Greens Creating Global Warming Crisis for Political Ends

EXCLUSIVE: A Third of U.K. Met Office Temperature Stations May Be Wrong by Up to 5°C, FOI Reveals

( or What the UK met office hides as do NOAA and BOM)
Both BOM and NOAA also consistently adjust and fudge the raw data almost always with an upward bias.


From the DAILY SCEPTIC
BY CHRIS MORRISON
Nearly one in three (29.2%) U.K. Met Office temperature measuring stations have an internationally-defined margin of error of up to 5°C. Another 48.7% of the total 380 stations could produce errors up to 2°C, meaning nearly eight out of ten stations (77.9%) are producing ‘junk’ or ‘near junk’ readings of surface air temperatures. Arguably, on no scientific basis should these figures be used for the Met Office’s constant promotion of the collectivist Net Zero project. Nevertheless, the state-funded operation frequently uses them to report and often catastrophise rises in temperature of as little as 0.01°C.
Under a freedom of information request, the Daily Sceptic has obtained a full list of the Met Office’s U.K. weather stations, along with an individual class rating defined by the World Meteorological Office. These CIMO ratings range from pristine class 1 and near pristine class 2, to an ‘anything goes’ or ‘junk’ class 5. The CIMO ratings penalise sites that are near any artificial heat sources such as buildings and concrete surfaces. According to the WMO, a class 5 site is one where nearby obstacles “create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”. Even the Met Office refers to sites next to buildings and vegetation as “undesirable”. It seems class 5 sites can be placed anywhere, and they come with a WMO warning of “additional estimated uncertainties added by siting up to 5°C”; class 4 notes “uncertainties” up to 2°C, while class 3 states 1°C. Only 13.7%, or 52 of the Met Office’s temperature and humidity stations come with no such ‘uncertainty’ warnings attached.
The below graph shows the percentage totals of each class. Class 1 and 2, identified in green, account for just 6.3% and 7.4% of the total respectively. Class 3 identified as orange comes in at 8.4%. The graph shows the huge majorities enjoyed by the darkening shades of red showing classes 4 and 5. It is possible that the margins of error identified for classes 3, 4 and 5 could be a minus amount – if for instance the measuring device was sited in a frost hollow – but the vast majority are certain to be pushed upwards by heat corruptions.
Last year, the investigative journalist Paul Homewood sought FOI information from the Met Office about the Welsh weather station Porthmadog, which often appears in ‘hottest of the day’ listings. He was informed that the site was listed as class 4 and “this is an acceptable rating for a temperature sensor”. Hence, continued the Met Office, “we will continue to quote from this site”. In short, observes Homewood, the Met Office is happy to use a class 4 site for climatological purposes, “even though that class is next to junk status”. It is bad enough that the Met Office is using this site, but it is even worse that they know about the issues but still plan to carry on doing so, Homewood continued. “How many other weather stations are of such poor quality?” he asked.
Now we know.
Using these figures with a precision to one hundredth of a degree centigrade, the Met Office declared that 2023 was the second hottest in the U.K., coming in just 0.06°C lower than the all-time record. Cue, of course, all the Thermogeddon headlines in mainstream media. In 2022, the Met Office said that five sites in the U.K. on July 19th went past 40°C, with a record of 40.3°C at RAF Coningsby. Kew Gardens is termed a class 2 site, although it is very close to one of the largest tropical glasshouses in the world. St James’s Park and Northolt airport are class 5 sites, Heathrow is class 4, while RAF Coningsby is class 3. At the time, the Met Office declared that the records set a “milestone in U.K. climate history”. A national record was also set on July 18th at Hawarden Airport in Wales (class 4) and on July 19th at Charterhall in Scotland (class 4).
Always alive to a popular headline catastrophising the weather, the Met Office declared a warmest St. Valentine’s night English record this year of 11.5°C at class 4-rated St. Mary’s airport on the Isles of Scilly. Earlier in the year, the Met Office declared the highest January temperature in Scotland at 19.6°C at Kinlochewe, a class 4 site. Interestingly the previous, much promoted, U.K. record was set on July 31th 2019 at the Cambridge Botanic Gardens, a class 5 site. Even more interesting is that in the Homewood FOI disclosures, the Met Office stated that class 5 data “will be flagged and not quoted in national records”.
The Met Office is between a rock and a hard place with these surface temperature measurements. Many of its long-standing stations have been encroached by urbanisation and corruptions seem to have become endemic across the entire system. In the past, this didn’t matter as much since margin of error allowances could be accepted along with less accurate local and national weather forecasting. Measuring surface temperatures across countries and then the planet is always going to be difficult, but a more accurate reading would be obtained by only using data from WMO classes 1 and 2. However, national and global temperatures have become politicised by the global warming scare and the proposed Net Zero solution. Alarmists often state that climate ‘tipping’ points will be reached with very small increases in temperature measured in tenths of a degree.
Using data from just classes 1 and 2 would likely crash the claimed rises in national and global temperatures.