Met Office Claims to Have Been Recording Temperatures at “Stornoway Airport” 30 Years Before Aeroplanes Were Invented – Watts Up With That?

From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

The U.K. Met Office claims to have a continuous record of temperatures at Stornoway Airport going back to 1873. This is truly remarkable since manned powered flight was not achieved until 1903 and the actual airport was built in 1937. Yet another error in the Met Office’s temperature recording database. Yet another sign that in its mission to scare the population into accepting the looming Net Zero catastrophe, the Met Office is failing in its day job to accurately record temperatures across the U.K. Over the last year there have been revelations about data invention at 103 non-existent weather stations while almost the entire 380-strong network is heavily skewed by unnatural heat corruptions. All of this in a year when it added a politicised measure to its “Indicators of Global Warming” based on just 10 years of actual data and 10 years of computer model speculations loaded with improbable claims of future temperature rises.

Again we are obliged to the work of super sleuth Ray Sanders, who has been conducting a forensic examination of the temperature claims made by the state-funded Met Office. Of course there was no airport on the site in 1873. The coordinates provided apply to the current airport location, although there is no indication in the detailed records when these might have changed. The diligent Sanders discovered that the original site was located 4.25 kms away in the grounds of Lews Castle. Further research found that the move to the airport site occurred in 1968. “Is all of this just ineptitude on the part of the Met Office or is there some motivation behind this covert dataset bonding?” asks Sanders. “Did nobody ever stop to think about the dates when attributing 19th century readings to a site with the name ‘Airport’ attached?” he further inquired.

Sanders’s work is published on the Tallbloke blog and comments are invited. Derek T noted: “You are uncovering so much of this sort of thing that it cannot be that they are unaware of any of it. The explanation must be that they are intentionally ignoring it. Eventually they must be held to account for it.”

Derek might be in for a bit of a wait. Any mainstream discussion of the Met Office’s sloppy methods will open a Pandora’s Box and will be extremely unhelpful in promoting the political Net Zero fantasy. Populations in the U.K. and around the world are being groomed to accept that temperatures are rising at a faster rate than can be justified by the poor data presented. Recent academic work suggests urban heat corruption, which appears to be a worldwide problem affecting many state-run weather services, is adding around 30% extra warming to recent temperature measurements.

Earlier this year, the Daily Sceptic disclosed via a Freedom of Information request that almost eight out of 10 U.K. temperature measuring stations were sited in locations that had internationally-recognised ‘uncertainties’ between 2-5°C. But is a scientifically-chastened Met Office trying to make amends for all this unscientific siting at or near airports, car parks, walled gardens, main roads, solar farms and electricity sub stations? It does not appear so. This year we have also learnt that 80% of the 113 measuring stations opened in the last 30 years were deliberately or carelessly sited in World Meteorological Organisation junk Class 4 (uncertainties of 2°C) and super-junk Class 5 (uncertainties 5°C). Shockingly, the situation was just as bad over 10 years, and it beggars belief that in the last five years, eight of the 13 newly-opened stations were at junk sites. And step forward again citizen journalist Sanders who used FOI requests to discover that the Met Office was inventing temperature data from over 100 non-existent stations.

Late last year Professor Richard Betts, the Met Office’s Head of Climate Impact, published a paper that sought to sidestep the inconvenient fact that temperature trends can only be measured over a long period, and breaching the so-called Paris threshold of 1.5°C industrial-age warming would take years to confirm. Science, alas, getting in the way of politics. Betts’s solution was to provide an “instant indicator” that would point to an exact period when the 1.5°C ‘guard-rail’ had been breached.  This would “provide clarity” and reduce delays in imposing further climate control measures. This magic indicator uses just 10 years of past data which are added to 10 future years of guesstimates from climate models.

A few problems would seem to present themselves. Recent global temperature datasets, including the Met Office’s HadCRUT5, have been subject to considerable retrospective warming adjustments of late, while computer models have barely an accurate temperature forecast to rub together over the past 40 years. In addition, the models will be loaded with a ‘pathway’ known as RCP4.5, which assumes a temperature rise over the next 80 years of up to 2°C. Given a rise of barely 0.2°C over the last 25 years, this looks a bit of a stretch. The indicator is now in use by the Met Office. Betts hopes that his “instantaneous indicator of current warming” will find favour with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In future years he suggests the IPCC could state: “It is very likely that the current global warming level exceeded 1.5°C in year X.”

All the while keeping a straight face, a discipline it seems is required for a great deal of the Met Office’s current output.

May I wish all my readers a Happy New Year. I love you all dearly and am encouraged by the support, insights and wisdom you give me in this publication and in wider social media. As can be seen, there are massed forces at work promoting the idea of a climate crisis and the need for a political Net Zero solution. Attentive readers might have gathered that I regard Net Zero as a looming catastrophe for humanity but I am encouraged that much more attention is being paid to what is little more than a luxury middle-class belief. If you are a student of history, you will know that these puritanical groupthink cults pop up at regular intervals. I am also encouraged by the growing interest in the underlying science and the scandalous way the scientific process has been traduced in recent years. We fight and debunk this nonsense with facts. Next year is likely to see reality make substantial gains and it should be fun.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.