Two years ago, the Daily Sceptic shocked the climate science world by revealing that the UK Met Office was inflating recent warming by deliberately collecting recordings from stations that were so ravaged by unnatural heat sources that the figures could realistically be labelled as junk. Almost 80% of its 380 station network spread across the UK were in locations that came with possible international errors between 2°C to 5°C. Mainstream media largely ignored the story since it did not fit the political Net Zero narrative, but the information has spread rapidly across all social media. Why was the story ignored? – because the higher temperatures from the UK and other similarly corrupted recordings around the world helped boost the supposed rate of warming in global datasets, and thus raised useful alarm in promoting the Net Zero fantasy. But when the Net Zero blackouts begin and the food riots hopefully don’t start as deliberate hydrocarbons restrictions bite, the Met Office will be asked to explain its rackety role in promoting the non-existent climate emergency – an invented crisis that will be seen as one of the greatest scientific frauds of all time.
The Met Office has had two years to make much needed improvements to the siting of its weather stations. Using a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, we disclosed at the time that 77.7% of its stations were in CIMO Classes 4 and 5 with internationally-recognised ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C and 5°C respectively. We checked last September on progress only to find that over the intervening 18 months, Classes 4 and 5 now accounted for 80.6% of the total. Far from appearing to take the matter seriously, we discovered that the Met Office had opened 20 new stations in the period, with an astonishing 67.7% starting life in the Class 4/5 junk lane. It might be asked why any scientific organisation that sets itself up as an authority on providing reliable untampered ambient air temperature statistics would consider doing this.
While many climate scientists seem happy to accept Met Office recordings at face value and use them in their climate model predictions, Associate Professor Nicola Scafetta bucks the consensus crowd by proposing some obvious allowances. In a recent paper on the detection, attribution and modelling of climate change, he argued that there had been a warming bias up to 20% in the recent temperature records that could be attributed to the effects of urbanisation. Scafetta works out of the Department of Earth Sciences, Environment and Georesources at the University of Naples. He is a long-time critic of many of the excess warming-based results of computer models that drive the Net Zero political process. Using modelled information, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change seems to ignore the role of natural climate variation, and arrives at the clearly false conclusion that warming in the atmosphere since 1900 is primarily due to humans burning hydrocarbons and releasing carbon dioxide. In his latest paper, Scafetta suggests that human involvement in the warming from around 1850 may around 30%.
Pristine Class 1 sites in the UK that give a proper ambient air temperature are a vanishing breed with a recent drop in stations between our FOI requests from 24 to just 19. It seems that the UK is so crowded with airports (100+ sites), solar farms, electricity sub stations, walled gardens, along with a multitude of brick walls and tarmac surfaces, that the Met Office can only find 19 places where there is no barrier likely to affect the recording of an accurate temperature.
Yes, the Met Office actually says as much on its own site, noting: “The higher classes [1 and 2] are simply not always possible in the UK… which have many densely populated areas”.
This is hardly an excuse since around 90% of land in the UK is countryside. Instead of coming up with ridiculous explanations, the Met Office might profitably spend its time moving the temperature measuring site at Aberdeen airport a few metres from its current location marked with a red blob.
Did the Met Office’s annual multi-million public sector budget not stretch to moving its weather station at Chertsey before someone built a solar farm around it?
From such dodgy data, the Met Office spins its Net Zero agitprop. Chief scientist Professor Stephen Belcher calls for Net Zero to “stabilise the climate”, reporting that between 2014–2023, the number of days recording 28°C in the UK had more than doubled, while those over 30°C had tripled compared to 1961–1990.
In a monumental piece of recent research, ignored of course in the mainstream, citizen scientist Dr Eric Huxter has provided conclusive findings that many of the recent higher maximum temperature recordings and claimed ‘records’ are due to the introduction over the last 30 years of automatic electronic devises. Short-term ‘heat’ spikes as little as 60 seconds in duration at compromised junk stations boost many maximum daily temperature extremes which ultimately feed greater warming into the global datasets. Using a year of one-minute recordings at the pristine Class 1 site at Rothamsted, Dr Huxter worked out a control to gauge the spikes found in the junk locations. He found that the likelihood of daily extremes from these junk sites being observed at Rothamsted would be less than one in 10,000. It seems obvious that a 380-strong network of Class 1 sites would produce less warming than that currently touted as cause for the country to suddenly give up the essential hydrocarbon building blocks of modern industrial life.
Over the last two years of intense scientific and social media scrutiny of its temperature recording abilities, the Met Office has found itself between a rock and a hard place. Its network is mostly crap and many of the recordings beggar belief. Yet over two years it has actually made the situation worse. It is dammed if it makes improvements and attempts to start removing the obvious unnatural heat bias from its recordings. This is likely to moderate the rate of recent warming and lead to questions as to why it used the statistics to whip up climate alarm in the first place. Doing nothing of course is worse, but the Met Office can still count on considerable protection from most mainstream media and politics.
Like the Met Office, the US weather service NOAA was riddled with activists making Net Zero hay with similar dodgy temperature data. Almost instantly, that all stopped when the Trump Administration took charge. The message went out to cut all the climate alarm BS and return to the weather forecasting day job. To concentrate minds, the annual budget was slashed by 25%. Similar cuts to the Met Office’s state funding could well be considered if a Reform UK government came to power committed to ending what is routinely described as Net ‘Stupid’ Zero.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
Well at least with Starmer nominally in charge, there won’t be anti-science rhetoric, if there are budget cuts. 😉
Well at least with Starmer nominally in charge, there won’t be anti-science rhetoric
He had to be told by Tony Blair what a woman is…
Sir Tony Blair has had to tell Sir Keir Starmer that a woman has a vagina and a man has a penis.
His government is deliberately ignoring the Supreme Court ruling. That is anti-science.
Ignoring it would be preferable. His government is actively working against it.
I will not be surprised if legislation is introduced during the lifetime of this government to defeat the ruling by changing the definition of sex to mean “gender identity” (by which I mean “autogynephilic daydream”).
Science—rationality in general—is coughing up blood in the UK.
The only political party with the will to do anything about this is Reform UK.
The Tories introduced Net Stupid Zero into law; they’ll promise they are going to do something about it after the general election in 2029, but they won’t, other than making things worse.
Perhaps Richard Tice should write an official letter to Ed Milliband, requesting he demand the MO remove all junk stations and ‘invented’ (aka: “well correlated”) data from their records as a matter of urgency and transparency, to restore the MO’s modus operandii as an honest weather forecaster, not ‘climate change’ campaigner. It will be interesting and telling to see his response. No doubt Millibrain will try to wriggle out of it and avoid answering in some way.
The BOM raises the bar on the term ‘Junk Science’.
0.01mm
How about taking the Met Office to court?
Surely, lying to the public about human-caused climate change is doing serious harm to the public and the economy.
Sue the Met Office for damages.
Typo in the second sentence. I’m sure “international” in the link should be “intentional”. Otherwise a good article but I fear the simple use of facts and logic will not penetrate the wall of pure ideology.
What’s that building in the image at the top? The Met Office? It sure is ugly.
If you can believe Google Lens, “This building is the main headquarters of the Met Office located in Exeter, United Kingdom.”
Ugly as sin. Almost as bad as the remodeled Museum of Modern Art in NYC. Maybe worse.
Might make a good set for a horror show or sci fi flick.
Oh wait…
Have you seen Obama’s library building in Chicago?
It looks like a North Korean watchtower.
. . . which is fitting.
That’s got to be the ugliest building on this planet. Trump has pretty good taste in architecture- at least for what’s in DC. His ballroom and the proposed memorial for vets that looks like the Arc de Triomphe. Not so sure about his other buildings.
Colleague Dr Bill Johnston had used Australian official Bureau of Meteorology “raw” data to examine some influences of water, since as we know, water cools. Physics, evaporation, that category is well researched and accepted. Dr Bill has regressed temperatures of the usual daily type against rainfall at numerous sites and has found that temperatures free of water influence have scarcely changed over the last 100 years.
Please go to his site named bomwatch.com.au
Bill is a professional Meteorologist who has worked with such temperatures as a senior scientist for decades.
If you disagree with his methods or findings, you are free to object and reason.
If you are a Brit and a bit worried by official goings on, it is easy to apply his methods and reasoning to your own UK observations to see what pops out of the cookie bag.
As for me, I am a scientist who has worked with this vexed climate change topic since 1992. In particular, I have studied many “pristine” Australian weather stations where it is plausible that the hand of man has among the lowest effects in the world. For comparison, the Great Britain population density in 2026 was 287 people per square kilometre, compared to 3.5 in Australia. Some of these stations are really remote and isolated. I cannot classify the temperature records over the last 100-150 years into pristine, rural, urban and metropolitan because there is too much noise in the data. The categories overlap, so that only a couple of big city cases look as if people have influenced the temperatures through being there.
The broader question of whether temperatures have been influenced deliberately to follow an agenda like human-caused global warming is partly answered by study of the BOM adjusted ACORN-SAT data manipulation. It is not recommended by fellow scientists I have asked, to be fit for any serious scientific purpose. Maybe it is fit for the advertising industry, but so what?
Geoff S
Everything is falling apart here. There’s no hint of a climate crisis whatsoever, but there are certainly crises everywhere else.
Miliband has a new guru. One Professor Mariana Mazzucato of University College London – Miliband’s Favourite Economist Doesn’t Understand How Markets Work
The Met Office could not be more certain of business as usual:
“”According to new figures for 2025 released by the Cabinet Office, Whitehall departments are becoming more secretive year-on-year. The right to Freedom of Information is under threat from Labour…”” – Guido
Which will obviously apply in the Met Office case – people like Huxter and Sanders are considered as irritants that can be shut down. There is pushback on this:
“Labour is trying to clamp down on Freedom of Information requests. It wants you to stop asking awkward questions. Don’t let Starmer get away with it…” – Right to Know
Starmer – back and front benchers allowing – will get away with it, just as they’ve got away with everything else. Perhaps people are beginning to understand what I mean when I call it the Parliamentary dictatorship. And this one is far more authoritarian and coercive than any of its predecessors.
The Met Office has had two years to make much needed improvements
Something else that will never happen before 2029 at the earliest.
Wouldn’t it be appropriate to find or create pictures (head shots at least) of the people responsible for the “ravaged” numbers and include them with each publication of the numbers? If a head shot is not available, how about a picture of their house? Stories about President Trump and King Charles include pictures, why not global warming experts?
Across the pond, here in the USA, head shots of persons arrested and charged with crimes are commonly known as “booking photos” (aka “mug shots”) and are public information in most jurisdictions across the country.
Just saying’ . . .
I liked the above article but, with all due respect to its title, it is already “too late” for reform at the UK MET Office.
Having been repeatedly warned about huge defects and even fabricated data in MET’s temperature data sets over the last decade or so, with the MET doing nothing significant to promptly correct these problems, most people serious about science-based, objective temperature data over Earth’s surface have now come to dismiss the MET Office data out-of-hand as being unreliable.
Once one’s credibility is lost, it’s a long, long time before it can be restored. Madison Avenue marketing 101.
The system is producing the numbers that it’s designers want to see.
How can it be “broken”?
/sarc
’internal’ errors I presume?
Oh, internationally recognised, I see.
It is time for the MO to set up a Reference Network similar to the CRN in the U.S. If the U.S. can cover the geographic area of the CONUS with a few more than 100 stations the MO could easily follow suit.
It is nothing more than having an expectation of excellent scientific measurements. Failure to do so pretty much tells you what the attitude toward science truly is.
“Before it’s too late” in the article headline.
Article never specifies, too late for what?
What might happen?
For a UK temperature check, I went to:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com/countries/united-kingdom/average-temperature-by-year. The Thi and Tlo temperature data from 1901 to 2024 are displayed in a long table. Here is the data for these two dates:
Year——-Thi——-Tlo——-Tav Temperatures are ° C
2024——12.9——6.9——-9.9
1901——-11.8——4.7——-8.2
Change—+1.1—-+2.2——+1.7
CO2 Concentration Data
2024: 424 ppmv (0.83 g CO2/cu. m. of air)
1901: 297 ppmv 0.58 g CO2/cu. m. of air)
After 123 years there has been only slight increase Thi while Tlo shows a slightly larger increase. However, the increases of the temperatures are within the range of natural temperature variations for the UK. Note how little CO2 there is in the air. It can have no effect on weather and climate
Extreme Weather Watch use temperature data from NOAA’s and the CRU’s data bases. Be sure to check out their website at:
https://www.extremeweatherwatch.com. On the home page there are links in light blue to many weather stations located around the world. There is no need to reduce the emission of carbon dioxide and Net Zero by 2O50 should be abandoned.
Walk in with pink slips and give Met one week to eliminate class four and five stations from the official record. Have the names printed on the pink slips when you first show them. The firings will be non judgmental it will be from the top down.