Substantial evidence has emerged to suggest that the UK Met Office is promoting the political cause of Net Zero by using recently introduced sensitive thermometers to collect 60-second unnatural heat spikes. These pulses are used to promote constant clickbait ‘records’ and claim exaggerated atmospheric warming. Furthermore, it appears that these short-term ‘spikes’ are larger in junk sites with massive internationally recognised ‘uncertainties”. Almost eight in 10 of the Met Office’s nationwide temperature measuring stations are in junk CIMO Classes 4 and 5 with possible errors up to 2°C and 5°C respectively.
On May 1st, the Met Office claimed a station at Kew Gardens recorded a temperature at 2.59pm of 29.3°C. Promoted by the BBC, this was said to be the highest temperature ever recorded on this day in the UK. But the temperature was a massive 2.6°C higher than that recorded at 2pm and no less than 0.76°C above the figure recorded a minute later on the hour. In fact the one minute plunge is similar to that found on July 19th 2022 when a national record of 40.3°C at RAF Coningsby was set at a time when three typhoon jets were landing. This was later claimed to be a “milestone in UK climate history” by the Met Office.
Temperature recordings can move around from minute to minute; change, if it occurs, is generally around 0.1°C to 0.3°C. These changes do not affect old-style mercury thermometers but are picked up by the super-sensitive electronic devices used by the Met Office since the 1990s. It is for this reason that the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) recommends averaging readings over five minutes to standardise data and remove short-term ‘noise’. For some inexplicable reason, despite playing a significant role in WMO deliberations, the UK Met Office does not appear to want to follow this sensible scientific advice. At Kew on May 1st the hourly recordings showed a typical convex curve of temperature movement during the afternoon recording seven readings from noon to 6pm of 26.88°C, 26.93°C, 26.7°C, 28.54°C, 28.41°C, 26.09°C and 25.15°C. The 29.3°C record came out of the blue as did an earlier spike to 28°C at 1.28pm.
Shout out at this stage for a new citizen super sleuth on the block who is taking a keen interest in Met Office statistics. Dr Eric Huxter is a retired geography teacher of 40 years standing with a PhD in Earth Sciences gained as part of continued learning in his 50s. He has tracked the huge temperature spikes seen recently in many of the Met Office sites producing daily highs, or ‘extremes’ as the state meteorologist likes to call them. The differences provide shocking reading and make a mockery of any claim that the recordings supply a useful scientific purpose.
Huxter highlights the appearances of Heathrow airport, a supposed CIMO Class 3 site with uncertainties of 1°C, but on this evidence an obvious super junk Class 5. Kew is a puzzle since it is rated at Class 2 with no uncertainties. It frequently appears as an extreme temperature possibly due to short-lived gusts of wind blowing over a nearby tropical greenhouse, one of the largest structures of its kind in the world.
Why is all this important? Activists at the Met Office have weaponised an agricultural temperature database, accurate enough for seasonal guidance, to spread mass climate psychosis in support of the Net Zero fantasy. Claiming guidance on climate change by producing statistics that at times are said to be accurate to one hundredth of a degree centigrade does not stand up to detailed scrutiny. Nonsense about climate milestones also goes hand in hand with calls by the operation’s Chief Scientist Professor Stephen Belcher for Net Zero to “stabilise the climate”. Believing that humans can control the climate is not unknown in human history – ancient tribes prayed to a variety of gods for help in this matter. Presumably Belcher hopes that something can be done to “stabilise the climate” given that, according to his observations, between 2014-2023 the number of days recording 28°C in the UK had doubled, while those over 30°C had tripled compared to 1961-1990. Ordering a crackdown on obvious temperature outliers might be a more productive use of his time.
Dr Huxter does not deny the climate is changing and of late the temperatures have warmed. Nevertheless, his work is demonstrating that some of the claimed warming is caused by the use of electronic thermometers that record instant unnatural air temperature spikes. Since the 1990s, increases in recorded temperature are “consistent with the narrative of global warming, a.k.a. climate change”. To him it is becoming apparent that this recorded increase “is an artefact of the change in observation method rather than a real change in temperature”.
It might be expected that the lower the CIMO class (with junk Class 5 being the lowest) the greater the convenient spikes in temperature produced. Huxter has also provided some initial calculations, admittedly from a small sample, that indicates this supposition might be correct. From May 6th-12th he calculated the average temperature change per hour at the 25 record-setting stations shown in the table above along with a number in close proximity and plotted the results in the graph below.
In simple terms the graph demonstrates that the lower the CIMO class (with Class 5 being the lowest), and thus the greater the uncertainties in temperature measurement, the greater the average hourly temperature changes. The workings at the top right indicate the calculation for the linear rise across the CIMO classes. The only large outlier is caused by Heathrow at Class 3, whose average 1.48°C per hour change would place it as an extreme Class 5 station. “Who knew?” comments the author.
Dr Huxter suggests that the fact that poorer siting of temperature stations appears to produce spikier results illustrates the impact of the local environment over the regional. In other words, Class 1 sites with no nearby corruptions measure genuine air temperatures over a wide area, while Class 3, 4 and 5 stations do not. The Met Office has very few Class 1 sites and a very large number that fall into the junk categories. Even more to its discredit is a seeming inability (or disinterest) in improving the situation. In the last 30 years to 2024, the Met Office has opened 113 stations and over eight in 10 of these are in Classes 4 and 5. Even worse is the revelation that over the last 10 years the percentage of junk sites opened is 81.5%, while over the last five years no fewer than eight of the 13 opened are unfit for purpose – purpose, that is, other than scaring the British public about an imaginary climate crisis.
Dr Eric Huxter is raising some interesting questions about the Met Office and its use of flawed statistics to promote extremist New Zero aims. His examination of the bizarre record recently declared at Kew causes him to remark that the use of such data reinforces the climate change narrative and “is undoubtedly of use to those wedded to alarmism”.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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inexplicable ? ? ? You’re way too kind
Despicable?
Inflamable – as you just need a lighter,
or any other heatsource,
get it close to the sensor –
et voila.
A new 60 second heat record out of the machine.(you just need to follow certain rules to keep the temperature spike within a certain range,and you can turn a bitter cold may,as the one from last year, into a record warming one)
Fake as everything else about AGW.
AGW is using here the same trick as manufacturers of cheap speakers do when they advertise their 100 dollar trash as “1000 Watt Speakers “.
Those Speakers can actually reach under specific conditions 1000 Watts for may be a tenth of a second
but will fall apart if they have to deliver constant 100 Watts for more than 5 minutes.
Why is it that situations like this continue to happen? Why don’t our governments and attached agencies FIX situations like this? Here at WUWT this has been presented and discussed for several (?) years, yet nothing seems to change. Personally, I am tired of reading about this.
Somebody chime in, How, do I as a USA citizen take some actions to help resolve this situation?
Vote Republican.
My family was historically party A and my uncle wanted to become a politician. I asked “Why is Uncle running as party B instead of party A?” Answer: We lived in a place where nobody won running as party A. Lesson I still remember 40 year later: He was trying to get the job, not make a point.
Person responsible for error was acting under assumed intent of superiors?
Your comment presupposes that “governments and attached agencies” actually want to FIX situations like this.
This practice is quite deliberate and designed to deceive. Yes, we sceptics have known about it ever since these electronic measuring devices were implemented over a decade ago, and the standard practice was supposed to be a 5 or even 10 minutes averaged value to be comparative with traditional thermometer instrumentation. However, in practice those in charge don’t seem to want a real comparison to be achievable, as the instantaneous high readings tell a better story about claimed AGW. This is going on in many countries including Australia who are also using a homogenizing process taken from the corrupt NOAA mob, to remove or reduce local natural climate anomalies in rural areas in favour of artificially warming urban climate stations affected by UHIE.
Tony Watts has been highlighting this for years and the public are finally waking up to the urban heat issue, but don’t realize they have been further conned by the new instant measurement practice. In reality many urban areas have already experienced the so-called catastrophic temperature rise above 2-4C, and the hazards we normally face in this world haven’t changed significantly, if anyone even noticed! So, the climate alarmism is confected nonsense, and Trump is right to call it out and act to reduce its effect be defunding institutions involved in creating this fake alarm.
Whatever The Met Office says or claims…
It’s complete, total and utter bolleaux
oui oui!
Just ask someone trying to grow tomatoes in the UK whether there has been significant warming.
If something is a clear outlier, like the Kew Gardens one you need to disgard it. In order to get reliable statistics and averages you take away the top and bottom anomalies. And you need to separate the station grades and only use the most reliable ones.
Unless you aim for records, then the system is the right one.
Anyway, in an experiment or even in a general comparison you start by keeping the operating elements under the same conditions so that you can assess a difference and start looking at attribution, causal patterns etc.
This clearly ought to be the Met Office forte. Their weather modeling is quite good. The ‘climate’ stuff is pure propaganda, including their temperature ‘analysis’.
disgard = ?
disregard = yes unless it can be explained
discard = no never
ie Gladwell’s Canadian hockey stars
In a past life when I had to collect and review analytical data, we were required to identify and discuss “outliers.” We couldn’t discard or disregard the data. We had to include it and discuss why it was (or at least why we thought it was) an outlier, but we didn’t have to include it in any analysis because it could skew the results.
Ah, correct. I am not a native ( english) speaker. Now and then a word slips by that a native speaker would spot as wrong intuitively but non native speakers like myself wouldn’t. Thanks for the correction but i am pretty sure people knew what i meant.
Now: eat, shoot and leave!😀
Your written language is quite good, I would not have guessed English as an added language. My note was just to make sure nobody throws away data. PR describes the process for not using data. I’ve seen people delete unused data, and not always for good reasons.
Great comments, the Met Office is due for a clean out, but politics will rule until Net Zero is finally dead, hopefully sometime soon before the economy is completely stuffed.
Jet wash and AC compressors are now harbingers of doom?
Of course. Hydrocarbon and coal fuels them.
Wasn’t it just a day or two ago, that someone was assuring us technological know nothings, that the sensors were designed to filter out such short-term spikes?
We need a new design for Met Office staff.
Can be is often quite different that is.
What’s lacking in all these Temps records is –
probity
/prō′bĭ-tē/
nounComplete and confirmed integrity; uprightness
And don’t get me started on the dodgy PROVENANCE of the dodgy temps measurements –
provenance /prŏv′ə-nəns, -näns″/
noun
Instruments with measurement uncertainties of ±5°C cannot legitimately resolve 0.1°C, as this result demonstrates, let alone 10 milli-Kelvin.
And averaging cannot increase measurement resolution, as claimed by the usual suspects.
“Dithering is a technique used in image and audio processing to create the illusion of a wider range of colors or shades than are actually available, or to reduce the impact of quantization error when downscaling a signal. In essence, it’s about introducing a small amount of controlled “noise” to mask undesirable artifacts.”
Climate Cheats 101: When Jimmy Carter decided to mess up education forever, lower speed limits to 55mph, push for DST and lower the thermostats in public schools to send a chill through everyone not wearing a winter coat inside the classroom. I, along with my friends, found a way to cause the classroom heater to spike. The thermostats were encased in environmentally friendly plastic lock-boxes … an Al Gore favorite! We simple packed snow on top of the boxes to defeat the set temperature. When teachers saw it they would smile asking, “Who did this?” One teacher would look at us boys at the back of the class and say, “Make sure to wipe up the water before you leave.” Nevertheless, every class I left was warmer than I’d found it.
The creativity, adaptability, and “thinking outside the box” of these youngsters should be encouraged in every generation.
Reasonable academic studies suggest lower temperature office work environments favor men. JC must have been a misogynist?
Men rarely wear thin sleeveless nylon blouses (at least not to work)
The first thing I thought about this post, was someone must have had a portable heater of some sort, to force a higher temp on the sensors. For about a minute!
(its at an airport)
I went to the Met office website and did my own research a few years ago to satisfy myself that “global” warming in the UK was an overstretch, and, applied to the densely populated areas only. Most of the warming I would attribute to the UHI effect.
See the same thing when compared to Valentia (a near pristine long term site)
London is just one big UHI centre and any temperature record there is meaningless, whether it be at Heathrow, Kew Gardens or the Greenwich Observatory.
Reminds me of a protist.
The main map is population, this is NOx – I guess the UHI map would look similar?
Your right. It is not a direct proxy map for temperatures but highlights human activity (such as traffic & roads), industrial areas and power sources. It does give a good representation though. Here is a thermal map of London from Landsat:
Figure 1b, Mean land surface temperature (LST, °C) for Greater London (2013-2023). Ref: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23748834.2025.2489854
In 2022, the MSM were all over a ‘record’ London max Temperature at Heathrow Airport. As Shania Twain said, “”that don’t impress me much.” Because back in the day of 1911, leafy Greenwich Observatory recorded a record temperature, at that time, of only a few degrees lower. And, that was before most people had motorised vehicles and there were no airports (first was in 1919.). See the comparison of the 2 locations in my slide below.
Things like this should not be surprising. Like bees in a hive they all work together towards their common goals. There is no lie too big, no lie too small, for the left in pursuit of their agenda. Because the truth is almost always not on their side…
Climatistas being willfully dishonest and fraudulent? This is unprecedented!
When your world view encompasses Niccolò Machiavelli and Thomas Malthus there is no limit to actions you’re willing to take to promote your cause.
What is a heatwave?
The World Meteorological Organization defines it as five or more consecutive days during which the daily maximum temperature surpasses the average maximum temperature by 5 °C (9 °F) or more.
https://www.iipa.org.in/cms/public/uploads/222841610370027.pdf
UK met office no longer use the WMO definition, they have changed it in 2018 to:
“A UK heatwave threshold is met when a location records a period of at least three consecutive days with daily maximum temperatures meeting or exceeding the heatwave temperature threshold, dependant on location.” (currently that is just 28ºC max)
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/weather/learn-about/weather/types-of-weather/temperature/heatwave
Clearly this is so they can claim that heatwaves occur more frequently, which is an obvious lie if they have to change the definition to make that claim. Of course, this also means they can claim “hottest since records began”, as a new record started with the definition change. The Met office are all in on the globalist’s “climate crisis” scam, designed to rob you of your freedoms and tax you based on the vagaries of the weather. We have seen nothing outside of natural variability, the temperature is NOT driven by CO2:
As a child, I burst a stay-home-from-school-today thermometer by holding it against my reading lamp too long.
Junk sites eh? Would the non existent 100 plus sites incorporated in the 300 plus used to confirm the average UK temperature be regarded as junk sites? Or do they get their own special designation? What should we call a site that does not exist but provides the Met Office with made up data used in the climate alarmism movement?
The WMO classification uncertainty is as follows.
2.2 Class 1
2.3 Class 2
2.4 Class 3 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 1 °C)
2.5 Class 4 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 2 °C)
2.6 Class 5 (additional estimated uncertainty added by siting up to 5 °C)
These classifications ADD uncertainty to that already at the station.
For U.S. ASOS stations one would have:
Class 1 – ±1.8°F
Class 2 – ±1.8°F
Class 3 – ±3.6°F
Class 4 – ±5.4°F
Class 5 – ±10.8°F
For U.S. CRN stations one would have:
Class 1 – ±0.3°C
Class 2 – ±0.3°C
Class 3 – ±1.3°C
Class 4 – ±2.3°C
Class 5 – ±5.3°C
Stating as ± is a bit kind…. errors will be mostly on the plus sides,, very asymmetric.
These are the stated values and I do not have the evidence to state anything else. The stated uncertainties address the measument estimated values for all temperature measurements.
I do not doubt that the instant values of an electronic thermometer are not comparable to temperatures from LIG thermometers. If one had access to uncertainty budgets, there would be considerable difference among different devices. Housings from Cotton shelters to new pancake styles would obviously have different uncertainty values.
The issue here is an uncertainty budget category based on a systematic uncertainty caused by siting.
How about somebody doing a test: put both an old style LIG thermometer system next to (or at some appropriate distance) a new electronic sensor system and measure every 5 minutes on a relatively hot day.
I have been also been takening a interest in this very subject myself this year.
Where since Feb 1st l have been keeping a daily record of the max and min temps in Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, with a Six’s thermometer and comparing the data with the local weather stations.
With taking this different approach it has highlighted other issues with the Met Office’s temperature data along side with the points Dr Huxter has raised.
The key point which my study is suggesting is that the real issues is with having these highly sensitive electronic thermometers housed in Stevenson screens during fine weather. Because from the results of my findings its that long spells of sunshine causes warming of the Stevenson screen, which causes these sensitive thermometers to overstate the temperatures been recorded during fine weather.
This happens weather its a class 1 site or a class 5 site, l believe the real issue is with having these thermometers housed in Stevenson screens. I supect the reason it’s shows up more with the class 4 and class 5 sites is because you have the effects of UHI warming along with the issue am pointing out.
What has convinced me that the issue is with electonic thermometers housed in Stevenson screens.?
Well it’s the fact that these weather stations only consistently overstate the temperatures during fine sunny weather. As because when the conditions become dull, cloudy or cloudy bright. Then this warming of the temperatures dissappears and the difference between my LiG thermometer and the weather stations is typical within + or – 0.7C, and not over stated by 1C to 3C like it is during fine sunny weather.
Also this issue not only impacts the max temps been recorded, but also effects the temperatures been recorded for all of the daytime that the sun has had time to warm the Stevenson screen. While this issue is made worse by the fact that the electronic thermometers are highly sensitive and take far more readings of the temperature, then when LiG thermometers were in use.
Confirmation bias rules OK!
A Meteorologist friend and I have discussed this issued for some time. An example is that the 1 min temp spike is common throughout nearly all US/NWS ASOS stations. He lives near KDTW and see s it often. I don’t see it at all sites, but it is not uncommon. It seems that it happens often enough that it adds upwards of a full deg F to the monthly ave temp. Not to mention the rounding up to the higher whole degree like we’d discussed a couple weeks back on the Climate Realism show. .
The Met office is a government run fraud.
I don’t know how many people work at the Met but 25% of them need to be fired starting at the top.
I suspect: