From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
According to the Met Office, Worcestershire has just had its wettest February on record:
It was certainly a dull and wet month across the country, but in overall terms it was not unusually wet:
As with all wet weather, the announcement was naturally accompanied by the usual blaming of climate change, with the BBC claiming without any evidence that increased burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil causes heavier rainfall.
But what about Worcestershire?
Data since provided by the Met Office under the Freedom of Information Act has now shown their claim of record rainfall does not stand up to scrutiny.
The Met Office only currently has three official weather stations in Worcestershire – Pershore, Pershore College and Astwood Bank. According to the Met Office data released, rainfall last month was 128mm, 121mm and 146mm respectively. If we discard Pershore as effectively duplicating the College, we get an average of 133.5mm. None of these stations were around in 1836; the College has the longest record, dating back to 1952 and Astwood only goes as far back as 1976.
How do these rainfall totals compare with other Februarys?
February 1923 was certainly exceptionally wet across the country, it is still the second wettest in England overall. It was no exception in Worcestershire either. In those days, the Met Office published detailed weather summaries and data every month. (For some reason, they no longer do this; one might think they don’t want the public to see the actual data behind their public pronouncements!).
Below is the section of the table showing rainfall for Worcestershire:
We can discard Sparkhill, as it is now part of the West Midlands. That leaves us with two stations – Malvern and Tenbury, with 153mm and 164mm.
So we clearly have a very large discrepancy. A range of 121mm to 146mm this year, compared with 153 and 164mm in 1923.
We also have further data for February 1923 from the annual British Rainfall publication that year. Again, we must discard Dudley, as it is also now part of the West Midlands. That leaves us with 121mm at Kempsey, 153mm at Bewdley and 138mm at Alvecurch.
If we average the six stations in 1923, we come to an average of 145.8mm, which is much higher than this year’s figure of 133.5mm. Three of the six were higher in 1923 than this year’s high at Astwood.
As the Met Office no longer have data for Malvern, they suggested I look at nearby Ross-on-Wye, just across the border in Herefordshire. In February 1923, the rainfall total there was 170mm. This year it was 148mm, reinforcing the conclusion that February 1923 was a much wetter month in the region.
All of the evidence points in one direction only – February 1923 was much wetter.
The Met Office pretends it has “comparable data” back to 1836. However, the only stations listed in the British Rainfall publication in the early days were Worcester and Tenbury, both of which closed years ago. As we have seen, the current stations only have short records, making comparison with 1836 a nonsensical concept.
The Met Office’s temperature datasets have already been discredited, following FOI requests which revealed their reliance on junk stations where temperatures are artificially increased by poor siting.
Now there are serious question marks over their rainfall datasets. This is not just a one-off glitch.
Is British weather really getting wetter as they claim. Or is it just a figment of their computer’s imagination?
The Met Office has consistently shown that it doesn’t know the difference between weather and climate. This illustrates the level of incompetence the Met Office demonstrates every day.
That’s frightening, considering what their job is…
It would be if Homewood was correct – but as usual he isn’t.
And yet the MO has 103 non existent weather stations.
Don’t tell me, they have cloaking devices loaned from the Romulan empire.
Wrong! They were loaned by the Klingons or, maybe, the Goa’uld. 😎
Never rely on your own ‘facts’. 😉
Lots of rain- how terrifying! 🙂
British weather wet? That is unpossible! England has dry, pleasant weather 24/7/365, unlike southern California or the Mediterranean coast of Spain and France. 😉
Certainly Southern Spain has had an unusually wet winter this year – far, far more Atlantic fronts tracking far further south than in an average year.
This is just a continuation of the same old story: When it’s wet, climate change: When it’s dry, climate change.
OK, so some counties had their wettest months ever, recently. Not long ago they were all in drought – I saw empty reservoirs up in Derbyshire last Summer. So what? That’s British weather for you; but everything tends to the average in the long run.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931317
The Great Famine of 1315-1317 started with unusally wet weather which was at the start, or precursor to the Little Ice Age
Should I be worried, Jimmy?
Not necessarily this year, but yes. The grand solar minimum will be 2030.
“Data since provided by the Met Office under the Freedom of Information Act has now shown their claim of record rainfall does not stand up to scrutiny.”
“In those days, the Met Office published detailed weather summaries and data every month. (For some reason, they no longer do this; one might think they don’t want the public to see the actual data behind their public pronouncements!).”
No it can be found online ….
https://catalogue.ceda.ac.uk/uuid/8ddfd4dd5af443f9ad382cd77366d877/
“The Met Office pretends it has “comparable data” back to 1836. However, the only stations listed in the British Rainfall publication in the early days were Worcester and Tenbury, both of which closed years ago. As we have seen, the current stations only have short records, making comparison with 1836 a nonsensical concept.”
There are far more data available to the MetO than the few stations that Homewood lists …..
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-centre/weather-and-climate-news/2022/rescued-victorian-rainfall-data-released
https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gdj3.157
“The Rainfall Rescue project was launched by the University of Reading in March 2020 and offered members of the public a way of distracting themselves from the pandemic by digitally transcribing 130 years’ worth of handwritten rainfall observations from the Met Office archives.
Some 16,000 volunteers responded to the challenge, digitising 5.2 million observations in just 16 days. Ahead of the two-year anniversary of the project launch, on Saturday 26 March, these records have now been made publicly available in the official Met Office national record, extending it back 26 years to 1836.“
Those records are worthless; the MO is political and invents data to suit.
The MO absolutely LOVE their junk data.. Its their only friend.
And my evidence for this is…. (drum roll) …
(tumbleweeds).
Having been born on a wooded small holding in Worcestershire I am very familiar with the area and its weather over the years. I still keep bees on the family small holding there, which ensures I have an intimate awareness of weather patterns/events in that part of the world.
The weather patterns over the past year, a very dry summer and a very wet winter has been damaging for beekeepers with local beekeeping associations reporting a loss of 50% of colonies over the year. For the first time in a generation I am without a colony of bees as my hives did not make it through.
The damage weather can do is real. The constant conflating weather with climate, as the media insists on doing, is equally damaging particularly to the less experienced members of society i.e. children.
On the plus side the dry reservoirs we saw last summer are now full and the brook that forms the boundary of the wooded small holding is flowing, having dried up for the first time in my lifetime last summer.
Yes there was a similar pattern of drought followed by flooding around my hometown on the Welsh border. Interestingly regarding Worcester there are records of flooding at the cathedral going back to the 1660s, the worst one being 1770 I believe.
Did they blame the lack of rain and creeks drying up last etc on human CO2. 😉
Something that has become of interest to me is the relationship between “earth” and air temperatures. The first table shown has some very interesting data.
Station Max Min 1 ft 4 ft
Malvern 56 32 41.3 42.8
Tonbury 55 25 42.3
Observations
It is “consensus” that insolation warms the surface which then warms the atmosphere through far infrared radiation captured by CO2 and H2O primarily. Yet, if the earth is radiating at 40°F, how does the atmosphere reach 55 – 56 °F?
I recently looked at a day at my location to see how insolation, soil temperature, and air temperature was related. Whoa! What a revelation.
My weather station gave about 700 W/m², a high temperature of 90°F, and a soil temperature increase from about 48 to 56 °F.
None of this adds up to a 30 to 40°F rise in temperature in the atmosphere. What is more interesting is that maximum insolation was around noon, maximum temperature around 2 hours later, and soil temperature 2 hours after that.
I suspect advection had a lot to do with it because of the wind, 10 to 15 mph from the south, carrying warmer air. This makes me think that using radiation to determine temperature changes has a lot of uncertainty that is not reflected in a Global Average (air) temperature.
The main process for warming surface air is conduction and convection. Greenhouse gas H2O is the major contributor to the greenhouse effect. Greenhouse gas CO2 causes very or no warming of the air. A cubic meter of air contains only ca 0.84 g of CO2. At 21° C and 70% RH a cubic meter of air contains ca. 14.3 g of H2O.
Your conjecture may be correct for part of the system, however, it can’t explain the heat transfers or temperature differentials. Latent heat absorbed by H2O is not sensible so it can’t raise the temperature of anything until it precipitates.
Miliband’s job is to control the weather and climate. Any change in rainfall is intentional and done by him.
Is the Met Office trying to claim that his measures are ineffective?
Last year is was the driest evvah,
Toujours bolleaux – comme les Grenouilles disent…
Such things don’t matter they don’t identify causation neither do temperature records.
Physical science is about definitive cause and effect demonstration and no such evidence exists for the claim of “dangerous man made climate change”.
The alarmist case comes down to fabricated hockey stick graphs which people are entitled to believe just not on the public dollar.
The end of winter follows a traditional pattern in Scotland.
Winter
First Spring
The cold weeks
Feudag a cold week of winds
Gearran an even colder week
Cailleach a week in April named after the Old Woman the Goddess of winter who keeps the ruler of summer Brìde prisoner over winter.
Something like that happens most years no climate change involved
In Europe they talk about the Ice Saints as being a period of late cold/frost, which can affect spring planting and early crop growth.
This is not Camelot. There’s no reason to expect the weather (even the climate) to be static over decades. It moves over decades, centuries, millennia, meandering up or down for long or short periods of time, whether man impacts it or does not. Unless you have identified every mechanism that impacts it, you cannot make any claim as to which mechanisms are currently, in the future, or in the past, at play. There are some obvious exceptions.