Compared to the late 1960s and early 1970s, over a typical January we now enjoy almost 50% more hours of sunshine. Over the whole year, we get about 13% additional hours of sunshine. That amounts to more than 30 extra minutes of sunshine per day.
Ironically, these changes appear to be rather more to do with the absence of pollution than because of it. And surprise, surprise, more sunshine equates to higher temperatures.
Climate change is not really my bailiwick, so apologies to our in-house boffins, Ben Pile, Tilak Doshi and Chris Morrison.
However, sunshine is an area where I have skin in the game. We’ve just spent our first summer in a house with three, metre square skylights in the kitchen roof. Unless you too have skylights in the ceiling you’d struggle to imagine how much heat they generate, by breakfast time the kitchen is effectively a no-go zone. We largely solved the problem by covering the skylights with car covers, creating shade. Instantly the temperature dropped from tropical to temperate. The difference is, literally, night and day, dark and light!
As a consequence of my ‘lived experience’ I was drawn to an article by Sarah Knapton, the Telegraph’s Science Editor, that looks at the contribution of increased sunshine to the observed rises in global temperatures.
The article followed on from a recent research paper looking at how cleaner skies lets more sunshine through the atmosphere, leading to higher ground temperatures. Indeed, the paper concludes that
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‘Why haven’t we heard more about this?’
For the same reason we never hear from sceptical scientists or the fact that natural variability is far from fully understood – it doesn’t fit the narrative.
I do worry about anyone who is writing about the world warming up, climate change referencing the MET OFFICE or a MSM jounalist. Surely you know after the past four yrs the Met Office is GAGGED and MSM misinforms and is bought and paid for and prints what it is told to.
how about printing one article about “climate change and the warming of earth” written by Professor Willie Soon, an astrophysicist.
Thanks.
Exactly. The Director of the Met Office worships at the altar of “man made climate change”.
Most likely
Great read – and enjoying the new look website very much!
It’s rarely mentioned, however having hundreds and hundreds of wind turbines in the sea off the coast of the UK removing energy from the wind and slowing the air flow across the land, must be having a significant impact on the temperatures as well. In science, you can’t destroy energy, only move it from one form to another… electricity in this case
The work of Svensmark and Christiansen have shown that particulates act as nuclei for clouds and with the increase in sunshine has been a reduction in clouds. Their work has also shown that cosmic particles seed clouds too and therefore the rise and fall of solar activity has an effect on our planet.
100%.
Clouds form when water vapour condenses onto microscopic particles called cloud condensation nuclei (CCN), producing tiny liquid water droplets or ice crystals. This was taught to me in the 1970s and was first documented in the 1870s.
Funnily enough, the IPCC has repeatedly identified cloud feedbacks as one of the largest contributors to uncertainty in estimates of climate sensitivity. Water vapour makes up to 4% of the atmosphere by volume, whilst C02 is around 0.04%.In other words, they haven’t a clue what the effects of the largest contributor to the so-called “greenhouse effect” are – which renders their models total garbage.
Sadly, Svensmark has recently been fired by the University of Copenhagen and his research into cloud processes and solar influence is likely to finish.
Interesting article. On your graphs my eye was instinctively drawn to 1976, which seems to have had the third highest hours for August but only just above the average total hours of 1991-2020. Nobody who experienced that summer in England is likely to forget it, but I would say that this summer, last summer and 2023 were at least as ‘sunny’.
The heading picture shows a heath fire as if rising temperatures are linked. There are forest/brush fires where ever there are forests with a build up of dead leaves and wood and that is dry.
As a reminder – There are 3 elements required to make a fire; fuel, oxygen and and ignition source. To the ideological possessed they may focus on the ‘heat’ and think that if the sun shines strong enough then trees, grass and houses will spontaneously combust. Someone actually tried to explain to me how hot weather will make trees and bushes catch fire! However, if you look up how to start a fire then heat is not mentioned, such as…
Some common methods for starting a fire include:
1. lighters.
2. matches.
3. fire by friction (we won’t actually be covering that here)
4. flint and steel.
5. “ferro” rods.
6. electrical sparks (more of a novelty, but fun nonetheless)
If heat is required to start a fire then what temperature is needed? Wood placed in an oven will spontaneously catch fire when the temperature reaches 700°F. At oven temperatures of 450°-500°F, the wood gradually chars and usually ignites after several hours. 700°F is 371°C, which… Read more »
Heath fires used to be set deliberately to burn off excess fuel and encourage new growth. Now we don’t do that deliberately it happens anyway and we call it a wildfire. Yes, a wildfire is worse – but mostly because people have not prepared by moving farm animals out of the way and are not at standby to control it and put it out when a big enough area has been burnt off.
They also used to happy by nature alone I would imagine, long before we learnt to walk upright, with lightning being the main ignition source…
True, and there used to be fire beater stands that were for anyone to use. I took part in numerous forest fires in 1976 using the readily available fire beaters,
Does Britain have “record-breaking high temperatures”? News to me….
Well, I suppose if the records say we do, then it must be true. The records are true, because the MET Office is infallible. The MET Office is infallible because the BBC says so.
The effect round here may be corrected – more warmth, more barbecues (cough, cough).
Why use a photo of a wildfire to head up this article? That’s the sort of thing the BBC would do. I would suggest that wildfires are due more to prolonged spells of dry weather coupled with human carelessness and vandalism than a small rise in average global temperatures.
Dunwich Heath fire is due to the idiots at the National Trust not using controlled burns to reduce fuel load and so we have a big uncontrolled inferno raging that will damage what they were supposed to be protecting. Experienced moorland and heath managers have said that we can expect more big fires due to the misguided government policy influenced by the enviroMentals.
It’s certainly an interesting idea that clearer skies lead to greater warming. However, can we trust the data?
The long running temperature data is often pilloried for poor detector siting and a change of instruments from liquid-in-glass thermometers to faster reacting detectors and minute-by-minute recording and urban environment encroaching on previously well sited instruments.
I’d be surprised if the instruments used to measure sunshine duration have not changed in the last 116 years – perhaps particularly around the 1970s? Who knows?
Quite simply the human race has not existed long enough to have an accurate veiw of this planets climate and has certainly not had long enough to accurately record anymore than a blink of an eye data over the lifetime of climate on the earth
Ice cores and fossil records give us clues but are not guaranteed accurate data, we needed to have been there
This planet is in charge of us not vice versa!
Also, there is no single Earth climate, just as there is no single Earth temperature. There are over 30 main Earth climates with quite a few countries having 10 or 15 and ranging from Polar to Arid.
Using any of the standard climate classifications I defy Sir David to classify Earth’s climate as a single entity.
I remember reading an interesting article some time ago which suggested that “decarbonising” maritime transport would lead to clearer skies and higher temperatures.
In addition the banning of high sulphur fuel for ships deliberately set out to reduce the effects of such fuel which created acid rain. This was regarded as a success… yet it would appear that there might be unexpected consequences.
Now you may argue that reductions in high sulphur fuel and the cumulative effects of the Clean Air Acts in the UK have improved the environment – we don’t want dead trees or killing smogs. But perhaps the benefits have to be assessed properly.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the modelled rise in global temperatures failed to take into consideration these particular deliberate ‘works of man’.
So the use of cleaner, and more expensive fuel given that nothing ‘green’ is ever cheaper, intended to reduce global warming has actually made it warmer. Yet another left wing policy fail.
Sulphur in the air is also an effective fungicide, could the reduction in this be partly responsible for the ‘ash
die back’ plague ing our woodlands?
I think you would need perhaps a dozen countries (with records stretching back over a similar time) in order to make comparisons. If there was a consistent correlation then it would be worth investigating thoroughly.
You don’t have to be a climate scientist to understand that climate models that don’t take this into account are doomed to give a wrong answer.
Will that be ‘the right wrong answer’ as far as Climate Scientists TM are concerned…
I’ve got a long-running anonymised thread on climate science with a AI chatbot, so I asked it about this specific question.
There is some provision in global models for aerosol effects, but they are currently underestimating the observed degree of warming by as much as ~0.5C. In other words, the reduction in air pollution is causing a bigger rise in temperature than the models would predict.
What’s particularly interesting is that Europe has its own regional climate model, EURO-CORDEX. While not specifically EU funded, according to AI, nevertheless it operates within EU frameworks. This model assumes the aerosol effect is constant, which is not the case according to the data.
This regional model is underestimating warming due to aerosol reduction by as much as ~0.8C.
The results of this modelling feed into all sorts of EU policy areas, especially things like agricultural planning.
Given that we’re all supposed to panic en masse if the temperature rises more than 1.5C from pre-industrial levels, this discrepancy is huge.
I beg to differ the increased hours of sunshine in the winter. I ain’t a scientist either, but the last two winters I recall, have been constant grey, dreary, cloudy skies. I longed to see the sun on a cold fresh crisp frosty morning. I miss those days.
Perhaps but this is about the clear sky days and how much sunlight gets through then.
The second chart in the article shows sunshine hours for Winter 2024-2026 being back down at around 160 hours. A considerable drop from the 220 hours or so in Winter 2019 and 2023. This supports your opinion of grey, dreary, cloudy skies in recent Winters. It’s not inconsistent with there being an increasing trend though.
Frosty Winter mornings? Yes. Lovely dog-walking weather.