By Paul Homewood
This was the study I highlighted yesterday, which found that European summer warming in recent decades has been driven by reduced aerosol emissions:
Abstract
Compared to observations, climate models underestimate the recent increase of European summer temperatures, due to an underestimation of Quasi-stationary Rossby Wave (QSW) trends over Europe. This is partially due to unpredictable internal variability and partially due to an underestimation of the predictable signal in response to external forcings. The analysis of a large ensemble of historical simulations shows that forcing factors generate changes in QSW and European summer temperatures consistent with those from observations but with a lower magnitude, making most of the observed changes predictable by the models through a signal adjustment. The analysis of single forcing experiments shows a major contribution of aerosols starting from 1980, when the reduction of sulfate aerosol emissions over Europe is associated with a longitudinal temperature asymmetry, which alters the atmospheric circulation. These results further demonstrate the need to account for model errors to best estimate past and future changes in climate.
Plain Language Summary
In the last decades, summer temperatures over Europe increased more than over other regions, associated with a reduction of particle emissions. In particular, the reduction of sulfate emissions over Europe starting from 1980 is associated with changes in the atmospheric circulation and an additional warming over Europe. Climate models reproduce this behavior, but with a magnitude much smaller than that of observations. If the outputs of the models are corrected to compensate for this underestimation, the increase in European summer temperatures becomes largely predictable. Our results highlight the need to take model error into account to estimate past and future climate change.
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2026GL122424
Three of the authors are from the Earth Sciences Department, Barcelona Supercomputing Center. But D M Smith works at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter.
The paper was first published on 30th June and formally included in the GRL Issue 13 on 16th July. Yet weeks later, the Met Office still has not referred to it on its news website, blog or even its X Feed.
I find this astonishing, given their own role in the study and the significance of the paper’s findings.
The study, of course, undermines the Met Office’s theory that hot summers, such as the current one, are largely the result of man-made climate change, by which they mean caused by the burning of fossil fuels.
It was only a couple of weeks ago that the Met Office claimed:
More than 2,700 people are thought to have died from heat-related causes during the May and June heatwaves in England and Wales. Of those, it’s estimated that 42% died as a result of the extra heat caused by human-induced warming.
Climate-fuelled heat: Daytime maximum temperatures across England and Wales are now roughly 3-4°C hotter than they would have been without human-induced climate change, raising the health risks associated with these heatwaves
You can take or leave the aerosol theory, but what this new research confirms is that the jet stream is the driver of hot summers here in the UK, not GHG emissions.
Perhaps now the Met Office will acknowledge their own research?
Perhaps they’ll acknowledge it about the same time that hell freezes over and then come up with some weasel words to show that it’s all caused by CO2.
As usual, the UK Met Office behaves like a dishonest employee found rifling through files which are none of their business…And refusing to answer questions when discovered…That’s how it looks to me…I might be wrong…
CAPS?????
I think you mean BOLD. Neil is full of himself.
Perhaps a filter that won’t let more than 10% of a post be bolded or italicized?
Or just stop being a narcissist.
Wait till he learns to colour in.
They haven’t said anything about the junk status of UKCP18
They aren’t going to. They are firmly behind the ideology and the narrative, anything contradictory goes down the memory hole.
If memory serves, their weather forecasters on the BBC, many years ago, did talk about the jet stream and its relationship to our weather in summer and winter, in particular.
Of course they did, as this was an easy solution to periodic heat waves generated by North African conditions pushing into Europe. The Co2 pollution theory hadn’t been fabricated yet, so they had to go with the meteorological facts nature presented. Despite slow modern warming responding to periodically evolving Earth-Solar orbital relationships, essentially nothing has changed in the overall pattern of meteorological conditions across Europe since the seventies, except faster urban warming due to UHIE which isn’t related to aerosols.
I don’t by the aerosol theory.
There has been already multi-decadal warming periods of about the same trend before, without any decreasing trend in human aerosols emissions during those periods, for example :
first half of the 19th century,first half of the 20th century.
That was also the case also during the 4 centuries of warming (from the 700s) which led to the middle age climate optimum (about 1000- 1250).
And how this theory could explain the warming which led to the Holocene interglacial period ?
The only way to justify this theory is to assume that all these natural climate changes suddenly desappeared in the 1980s … very very unlikely.
Moreover, the reduction in pollution from the 80s was mainly achieved in US and Europe and no where else before the 2000s (or even later).
I don’t buy the CO2 theory for basically the same reasons (and many others).
Aerosols have an effect.
CO2 has an effect.
Both are trivial to the point of being immeasurable.
Another case of correlation proves causation, which is bogus.
Clearly the solution is to stop the Jet Stream! Then England’s weather will be perfect.
God Forbid. The Poms would have nothing to complain about
The Met Office is corrupt in the same way as the whole Climate Industry. They do ‘lying’, they don’t do ‘truthing’
Since Labour came to power promising £300 off of energy bills, reality has seen our bills go up by almost double that. So, it came as some surprise to read…
“His detractors won’t like to admit it, but Miliband has been the most successful minister under the Starmer administration,” says Ed Matthew, the UK director at the E3G thinktank.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2026/jul/21/labour-briefed-against-ed-miliband-success-popularity
To fulfil the election manifesto promise bills will have to come down by ~£800.
Can’t see that happening.
Funny how so many directors of so called ‘think tanks’ can’t think.
When they think, they are hobbled by complying with socialist constraints on truth.
“Think tanks” is short for “their thinking tanks…”
What, pray tell, does “most successful minister under the Starmer administration” mean anyway?
Starmer’s government was so bad that it’s possible that it was deliberately trying to wreck everything it touched. By that measure I guess Minibrain could be judged a ‘success’.
It means they haven’t been sacked for gross incompetency yet
Recent warm northern European climate conditions refute the widely hyped claims that thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic is dwindling or collapsing. If the Gulf Stream / AMOC currents were actually slowing significantly, the clearest symptom would be cooling climates in northern Europe.
The latitudes of Edinburgh, Stockholm and Helsinki are similar to that of Polar Bear Provincial Park (named for its inhabitants), on Hudson Bay, in Canada. Heat carried by the Gulf Stream to northern Europe is one of the reasons that places like Scotland and Scandinavia are habitable.
Here’s the Met Office fretting over that supposed threat of climate change to the AMOC:
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/blog/2023/what-do-we-mean-by-a-climate-tipping-point
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/blog/2023/what-do-climate-tipping-points-mean-for-the-uk
So the Met Office simultaneously claims that manmade climate change is causing warming European climates and may well cause cooling European climates.
Heads I win, tails you lose. If every possibility is caused by climate change, then no matter what happens they can always say, “we told you so.”
From the article: “but what this new research confirms is that the jet stream is the driver of hot summers here in the UK, not GHG emissions.”
Your local weather is all about how the jet streams and high and low pressure centers are configured.
But the high priests of ‘climate change’ cannot admit this fact without conceding that hey have been lying and stealing since the founding of that cult.
Reduction in aerosols is a type of human caused warming due to reduced pollution. It just happens to undermine the consensus narrative fueled by the CO2 / CH4 fixation. It may also prompt the nutters to support geo engineering to inject the pollutants that they removed by regulation.
Willis E’s simple model does a far better job than the elaborate curve fitting by the CMIP approaches.
But it does not line their pockets.
All I get from the MET office is a good visual explanation of why the Clintons were pushing green (glass) buildings ignorant of the heating and cooling cost differences. Bad judgement spread onto others expense is bad public policy.
“The study, of course, undermines the Met Office’s theory that hot summers, such as the current one, are largely the result of man-made climate change, by which they mean caused by the burning of fossil fuels.”
The burning of fossil fuels produces aerosols as well as CO2.
CO2 produces a positive driver on climate and aerosols a negative one.
Both come from the burning of fossil fuels (yes there are natural aerosols as well).
Therefore the reduction of man-made aerosols removes a “brake” on the positive to allow faster warming and it’s bizarre to imply that fossil derived aerosols are divorced from human causation.
“You can take or leave the aerosol theory, but what this new research confirms is that the jet stream is the driver of hot summers here in the UK, not GHG emissions.”
The jet stream, as Homewood puts it, is precisely what the paper talks of with …
“Compared to observations, climate models underestimate the recent increase of European summer temperatures, due to an underestimation of Quasi-stationary Rossby Wave (QSW) trends over Europe. “
The Rossby wave train is merely the position that the PJS takes around the NH and the QSW highlights it’s position with regard the W Europe.
What this paper is saying is that there were feedbacks which trended the quasi-stationary positioning, and as a consequence there been an increased of SW’ly winds into W Europe. The asymmetric nature of aerosol reduction over Europe combining with higher SSTs over the North Atlantic as referenced by the AMO.
Problem with the Met-Office, is that they have let their surface sites degrade to such a parlous state that is no possible way of knowing how much REAL warming there has been, and how much is because of really bad sites, expanding airports, urban warming and data manipulation.
There is no reason to believe that European surface sites would be any better.
Does this mean that the particulates and aerosols we’ve been putting in the atmosphere have been COOLING the climate?
Which of the ecological disaster lies are we supposed to believe?
Oi give us back our missing heat you blighters-
Near-freezing cold snap to engulf millions
(with apologies to real snow and ice countries)
Hit 3ºC where I am in the Hunter Valley..
nice crunchy frost underfoot, had to wait until 9am for the ice to clear off the car windscreen.
I cringe every time the jet stream is invoked as the cause of anything. It is much more an effect than a cause, the result of the thermal wind between air masses of different temperature, which increases with height as long as the horizontal thermal contrast exists. The wind stops increasing with height at the “jet stream level” when there is no longer a horizontal temperature contrast. Nevertheless, there is a continual evolving interplay between forces, including vertical motions and low and high pressure centers that develop and intensify through baroclinic instability, but these all ultimately derive their energy source from the temperature contrast between air masses, especially if that contrast extends over deep layers (at least up to the middle of the troposphere, and often extending through almost the entire depth).
The MET Office is willingly lying to the public. Their scientists know full well that there is no climate panic. The biggest problem logical people face is trying to convince other people that their gov’ts and their agencies tell them bare faced lies all the time. Even to the point of harm.
I think of the Met as my new four letter word.