The Temperature Of The UK Over The Last 100 Years (part 1)

A butcher's at daily maxima and minima over the last 100 years. Are things getting worse, and what does ‘worse’ mean?

“It’s hard to grow carrots on a glacier" is a phrase you’ll find me using time and time again. Somehow we’ve slipped into a parallel reality whereby excess plant food and a life-giving gas (carbon dioxide) is being regarded as some sort of toxic pollutant, and where the warming of the planet a terribly bad thing even though the greatest spurts of biodiversity took place on a warmer globe.

Cold is good, apparently, as are the glaciers and polar ice that activists want to see more of. For some inexplicable reason they haven’t yet figured out that it is the great ice ages that destroy life and the ecosystem, with life on Earth flourishing under warm ages.

Neither have they figured out that runaway global warming doesn’t happen on Earth. There have been plenty of chances for this over the millennia, with carbon dioxide up at 4,000pm and beyond rather than the paltry 400ppm it is today. Such folk are oblivious to the fact that we’re coming out of an extended period of carbon dioxide deficit when levels dropped to 280ppm or thereabouts. Trying growing plants at 280ppm and 400ppm and you’ll soon figure out which is better for the biosphere!

In response to these statements I’m going to get the usual regurgitation of old chestnuts such as: ‘but sea levels are going to rise’, ‘hurricanes are going rage’, ‘wildfires will burn out of control, ‘drought will kill millions’, ‘floods will kill millions’, ‘species will go extinct’, ‘climate refugees will be a major issue’, ‘cities will become uninhabitable’ and all the rest. I shall be looking at these claims to see if they are valid or politicised propaganda of the very corporate green agenda.

We are submerged in a most familiar narrative indeed for we all turn on the TV or glance at the glossies in the newsstand, or gawp at our smartphones that tell us these things will be because experts have said so and they all agree. “A new study shows” is a favourite of the popular science journalist. The general public swallow this whole, along with “experts say” because we don’t teach people how to think critically, and we certainly don’t teach them how to appraise scientific papers.

In the real world scientific studies - even from the biggest and best players - are burdened by assumptions and limitations. A fair few contain errors and bloopers, and some are even deliberately fraudulent. This is not new news to research professionals but it may come as an unpleasant revelation to a trusting public who equate a white lab coat with purity. Nothing could be further from the truth and I have the scars to prove it!

The Rain In Spain

On August 7th I started out with a newsletter on something as deliberately innocuous as UK rainfall and we discovered a few things along the way. We discovered that NOAA’s data is not to be trusted just because it’s NOAA, and we discovered that it’s really easy to bend the truth with climate data. The straightest bat that could be swung produced an anomaly series that revealed a possible upturn in mean rainfall in recent decades that could easily be part of a cycle rather than anything fossil fuel emissions are doing.

We might say that ambiguity is the hallmark of real science, and the duality of light as both a wave and a particle embodies this beautifully. Some say it’s turtles all the way down; if it is then these are ambiguous turtles with chaotic smiles.

The Thermometers’ Tale

What I am going to do in the next series of newsletters is take the methodology I adopted for UK rainfall and apply it to UK temperature. We shall be looking at daily minima and daily maxima for these tell their own story, and I shall be producing a mean land surface temperature anomaly since these are what gets bandied about.

The thing to remember about means is that they are not necessarily meaningful, and I recommend subscribers have a look at my two short notes on this subject starting with this newsletter. You can hide a lot of fudge within the bucket of the mean!

Setting means aside (mine will most certainly not be buckets of fudge) we’ll get to see if the UK is consistently warming as claimed or whether it’s subject to some sort of cyclical dance of the decades in which inconsistency rules.

Data permitting we’ll also have a look at whether any warming is due to encroaching urban development or due to climate change proper. It’s no coincidence that UK records tend to be set at Heathrow Airport, and we need to question the value of measurements taken there. The Met Office seem to think it’s OK to have a thermometer here…

…but then again they are a very political organisation these days.

Thunderbirds Are Go!

Right then, that’s enough of a preamble. I’ll grab some breakfast, comb my hair, clean my glasses, straighten my pencils, defrag my hard drive and get stuck in to the pile of data I have downloaded from this very handy resource offered by the Met Office. Ideally they’d offer a few hundred stations worth of collated time series data but I doubt that they’re as public facing as they claim. The phrase ‘lip service’ springs to mind.

Sure, there’s fabulous amounts of publicly available weather station data available from MIDAS but try downloading CSV files one year at a time for one station at a time and see how long it takes to build a sample of 1,000 stations, each covering a span of 50 years. My trusty hand-held calculator tells me that’s 50,000 downloads. At 5 seconds per download I’d need to set aside 69.4 hours, as opposed to the 2 minutes I’d need if they bothered to crunch the data they hold and make it more accessible to independent researchers like myself. After all, they are supposed to be a public service, aren’t they? Well maybe not if it lets any cats out of any bags.

Kettle On!