Sink Thinking

I utilise the Central England Temperature Record (HadCET) to investigate the progress of global boiling by month: are we about to be sautéed in unsalted butter?

To date I have penned this article, this article and this article investigating June 2023, this article and this article investigating July 2023, this article investigating August 2023, and this article investigating September 2023 from the UK perspective of climate change. I don’t honestly know what climate change is meant to be when it’s at home, for it started off being global warming and flipped to several other non-scientific identities when folk realised global warming wasn’t really global and that things were not necessarily warming in accordance with the theory. But, when something hot is spotted, as sure as eggs are eggs the MSM are keen to leap back into pushing the global warming narrative at all costs. This is not unlike a griping toddler and their dummy.

Thus, I am going to interpret climate change as being a period of global warming (due to people recklessly and selfishly burning fossil fuels) whenever the MSM can get data to support the getting hotter and hotter doomsday narrative. That period could be 150 years or it could be just one location for just one day, depending on how desperate the churnalists are in churning a story because they’ve been ordered/paid to do so by the masters of the narrative. In many ways we could look upon climate change as an economist’s/central banker’s fancy, though I also like the word whimsy.

On contemplating the global whimsy I had one of those washing-up moments whereby my bowl was foaming, the scrubbing brush whirling, and plates were clattering into the drying rack. Under such conditions I’m able to think deeply (we may call it sink thinking) and thereby ideated a short, sharp analysis that might throw some light/mud. We can start by asking ourselves this question:

If climate change is genuine, and the result of increasing CO2, should all months of the year reveal a warming trend?

I’m going to stick my neck out and suggest the answer must be yes, but with some months exhibiting a greater rate of warming than others. But is this the case for the mean daily temperature as embodied in the Central England Temperature Record (HadCET?).

Computer says no:

What we’ve got here is a split file regression analysis that takes data for the whole year period 1772 – 2022 and spits out multiple linear trend estimates in one neat table. What we need to do is check the column headed ‘Sig.’ to see if any trend reaches statistical significance (i.e. can be considered to be greater than the null hypothesis of zero trend) at the 95% level of confidence (i.e. p<=0.05). Whilst this is the case for many months it is not the case for February (p=0.083), May (p=0.163) and June (p=0.706) and we must ask why climate change is not evident for these three months of the year.

We can then eyeball the column headed ‘b1’ to see the point estimate for the warming rate per year. Slide the decimal to the right by two places and we’ve got the rate per century. My eyeballs tell me that the greatest rate is to be found for the month of January (+0.90°C per century, p<0.001), with the weakest statistically significant rate to be found for the month of July (+0.27°C per century, p<0.001). Talk about cock-eyed!

What we observe, then, is the greatest warming during the coldest parts of the English year and the least amount of warming during the hottest parts of the English year. Does this make sense to anybody? It sure doesn’t make sense to me for my simple mind is expecting hotter and hotter weather during the summer months; after all, this story is exactly what the Met Office and the MSM are selling us by running out scary headlines whenever the bulb hits the top mark in a few places.

Sorry folks, but winter is where the global warming is at, not the scorchio summer and this suggests that it may be the rise in minimum temperatures attained that is the driver, rather than the rise in maximum temperatures. Let me put this to the test by running the same analysis for both daily minima and daily maxima for the whole year period 1878 - 2022:

Well I’ll be darned! From the top table we now see that global warming is not affecting the minimum temperatures attained during the winter months of December (p=0.052) through to February (p=0.392) as I had suspected but really kicks in during October, with a point estimate of +1.54°C per century (p<0.001), with November popping in behind at +0.90°C per century (p=0.002). In sum, climate change in terms of warming of the minimum temperature record is more evident in the autumn than at any other time of the year. How bizarre is that?!

Global warming is splattered all over the bottom table with the exception of June (p=0.140). How very darn curious that a notoriously hot summer month should not be subject to climate change! If we look to see where the maximum warming rate lies we once again find October leaping forward with a point estimate of +1.64°C per century (p<0.001). There’s nowt so queer as thermometers!

I had been hoping that this analysis would have given a straightforward answer, but it ain’t. For those who like something visual here’s a bar chart of warming rates for the period 1878 – 2022 by month for the minimum (nighttime) and maximum (daytime) temperature series:

If this isn’t worth sitting with a cream bun and a steaming pot of Darjeeling I don’t know what is. This colourful plot paints a picture of when climate change a.k.a. global warming is hitting the nation of England the most, and when it is smacking us the least.

The shocker for me is the negligible warming trend for June for both daytime and nighttime series, this being a month when we’d expect global boiling to be boiling over and making a mess of the stove. The second shocker is the emergence of October as the king of global warming for both daytime and nighttime series. Ironic, then, that talking heads and expertistas tried to make a meal out of June 2023.

There is a pattern here of greater rates of warming during the spring and autumn, with lesser rates of warming during the winter and summer and this is worth some decent cogitation. We might be talking wind strength and direction, tides, warm and cold water currents, atmospheric pressure and weather fronts, humidity, precipitation, cloud formation and much more.

Sink thinking is required, and I venture we’d all get to a better place of understanding of the climate proper if we put down the soup, the superglue, the politics and the censorship.

Kettle On!