The Temperature Of The UK Over The Last 100 Years (part 9)

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

In this series so far I have focused on UK daily mean maximum and minimum temperatures as recorded at 34 weather stations since 1853, details of which may be found here. My experience is such that alarmists will respond with phrases like, “big deal, so what?”, or perhaps, “only 34, that’s nothing: they’re not likely to be representative of the global picture”.  Hence today I’m going to determine if 34 UK weather stations is a big deal or not, and whether a small island sitting between a cold northerly sea and warmer ocean at latitude is capable of yielding anything worth spending cogitation time on.

What we need, then, is to get our hands on a highly reputable temperature dataset derived from land-based stations by a leading institution, and ideally one that feeds measurements into IPCC’s CMIP sausage machine. Whilst I could go to NASA, NOAA or Berkeley I decided to keep it Brit-flavoured and opted for the mighty CRUTEM5 anomaly series as concocted by the Climatic Research Unit at the …