By Paul Homewood
According to the Met Office, UK mean temperatures have been on the rise since about 1980. But during the exact same period sunshine hours have also been steadily rising:
It does not take a genius to work out there might just be a connection here!
And in a paper they published in 2006, the Met Office admitted there was not just a connection, but temperatures and sunshine were in fact strongly correlated.
The paper, Climate Memorandum No 21, was an analysis of all climate trends. It has since disappeared from the Met Office website, but is fortunately still saved on Wayback:
This is the key chart:
Remember that the correlation co-efficient goes from 0 to 1, with 1 being a perfect correlation, and even 0.7 being a “strong linear relationship” (see here). Zero, of course, tells us there is no relationship. Minus co-efficients work the same way, except the relationship is negative – eg more sun = less rain).
Broadly we can see that there are strong positive correlations in spring and autumn, both in max and mins. In summer, there is a positive correlation for max temperatures, but little correlation either way with mins.
In winter there is a very weak negative correlation, with virtually none at all in England.
Overall, the data tells us that more sunshine leads to higher average temperatures annually. This is confirmed by the Report:
It goes on to speculate that the increased sunshine could be linked to reduced air pollution:
Whether this is the case, or whether it is a meteorological phenomenon, it would seem that at least part of the rise in temperatures in recent decades is the result of more sunshine, and not GHGs. (It is worth bearing in mind that global cooling in the 1960s and 70s was widely blamed on air pollution.)
The Met Office have hidden this inconvenient report away, and never refer to its findings and implications.
It is time they came clean, updated its analysis and published the results.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
January 27, 2024 at 05:33AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 