Even before August was over, the global-warming obsessed Met Office was rushing to claim that 2018 might have been the hottest UK summer on record.
Last week, it qualified this to confirm that, although this summer only tied with 1976, 2003 and 2006, in England alone it was definitely the hottest ever, its mean temperature of 17.16 beating 1976’s previous record of 17.01.
As often before, however, the expert climate blogger Paul Homewood looked carefully at how the Met Office sought to justify these claims.
It depended on that supposed record temperature average for England, because its UK-wide database, going back to 1910, showed none of the UK’s other nations registering a new record.
But herein emerged a puzzle. According to another data set, the Met Office’s Central England Temperature record (CET), meticulously kept since 1659, the summer of 2018 was not the hottest in history.
It was only the fifth warmest, coming in even behind 1826. The CET’s 2018 figure of 17.27 is exactly half a degree cooler than 1976’s figure of 17.77, which the CET clearly shows still holding the English record.
So why, in preference to a data set widely respected as the world’s longest continuous temperature record, did the Met Office rely on one very much shorter, which may draw on many more weather stations but which has long come under fire for the questionable siting of several of its thermometers, and where readings can be seriously distorted by local factors such as the “urban heat island” effect?
Based on his diligent analysis of the Met Office’s own figures, Homewood suggests that its UK data set is no longer credible.
It should, he says, “immediately withdraw all claims about ‘hottest summers’ and explain why the two data sets diverge so wildly”.
Read more at Telegraph
Selectively using data that misrepresents what is happening has been going on for a long time. NOAA used to make many announcements of “Hottest ever.” The reason for these inaccurate analyses is clearly political in motivation. Why else would they do it.
Given the size and chaotic nature of the atmosphere and the impossibility of calibrating historic measuring devices against current ones can they really quote temperatures to 2 decimal places? Living in the UK the Met Office can’t be relied upon to tell you what will be happening in the next day or two, they have become just another part of a “not fit for purpose”, very expensive establishment.