zero. Problem solved.
Now, about those pesky small boat crossings ……
[As of 2021 – 9 million of our population is foreign born/foreign citizens – 4 million EU and 5 million non EU:
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/migrants-in-the-uk-an-overview/
It will be higher now of course in 2024. And that does not include the increase attributable to children born in the UK to foreign born parents].
Chris, is it possible to compare the readings of the different classes of sites over time?
The problem is: the measuring instruments are not calibrated to a standard reference instrument. They are of different ages and types, and therefore differing degrees of accuracy.
Some instruments have replaced older instruments, some stations have been moved, many started off in fields and are now surrounded by buildings.
The whole thing is a non-scientific mess. Comparisons therefore are meaningless, as are the alleged temperatures we are quoted.
in fact they are not temperatures, they are numbers as they do not represent direct readings, but the output of mathematical formulæ using averages (so there’s the first inaccuracy) and modelling using algorithms supposedly to correct for things like station drop-out, instrument changes, station location changes and local heat bias.
In other words just guesswork and manipulation, but designed always to demonstrate… hottest ever.
How ridiculous – someone down voted that comment!!
Anonymous down voting should be made a hanging offence.
Yes. Anthony Watts of https://wattsupwiththat.com/ got people to survey rural weather stations in the USA, verify they were kosher (e.g had not had airports built around them, etc.) calculated the warming they had recorded over ?50? years.
They showed cooling.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/27/new-surface-stations-report-released-its-worse-than-we-thought/
http://surfacestations.org/
See also paper and article on European temperature fiddling, above
When I were a lad doing physics,we were always required to indicate the precision of a result by stating the error with a ± sign.
It’s rather simple the entire green movement is a Marxist death cult. The end.
Marxist as in this government, the globalists?
wokeman
Be careful – I hear the Labour Party’s new definition of Islamophobia includes fear of Islamic extremism borrowing from Marxism.
[The Marxist roots of Islamic extremism. Everything is permitted, because history says so. That is Marx’s lesson.
Just kidding.]
And I still do not understand why a phobia [fear] of being attacked in the street by Islamic extremists [Islamophobia] is claimed to be wrong and even to be criminalised.
That is making fear itself a crime!!!! It is bonkers. But hey, no more bonkers than chicks with dicks by law. Get on message sheeple and line up and join the ranks of the obedient unwashed.
The temperature record of earth is a dog’s breakfast of heavily manipulated and adjusted (homogenised) data. Yet all the time we see claims of “warmest years”. “The hottest since records began” etc etc. ——–This clear distortion of data to fit a particular narrative that humans are dangerously raising temperatures and speculations that this will cause extreme weather, death and destruction is the biggest pseudo scientific fraud ever perpetrated. But how are the general public to ever get the opportunity to decide that for themselves when their mainstream news programs are all singing from the same global government hymn sheet? Media and news is regulated by OFCOM, which is basically just censorship. There are only 2 channels where you will hear any questions asked about energy policy based on the “official science” —-GB News and Talk TV (mainly Hartley Brewer), but those have lower levels of viewers. Incredibly 70% of people still get their news from the BBC. ——–Almost everything we hear on those mainstream bought and paid for channels is a smidgeon of the truth elevated into a planetary emergency for which no evidence exists. Yet quite astonishingly the UK parliament saw fit to force this country in law to spend several trillions on NET ZERO and it may well be that after the next election the new Labour Government will set about silencing GB News and Talk TV as they will be accused of incitement to break the law.
Sheffield weather station is in Weston Park opposite the children’s hospital and on the road that goes to the Snake Pass and several major suburbs. Usually there is a queue of idling traffic waiting to get into the hospital car park.
Needed more caffeine before I posted. The queue of traffic is at the adjacent Weston Park hospital.
Whilst I fully agree with the substance of this article, as a resident who lives in the area, I have to point out that the weather station in Sheffield is not where the Google pin is (ie in the main road) but at least 20 metres into the small urban park at the top of the photo.
However, the park is in a heavily urbanised part of Sheffield, with construction work having occurred at the hospital on the other side of the main road for much of the past few years.
Temperature can vary between countryside and urban area by a significant amount (several degrees). So remember that temperature stations have been around for over one hundred years and longer, and the areas around them have changed significantly in that time, so a station that was once in a field is now surrounded by buildings and roads, and the readings will be 2 or 3 degrees higher than they would be if the station was still located in a field. ———-When science is used for a genuine search for truth about the world everyone can support that, but once issues become highly politicised like climate change is then people need to be very suspicious. In science scepticism is the highest calling and blind faith the one unpardonable sin. —-Every aspect of the Net Zero agenda has to be questioned or it isn’t based on science as claimed. We do not live in a scientific dictatorship.
“We do not live in a scientific dictatorship.”
Not quite, yet.
wink——–Net Zero is enshrined in law and it was done with no questions asked and NO VOTE. —–So when you say “not quite yet” you are not far wrong.
The reality is the Earth’s climate system has been warming since the last ice age for about 12 000 years with no input from Mankind.
So slow (and non-linear) is the rate of increase that it is too small to be observed and measured.
The reported Man-made global warming – to tenths and hundredths of a degree – is entirely a fabrication of data manipulation to produce the Global Mean Temperature Anomaly report, and is meaningless absurd.
We are now seeing why.
“The last ice age” ??? ——-We are actually still in the current ice age called the Pleistocene and this interglacial period within this ice age is called the Holocene. This happens in the middle of all ice ages and usually lasts about 12-15000 years, but full ice age conditions will return somewhere in the net 1-3 thousand years. ——-If politicians think a little warming is a problem then they “ain’t seen nuthin yet”
Actually, as per previous interglacials, quite rapid warmth then gradual cooling with warm periods, each cooler than the last. We’ve actually been cooling for c7k years
The Club of Rome: Limits to Growth.
That is all anybody needs to know about alleged AGW or whatever flavour they give it.
It’s an open conspiracy
There is some loose thinking about records. Of course a record for the highest temperature in the UK is likely to happen at one of the places which tends to record the highest temperatures and given the definition of CIMO 4 or 5 these are likely to be CIMO 4 or 5 locations. They are still records.
If you want to trust “records” from unreliable witnesses known to have manipulated data and have been caught red handed doing so, then that is up to you. ——–Once I have identified a pack of liars I trust nothing else they have to say. ———-“Mikes Nature Trick” was the truncation of modern temperature data onto proxies from tree ring data simply because the tree ring data was no longer showing any warming from about 1961 onwards. So to maintain the illusion of warming (all caused by humans) the two data sets were joined together, but in science this is a NO NO.——-You can read all about that in Andrew Montford’s “The Hockey Stick Illusion”. A cautionary tale ——–But I suspect you will not do that because you have already decided what is true a long time ago.
What has this got to do with Met Office weather stations?
It is all part of the same issue. ——–I listen to Jim Dale (Met Office) on GB News and I have never heard such a blithering idiot climate activist that is like a hammer that sees everything as a nail——No doubt you will be a huge fan of the imbecile.
Thay might give you a record for that one instrument taken over a number of years but the argument is that many or all of these stations would have started at CIMO 1 or 2 and progressed to a 4 or 5 so producing a perceived record. So, nonsense records as far as the overall UK is concerned.
The met office is gagged. They persistently deny chem trails, calling them contrails, despite the long white trails in the sky, everywhere that do not dissipate. Despite Geoengineering, weather manipulation and chem trails being well known. Who is gagging the met office? Why?
Professor Stephen Belcher. Is he just ignorant? A ‘non-thinker’? a WEF stooge? Or any combination thereof?
Met Office should follow the USA method where they actually invent numbers for about 800 weather stations that are defunct for various reasons. Perhaps they should use tree ring data from nearby trees instead!
Why doesn’t the downticker just go away and stick to reading the Guardian where their brainwashing isn’t challenged?!
Excellent paper on temperature record “adjustment” (fraudulent tampering in reality)
https://www.theepochtimes.com/article/prominent-scientists-challenge-key-data-underlying-climate-change-agenda-5593800?src_src=partner&src_cmp=ZeroHedge
https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4433/13/2/285