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.
