An important by- election was held in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, last Thursday. I followed the results, on and off, on the BBC’s live internet feed.

There were eleven candidates. The two candidates for the mainstream leftwing parties (Labour and the Greens) had been disowned by their own parties for making allegedly racist comments. Since they were about opposing racial or religious groups, one might imagine that they would cancel each other out, with supporters of each racial/religious group cleaving to the leftwing candidate who insulted the other. But it was not to be.

At 3.31 am, while waiting for the result, the BBC interviewed one of the eleven candidates:

The Rev Mark Coleman who stood as a Just Stop Oil campaigner said the election has been “an absolutely amazing experience”. He added: “I felt a real privilege and talking to the people of Rochdale. It is not like going to say come to a meeting or buy some double glazing.  This is like saying, can I have your vote. And they want to know why so I’ve had to explain myself. What the platform is what we want to do. But they inevitably say we don’t trust politicians. I know it’s a bit of a cliche, but people like local candidates but we are all local candidates and some of the other candidates are not so local, so we have that sense of what’s wrong. And what’s possible. In the community. And, yes. I’m talking a bit about a global issue. The climate, the economy. But you cannot separate local from national. Because if there’s no food in the supermarkets that will happen throughout the country. And the solutions are a national and International. Rochdale’s heart for the people of Gaza is his enormous. People are so sad to see the suffering there. So I’ve been moved by their compassion and kindness.”

The BBC later added more detail:

Mark Coleman is a long-time climate campaigner and Just Stop Oil supporter who was imprisoned for taking nonviolent direct action.The 64-year-old worked as a vicar in Rochdale town centre until he retired in 2020 due to Parkinson’s disease. Mr Coleman said: “The people of Rochdale deserve the truth – and that is we need radical action on climate right now to stand any chance of a safe and stable future. Government policies have put us well on the way to climate hell, and the Labour Party is willing to let that happen. “I want the people of Rochdale to be able to ‘vote change’ in this election to show they want failing Westminster politicians to step up and defend our future.”

And the BBC added an audio of his “one minute manifesto” which I transcribe here:

I’m Mark Coleman. Our leaders are failing us. They won’t protect us. They are enabling the death of massive numbers of our fellow human beings. The killing in Gaza must stop with a permanent ceasefire. Investing in new oil & gas will bring climate breakdown & kill millions of people. Labour in power won’t revoke Tory new oil & gas licences and they will burn our future. Big oil companies are making obscene profits, while we struggle to pay energy bills. We pay them billions of pounds a year in subsidies & tax breaks. They should pay for free home insulation & retrofit for all & free electric local public transport. If elected, my job is to get your voice heard. I will set up a people’s assembly to bring communities together so that we can agree what’s best for Rochdale. This way, you will have your actual voice in Parliament. This is the future of politics. Vote Mark Coleman to protect our communities.

The BBC announced the result at 3.47am. Few would be tuned in at that hour, so they repeated the results at 7.06am under the headline: “A resounding win for Rochdale’s new MP” without actually naming him in the headline. I wouldn’t like to upstage our national broadcaster, so I won’t name him either. 

At 6.17am the BBC gave us a short extract from his victory speech:

“.. during which orange confetti was thrown in his direction by a rival candidate. A heckler also accused [him] of being a climate change denier, and you can watch that moment below:

[I watched it but couldn’t catch the comments. The new MP waited for the end of the intervention and then continued his speech, announcing: “I want to put the council on notice that we intend to clean the Town Hall Clock”]

The BBC added more detail:

Rev Mark Coleman – who ran in the by-election as an independent candidate – produced a box of orange confetti and threw it in G***’s direction as he began addressing the hall. Coleman is a long-time climate campaigner and Just Stop Oil supporter who was imprisoned for taking nonviolent direct action. Another climate change protester could be heard heckling from somewhere in the room too, which led to quite a long pause in the speech.

[Call me a rightwing authoritarian, but you’d think a bloke with a criminal record who’s already done time would hesitate before throwing things at a newly elected MP, especially in Greater Manchester, following the bombing in 2017 that killed 22 people.]

At 8.52am the BBC gave “the results in full” for a second time – “results in full” which in fact only listed half the candidates, thus obscuring the fact that the BBC’s favorite, the Reverend Mark Coleman, was one of five candidates to get just 1% of the vote, the others being two independents with the same surname, the allegedly racist Green, and the Monster Raving Loony Party. 

[Never underestimate the Monster Raving Loonies. Back in the last century they beat one David Steel – a politician who was widely tipped as a future prime minister – into seventh place in a by-election, leading to his utter humiliation and subsequent elevation to the House of Lords.]

What to make of this election, in which the two leftwing parliamentary parties – Labour and the Greens – were utterly humiliated for reasons that remain obscure to the BBC, along with the rest of the left-leaning media?  

Let’s leave the last word to another leftwing journal, the New Statesman where Anoosh Chakelian writes:

“..  in the centre of Rochdale, one politician remained defiant. A statue of John Bright looked out at the nearby hills rising above his birthplace. One of the great Victorian free traders and liberals, Bright is perhaps best remembered in parliamentary history for his appeal to the House of Commons against the Crimean War: “The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land; you may almost hear the beating of his wings.” It was a speech delivered in vain then, and now, with tens of thousands dead abroad, the angel’s wings return to beat our fractured land.”

And right on cue, just this week Chancellor Scholtz of Germany, our oldest ally (remember, Germans helped us defeat the Romans, and Napoleon, and valiantly opposed our current enemy Russia in 1942) revealed that the British Army is active again in Crimea, scene of that  famous military exploit celebrated in Lord Tennyson’s poem, “the Charge of the Light Brigade”:

They that had fought so well 
Came thro’ the jaws of Death, 
Back from the mouth of Hell, 
All that was left of them, 
Left of six hundred.

That was not the Climate Hell predicted by the Just Stop Oil candidate, who received 455 votes (all that was left of them.) It was the real thing.

From the DAILY SCEPTIC

BY CHRIS MORRISON

Nearly one in three (29.2%) U.K. Met Office temperature measuring stations have an internationally-defined margin of error of up to 5°C. Another 48.7% of the total 380 stations could produce errors up to 2°C, meaning nearly eight out of ten stations (77.9%) are producing ‘junk’ or ‘near junk’ readings of surface air temperatures. Arguably, on no scientific basis should these figures be used for the Met Office’s constant promotion of the collectivist Net Zero project. Nevertheless, the state-funded operation frequently uses them to report and often catastrophise rises in temperature of as little as 0.01°C.

Under a freedom of information request, the Daily Sceptic has obtained a full list of the Met Office’s U.K. weather stations, along with an individual class rating defined by the World Meteorological Office. These CIMO ratings range from pristine class 1 and near pristine class 2, to an ‘anything goes’ or ‘junk’ class 5. The CIMO ratings penalise sites that are near any artificial heat sources such as buildings and concrete surfaces. According to the WMO, a class 5 site is one where nearby obstacles “create an inappropriate environment  for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wide area”. Even the Met Office refers to sites next to buildings and vegetation as “undesirable”. It seems class 5 sites can be placed anywhere, and they come with a WMO warning of “additional estimated uncertainties added by siting up to 5°C”; class 4 notes “uncertainties” up to 2°C, while class 3 states 1°C. Only 13.7%, or 52 of the Met Office’s temperature and humidity stations come with no such ‘uncertainty’ warnings attached.

The above graph shows the percentage totals of each class. Class 1 and 2, identified in green, account for just 6.3% and 7.4% of the total respectively. Class 3 identified as orange comes in at 8.4%. The graph shows the huge majorities enjoyed by the darkening shades of red showing classes 4 and 5. It is possible that the margins of error identified for classes 3, 4 and 5 could be a minus amount – if for instance the measuring device was sited in a frost hollow – but the vast majority are certain to be pushed upwards by heat corruptions. 

Last year, the investigative journalist Paul Homewood sought FOI information from the Met Office about the Welsh weather station Porthmadog, which often appears in ‘hottest of the day’ listings. He was informed that the site was listed as class 4 and “this is an acceptable rating for a temperature sensor”. Hence, continued the Met Office, “we will continue to quote from this site”. In short, observes Homewood, the Met Office is happy to use a class 4 site for climatological purposes, “even though that class is next to junk status”. It is bad enough that the Met Office is using this site, but it is even worse that they know about the issues but still plan to carry on doing so, Homewood continued. “How many other weather stations are of such poor quality?” he asked.

Now we know.

Using these figures with a precision to one hundredth of a degree centigrade, the Met Office declared that 2023 was the second hottest in the U.K., coming in just 0.06°C lower than the all-time record. Cue, of course, all the Thermogeddon headlines in mainstream media. In 2022, the Met Office said that five sites in the U.K. on July 19th went past 40°C, with a record of 40.3°C at RAF Coningsby. Kew Gardens is termed a class 2 site, although it is very close to one of the largest tropical glasshouses in the world. St James’s Park and Northolt airport are class 5 sites, Heathrow is class 4, while RAF Coningsby is class 3. At the time, the Met Office declared that the records set a “milestone in U.K. climate history”. A national record was also set on July 18th at Hawarden Airport in Wales (class 4) and on July 19th at Charterhall in Scotland (class 4).

Always alive to a popular headline catastrophising the weather, the Met Office declared a warmest St. Valentine’s night English record this year of 11.5°C at class 4-rated St. Mary’s airport on the Isles of Scilly. Earlier in the year, the Met Office declared the highest January temperature in Scotland at 19.6°C at Kinlochewe, a class 4 site. Interestingly the previous, much promoted, U.K. record was set on July 31th 2019 at the Cambridge Botanic Gardens, a class 5 site. Even more interesting is that in the Homewood FOI disclosures, the Met Office stated that class 5 data “will be flagged and not quoted in national records”.

The Met Office is between a rock and a hard place with these surface temperature measurements. Many of its long-standing stations have been encroached by urbanisation and corruptions seem to have become endemic across the entire system. In the past, this didn’t matter as much since margin of error allowances could be accepted along with less accurate local and national weather forecasting. Measuring surface temperatures across countries and then the planet is always going to be difficult, but a more accurate reading would be obtained by only using data from WMO classes 1 and 2. However, national and global temperatures have become politicised by the global warming scare and the proposed Net Zero solution. Alarmists often state that climate ‘tipping’ points will be reached with very small increases in temperature measured in tenths of a degree.

Using data from just classes 1 and 2 would likely crash the claimed rises in national and global temperatures. Something similar would likely occur if the Met Office moved the majority of its stations to more suitable spots. A number of scientists have tried to measure the urban heat bias in temperature records with estimates suggesting a general problem of warming corruption around the 20-30% mark. Last October, two scientists working out of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), produced a paper noting: “The bottom line is that an estimated 22% of the U.S. warming trend, 1895 to 2023, is due to localised UHI [urban heat island] effects.”

Under our FOI request, it can now be seen that the problems with corrupted U.K. weather stations are similar to those discovered in the United States by meteorologist Anthony Watts. In work compiled over a decade, Watts found that 96% of temperature stations used by the U.S. weather service NOAA were “corrupted” by the localised effects of urbanisation.  Sites in close proximity to asphalt, machinery and other heat-producing or heat-accentuating objects, “violates NOAA’s own published standards, and strongly undermines the legitimacy and magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States”, he observed.

Both the U.K. and U.S. temperature datasets are important constituents of global totals compiled by a number of weather operations including the Met Office and NASA. The Met Office runs HadCRUT, where over the last 10 years two retrospective revisions have added about 30% extra warming to recent global temperatures. This had the effect of removing all traces of a pause around 2000-2014. Meanwhile, Professor Ole Humlum has noted that the GISS database run by NASA increased its surface air temperature between 1910 to 2000 from 0.47°C to 0.67°C, a boost of 49% over this period. “Frequent and large corrections in a database unavoidably signal a fundamental uncertainty about the correct values,” commented Humlum.

Pristine temperature data is available. In 2005, NOAA set up a 114 nationwide network of stations called the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). It was designed to remove all urban heat distortions, aiming for “superior accuracy and continuity in places that land use will not likely impact during the next five decades”.

The graph above shows nothing more than very minor, gentle warming since 2005, slight warming that might be expected in the small and continuing natural rebound from the depths of the pre-industrial Little Ice Age. A reliable source of global data is to be found in the UAH satellite record, which shows less overall warming since 1979 than the surface datasets. Both these datasets are rarely mentioned. In fact one of the compilers of the satellite data, along with the UAH paper on urban heat, is Dr. Roy Spencer. In 2022 he was kicked off Google AdSense for publishing “unreliable and harmful claims”. The move demonetised Dr. Spencer’s widely consulted monthly satellite temperature update page by removing all Google-supplied advertising. Google is on record as stating that it will ban all sites that are sceptical of “well established scientific consensus”.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.