The Temperature Of The UK Over The Last 100 Years (part 6)

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

In part 5 of this series we ate another helping of spaghetti Bolognese, this being the colourful plot of tmin anomalies for the 34 UK stations in my sample, tmin being a lazy way of writing mean minimum daily temperature. The Bolognese was reduced into a clarified slide that revealed a rather wobbly grand mean anomaly. Night temperatures have certainly been getting warmer, but they’ve also been oscillating between warmer and cooler phases which cannot easily be explained by such simplistic notions such as carbon = warming.

After sticking a straight line through all that deliciously curvy behaviour we arrived at a warming rate estimate of 0.8°C per century for the mean minimum daily temperature as measured at 34 UK stations over the period 1865-2021. This is a lot less than the 1.5°C mean global warming offered by the IPCC in Special Report 15 and so we donned our sleuthing hats to go and find the reasons why.

We started by picking cherries and boy what ripe cherries they were! In next t…