The UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) was all over mainstream media recently with claims that Britain had to spend £11 billion a year to adapt to 4°C higher temperatures by 2100. Did nobody tell them that their fanciful claims are based on RCP8.5 computer model assumptions that have just been declared “implausible” by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)? Probably not, since it is a Government-captured nest of Net Zero activists led by a young Classics graduate. Step forward the Met Office, the real culprit behind the calamitous charge to Net Zero, whose UK Climate Projections report (UKCP18) is the foundation source for the CCC’s whacky weather witterings.
UKCP18 only used an RCP8.5 super-computer run and highlighted the absurd findings in bold type. The most notorious claim was that British summers could be up to 5.1°C hotter in just 50 years measured against an 1850–1900 baseline. All the other projections in the 2018 report are statistically derived from this one ‘garbage-in, garbage-out’ run. It is no exaggeration to state that its preposterous findings have given backing to most climate change impact regulations and rules since 2018. In the light of the IPCC’s recent damning declaration, surely the head of the Met Office Professor Penny Endersby should consider her position. She has been in post since 2018 and all these unnecessary rules, highlighted here in a recent Daily Sceptic article, can be traced back to the malign influence of UKCP18.
If the Met Office were a private company, swift dismissal would inevitably follow given the scale of the damage, wreckage even, visited on the British economy by this pumped-up pile of climate catastrophe claptrap.
Even in its day job of measuring temperatures, the Met Office under her command has gone from bad to worse. The percentage of junk stations in its 380-strong nationwide network has risen from 77.9% to 80.6%. Junk stations that come with internationally recognised ‘uncertainties’ of up to 5°C are now to be found in nearly a third of the network. The Met Office’s lame excuse that it is difficult to find open spaces to give an accurate ambient air temperature on a crowded island is laughable, given that 93% of UK land is rural. In many cases, the Met Office needs only to move a station a few yards and control surrounding vegetation to obtain a more reliable reading. On such data, the Met Office declared, to widespread mainstream media acclaim, that last year was the hottest on record in the UK by six hundredths of a degree Centigrade. Professor Endersby has also been in charge over the last couple of years when 17 new classified stations were added to the network with an astonishing 64.7% starting life as junk. Does nobody check this stuff?
When the closure of the Straits of Hormuz really bites and food prices rocket, fuel runs short and fripperies like foreign holidays are abandoned, don’t forget to drop a ‘Thanks Pen’ message into the Met Office. Great job in producing all that statistical BS that helped dunderhead Government ministers cut off the exploitation of our own local hydrocarbon supplies.
But all is not lost for the Met Office. On October 8th last year, the rising star of Net Zero and climate scepticism Kathryn Porter appeared on the Mike Graham Talk morning show and, quoting from Daily Sceptic and citizen sleuth Ray Sanders articles, said:
They’ve closed a lot of weather stations and then they say that they interpolate from other weather stations that are nearby. And then various people have gone round to investigate this and discovered that there are no weather stations nearby, and so they had to remove data because people have basically said “You’re making it up” and they have been. And the other thing is that some of these weather stations that do exist produce junk data… And then they will say, “Oh well, you know, it’s so much hotter than it was in the past.” Well you can’t say that if you made up the numbers.
Of course, regular readers will be aware of all these issues which we have covered in detail over the last two years. In addition, Ray Sanders on Tallbloke’s Talkshop has conducted a forensic examination of most of the individual sites and recordings, and to say he has been extremely critical of what he found may be considered an understatement.
The full arguments in this Ofcom case can be read here, along with the judgement that Talk did not take reasonable care to satisfy itself that material facts had not been presented, disregarded or omitted in a way that was unfair to the complainant. Also, the broadcaster was said to have not given the complainant a timely and appropriate opportunity to respond to the allegations made about it in the programme. This finding was made despite Ofcom accepting that the broadcaster had already given the Met Office an opportunity to contribute to Talk, “at a time of its choosing”. This occurred the month before when your correspondent appeared on the Julia Hartley-Brewer Show where similar Met Office matters were discussed. Talk noted that “the offer has not been taken up”.
Regarding the suggestion from Kathryn Porter that the Met Office “makes up data”, Talk noted that the phrase was a criticism of methodology, rather than an allegation of fabrication. In fact, this is exactly what the Daily Sceptic has long argued. If, for instance, you claim to use “well correlated neighbouring station” data to infill supposed temperature recordings, it would be helpful if the actual sites could be named. And if it is discovered that there are no such stations for many miles around, it would again be useful for further realistic guidance on the matter to be provided. Can a Met Office computer, even a highly expensive super-computer, provide an accurate ambient air temperature for a location up to 30 miles away? There are many who would suggest that this is highly unlikely.
Blubbing to the broadcasting beak might have given the Met Office some help in keeping the mainstream media lid on its dreadful temperature measuring network. But the dam burst of RCP8.5 cannot be stemmed. Years of promoting a set of assumptions that were always implausible – an insult to the intelligence, some might add – to ratchet up the Net Zero fantasy requires at the very least a fulsome apology, followed by a withdrawal of all RCP8.5-corrupted data and major changes in the top hierarchy. If the current Labour Government does not insist on these actions – and let’s be realistic, it will not – it is possible that an electorally successful Reform administration will.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.