By Paul Homewood
Chris Morrison keeps the pressure up on the Met Office:
Interest and concern continues to grow about the numerous retrospective adjustments that the U.K. Met Office has made to its global HadCRUT temperature database. Often the adjustments cool earlier periods going back to the 1930s and add warming in more recent times. The adjustments are of course most convenient in promoting the global warming narrative surrounding Net Zero fantasies. There is particular interest in the 0.15°C cooling inserted in the 1940s and the greater warming added in more recent decades. The scientific blog No Tricks Zone (NTZ) has recently returned to the story noting the state-controlled Met Office has “corrected” the data to “align with their narrative”.
In suggesting a narrative, NTZ traces the adjustments back to the 2009 leak of ‘Climategate’ emails from academic staff at the University of East Anglia working on the HadCRUT project. In one email speculating on ‘correcting’ sea surface temperatures to partly explain the 1940s ‘warming blip’, it is noted that “if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15°C, then this would be significant for the global mean”. It would be good to “remove at least part of the 1940s blip”, it is suggested. Just as they have said they would do, comments NTZ, 0.15°C of warmth has gradually been removed from the 1940s HadCRUT global temperature data over the last 15 years.
Read the full article here.
The Daily Sceptic report also maintains the pressure on the Met Office for failing to respond to concerns about the poor quality of its temperature recording network, following revelations, both here and in the Daily Sceptic, that most of the Met Office’s weather stations are junk status Class 4 and 5, totally inappropriate for climatological use:
Complaints about this have been studiously ignored by the Met Office.
According to the WMO, Class 3 stations can overstate underlying temperatures by 1C. Class 4 and 5 are even worse, artificially adding up to 2C and 5C respectively.
The WMO’s station siting standards state:
The WMO could not be clearer. Temperatures recorded at Class 3, 4 and 5 sites should never be used where they are intended to be representative of a wider area, only for local purposes, such as to give temperatures at airports for aviation purposes.
Only 24 of the 380 stations used by the Met Office to calculate UK temperatures are fit for purpose, Class 1.
Why are the Met Office still using the others? Could it be that they help to inflate the warming trend?
As the WMO says, we do not live in a perfect world. Nevertheless, there is no reason why the Met Office cannot do what NOAA do, and that is to dump their existing network, which is totally unfit for purpose, and replace it with a small number of pristine, Class 1 stations. These must be visually inspected at least once a year, to ensure they are properly maintained. They should also have long records, in order to provide a long dataset.
Finally they must ensure that the environment around the site has not materially changed over the period of record. For instance, a perfect local siting may be compromised by urban encroachment during preceding decades. The WMO classification system, of course, makes no allowance for this.
It maybe that there are no stations which meet these criteria, in which the Met Office should admit that it cannot accurately measure UK temperatures in the past and therefore cannot make claims about record high temperatures or quantify how much the UK has warmed in the last century or so, if at all.