From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

The UK Met Office recently declared an average daily maximum temperature of 22.3°C for June 2025 at Lowestoft: Monkton Avenue. But there is no weather station at Lowestoft and hasn’t been since 2010. Over the last 15 years, the temperature measurements published in the Met Office’s Historic Station Database have been invented, or rather estimated according to the State meteorologist with figures from “well-correlated related neighbouring stations”. This explanation might be more plausible if the Met Office could actually name the stations, presumably a simple task with the vital scientific input data readily to hand. Alas, it seems not. A number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for the identity of these well-correlated stations near Lowestoft and other non-existent stations have been denied by the Met Office quoting “vexatious” grounds. It has concluded that the “public interest factors in favour of not responding to the requests outweighed the public interest factors in favour of responding to the requests”.

The FOI requests have been made by citizen super sleuth Ray Sanders who is engaged on a detailed scientific study of the Met Office’s nationwide temperature measuring network and climate average databases. His requests for help in this work are simple and, in addition to seeking how data is inputted into non-existent weather stations – 103 at the last count – he asked why a national record of 40.3°C on July 19th, 2022 at RAF Waddington is to be found in the CEDA archives, but was not claimed at the time. Great play was made of the record 40.3°C declared at nearby RAF Coningsby on the same day, although later disclosures have shown it was a 60-second spike as three Typhoon jets were attempting to land. Sanders is not asking for anything complicated that might involve considerable work on the part of the Met Office. He is merely seeking information that should be easily obtained within the records of the Met Office.

The ‘vexatious/public interest’ suggestion is the latest dog ate my homework excuse offered by the Met Office to avoid identifying the so-called well-correlated neighbouring stations. Earlier this year, it told Sanders that the information was not actually held by the Met Office. It was claimed that “the specific stations used in regressive analysis each month are not an output from the process”. Needless to say, that nonsense failed to satisfy Sanders and you can read here details of his recent FOI requests and the Met Office’s lengthy reply.

The Met Office’s inability to produce this information will inevitably lead to speculation that the data is being invented, possibly with a political motive in mind to promote Net Zero. To head off such damaging conclusions being drawn, the State-funded Met Office needs to stop hiding behind “vexatious” excuses and treat these reasonable requests with the attention and respect they deserve. As Sanders notes, it is impossible to rationally justify any climate average figures without knowing what the relevant inputs were. If these well-correlated stations are unknown or no details retained, “then you have no proof whatsoever of the accuracy of the outputs” – outputs, it might additionally be noted, that should be removed when they are being used to promote the Net Zero fantasy.

It is hardly vexatious or not in the public interest to identify the stations currently supplying data for Lowestoft. In fact, Sanders went out of his way to explain that he was solely concerned with the details of which stations’ data are currently being used. “Obviously, as this is an ongoing process these stations must be known”, he writes. Similar inquiries have also been made about Scole, Manby, Fontmell Magna, Nairn Druim, Bodiam and Aberdaron weather stations. Answers to all of these came back none. In a long, detailed and legalistic explanation arguing why the Met Office should not provide the information, it was claimed that the “public interest test arguments were upheld”. 

Sanders’ view is an obvious one – “It would have been much simpler and less expensive to actually answer my questions than go to all this rigmarole to not answer… In early August they will produce such figures for Lowestoft, Nairn Druim and Paisley (all long closed) but they will not be able to produce details of the stations used to compile such ‘data’ – does anyone really believe that? Why do they allow readings they know to be wrong to be archived? If the Met Office cannot (or will not) produce evidence to support their claims why should anyone believe them?”.

Interest in the temperature measuring activities of the Met Office has grown over the last year following revelations published in the Daily Sceptic that nearly 80% of its 380 sites are poorly located. As a result, they are subject to unnatural temperature corruptions that lead to classification ratings that come with possible ‘uncertainties’ between 2°C and 5°C. Not to exaggerate, many sites seem to measure everything except the natural ambient air temperature. Further work from Dr Eric Huxter has shown that many of the ‘extremes’ and ‘records’ claimed recently by the Met Office are due to suspicious heat spikes in junk sites picked up by recently introduced electronic devices. In addition to his work describing the lamentable state of many temperature sites, Ray Sanders has also discovered the massive estimations made for over 100 non-existent stations. Mainstream media has been slow to pick up on this story since it leads to the obvious opening of a Pandora’s Box and a questioning of the Met Office’s role in promoting a made-up climate crisis that requires an unnecessary Net Zero solution.

But with the fantasy nature of Net Zero coming to the fore, this is starting to change. The walls are slowly crumbling. On July 3rd, the distinguished science writer Matt Ridley noted in the Telegraph that the 34.7°C recorded two days before in London’s St James’s Park might have something to do with that weather station being a low reliability Class 5 site with an error rating up to 5°C. “So yes, the heat is indeed partly man-made – but not necessarily in the way the Met Office means,” he observed.

Ridley goes on to note that the Met Office seems increasingly bored by its day job of forecasting the weather, “so it likes to lecture us about climate change”. In his view it has been “embarrassingly duped by activists”. He gives the example of its continued use of the de-bunked RCP8.5 ‘business-as-usual’ scenario to make future apocalyptic predictions that summers in less than 50 years could be up to 6°C warmer and 60% drier. In his view, the Met Office is “deliberately seeking extreme predictions to scare people and so get media attention”.

Recent revelations might suggest that it is none too fussy in how it goes about achieving these desperate ends.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X

The “New Tab” on Firefox offers, as well as a grid of your favourite haunts, some curated stories from around the world. I once tried to get to the bottom of who selected them, perceiving a rather left-climate bias in the selections. However, despite a polite interaction with a volunteer, I ended up none the wiser. Probably the staff picks the stories. The staff is left-climate. Hence, so are the stories.

Today [actually by the time you’re reading this, it’s two days ago], one such story had the headline of this note, saving the snark quotes. Ten animal species were facing UK extinction, thanks to surging temperatures and climate change. The two factors are seemingly divisible now. It’s rather like saying a murder victim died of a 45 calibre bullet through the heart, and a gunshot wound.

What are these ten species? I wondered. I thought I’d try to guess, but before I could action that thought, I’d already read the sub head, which as you can see gives away three of the victims: puffins, red squirrels, and hedgehogs. [The featured image might be a clue to one of the other 7 too.]

Now I only had to guess the rump. The guessing involved a certain amount of second guessing, because I had to put myself in the mindset of someone determined to find peril in the most innocuous things. Should I stick to birds and mammals? What about insects, or fish? The idea that one of our few reptiles might suffer from surging temperature was of course ludicrous. Well, here’s what I came up with for the missing 7.

• Ptarmigan
• Capercaillie
• Kittiwake
• Swallowtail butterfly
• Killer whale
• Salmon
• Char

A good spread of taxa, but who knows, might be well off the mark. Are any of them genuinely threatened by climate change? Well, the best shout is the ptarmigan, thanks to its high altitude life. When you live on the tops of the highest mountains, there’s nowhere to go if it gets any warmer. How many do I score out of 7?

Note that quite an impressive list could have been made along these lines:

• Northern right whale
• Large blue butterfly
• Large copper butterfly
• Lynx
• Brown bear
• Elk
• Reindeer
• Beaver
• Wolf
• Great auk
• Sea eagle

Whoops! That’s eleven, not ten. An astute reader will know that these are species that are or have been driven to extinction in the UK in historical times. [One or two have been re-introduced on a small scale.] Note that none, so far as I know, suffered their fate at the hands of surging temperatures, or climate change; they were either hunted out, or met their fate due to land-use change. I wonder whether the iNews author is aware of all of them?

Asterisk: the large blue went extinct after the drought of 1976 – see Dead Butterfly Blues – but it had already been reduced down to a tiny remnant population by that time. Such populations are incredibly vulnerable to the vicissitudes of chance, and almost inevitably dwindle to nothing.

So, how did I do? Here is iNews’s list:

• Turtle dove
• Cuckoo
• Red squirrel
• Scottish wildcat
• Hedgehog
• Peregrine falcon
• Short-eared owl
• Barnacle goose
• Puffin
• Manx shearwater

Well, of the 7 I didn’t already know from the headline, I guessed exactly 0 of them. Are any of the 10 actually threatened by climate change? No, I don’t think so. Ptarmigan was a much better shout.

The iNews has its climate scientist to go to for absurd quotes. His name is Dr. Jesse Abrams. Quoth he:

“As the planet continues to warm, some of Britain’s most beloved wildlife face imminent threats: the turtle dove population has declined by 98 per cent since the 1950s and may disappear entirely, while hedgehog numbers have crashed by 95 per cent since the 1950s, with almost a third of the population lost since 2000 alone. Red squirrels are already all but extinct in England and Wales and the Scottish wildcat is critically endangered,” Dr Abrams said.

Those stats may be true, but it is disgraceful to try to stamp them with “Because teh climate.” The turtle dove has declined thanks to the sterilisation of the countryside. See all those weeds in the fields of wheat as you drive by them? Thought not. That’s why there are no turtle doves. The turtle doves can’t see them either, or eat their seeds. It would actually be quite easy to go through the list and explain the real reasons for the other species’ declines too.

But I’m not going to trouble you with that. [We have already discussed puffins.] I’m just going to pick one, and no I’m not going to pretend I chose randomly. I cherry picked! How evil of me. I want to pick…

Peregrine falcon

This species, which is allegedly threatened with extinction in the UK “because teh climate” is found all around the world. Literally. Here’s a distribution map from wiki (numbers represent different subspecies):

Somehow they manage to survive in tropical Africa, but in the UK, teh climate is gonna do for them! Nope: crass misinformation. Or probably disinformation, since the iNews is supposed to be an authoritative source. Well, it blew it. You can find peregrines in Australia, Fiji, India, Japan, South Africa, California…

But I want to draw your eye to a little * on the map. Do you see it? What might that represent? What about the green Es nearby? Well, I’ll tell you. Let me quote from an old book of mine, Leslie Brown’s Birds of Prey (1976). My bold:

In all developed countries of western Europe, Britain included, and North America it has become scarce or even – in eastern North America – extinct…

The primary cause of this decline seems absolutely clear. It is not due to persecution by gamekeepers, egg collectors, or pigeon fanciers, which the peregrines survived in a mild way until the fifties of this century. It is primarily due to pesticides used in agriculture…

And these tyros have the audacity to deliver lectures on the perils of teh climate.

Asterisk: peregrines have been re-introduced to eastern North America. That’s what the asterisk means. The Es show localised extinctions, thanks to DDT.

Here’s the EBBA 2 (European Breeding Bird Atlas) map of the peregrine’s present range in Europe:

It’s clinging to the extreme far north! Any sniff of more warmth, and it’s toast! Oh… wait… maybe we’re just talking BS to scare people into supporting pointless climate policies? [Note there is still a large gap in Eastern Europe, presumably a legacy of communist times.]

Now showing the change between the two atlases: 1980s for EBBA 1 and 2013-17 for EBBA 2. The blue shows where the bird is found in EBBA 2 but not EBBA 1 – i.e., where it has expanded from the 1980s onwards, from its nadir under the pummelling of our little friend DDT:

The lesson here is that when you stop poisoning birds, their population stops declining, and they start recolonising places where they’ve been wiped out.

Summary: Humans have laid waste to vast swathes of the Earth, but their attempts to kill things by increasing the CO₂ concentration of the atmosphere have so far come to naught. This is just rubbish by iNews and its pet climate scientist. Guys, learn some ecology. Read some history. It did not begin when you were born. Don’t make authoritative statements unless you are damn sure what you are talking about. First, identify the real problems. Then, you can help to find the real solutions.

/rant over