Time for the UK Met Office to Reform its Junk Temperature Statistics Before it’s Too Late

If anything, the Met Office is getting worse!

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.