How the lying liars at the lying Met Office lie to us

Friday-weekend blog

As we all shiver in the autumnal weather during what is meant to be summer and some of us have even turned our central heating back on, there is one certainty – in a few weeks time, the liars at the lying Met Office will tell us that we’ve just had the “warmest June on record”. After all, the Met Office made the same claim about miserable May and appalling April. What will be intriguing will be what mathematical contortions the Met Office will use to justify their preposterous nonsense:

• will the Met Office have the gall to say that June in the UK was the warmest on record?
• or will the Met Office choose somewhere which had decent weather – perhaps Greece or India – to justify their climate catastrophism?
• or will the Met Office instead try to fob us off by claiming that, although June in the UK was a disaster, global temperatures (if such a thing can even be measured) were at record levels?

What is normal?

For decades the Met Office has been claiming that temperatures have been higher than normal. But what is ‘normal’. In line with World Meteorological Organization guidelines, climate is measured against 30-year �averaging� periods. Known as �climate normal� periods, these act as a benchmark against which the observational records of weather and climate can be compared to place them into context and as a reference baseline to provide context for future climate projections. The 30-year periods begin on 1st January of a year ending with the digit 1. Up till 2020, the base period – what we’re told is ‘normal’ – was the period from 1961 to 1990. Hopefully some readers will remember that from 1960 to at least 1980 the Earth cooled so much that even the experts at the climate-catastrophist Guardian assured us a new Ice Age was on the way:

So, it’s hardy surprising that temperatures have been rising since the 30-year reference period included at least 20 years of bitterly cold weather. Thus all claims up till 1990 that the Earth was warming are more likely to be just variations in a natural cycle of cooling and warming rather than a climate catastrophe caused by human activities.

The latest 30-year period ended on 31 December 2020. The Met Office now uses 1991-2020 as the reference �normal� for routine UK climate monitoring. However, the 1961-1990 reference will be retained for the monitoring of longer-term climate change.

Can any temperature measured be trusted?

Until the 1991 to 2020 reference period ended, the climate doomsters could be pretty confident that most days, weeks, months and years would be warmer than what the Met Office used as ‘normal’ But now we have a new, warmer reference period, the Met Office has a new trick. This is to claim that a certain place or day or month or whatever has been “the hottest since records began”. I haven’t checked, but I have a vague memory of the year 1884 being the year ‘when records began’. But don’t quote me on that.

Now let’s think of what might have changed since 1884. Hmmm. In 1884 the UK population was around 30 million. Now it’s about 70 million:

More people means more buildings, more cars, more jet planes, more central heating, more everything except for tranquil places with peace and quiet and no multi-cultural enrichment.

Here’s just one of the many places where the Met Office measures our country’s temperature:

The temperatures is measured at the red mark. You’ll see that its between an airport runway and a road. I believe that this began to be used in 1959. And I wonder whether since 1959 there are fewer or more jet planes taking off from this airport and whether there are fewer or more cars driving past. I suspect the answer to both conundrums is ‘more’. More planes and more cars mean more heat.

If I remember correctly England’s hottest ever days were recorded next to an RAF airbase where Typhoon jets were taking off and landing and in a very sheltered botanical garden in Cambridge which was being turned into a furnace by the heat from airconditioning from surrounding office buildings and laboratories. Scotland’s hottest ever day was at a temperature measuring station which happened to have an ice cream van parked nearby pumping out hot air from its cooling system.

The WMO Siting Classification for Surface Observing Stations on Land was formally introduced from 2014, enabling us to make broad comparisons of our weather and climate stations with those around the world. These WMO classifications focus on the exposure of an observed element at a site, with a Class 1 assessment being the highest standard and Class 5 the lowest. Class 1 stations would be the most reliable and Classes 4 and 5 pretty worthless. Unfortunately for us, fewer than 10% of the UK’s monitoring stations are Class 1. The huge majority are Class 4 or Class 5:

Class 4 and Class 5 observation stations are likely to be affected by increased urbanisation, more traffic, more heat from buildings and so on. In short, they are more likely to give much higher temperature readings than they should due to the Urban Heat Island Effect.

So, next time the Met Office or the BBC or C4 News or any of the bought mainstream media gravely informs you that we are experiencing the hottest day or week or month or whatever ‘since records began’, you should probably take these claims with a Siberian salt mine of salt.