By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
From the Spectator:
The UK climate is getting ever more extreme. We know this because the BBC keeps telling us so, most recently in today’s reporting of the annual Met Office/Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) State of the Climate Report for 2023. ‘Climate change is dramatically increasing the frequency of extreme high temperatures in the UK,’ writes climate editor Justin Rowlatt on the BBC website. As well as experiencing more really hot days, ‘its observations suggest there has been an increase in the number of really wet days too, such as the prolonged and heavy rain Storm Babet brought to wide areas of the country in October last year.’ He comments: ‘The UK’s shifting climate represents a dangerous upheaval for our ecosystems as well as our infrastructure’. And in case we still haven’t got it, he adds: ‘Climate change has already made more extreme weather events, such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall, storms, and drought, more frequent and stronger in many parts of the world.’
But how much of this is really true, and how much of it – were BBC Verify minded to undertake a fair analysis of this output – is hyperbole? The State of the UK Climate Report 2023 is published today in the International Journal of Climatology, and you can read it for yourself here. But for those without the time to do this, this is what it says on the specific matters raised by Rowlatt and the BBC. Firstly, those ‘extremely high temperatures’. As far as 2023 was concerned, it turns out that actually they were rather thin on the ground. The highest temperature measured anywhere in the UK in 2023 was 33ºC in Faversham, Kent, which the report notes is rather modest by the standards of recent years. Nevertheless, it is true to say that there is an increasing trend in the frequency of hot weather in Britain. In the decade from 2014 to 23 there were 2.5 times as many days per year with temperatures exceeding 28ºC somewhere in Britain as there were during the years 1961 to 1990. There were 3.6 times as many days per year with temperatures over 32ºC.
This is consistent with the long-term trend in mean temperatures, which have also resulted in fewer very cold days. In the decade from 2014 to 2023, there were on average 17 fewer days of air frost per year than during 1961 to 1990. It is not very satisfactory comparing a ten-year period with a 30-year one, given the natural variability in the weather, but year-on-year graphs appear to confirm that Britain is experiencing more hot weather and less cold weather. That is something that needs to be borne in mind when the BBC and others claim climate change is causing more ‘extreme’ weather. The rise in extreme hot weather is balanced out by a fall in extreme cold weather.
What about the claimed rise in ‘really wet days’? The State of the Climate Report does state that overall Britain is becoming wetter, with overall rainfall ten per cent higher from 2014 to 2023 than between 1961 and 1990. But then rainfall fluctuated quite a lot decade on decade prior to the 1960s. The year 2023 was the seventh wettest year in England and Wales in a series going back to 1766. The wettest, by the way, was 1767. But ‘really wet days’? The report states that there has been a ‘slight increase in heavy rainfall across the UK in recent decades’. There are a number of metrics used to measure heavy rainfall, such as the average number of days a year with rain exceeding 10mm, the number of days when rainfall exceeds the 99th percentile, etc. All seem to tell a similar story: there was a strong upward trend in the frequency of heavy rain in Britain between the 1960s and the beginning of this century, but with little or no trend since then (figure 49 shows this).
As for the claim that the world is seeing more frequent and stronger storms – made by Rowlatt in the global rather than specifically UK context – what does the UK State of the Climate Report say about that? By recent standards, last year was a relatively stormy year. However, the frequently-made claim that Britain saw a ‘record’ number of storms last winter is based on a meaningless metric: the number of named storms. There is no consistent definition of a named storm other than that someone in the UK or Ireland Met Office’s has decided it warrants a name. Moreover, the naming of storms only began in 2015 – so not even the 1987 hurricane had a name. But the State of the Climate Report does present data on extreme wind speeds measured in the UK – namely the number of days per year on which gusts of over 40, 50, and 60 knots have been recorded somewhere in the UK. This data shows a very clear downward trend since 1990 [fig 60]. There is also data showing that mean wind speeds have been falling in Britain since 1970 – a trend that echoes that in many parts of the world. That is not very good for Ed Miliband’s wind turbines, but it is not consistent with a claim that Britain is becoming more stormy.
So, yes, we are seeing more hot weather and we are seeing more rainfall overall. But no, we are not being battered by biblical downpours or extreme weather of all kinds.
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/are-we-really-experiencing-more-extreme-weather/
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I would add to Ross’ comments about storms that the global data shows no increase either:
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https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/01/25/hurricane-review-for-2023/