From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness/Robin Guenier
What an utterly absurd report! This year has been one of the least extreme on record in England.
Quite when the National Trust became climate experts, I have no idea!
The National Trust has warned that extreme weather seen in the UK in 2022 has set a benchmark for what a typical year could be like from now on.
The charity said high temperatures, drought and back-to-back storms have created major challenges for nature.
In its annual review, it described such conditions as the “new normal”.
It said this year was a “stark illustration” of the difficulties many UK species could face without more action to tackle climate change.
The hot summer and months of low rainfall dried up rivers, fragile chalk streams and ponds, damaged crops and natural habitats, and fuelled wildfires that destroyed landscapes, the charity said.
The National Trust’s climate change adviser, Keith Jones, said there was “no escaping” how challenging this year’s weather had been for nature.
“Drought, high temperatures, back-to-back storms, unseasonal heat, the recent cold snap and floods means nature, like us, is having to cope with a new litany of weather extremes,” he said.
He added weather experts were predicting the future would see more torrential downpours, along with very dry and hot summers.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-64107967
The Facts
- Three storms in a week – the first time since, wait for it, 2015. How pathetically ridiculous. Just because the Met Office has started giving silly names to storms does not mean that these things never happened before.
Winter storms are perfectly normal, and often two or three depressions follow in quick succession. During February as a whole, the rainfall totals in England were not unusually high, being only the 20th highest since 1836:
- Hot summer – according to CET, it was hotter in 1976, 1995 and 2018. It was even hotter in 1826!
- Dry summer – it was drier in 1869, 1887, 1976, 1983 and 1995: there is no trend to summers becoming drier:
- Autumn was mild, the total opposite of any honest person’s definition of extreme.
- Cold weather in December! They are really are scarping the bottom of the barrel now, trying to pretend that cold winters will now be the norm.
For the record, the December CET currently stands at 2.7C. Throughout the CET record, December mean temperatures have ranged from –0.8C to + 9.6C.
An average temperature of 2.7C is nothing out of the ordinary at all.
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/meantemp_monthly_totals.txt
Finally let’s challenge this idea that warm weather is extreme but cold is not, and that there is something new about large swings in temperature from winter to summer. The chart below plots the temperature between winter and summer each year on CET:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/data/meantemp_seasonal_totals.txt
This year the difference was 11.4C. The average for the full record since 1660 is 11.6C.
Enough said I think!
what is even worse than the National Trust regarding itself as an expert is the BBC reporting which seems to accept that expertise without question.
Interestingly this was one of two stories in recent days that finally pushed me to delete the BBC News link from my browser home page. I completely agree with Allan’s comment above. No worthwhile science writer would think that featuring a second-hand opinion on the front page contributes anything to science. It’s just activism.
But if you look carefully you will see there is no by-line. If you dig into the page source you will find a link to the BBC’s “noBylinesPolicy”. Follow it and you get to some very self-satisfied puffery that assures us the BBC has achieved all that anyone could hope for it, but it also tells us this article is a team effort, possibly assembled over days, which I would take to mean it is the work of very junior personnel like maybe interns. And it made it to the front page, at least for a few hours.
but it also tells us this article is a team effort, possibly assembled over days, which I would take to mean it is the work of very junior personnel like maybe interns.
The worry is their cutting edge headline stuff was carefully cobbled together by senior sleuths and editorial staff as usual.
Propaganda amplification
What seems to never get reported is the human death toll from all of the drastic unprecedented climatic change. Turns out in the last 100 years, with the ever increasing consumption of fossil fuels, the death toll from climate related disasters has DECREASED 98%.
Isn’t all those useless eaters living on a significant problem?
Hey they have “trust” in the title , so obviously we must trust them. They are also a non-profit so necessarily totally fair, objective and beyond question in terms of morality and integrity. Plus they are “National”. I does not get much bigger than that without being part of the UN. ( Which they probably are somewhere along the line anyway ).
Where I am in the East Midlands, Derby to be precise, we managed two hot days when “records were being broken all over the country” according to the BBC It was dry but not warm and there was green to be seen unless, like the afore mentioned organisation, you took a picture of recently harvested fields.
The local reservoirs, Derwent, Ladybower and Carsington got pretty empty and some experts said they won’t fill again until the winter of 2023-24. Funnily enough Derwent filled at the beginning of December which means Ladybower which is part of the same river system and downstream from Derwent will be full soon if it’s not already.
Carsington, had the lowest water level for more than 25 years, 39.4%, Although the level is unusual, it isn’t exceptional.and is predicted to reach 75% by Easter. But Carsington water is filled by pumping water from the River Derwent (same as fills Ladybower and Derwent) through a 6.5 mile long system of tunnels and aqueducts.
So things round here are pretty much back to normal water storage wise
The average level of Severn Trent reservoirs on Boxing Day was 72%. Details here.
https://www.stwater.co.uk/about-us/reservoir-levels/raw-water-storage-levels-26-december-2022/
The low point was 3 months earlier at 40%
https://www.stwater.co.uk/about-us/reservoir-levels/raw-water-storage-levels-26-september-2022/
Absolutely sickening but such is the world we’ve now built.
Humourless, politically correct, consensus-driven junk science/medicine/politics, over-obedient, paranoid, frightened by ghosts, incapable of original thought, hemmed in totally from doing ‘original action’, magical thinking and deeply deeply deeply (chemically) depressed.
= a self-reinforcing death spiral, as depression of all sorts is.
Humanity has died. It was predicted and thus we witness one more tree falling, never to regrow.
how many are left
Totally agree. The odd thing is, very few of the people I associate with agree with all the crap going on, but they are just not in a position to argue as they too busy just trying to get by in life and don’t have time to dig into these things. Those that are in a position to do something are too afraid to be cancelled by the cancel culture crew. The reality is, it is up to us in the middle to get more and more vocal and call out the lies on as many platforms we can. On the positive side, since Musk took over Twitter, I have seen a significant increase in the amount of posts in opposition to the climate alarmism and all the other political PC garbage. Seems a lot of climate realists and non-PC accounts were either shadow banned or outright banned by the previous twitter overlords. While the opportunity is there, we should shout loud and hard. The next challenge is managing the AI systems. ChatGP looks like it has actually had an alarmist bias programmed into it, which has been noted many. Seems it is getting harder for these platforms to hide their bias now, but time will tell.
Now tell us what you really think…:-)
Peta, please do not include me in those responsible for what you call “the world we’ve now built.” I have had no part in any of the dishonesties that have been used to try to persuade us, or to force us, to destroy our human civilization. I haven’t even voted in a general election for 35 years!
Peta, you need to understand who are your friends, and who are your enemies.
The National misTrust has once again shown its core ignorance.
We should be relieved they didn’t apportion the weather events to past colonial activities and in particular the slave trade, which it thinks every artefact it holds in trust for the nation was a product of.
I speak as a ‘past’ member and past supporter of The National Trust.
Am still a member because it’s good value for the days out.
And, more importantly, I truly believe our nation’s heritage will last long beyond the current leadership.
Yes, much of our heritage profited from Imperialism and a slave trade. But so did everybody else.
The UK was just better at it.
The report states that the UK had a hot summer in 2022; Paul Homewood responds with data from the Central England Temperature series (CET). CET doesn’t even cover most of England, never mind the whole of the UK.
For the UK as a whole, summer 2022 was the 4th warmest on record, behind 2018, 2006 and 2003, but warmer than 1976.
Paul dismisses the report’s observation that “Autumn 2022 was one of the UK’s warmest…” by saying “Autumn was mild…”. Who’s right? Just check the actual Met Office UK data (link above). Autumn 2022 was the 3rd warmest on record for the UK (data starts in 1884), behind 2006 and 2011. The 6 warmest autumns in the UK have occurred since 2001 and the 30-year autumn temperature trend is +0.3C per decade.
Finally, the UK Met Office has just announced that 2022 is provisionally the warmest year on record, both for the UK and for CET. Nothing to see here, according to Paul Homewood.
The UK Met Office is a tool. Remember the BBQ summer? The non-hurricane that was?
Would that be the same Met Office whose data Paul Homewood just used to make every one of his points in the above article? Funny you didn’t object at the time.
Brilliant…..
His points are up for debate, the MO remains a captured tool
The problem with ‘warmest on record’ is
Records, particularly geographically diverse and comprehensive records, don’t exist more than a few years back…The land usage in the UK, particularly where the thermometers are, is vastly more (sub)urbanised than it used to beErgo, we don’t know it it WAS a record hot year and even if it was, we cannot disentangle the effect of concreting over large areas of it from putative carbon dioxide increases.Maybe the answer is to put all cities underground and plant trees on top. Be a lot easier to keep warm in winter and cool in summer, too.
As far as I am concerned the peak temperatures in summer were marginally hotter for a few days than I have experienced in England, and the December cold period the coldest December temperatures EVER.
And hand waving that away as ‘climate change’ (caused by CO2) is just the typically sloppy sort of ArtStudent™ arguments one has come to expect.
But it is all consistent with England’s maritime climate briefly becoming continental..
1962/63 was so cold it broke all records. We were then apparently heading into a new Ice Age (or a deepening of the current one).
shrug. When I grew up it was just ‘weather’. In my lifetime, before ‘climate change’, there were dozens of ‘one in a thousand year events’.
The East coast floods, the flooding and destruction of Lynmouth, the flooding of the River Mole, the 1962/63 winter….
And so on.
Weather, it seems, likes to break records somewhere every year.
The other problem with records is that they are usually filled with qualifiers that dilute any meaning out of them. The “hottest” day record might be reported only for an April 17th falling on a Tuesday during a leap year.
You can check the daily CET data back to 1772 here. Including leap years.
Leo Smith
Well, they kind of do, Leo. The UK series is quality controlled back to 1884 and might be pushed back even further once all existing written records are digitised.
The CET series dates back as far as 1659; though the more reliable daily record starts in 1772. Still, that’s a very long and reputable temperature record.
You can bet your bottom dollar that if 2022 had been the coldest year in CET, rather than the warmest, commentators like Homwood would be shouting it from the rooftops right now, rather than ignoring and misdirecting from it.
For many reasons I don’t trust the Met Office’s climate announcements but let’s pretend for a moment they are reliable and 2022 was indisputably the hottest year ever in the UK. It was hotter and drier than most I still clearly remember, so maybe it beat 1976. But so what? We only know it broke records because we had instruments that told us so. Otherwise we’d have said, “wow, this a hot dry summer”, and life would have gone—and did go—on.
To break a record that can be perceived only with subtle instruments is just a freak. Get close to the record and all it takes is an errant waft from the south. What is important is the trend. Peaks and troughs amuse children, like snow, or indeed a sunny day.
If the Met Office is going to tell me the waft from the south was anthropogenic, I am all ears.
In early June 1976 we had snow (more D-day weather). By mid month the weather was hot. We had two months of hot weather, not a few days. Weeks on end of the temperature not dipping below 70F at night. Definitely hotter than 2022.
It did not snow in June 1976. It’s June 1975 you are thinking of.
Correct I was planning on watching the Derbyshire vs Lancashire cricket match that June, snow stopped play!
quelgeek
Agreed. The 30-year trend in UK summer temperatures is +0.3C per decade.
You forgot to mention that almost every weather station is taking complete bogus temperatures. England doesn’t have a USCRN. The US does but its way too short to make a trend out of it or to say that anything is unusual.
I wonder why you didn’t point that out to Paul? He used the same UK Met Office data I did, albeit in a highly selective way, to make his points in the article.
How does this work, exactly?
It seems that when UK Met Office data are used in a way that supports a ‘contrarian’ point of view (using specific CET data when the subject is UK-wide, for example) it seems to be accepted without question. When the data from the same source are used to contradict such points of view, it is dismissed as ‘bogus’.
I think it’s called ‘having your cake and eating it’.
The alarmists do the same thing. In the article linked below, the mainstream climate community purposefully conflates mostly UHI warming with climate change. I’ve checked the weather stations nearby where I live and I can see a huge difference between urban areas and rural areas.
But I agree with you about cherry picking with the different datasets. Most of them aren’t reliable in my view. The only one that I would trust would be the USCRN and UAH, because Spencer and Christy don’t seem to be biased. Spencer agrees with a lot of the mainstream climate community including the use of CMIP models. RSS was reliable until the pressure from the mainstream community kicked in.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/19/las-vegas-heatwave-nevada-us-west-temperatures
Temperature has to do one of three things:
-Get warmer.
-Stay the same.
-Get cooler.
In nature nothing stays the same.
Fahrenheit invented the thermometer during a particularly cold part of the millennium. All temperature trends have been upwards since then, with wobbles.
So does the upwards trend that started long before mass emissions of CO2 in the 1950s prove we are on the brink of destruction?
Well, no. It’s not exciting. It has to do something, Mostly, it’s regression to the mean.
Let’s face it, if you predict that children will no longer know what snow is… you can’t then claim snowfall as a sign of being right.
Like Parliament and like every other state institution or agency, the NT is totally woke and on board with the climate change narrative.
“”Anti-woke insurgents’ Restore Trust promoting candidates for governing body in bid to influence charity’s policies””
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/oct/31/national-trust-set-for-fresh-battle-over-culture-wars
I was recently at the ruins of Whitby Abbey. No danger there of climate calamity, nor at any other NT concern
Three Atlantic storms lined up in a row during February?
How unusual /sarc
The National Trust is not to be trusted. They have become a left wing activist group that supports all things woke, rather like the BBC.
Not just Coningsby but RAF Coningsby, 10m from the main taxiway.
It’s easy to imagine a pilot angling his jet to waft hot exhaust in the general direction of the weather station for a bet.
Other than the fact that dozens of other nearby weather stations also set new temperature records on that day.
We are subjected to ‘climate change’ crap on a daily basis, here in the UK, and with the BBC gleefully soreading such crap, the idiots in ext reb and their various offshoots, are causing havoc, which the BBC happily reporting on…..one big crap filled circle.
What can we do? Very little, it seems.
There is no public forum (in the UK) that will allow any counter arguments.
Perhaps a billboard campaign is needed.
Something needs doing…..
I’m a member of the National Trust and I voted in this year’s AGM to try and get some sanity back into its governance. I think the Director General Hillary McGrady is trying to make a name for herself and just using the NT as a platform for her own agenda. A group called Restore Trust has challenged the NT board and were trying to get different members (who think the NT should stick to preserving Britain’s heritage) voted onto the board but due to a tick box inserted into the voting form which if ticked gave the members voting rights to the Chair (Hillary McGrady), most NT members are quite old and not that bothered and so just ticked the box.
Yes its a utter joke they make such big claims about climate change just because this year in Feb we had the most storms since 2015. But l can understand why they would start from 2015 because that way you can overlook the runs of very stormy weather the UK suffered during the early 90’s.
As for the cold snap during Dec there was nothing really extreme about that, you just have to go back to Dec 2010 to understand that.
“Extreme weather” has replaced “global warming” because nobody can tell if the climate is actually warming in their lifetime … whereas everyone is sensitive to extreme weather, which happens from time to time practically everywhere. So now climate change, which used to be “global warming”, has been redefined as “extreme weather”.
Of course, most people get it, that the weather is something that varies from time to time and place to place and thus can affect one’s life, be it heat or cold or windy or not or dry or wet … and that all the yakking about extreme weather simply reveals the scam that used to be global warming.
If one doesn’t like the weather, if able they vacation in or move to a place with weather more to their liking. I live in south Florida, so we have long been used to northerners vacationing here and moving here … and the worse the weather gets up north – as it was this past week – the more people flock down here to warm up (even if we consider last weeks temps to be uncomfortably cold for south Florida).
It was just announced today that the 2020 census data revealed that Florida was the fastest growing state in the US during the 2010s. So the more that the warmunists yak about warming and extreme weather, the more people move here to the state that is perceived to be both the warmest and the most subject to weather extremes (i.e., tropical storms and hurricanes). People are voting with their feet.
Extreme weather is normal weather.
BBC R4 just interviewed McKibben for his climate expertise
No counter, no question, it’s pure gospel
The Biased Broadcasting Company put an end to any sort of rebuttals of ‘climate change’ several years ago after a radio presenter allowed a sceptic to join in with a discussion. After complaints, the presenter was tajen off air and sent on a ‘course’ to be re-educated!!
The once respected BBC is a despicable piece of crap that needs to lose funding as soon as possible.
I recall a rumour that a BBC environment editor (with a degree in English and therefore presumably innumerate) somehow arranged for the BBC to declare the science settled for editorial purposes. This relieved the Beeb of its obligation to have balanced coverage of any climate story.
Apart from the obvious problem with declaring any scientific conjecture beyond doubt, one wonders what climate stories remain open to being questioned at the BBC. Are all climate claims to be taken as settled? How do you decide which should be balanced with a contrary view? Is it enough to reach into the dress-up box for a white coat, some glue, and a tin of soup to render all your words sacred, as if from Mount Sinai?
It looks very like the answer is “yes”.
What’s always puzzled me as a keen weather watcher here in England has been the steady increase in summer temps since the 1970’s as shown in the Met office records. Because as a weather watcher l have noticed no real change in our summer weather that would support such a rise.
Now there has been the same sort of trend happening during England’s springs which l can understand why it would be happening. Because l have noticed a increase in more summer like weather during our springs in recent years. This change l have noticed is supported by the increase in sunshine amounts since the 1970’s and the gentle decline in rainfall amounts since around 1980 during the spring.
But during the summer l have noticed no real changes in the weather over recent years. This observation is supported by the lack of change in both sunshine and rainfall amounts during the summer since the 1970’s. So l have been wondering if this warming trend during the summer since the 1970’s, has not been due to any real changes in the weather. Then could this warming trend then be due to changes on how these temps have been recorded over this time.
I thought snow was a thing of the past.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-55179603
Pretty good conditions near me.
https://www.eldora.com/the-mountain/webcams/snow-stake-cam
UK weather normals to become new extremes, says National Trust FIFT…
News media just want to get attention to financially survive.
They will print anything, nonsense or not, to keep the climate pot boiling,
But the CO2 craze is about to come to an end, because of its minor absorption of energy at infrared frequencies, which is claimed by IPCC and its Posse to burn up the planet, whereaas, it is more like lighting a match in a cold room.
The Woke-Climate crowd has a big foghorn. They will keep blowing it until it explodes in their faces.
Where’s the Hockey Stick? Something has to be wrong here…
It’s at the beach and not being tracked like targeted politicos and Musk.
National Distrust
Hey, come on Paul. It was not just mild, it was EXTREMELY MILD !
It was extremely unextreme. That is unprecedented. It may be / could be the new stark reality if we do not act to protect the natural fragility of mildness.
To me, extreme is how to describe living on the Canadian prairies
+42C to -45C temperature range.
The definition of extreme
“Scarping the bottom of the barrel” – should be “scraping”
Salute!
BTW. I thot we agreed a long time ago on this forum that “climate” is what you expect getting off the plane/train/ship, but “weather” is what you actually get.
Gums sends…
P.S. I really like those graphs with real temperatures and such versus “anomalies” from some arbitrary period.
A) First set low expectations for what defines “extreme”:
B) Hype everything from now to 2100, as if the world is ending.
The faithful will love hearing daily norms as being “Worse than ever”, that keeps them tearfully fearful.
National Trust will look foolish and we will love it, at least I will.
What is the difference between that claimed “new normal” and the “old” normal?
Interesting the 40C high in Coningsby , I suspect that the temperature data came from the RAF base , which is active and holds two squadrons of Typhoon fighters , each fighter has about 2/3rds the power of a Boeing 737 , so in an airport plenty of super giant patio heaters moving around , was that something to do with the temperature record ? I live on the South coast of England and my temperature read out was 34C at the hottest part of the summer and we have these temperatures every 5 or 6 years , we had 36C in the long record breaking summer of 1976 , otherwise apart from short hot spell a very normal weather year . We even had more violent storms years ago , autumn 1987 springs to mind as does January and February 1989
I really hate when they scarp the bottom of the barrel. BTW, why is the National Trust pushing climate change lies? What’s the mechanism for them making money out of it? Pretending that it damages historic buildings so we should make more donations? Is that it?