What About August 2023?

I take a quick look at the Central England Temperature Record (HadCET) to see how August fared in the new era of global boiling

August has come and gone and, like July before it, we found ourselves popping the central heating on now and then and resorting to sweaters, warming soups and Norwegian wool socks. We would have put a couple of logs on the wood fire but this isn’t a good idea when honey bees are nesting in your chimney. The boiler it is, then.

With weather conditions pretty similar to those in July I had been waiting for yet another announcement by talking heads that August 2023 had broken all temperature records since time began. This never came, so I presume they’re trying to avoid eye contact.

Two can play at this game so this fine September morning, with tweety birds singing outside my office window, I downloaded the venerable and most trustworthy Central England Temperature Record data from here, then whipped my crayons out:

Herewith a scatterplot of all mean daily August temperatures since time began in 1772. The thin black line is one of those linear trend thingummies that everybody plots, and I …