The Temperature Of The UK Over The Last 100 Years (part 3)

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

In part 2 of this series we took a closer look at the maximum daily temperature record at two UK airfields - whopping great Heathrow Airport down South and weeny little Wick Airport up North. Hardened activists are going to roll their eyeballs and declare a pathetic attempt to undermine a vast body of settled science, which tells us that they don’t understand anything about science.

Given that both airports are on the face of the globe, and given that both airports must obey the laws of physics (and especially the laws of thermodynamics), then we can use them as experimental subjects - guinea pigs if you will - to assess what is being billed as a global phenomenon. Global Warming is either global or somebody has sold us a lemon.

Yes, we are going to find localised factors, and yes the UK is going to behave differently to the Steppes of Russia, but global warming must leave its tell-tail trace everywhere otherwise activists will have to qualify their slogans: “global warming will fry us all… apart from those living in Croydon, maybe”.

Just two airports can tell us a great deal if we are genuinely interested in climate science. In this regard Heathrow and Wick have revealed they have both been warming since 1965, with Heathrow warming faster than Wick. This led us to our first estimate of the urban heat island effect (UHIE) which popped out at 1.8°C per century, this being some 0.3°C greater than the 1.5°C offered by the IPCC in SR15. Both airports also revealed to us lengthy periods where warming of the maximum temperature record hadn’t taken place when the science says it should have, with the mean daily maximum at Wick not shifting for 70 years. Since Wick Airport isn’t a mirage something must be happening there other than activism would have us believe.

With its lengthy data record stretching back to 1914 we also stumbled upon an incredible 1.0°C rise in the mean daily maximum record at Wick that took place over a span of just 2 years, those 2 years coinciding with preparations for WWII. Wick Airport is located in a remote region right at the tip of Scotland, so this finding tells us that UHIE applies even to rural airfields with just a smattering of tarmac and a few buildings. Consequently, and as science-types who are supposed to conduct research instead of regurgitate mantras, we may rightly ask just how much of the land surface temperature record for the rest of the globe is also due to UHIE. Have we stuck our thermometers in sensible places?

Plat Du Jour

Today Heathrow and Wick are going to be joined by 32 other UK weather stations. This will be made possible by converting their mean daily maximum temperature records into mean anomalies (have a look at this newsletter if the concept of the temperature anomaly remains a mystery). But before I assemble the sample let us have quick look at how the mean daily maximum temperature record for Heathrow and Wick stacks up against their respective anomalies.