BY BEN PILE
Weatherwise, it has been a rubbish May. And it has been an abysmal spring. It has been cold and wet. And everyone knows it. But according to the Meteorological Office, the U.K. has just experienced its hottest ever May, and its hottest ever spring. As news reports and the Met Office’s own press release have correctly indicated, this “may come as a surprise” to many people who actually live here (rather than on the planet that the Met Office’s scientists inhabit). To those people, many of whom had their heating on for a good part of the month, the Met Office’s statement, as well as the “akshully…” news reports that claim to shed light on the difference between perception and reality, look like actual gaslighting. Even if the claim is true, which remains to be seen, what it reveals is the inadequacy of temperature as a metric on which U.K. climate and energy policy rests.
The Met Office’s charts for May and Spring show mean U.K. temperatures far in excess of what most people would expect. The mean temperature for May was a full degree warmer than the next warmest May in 2017. ‘Mean temperature’ is the average of the minimum and maximum temperatures recorded on one day. And the two extremes is obtained by averaging the highest and lowest temperatures of all stations in the MO’s network of weather stations. But as the following chart shows, while the max temperature is equal highest with 2018, it is the average minimum temperature which really makes May 2024 an outlier at 9°C, which is 1.2°C warmer than the next warmest average minimum, which was in May 2022.
The obvious point to make about this is understated by the Met Office, which explains: “This warmth was especially influenced by high overnight temperatures.” But this speaks to the inadequacy of temperature measurements of this kind to sustain climate change narratives. Whereas fears about global warming are driven by stories of relentless heat driving extreme weather such as heatwaves, wildfires and floods, a slight rise in minimum temperatures is the opposite of extreme: it is mildness. A 9°C average minimum temperature is not going to boil the planet, set the world on fire, or tear civilisation from its foundations.
But alarmists might point to the average maximum for May 2024, which is tied with 2018 as the warmest at 17.2°C. The problem, however, is that this says very little about what people are actually experiencing. Spring and May 2018 were notable for their record-breaking heatwaves. In April 2018, the hottest April temperatures for 70 years were recorded at 29.1°C, according to the Standard, caused by a huge plume of hot air from Portugal. The following month was the “sunniest and warmest on record in U.K.”, according to the Guardian, which began with a heatwave in which temperatures of 28.7°C made it “the hottest early May bank holiday weekend on record”.
Neither Spring nor May 2024 have had any weather events to compare with 2018. Yet max average temperatures do compare, and May 2024 min average temperatures exceed 2018’s. How can temperature therefore be a useful guide to what’s happening to our climate if it can seemingly underpin both extremely hot weather and extremely disappointing weather?
The problem is perhaps caused by these metrics being produced by cascades of averages. Data from weather stations across a nation that spans nearly 600 miles north to south and 300 miles west to east are mashed together as though a single metric of ‘climate’ for such a landmass was meaningful. Twenty four-hour minimum temperatures from all these stations are averaged. Then their maximum temperatures are averaged. And then these averages are averaged again to produce the ‘mean’. But anyone who has spent any time in the northwest of Scotland and the southeast of England know that these are radically different climes – as different in latitude as the south coast of Spain and its central region.
But perhaps the problem is even more radical than that. If the Met Office’s method of working out ‘average temperatures’ makes a dreary May like the one we’ve just had ‘hotter’ than one with a historic heatwave, eg May 2018, why should slight increases in ‘average temperatures’, as per the MO’s definition, concern us at all? The increased average temperature in May was, after all, likely driven by merely milder not extreme weather in a month that most people experienced as colder than average. Average temperature is supposed to be the most important metric of our time. Yet the same metric can mean anything between nearly 30°C heatwaves in April, and people wearing coats, hats and scarves in the week before summer. And a metric that can mean anything means nothing. It is a junk statistic.
None of this would matter if the Met Office and Britain’s news media were not so manifestly intent on gaslighting us into political obedience. But they want us to believe that our lives are deeply affected by such metrics, and use the weather forecast and news items about the weather to sustain the climate change narrative. Constant reminders of ‘danger to life’ herald something more than a breeze, a balmy evening or a scattered shower.
I wanted to see for myself how the raw data had been turned into this kind of zombie climate stat. It has been a long time since I bothered doing a deep dive into meteorological data, because it turns out that you do not need any kind of weather statistics to know, for absolute sure, that there is no ‘climate crisis’, so I haven’t felt the need. However, I was surprised to discover that data from the weather stations that are used in the Met Office’s analysis are not available to the public at higher than monthly resolution.
That’s a problem because in order to build an estimate of how useful minimum and maximum temperature data are, even in one location, never mind across an entire country, it would need to be compared to hourly data at a minimum. But not even daily data are available.
You might have thought that scientists and institutions that are so keen to tell us that their metric is so significant would be just as keen to make all of that data available to us. But you would be mistaken. The data is jealously guarded. It’s not for public consumption. We are supposed to take the good faith of institutional science for granted and are neither welcome nor even permitted to check for ourselves. ‘Follow the science’, means ‘obey’, not ‘try to understand’. And that’s what makes me – and, I hope, you – a sceptic.
Blah. Temperature. Their fear porn is going to work until you change your formula.
Headline:
‘United Nations calls for plan to euthanize elderly and poor’
‘During a Wednesday speech at the Museum of Natural History in New York City, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called for a plan to euthanize the elderly and the poor by banning fossil fuel advertising. Climate and economic experts worldwide say this plan would immediately impact the elderly and poor, resulting in thousands of deaths worldwide.’
link:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/06/07/un-chief-calls-for-governments-to-censor-fossil-fuel-advertisements/
The Met Office once owned up when it went boobs up; its famous no hurricane coming and glorious bbq summer predictions proved utterly incorrect. Michael Fish has undoubtedly earned his place in meteorological history. But today’s MO is a very different, very well connected and very, very political organisation.
Talking of gaslighting…
Today the BBC has muscled in on the 75th anniversary of the modern wokester’s manual – Nineteen Eighty-Four. Read in segments throughout the day on Radio 4 by Martin Freeman – a genuine hobbit – and contrasted against the ideas etc of Franz Kafka.
Now, someone heavily into gaslighting people at the Beeb had a light-bulb moment with that one.
Do others agree that daily Tmax and Tmin should not be thrown together statistically – such as averaged – because each is a different sample from parent populations?
The max-min recording thermometer, liquid in glass, gathers a Tmax when certain weather conditions happen, which are different for when Tmin is captured. I claim they are too different to allow valid classical stats. Geoff S
Geoff: yes, you are correct.
On one Tmax might be hit for 5 minutes, before the temperature starts cooling.
The next day temperatures may hit Tmax and hold there for 3 or 4 hours.
Tmin and Tmax tell you nothing about what the average temperature for the day was. Yet that is what they are trying to determine by averaging the two numbers.
Years ago I recall an analysis of a record high for the day in, I think it was Boston(?).
Someone looked into it and the only station that reported was at an airport. And the time of the record (a spike) coincided with a brief shift in the wind that blew from a runway where planes were waiting to takeoff to that station.
Surrounding stations in the area showed no spike.
Probably Baaastin- a Mecca of the climate lunacy. In today’s Globe, numerous climate lunacy stories and several letters about the horrors of the climate. One person lamented all the horrible people who have methane burning furnaces. Couldn’t say “natural gas”- had to say methane.
Another reminder of the maxim that “The average of measurements is not a measurement!: The calculated “average” has much less information content than the set of measurements!
Average temperature is not a physically meaningful quantity.
Temperature is not an extensive property like heat energy. ( If you have twice a much air at given temperature you have twice as much heat. Temperature does not change. ) Thus averaging temperature is NOT a valid proxy for measuring heat NOR the supposed effects of radiative “forcings”.
Absolute humidity of air a dawn if vastly different from air 4-5pm. So specific heat content is not the same and temperature is not a proxy for heat content. This is even more important when you start “averaging” land and sea surface temperatures.
NONE of this follows basic scientific rules yet is the basis for up-ending the world economy on claims it’s all just well understood “basic science”.
IT’S A LIE.
I come from a background investigating Fraud , in this there are many classic signs of fraud.
the green billionaires funding this make even more millions and are well sheltered from its effect – they are the ring masters.
the University Academics promoting Climate Change have comfy well paid long term jobs so they are never going to say everything is ok .
Anyone trying to ask questions is ruthlessly silenced – absolute classic fraud behaviour, many times I’ve had high level complaints made about me including to MPs to try and stall investigations, it didn’t work .
Another behaviour gas lighting – your too stupid to understand comes up all the time .
The media are a bit park actor in this they believe in left wing values mob rule , so shutting down our economy plays into this fantasy of redistribution of wealth , over the years all sorts of fanatics have been witnessed , from Middle Ages wearing hair shirts and beating oneself , to the austerity of the Roundheads , people in the 50s marching up and down with signs saying the end of the world is coming . So they use thier influence to promote their chosen values currently Gaza and Climate Change , previously apartheid , acid rain , hole in ozone layer , anti nuclear. You will note that the media are careful with their own money and avoiding paying tax these things are for the untermensch.
so you have a medusas head of a problem
If I understand correctly, if we have two days, each with the same Tmin and Tmax, but one day where the temperature lingered around Tmin for a large part of the day, and the other where it sat around Tmax for long periods and dropped to Tmin only briefly, these two days would be treated as the same.
In real life we would perceive one of those days as quite a bit cooler than the other.
In the old days this might have been about the best we could do for the purpose of recording, but nowadays we don’t need to restrict ourselves to such a crude approach, do we?
“Even if the claim is true, which remains to be seen, what it reveals is the inadequacy of temperature as a metric on which U.K. climate and energy policy rests.”
No, what it reveals is that averaging disparate temperature readings is physically meaningless. There is no Global Temperature, there is no UK temperature. You can’t average Portsmouth and Glasgow and expect anything meaningful. All of this is rubbish.
This is the problem of confusing the quality of the weather with temperature. It was by all measurements a warm spring, but that doesn’t equate to good weather. It was cloudy and wet, and that’s what made the season “rubbish”.
Even ignoring the record breaking minimum temperatures, it was still warm. May maximum was well above average, top 15 warmest. I suspect the teal problem is that this is air temperature, and what people experience is the temperature in the sun.
Besides, I think it’s disengenous to claim all of May was cold and wet. There was plenty of sunshine around the middle, and that’s where the highest temperatures were recorded.
Can you inform us [all] as to what you mean by the term: quality of the weather?
What would be good quality weather and what would be bad quality weather?
Quality of the weather, as in:
“Weatherwise, it has been a rubbish May. “
what is a good or bad quality will be subjective. Personally I like it dry, sunny but not too hot.
“Good quality” weather is stuff that can be exploited to frighten people. “Bad quality weather” is stuff that would escape notice without some activist waxing hysterical.
As such, good quality weather has been increasing rapidly for at least 30 years, not because patterns have changed — they have NOT — but because the propaganda machine has become more adept at frightening people over trifles.
The more urbanized we become, and the more time people spend in well-constructed, properly heated and cooled buildings, then the more weather is only something you see on TV. Any situation varying from the 24/7 72°F and moderate humidity of an air-conditioned shopping mall, or anything real like rain, snow, wind, etc. seem “abnormal.”
It’s time to panic! Time to picket. Time to throw a tantrum in front of the U.N. Time to give up all your comforts, your favorite foods, and get poor to show how virtuous you are.
Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that all of your observations and claims are spot on and accurate as far as they go. The $64,000 question is:
So what?
“May maximum was well above average, top 15 warmest”
Should have checked before posting. In fact maximums for May were equal warmest for the UK. But it was cooler in the south. Southern England was only 11th warmest for maximums. Scotland had the warmest May maxes by some way.
How would they know.
The Met Orifice temperature sites are being shown to be in even worse condition than the US and Australia.
Many sites closed, but still “reporting” data.
The surface data is a complete FARCE !
Obviously, record breaking temperatures in May must have had disastrous consequences for Britain.
Or else what could all the fuss be about?
Let’s list the three most catastrophic effects of record breaking May temperatures on Britain.
I’ll start.
1) More migrants were able to cross the Channel in small boats.
Your turn, Bellman. What are the second and third most horrible effects of the record-breaking, climate-crisis causing temperatures on Britain this May?
If you can’t think of any, we can conclude that record-breaking temperatures don’t have bad effects.
Record-breaking May temperatures in Scotland would be amazing for growing food. Crops will get well established early and germination frequencies will have been high. After all, it still would not be as warm as an average south of England May, as Scotland is, on average, about 4C cooler at maximum at this time of year.
It will also have been great for the prospects of a good, early hay harvest.
Thanks for admitting that it was NORMAL English weather.
And that you have zero evidence of any human causation.
“I suspect the teal problem is that this is air temperature”
Are you referring to how weather maps on TV and “the net” have “adjusted” the colors they use on those maps to represent temperatures to make everything appear warmer?
The way things are going, this could be the first time on record that UK June temperatures are colder then May.
Will there be so many here claiming the MO figures are wrong if that happens?
All measurements? So every station was the warmest ever? I don’t believe that for a second. Averaging them all together is scientific fraud.
“Lies, damn lies, and statistics”- Mark Twain
I recall that when I first started reading about “globull warming” the literature said it would be due to higher nighttime low temperatures, not higher daily temperatures. This appears to be the situation in May. But all you hear is the screeching about extreme highs, usually well within measurement error.
Here’s what the IPCC’s AR4 says in Chapter ten:
Temperature Extremes
It is very likely that heat waves will be more intense, more frequent and longer lasting in a future warmer climate. Cold episodes are projected to decrease significantly in a future warmer climate. Almost everywhere, daily minimum temperatures are projected to increase faster than daily maximum temperatures, leading to a decrease in diurnal temperature range. Decreases in frost days are projected to occur almost everywhere in the middle and high latitudes, with a comparable increase in growing season length.
A warmer world with fewer cold episodes, more rain, longer growing seasons, fewer frost days, and probably fewer intense storms. Time for this one again:
1. More rain is not a problem.
2. Warmer weather is not a problem.
3. More arable land is not a problem.
4. Longer growing seasons is not a problem.
5. CO2 greening of the earth is not a problem.
6. There isn’t any Climate Crisis.
Steve,
Re temperatures over the oceans. Daily sea surface temperatures over large ocean area seem to meet an upper limit of some 30 deg C. Can be more in small, land bound areas where convective cooling is handicapped.
So, over the oceans there are mechanism that limit how hot heatwaves can get.
Has anyone studied land temperatures with this as a possible parallel but with different mechanisms because no free water? Earth temperature history shows tight control between narrow limits, as if a land thermo-regulator is at work. Can it not also set an upper land heatwaves limit?
I have looked at many Australian heatwave numbers. I do not see the hottest annual heatwaves being much higher than other annual hottest levels at a location, not much contrast, they tend not to be prominent. Some say that a century of rising ambient temperatures (about 1 deg C) should put a similar rise under heatwaves as the years pass, but I do not see evidence for this as widespread. It is hard work because the original raw daily temperature data are not really fit for the purpose of understanding heatwaves, rather too much uncertainty. Geoff S
In many respects, climate change is very much like religion. People arguing their religion, quote the bible or what ever holy book they subscribe to support their argument. Naysayers use that same book for the rebuttal. The only difference between the IPCC and most holy scriptures, is the IPCC rewrites it on a regular basis.
I’m guessing The IPCC’s AR4 is a bit more circumspect about the intensity of future heat waves. Death Valley still holds the record.
The more intense, “more frequent and longer lasting” quote is from from the Executive Summary. Elsewhere the report may reveal a more circumspect narrative.
Yes here in the UK over the course of a year we can go from minus8 C to plus 34c so I really don’t think fraction of a degree C are going to make much difference .
On an Earth that experiences a temperature range of 233K to 313K constantly, and I mean at every instant, a change of one or two K is trivial.
April in the UK was colder than average and the soil wet and cold, with very little sunshine.
Any farmer or gardener will tell you it was a late spring. And not noticably warm.
with very few days above 20C.
This June so far, with Northerly winds prevailing is at least 2 C below normal, and next week even cooler.
The met office forecast today that night time temperatures would drop to 7 C, but in rural
areas two or three degrees colder. In the 1970s the met office allowed 0.4 C for Urban heat
effect, as as far as I aware this has not been increased, despite more roads, buildings and traffic.
Tmin is likely to be the most responsive to UHI. Old thermometers with high thermal mass have slower response to brief events than modern resistance-temperature sensors, so you have to sure the latter data is filtered to match transient response (apparently not done in Australia, and who knows what is done here?) A large proportion of UK met stations are in poor accuracy categories due to siting.
I wonder whether the whole coterie of them will go to Hell, which deserves to exist just for this one purpose. Well done with the Apocalypto analogy, a salutary tale. Look up Kakistocracy, you are living in one.
in Australia, the electronic thermometers that mostly replaced liquid-in-glass in the 1990s were designed with probe surroundings to slow response times to similar levels, I believe with a metal mass surrounding.
Not much publicity, especially overlap comparisons with the two thermometer types side by side has been given for independent observation of errors. Chris Gillham at the site waclimate has done work for public view, in a much appreciated, high quality several readable articles. Geoff S
The problem with monthly stats in the UK is that only 3 days that are 10 degrees above or below normal, in given geographical area having closely related weather patterns, and with its own media coverage, changes the average by a whole degree….Countries spanning a couple of oceans and a couple of thousand miles wide aren’t going to see such monthly variations cuz more weather patterns get averaged in before the media can publish their doom scenario click bait.
Speaking of Gaslighting. This is the most idiotic “climate porn”+”social justice” article I have read recently.
“story tip”
Is a colonial-era drop in CO₂ tied to regrowing forests?Carbon dioxide dropped after colonial contact wiped out Native Americans.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/06/is-a-colonial-era-drop-in-co%e2%82%82-tied-to-regrowing-forests/?comments=1&comments-page=1
It is still so cold in the UK that people need to live and work in heated buildings most of the year.
It is this year.
Arithmetic averages can’t be averaged. 🤦
Of course they “can”! It’s just that the resulting calculations have little information content!
So, from the green plot, the mean trend is about 1.3 degrees C in 140 years (~9.4 to ~10.7), and this years spike is about as above the trend as the trough at about 1995 is below it?
Well damn, I had to spend a pile of British Airways frequent flyer miles, so got a couple of Club-class tickets for next May. I’ll take the 10.7, but no rain please.
The MET is a disgrace. If I had the power I would present to the MET the dishonesty of their reporting then ask them if they stand by their reports. If they say yes I would fire all of the top executives.
Nice idea, but I suspect almost impossible to do. The closest you’d likely come to that is that they’d be paid off on full pensions.
The climate change narrative = huge, shiny and incredibly expensive supercomputers, lovely offices and lots of overseas conferences for the Met Office.
Just follow the money, not the science…
The article says the record was due to high night temperatures. Was that because of cloud cover? Seems that clouds would make it warmer at night but cooler during the day. No mystery here.
It was due to cloud cover. A well known market gardener in Somerset (whose YouTube channel has nearly 700k subscribers), who has been doing weather readings in the area since 1973, said that May had the fewest sunshine hours of any May since he started making records.
Yes, I discovered this about 10y ago when I wanted to look into changes in sunlight hours. At the time I was in contact with Met Office’s John Kennedy who kindly explained nothing is available at less than monthly average level. ( Without paying extortionate “extraction” fees for data, the creation and archiving of which we have already paid for).
This underlines that a lot of the “dangerous global warming” is in truth MILDER weather. Milder nights and milder winters.
Since cold kills 5 times more people that hot weather, this should be regarded as a positive, not a “crisis”.
Ah yes, but grants would be cut 80% if the researchers said: ‘Changes in climate are making life safer, not more dangerous’, eh?
I’ve been saying for a decade: Average temperature is not a physically meaningful quantity !
Temperature is not an extensive property of matter like heat energy. ( If you have twice as much air at given a temperature you have twice as much heat. Temperature does not change. ) Thus averaging temperature is NOT a valid proxy for measuring heat NOR the supposed effects of radiative “forcings”.
Absolute humidity of air a dawn if vastly different from air at 4-5pm. So specific heat content is not the same and temperature is not a proxy for heat content. This is even more important when you start “averaging” land and sea surface temperatures.
NONE of this follows basic scientific rules yet is the basis for up-ending the world economy on claims it’s all just well understood “basic science”.
IT’S A LIE.
“story tip”
MIT has just made a major discovery about light causing evaporation directly without becoming heat first:
https://news.mit.edu/2024/how-light-can-vaporize-water-without-heat-0423
This has massive implications for the water cycle which computer models fudge together with expertly guestimated “parameters”.
In particular it means clouds absorb more light than expected . The process also leads to further cooling of surrounding air.
So much for all the well understood “basic physics” all the models are based on.
If carbon dioxide could be persuaded to produce its own heat then I am sure a clever engineer somewhere would have by now patented the match winning process … who needs anything else?
Meanwhile the Urban Heat Island effect demonstrates that where there is much heat retaining building material and infrastructure (e.g. roads) the overnight temperatures are much higher than those in rural areas even just a mile or so away.
That is how mankind unintentionally influences temperatures in our towns, cities and some sprawled commercial and residential areas. The carbon dioxide levels are meaningless in this process if temperatures are contemporaneously markedly different in rural and urban area because of the UHI effect. This is another area where the joined up dots and joined up thinking is sadly lacking among so called meteorologists. It is also a product of consensus idiocy in a profession that has long lost integrity and has no shame.
Start a top down purge at the Met Office and see how much better (and cheaper) handling here and now weather will be without alarmism.
When you keep cooking the books and turning up the temperature, eventually people will notice that the temperature outside doesn’t match. They just did.
I think that the Met Office have scored a significant own-goal.When they tell people something that is so obviously contrary to the common experience they undermine their own credibility. Perhaps they are falling for a failing common with psychopaths – hubris. The more they succeed in decieving people, the more they convince themselves of their own superior intellect and the less effort they put into maintaining credibility.