By Paul Homewood
Booker on those “hottest winter day” claims:
Woolly-headed weather
Inevitably last Monday and Tuesday, the Met Office and the BBC rushed to publicise temperatures of over 70F (20C) as the highest ever recorded in any British winter, with the BBC quoting green zealots claiming that this was proof of global warming.
Tom Burke, a former director of Friends of the Earth but now described as running an “independent climate change think tank”, pointed out that this was twice the normal temperature for this time of year, asking us to imagine what it will be like when summer temperatures similarly reach twice their normal level. But equally inevitably this prompted Paul Homewood, on his Notalotofpeopleknowthat blog, to examine the Met Office’s own records to put these February temperatures into historical perspective.
For a start he found that, if this year set a daily record for February, caused by a high pressure cell sucking in hot air from the Sahara, record days for the other two winter months, January and December, date back to 1958 and 1948. Record temperatures for other months include the hottest ever May day in 1922 and September’s in 1906. But Homewood then focused on the “mean temperature” for February as a whole. Despite its unusual warmth, he found the Met Office’s own figure to show this to have been only 44F (6.7C), making a nonsense of idle media claims that this had been “the hottest winter ever”.
A chart meticulously plotted by Homewood from the Met Office’s Central England Temperature record dating back to 1659 shows that February 2019 ranked as only 15th among our warmest Februarys, way behind the hottest ever in 1779, while this was only the 17th warmest winter as a whole. What the graph shows is how astonishingly consistent overall our Februarys have remained over the past 360 years. As for that absurd comment by Mr Burke, it appears to have disappeared from the BBC website.
My relevant post is here.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
March 3, 2019 at 04:42AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 