The Met Office is refusing to retract a claim made by a senior meteorologist on BBC Radio 5 Live that storms in the U.K. are becoming “more intense” due to climate change. This is despite admitting in Freedom of Information (FOI) documents that it had no evidence to back up the claim. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) noted the “false” claim seriously misled the public and demanded a retraction. The Daily Sceptic covered the story last Thursday and has since contacted the Met Office on three occasions seeking a response. “False information of this kind does much to induce climate anxiety in the population and I am sure you would agree such errors should be corrected by any reputable organisation,” it was noted. No reply was received – no retraction has been forthcoming.
The storm claim was made by Met Office spokesman Clare Nasir on January 22nd and led to an FOI request for an explanation by the investigative journalist Paul Homewood. The Met Office replied that it was unable to answer the request due to the fact that the information “is not held”. Interestingly, the Met Office’s own 2022 climate report noted that the last two decades have seen fewer occurrences of maximum wind speeds in the 40, 50, 60 knot bands than previous decades. The Daily Sceptic report went viral on social media with almost 3,000 retweets on X, while GWPF’s demand for retraction was covered by the Scottish Daily Express.
The lack of action by the state-funded Met Office is very interesting. Extreme weather is now the major go-to explanation for the opinion that humans largely control the climate, despite a general lack of scientific evidence. Backing away from this ‘settled’ narrative risks damaging a potent tool nudging populations across the world towards the collectivist Net Zero political project. Mainstream media usually take care to fudge their reporting of any direct link, using phrases such as ‘scientists say’ and sprinkling words ‘could’ and ‘might’ in the copy. The mistake Nasir made was to forget this basic requirement of broadcast fearmongering.
There appears to be an arrogance around the Met Office, an arrogance it shares with many other organisations and scientists promoting Net Zero. At the heart of this assumed superiority is the ludicrous claim that the science around human-caused climate change is ‘settled’. As a result of this, it seems many have lost the ability to debate their work with anyone taking an inquiring position. The scientific process has largely broken down in the climate science world. Secure in the knowledge that it will not be challenged, almost anything can be said on legacy media from a ‘consensus’ narrative point of view to promote the supra-national aims of Net Zero. On the legal front, this arrogance was in evidence in the summing up in the recent Mann v Steyn defamation trial in Washington D.C. The jury should award punitive damages to Michael Mann, inventor of the temperature ‘hockey stick’ graph, “so that in future no one will dare engage in climate denialism”, said Mann’s defending lawyer.
It is possible that if the Met Office is obliged to explain or retract what was after all just a routine scare broadcast on a tame state-reliant media outlet, it might be forced into more substantial scientific debate. How it abolished the global temperature pause from 2000-2014 by adding 30% extra warming on a retrospective basis to its HadCRUT5 record, and why it insists on promoting temperature records from busy U.K. airbases, are two subjects that spring immediately to mind.
Ineffable superiority was certainly on display when the Daily Sceptic recently reported that the Met Office was considered ditching the measurement of changes in temperature using data from the past 30 years in favour of a measurement compiled with 10 years’ past data and 10 years’ future modelled estimates. This was designed to promote a possible earlier breach of the political 1.5°C threshold. Lead author Professor Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts at the Met Office, tweeted a ‘rebuttal’ on X, noting we had taken three weeks to review the paper. “Or are they just very slow readers? I suppose our paper does use big words like ‘temperature’ so maybe they had to get grown-ups to help,” he added.
Why is the Met Office struggling to come up with any evidence to back up its claim that bad weather is caused by climate change? Because there is precious little of it. “People are going absolutely nuts these days about extreme weather,” writes the distinguished academic and science writer Roger Pielke Jr. “Every event, anywhere, is now readily associated with climate change and a portent of a climate out of control, apocalyptic even. I’ve long given up hope that the actual science of climate and extreme weather will be fairly reported or discussed in policy – nowadays, climate change is just too seductive and politically expedient,” he notes.
In its latest ‘Sixth Assessment Report‘, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that attempts to discern human involvement in severe storms outside natural variation remain of “low confidence”. In fact, it is unable to find human involvement in a wide range of weather-related events, not just in the past but out to the turn of this century.
Beyond natural variability, the IPCC, much to the disappointment of alarmists, has concluded there is little or no evidence that the following events (table above) are or will be affected by human-caused climate change: river floods, heavy rain and pluvial floods, landslides, drought (all types), fire ‘weather’, severe wind storms (Met Office please note), tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, heavy snowfall and ice storms, hail, snow avalanche, coastal flooding and erosion, and marine heatwaves.
Perhaps the Met Office doesn’t want to apologise for misleading the public over winter storms – it might put down an unwelcome marker for mea culpas becoming general across the entire media and climate front.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Bloated government is our biggest problem, dishonest mainstream media next biggest.
I think the dishonest mainstream media is the biggest problem.
People cannot govern themselves properly without knowing the truth, and they don’t get the truth from the dishonest mainstream media, they get political, leftwing propaganda which causes them to vote for imbeciles like Joe Biden and other radical Democrats, who are at the root of all our problems.
To reduce government bloat requires electing the proper political party and dishonest mainstream media make that very difficult to do.
Yes, the dishonest, radical leftwing News Media poses the most danger to the personal freedoms of Americans. They distort the truth and get radical Democrats elected which brings crime, and societal divisions, and economic bankruptcy.
They are more dangerous to the personal freedoms of Americans than any outside force because they lie about reality constantly, and confuse millions of voters into voting for the wrong people; People who are harmful, not helpful.
Story tip
TOWER INFERNO Valencia fire: Four dead & 20 missing after fire rips through Grenfell-style cladding on 14-storey block
Today’s focus….
A corrupted speaker and a devious leader of the opposition
It’s the definition, meaning or translation of the word ‘extreme’ itself that is the problem.
And that comes out of how The Data is manipulated:
Torture the data enough and it’ll tell you what you wanted to hear
What CliSci/Skeptics are looking for is ‘large-ness’
But what The Little People see, (the ‘weather consumers’) are perfectly seen in the attached = yesterdays weather in North Cambs
How the temp plummeted by 4°C inside 40 minutes, the wind suddenly dropped, changed direction, swung right back again and at same time, heavy rain started.
That sort of ‘extremely rapidly changing‘ is what folks don’t like and is what many imagine scientists mean when they’re talking ‘extreme’
But will vanish inside a 30 yr low pass
iow: Run a High Pass Filter over the data to see the ‘extreme’ that upsets and hurts people.
It’s the sudden (extreme) changes that count – not the ‘big-ness’
Yes, don’t look at the big picture, look at obscure details.
February has already set several new daily warmest temperature records in the long-running CET temperature series and looks set to be one of the warmest Februarys on record, both in CET and globally.
But don’t look at that!
Just a thought –
if production of graphs of any kind was verboten by The State in1984-style governance, global warming / climate change / extreme weather would cease to exist completely.
Just like all mirages do when the visibility enabling influences change.
So graphs of data are the cause of global warming. Right.
The conclusion you jumped to from my comment displays no evidence of any logical thought process from you.
I’m shocked, shocked I tell you. 🙂
Which begs the question: what were you trying to say?
The graphs show observed data.
They don’t cause it.
It looks to me that February, with the exception of a couple of blips mid month, was within the normal range of temperatures. It certainly appears that one day was warmer than the highest previous recorded temperature, however the chart relies on the average temperature from 1962 to 1990, I wonder what this chart would show if the base was 1920 to 2020. I do note that you fail to mention the lower than average temperatures in January.
Very unlikely, unless the remainder of the month is very cold. The CET mean for February is 3.8C, with a standard deviation of +/- 2.0. Up to and including Feb 22nd 2023 it is 8.7C. So currently > the 95% confidence level for being outside ‘normal’. It would need to fall considerably just to be 1SD above normal. Not ‘normal’, no.
“One of the warmest Februarys on record”, which is itself a great use of weasel words and assumes that climate didn’t exist before records began.
It never ceases to amaze me how much significance climate scientists put on “recent” warming trends, as though this somehow makes them special. In fact, there’s nothing remotely unusual about even long sequences of events in purely random data.
Climate ‘science’ either doesn’t understand this or deliberately uses it to obfuscate the true facts.
That may be your inference, but it is in no way an implication. It’s just a statement of fact. How you chose to interpret it is your concern.
This is where the use of standard deviations, etc, come in; to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. They sort out the ‘normal’ from ‘unusual’ and the ‘really unusual’.
2 standard deviations above ‘normal’ is considered to be ‘scientifically significant’; i.e. ‘really unusual’.
1 standard deviation is ‘unusual’, but not to the scientific extent.
It is very likely that February 2024 will fall either into the ‘unusual’ or ‘really unusual’ range in the CET data set (starts 1659).
It’s not ‘normal’, that’s all.
The problem is that there is more than one truth, alternative facts; whatever you want to call it. The description of ‘more intense’ only has to apply to one characteristic for the statement to be essentially true.
The same MO report used to claim storms aren’t windier (on one particular time scale comparison) does suggest that they are wetter. They may also be more numerous overall, or closer together when they do occur…. No doubt ‘ more intense’ can be justified on some level.
Organizations like the MO, wedded to the climate agenda, have become habitual dispensers of casual alarmism, arrogant and sloppy. But I wouldn’t expect that to change any time soon.
The “AGW causes more frequent and intense storms” theme is one of their most effective marketing concepts so I agree that they’re not going let that go any time soon.
It is quite easy to calculate the hottest heatwaves each year and to rank them for frequency, heat level and duration. Define a 3-day heatwave as the ranked hottest average of all consecutive 3 days in the year, usually for Tmax. Do 10-day, 5-day, even 1-day as the mood takes you.
I have done this for 8 of Australia’s biggest cities like state capitals. I usually start with raw daily Tmax labelled CDO hjere, but now and then I use adjusted data, such as for Australia the ACORN-SAT data.
Why do you not do this for your locality? It is elementary level on Excel, to produce graphs like these that follow. BIG FILE – GIVE IT TIME PLEASE.
https://www.geoffstuff.com/eightheatwave2022.xlsx
When you have numbers and graphs, you can challenge the frequent Establishment catch phrase drivel that heatwaves are becoming longer, hotter and more frequent.
I do not see this supported for these Australian cities unless you use adjusted data.
Geoff S
But Geoff if you’re going to make your case by using adjusted “data” (i.e. plucked numbers), why go to all the trouble of populating spreadsheets and rendering various permutations of graphs?
Just get your crayons and butchers paper out and start drawing some squiggly lines across the sheets.
And a pro tip – the more coloured crayons you use, the more gravitas your graphs will carry with the media, politicians, activists, et al.
The conduct of the Met Office, with their enablers at the BBC, cited above, is in alignment with the Saul Alinsky book “Rules For Radicals”. Alinksy wrote the book in about 1971, and it contains 10 to 13 “Rules” (not listed by numbers, but interpreted by reviewers). For instance, Rule 9: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself. Or Rule 11: If you push a negative hard enough…it will break through… . The terminal agenda is the same on both sides of the pond: Control.
Yes, Alinsky inspired a lot of radical leftists
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=100057050
Saul Alinsky, The Man Who Inspired Obama
January 30, 20091:00 PM
“You may not recognize his name at first, but Saul Alinsky served as the inspiration behind President Barack Obama’s initiative to become a community organizer in Chicago.”
end excerpt
“community organizer”
I’ve seen this job title used a lot.
So wtf does a community organizer actually do, produce, sell, maintain, service or otherwise justify their existence?
They dare not admit to falsifying anything for fear of losing their jobs. If they ignore the calls they keep their jobs and get a few extra brownie points too. Claire Nasir will do the same thing again just to rub it in and tell us all that there is no limit to the badness you can do when you have no conscience.
The Met Office resembles nothing more than an asylum for climate lunatics, but in time, that’ll all change and then we may see some justice being done. What goes around comes around.
Must be highly infectious, NOAA has it bad too.
Religions are like that.
“there is no limit to the badness you can do when you have no conscience.”
Or accountability.
From the article: “Why is the Met Office struggling to come up with any evidence to back up its claim that bad weather is caused by climate change? Because there is precious little of it.”
There is not one shred of evidence connecting CO2 to any weather event, or to climate changes. “Precious little” implies there is at least some evidence. No, there is not. Not one shred. Speculation, assumptions and unsubstantiated assertions are not evidence of anything, and this is all climate alarmists have. No evidence.
“…attempts to discern human involvement in severe storms outside natural variation remain of “low confidence”. “
I have pointed out before that the IPCC uses a deceptive confidence scale in their attributions. “Low confidence” actually means high confidence in the opposite of the claimed association. In their scale “high confidence” means >=90% probability, “low confidence” means <=10% probability and “medium confidence” means equally (50%) likely and unlikely. So if they say they have medium confidence that storms are more severe due to climate change they mean the have no strong evidence either way. But when the say low confidence that means the evidence supports the conclusion that there is no effect.
CONfidence levels are subjective.
Science is objective.
Definition:
“What do objective and subjective mean? Objective means verifiable information based on facts and evidence. Subjective means information or perspectives based on feelings, opinions, or emotions.”
Climate Change Alarmism is subjective.
“feelings, opinions, or emotions” are not sufficient reason to destroy our economies trying to corral CO2.
Well you can’t expect an organisation that believes if a single snowflake falls anywhere in the UK on Christmas Day it means we have had a ‘white Christmas’ to understand anything about reality or climate.
Whiteness must be called out wherever / whenever it is detected.
No exceptions.
“Everyone’s doing it” was often used in my younger years for social fads such as drug use, sexual recreation, etc. but now it is an apt term for the habit of continually and inrepentantly lying through your teeth about any and all issues of social importance. It has become the rule rather than exception in leadership and elite circles. Perhaps this reflects an overly enthusiastic tendency to train lawyers and political science majors in the relevant skills.
“sexual recreation”
Thanks Andy, wish I could have had me some of that back in the 60s.
I had to make do with some occasional “back-seat boogie” 🙁
What’s not said on the IPCC chart is extreme heat was only based on post 1950 data.
From EPA 1895-2021 Heatwave index data for the US, I calculated 30 year average index trends to separate climate trends from weather variability.
·Highest 30 year running average was 1926 – 1955 with an average index value of .200. There was a 137% increase in heatwave index over that period when CO2 levels increased by 8 ppm or less than 3% of pre-industrial level.
·The lowest 30 year average was 1958 – 1987 with an average index value of .043. There was a 78% decline in heatwave index over that that period even though CO2 levels increased by 32 ppm or about 11.6% of pre-industrial level.
·The last 30 year running average index (1992 thru 2021) was .100. That represents a 77% increase in the 30 year average index over the period and about half the rate of increase seen between 1926 and 1955. During that period CO2 levels increased by 58 ppm or over 20% of pre-industrial levels
Well it seems very clear to me that the MET office is not a credible or responsible organization. They.want fear. It is the only way they believe they can achieve the goal of the IPCC and WEF, the great reset and global government rule.
But aren’t all religions based on unrealistic, unachievable, irrational goals and outcomes?
And don’t they all foster ignorance, confusion, anxiety and fear as their main weapons?
(yeah, yeah – I know, I forgot “surprise”)